50 Centavos

Banco Nacional Ultramarino occupied an unusual position in Portuguese colonial finance — it held the note-issuing concession for multiple overseas territories simultaneously, and this 50 Centavos issue reflects that administrative sprawl. Bradbury Wilkinson produced colonial small-denomination notes for numerous issuers in this period, and their work for BNU was no exception to the general pattern of shared plate economies across different territories.

1914 places this at the outbreak of the First World War, when Portuguese overseas currency supply chains became genuinely complicated. Determining which territory this specific note was intended to serve — Mozambique, Angola, Timor — requires checking the printed text, as BNU issued near-identical notes across several dependencies in the same years.