5 Escudos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese monetary history — a private overseas bank granted sole right of issue across Portugal's colonial territories, operating simultaneously in places as distant as Mozambique, Timor, and Cape Verde. This particular note was issued for Portuguese Guinea, one of the smaller and more economically marginal of those territories, which meant issue volumes were correspondingly low and surviving examples are genuinely uncommon.

Bradbury, Wilkinson engraved and printed the series in London — a common arrangement for colonial issuers who lacked domestic security printing capacity and trusted British firms with the work throughout the early twentieth century.