50 Centavos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino's 50 Centavos issue of 1914 belongs to the wartime contraction of coinage that hit Portugal's colonial monetary network hard. With silver increasingly hoarded or redirected by the outbreak of the First World War, low-denomination paper substitutes became necessary across the Ultramarino's territories — this note was part of that emergency response, though it circulated under the bank's metropolitan Portuguese authority rather than any single colony.

Bradbury Wilkinson's intaglio work on small-format fractional notes from this period is consistently fine, a quality that actually complicated matters: the notes were frequently retained rather than returned, thinning surviving populations considerably.