On 27 July 1825, a brig called Espadarte (Swordfish) docked in Rio de Janeiro and unloaded its expensive cargo: 422 Africans forcibly shipped across the Atlantic from Angola. It was the first slave shipment known to have been organised by José Bernardino de Sá, then a clerk at a Rio trading house.
Over the following 25 years, undeterred by a law that theoretically made the slave trade illegal in 1831, Sá would be responsible for trafficking at least 19,000 Africans to Brazil – and become one of the empire’s richest men in the process. By the time of his death in 1855, Sá was a viscount who owned countless buildings in Rio, a handful of rural properties on the south-eastern coast, three ships and more shares in the Banco do Brasil than any other individual.
