In 1784 a large meteorite was discovered in backcountry Brazil, and an effort was soon made to move it to where more Brazilians might see it. But the item got moved only 180 meters, and there things stood – in a gully, the giant stone as well as a wrecked carriage – for a century. At last there was a second try, by oxteam, then train, then boat, all the way to a museum in Rio de Janeiro, where the Bendegó Meteorite has been ever since.

I could never be a blogger or even a columnist, mainly because I am wiry and sunburnt and obviously do not look the part; but also because I just couldn't write every day. I'd run out of material. On the other hand, I keep finding stuff like this. And I could eke it out with observations such as: the museum burned down in 2018, but – and this was reported in all seriousness – the meteorite survived the flames.

A blogger or columnist would say: "I'll bet." Or: "Ya think?" Heck, I'll say both those things, myself. But I'd like to do better, and I can, by reading the report written just after the 1888 project was completed.

I admit I was expecting something that went like Dear diary: Another hot day. That darn rock ain't gettin' any lighter but of course this is fully professional. Though the team was military, the operation reported to the Ministry of Agriculture, which was naturally curious about soil and geography, water and weather, flora and fauna. Even dead fauna: mastodon and giant ground sloth fossils were noted. For the latter, the genus Megatherium was named. I think people actually talked like this in the 19th century.

I am perhaps too readily making this expedition sound weird, when in fact it may have been anything but. Were these typical impulses for the age? Move the thing, not try to move people to the thing? Even once there was a railway pretty close? And was mineralogy back then a kind of ufology? I mean if people back then had actually seen a UFO, they would not imagine superior intelligence or death rays, but just how much precious metal was in the hull. If you traveled back in time with a chunk of polyurethane, would people totally ignore its strength and lightness and simply yearn to assay its gold content?

I should concede that a railway was not that close, though it did matter that the 19th century had more of these than the 18th century did. In the case of northern Bahia, the score was 1-0. The route along which the meteorite was moved was circuitous, as far as I can tell from modern maps; whichever way the thing went, the report does not conceal or (I am sure) exaggerate the physical difficulties. It's not mountainous out there, but it's accidentado enough: direct routes are rare, such roads as there were no more than 2 meters wide, and such rivers as there are were more barriers than arteries. The original plan back in 1785 was to float the meteorite some of the way to Aracaju, thence coastwise. In 1887-1888, it took four months on dry land to get to Salvador.

Speaking of 1888: I had to remind myself – because the report sure didn't – that these were momentous times in Brazil. Dom Pedro II, at whose instance this project was revived, would be exiled a year later. And before that, slavery would be abolished. Just 74 years before Saudi Arabia did! Remember that the next time Brazil defeats Saudi Arabia in soccer 1-0! I wondered if slaves were involved in moving the meteorite. I kind of doubted it, as my understanding is that slavery in Brazil had been withering long before formal abolition, partly because a legal phaseout of the institution had been decades in the works, and partly because escaping from slavery had been pretty easy: there were stable, almost fully urban refuges in this and other parts of Brazil. Well, the report mentioned not slaves but tabaréos. It actually footnotes this apparently unfamiliar word, as merely "men of the backland," but evidently it caught on, and the dictionary definition is now a broad one, covering menial laborers, the lowliest of soldiers, grunts and general simpletons. The author of this report does call them simple, people "who had never left the thorny forests of the interior" but could "at least be made sufferable auxiliaries for the execution of a job that would require the use of tools entirely unknown to them."

You can say in Portuguese "human resources" but I remain unsure whether it ever was a persistent preoccupation thereabouts. It had seemed strange and notable to me that immigration of Italians came right after abolition of slavery. (Japanese came in the early 20th century; then Germans after WWI. After WWII too, but WWI was the real big time.) But maybe it was unrelated. I never heard a Brazilian say that blacks are expensive to have around, but neither did I ever hear a Brazilian say that blacks are good at music and sports, although Brazilian journalism, foolishly mimicking American journalism, does at times emit frantic rah-rah for some accomplishment-of-color. I get the idea that slavery in Brazil was so imperfectly realized an institution that hardly anyone noticed what blacks did or didn't do, because it wasn't much different from what other Brazilians did. Slave labor may have cost nothing, but other labor didn't pay much better, and abolition was – I sense – much like other political exertions thereabouts, something for a very small number of hyperliterate perspiring males. The arrival of immigrants may have had more to do with where they were coming from than where they were going to.

Something to think about, and maybe later I will. Meanwhile, I am still notionally on the subject of moving a big rock to Rio, and this mission was accomplished. Even with the guys taking Easter week off. The report, which concludes with an intelligent discussion of the origins of extraterrestrial objects and some photos of the operation, is something all Brazilians should be proud of.

(8/22/20)