Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira

Remittance to Portugal During all of the years of exploration of the hinterland, he ordered the material collected to be sent to the royal court. Upon discovering that all of the expenses had been covered by the captain, spending his daughter's dowry, he decided that it wouldn't do to embarrass her marriage, and married his daughter, Germana Pereira de Queiroz, himself on 16 September 1792.

He returned to Lisbon in January 1793, and dedicated the remainder of his life to metropolitan administration. He was named Official of the Secretary of State of Sea Commerce and Ultramarine Dominions. In 1794 he was awarded the Order of Christ and took a post as temporary director of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History and the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra. In the following year, he was nominated, in sequence, the Vice Director of the institution, Administrator of the Royal Farms, and Deputy of the Royal Junta of Commerce. He died in Lisbon.

The material provided by the Philosophical Voyage remained for more than a century unknown and unstudied by Portuguese scholars, not even by Ferreira himself. He never resumed work on the species and samples collected in Brazil, nor refined his records and studies of the journey, and much of the material was taken to Paris as war booty. There remains today, however, a rich archive of diaries, geographic, demographic and agricultural maps, correspondence, more than a thousand boards and records, today kept mainly in the National Library Foundation in Rio de Janeiro and the Museum Bocage in Lisbon.

Legacy Ferreira is commemorated in the scientific names of a genus of Brazilian lizard, Alexandresaurus, a species of Brazilian lizard, Loxopholis ferreirai, and in the specific name of the Brazilian snapper (Lutjanus alexandrei).

The Black Arowana Osteoglossum ferreirai is named after him.