INDIAN THEME BANKNOTES EXPERIMENT
Posted: November, 2002
|
T he first printing executed in Brasil in the royal regime were
gold dust exchange notes lithographed in Rio de Jeneiro. Later in
1828 copper redemption notes appeared in Bahia, and five years
afterwards, copper-based notes, as they were known, were issued in
all the provinces of the Empire.
The plans for the manufacture of paper money are very old. On
several opportunities, the Rio de Janeiro Mint came close to
resolving the problem without, nevertheless, achieving it. Scattered
orders were carried out, but only to attend to the circumstances of
the moment and to impress public opinion. It did not want industrial
production to serve as a base in the sense of enabling the Mint to
attend to the necessities of the country.
In 1854 when the Bank of Brazil had the power to issue, the Mint
manufactured some of its banknotes. The manufacturer was imposed due
to the lack of notes to take care of the scarcity while it was
waiting for the note order done overseas.
When the Treasury banknote order regularly taken care of in the
Empire through the American Banknote Company for decades, its own
manufacture of paper money was not considered. The beginning of the
Republic and the politics adopted by Ruy Barbosa, which allowed a
multitude of issuing banks, provoked a great deal of notes, which
drove the authorities to think about this matter. But only in 1907
an experiment was attempted by the Mint when 5$000 notes with 11th
and 12th impressions were printed.
In fact, the experiment for the most part was carried out in the
period from 1920 to 1924 with seventeen printings distributed
through 10 denominations and, in 1961, the Cr$5.00, third impression
was also printed.
It was more an experiment (this last case) that it was not
considered for industrial production, sufficing that it was known
that the Sinking Fund Office gave an order of 40,000,000 of which it
only received eleven series, in total, eleven million, one hundred
thousand units. Thus, we can scarely verify the dealings of the
industrial experiment and nothing that might justify the affirmation
of the Mint to supply our needs for circulating paper money.
On July 1, 1961, President Janio da Silva Quadros, in a
celebration carried out in Itamarati, for the occasion of the
meeting of the governors of Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo,
distributed to certain individuals the first Cr$5.00 of the third
printing. Only on the 6th, therefore, these notes had legal
circulating authorization after the Sinking Fund Administrative
Council approved its printing.
The distribution done quickly by President Quadros revealed the
lack of governmental technical advise, since the notes were not
legally issued. In any event, the president would have been able to
have samples of the banknote put into circulation and that would be
genuine and routine since it was the custom in all issuing agencies
to remit "samples" to all the countries that maintained relations
with the issuing country.
(Translator's thanks to Amauri Siquiera Leite, fellow LANSA
member, for word clarification.)
Source: Sociedad Filatelica e Numismatica de Joao Pessoa,
Brasil
Boletim Informativo:, No. 65, Jan-Mar, 2001,
Ano XVII
|
|
