The early morning sun had yet to penetrate its depths and my flashlight barely pierced the murky gloom. I took a few small, tentative steps inside and pulled the door closed behind me. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the dark, breathing in the musty smell of rotting wood and decaying fruit.

I let my flashlight play lazily over the walls of what my host had told me, just a few hours ago, with considerable pride, had been built entirely by slaves. My light disturbed the flock of bats that were roosting in the rafters. Unlike every scary film I have seen, their swooping and confusion at being disturbed was not accompanied by a blood-curdling screech or a sense of menace. However, their frantic motion was still enough to send me flailing, like a whirling dervish, out the door into the early morning sun. The farm hand, or bios-frias as the Brazilians say, was leaning on a post laughing genially at my antics.

The moist and fertile seaboard of what is now the State of Pernambuco was most suitable for growing sugar and also conveniently located as a port of call for sailing ships travelling from Portugal to West Africa and the Orient. The sugar plant and the technique of its cultivation had reached Brazil from Madeira. A flourishing triangular trade soon developed, based on the importation of slave labour from West Africa to work on sugar plantations. The sugar was exported to markets in Europe where rising demand was beginning to outrun supplies from traditional sources. Slavery suddenly became a major issue.

Later, when the bats had returned to their roosts, the old farm hand showed me the exquisite machines that remained in the barn, the last testament of a different age. The machines reminded me of the glorious steam powdered devices I had once seen in a museum in London, remnants of an age when engineering was both noble and worthy and England was a mighty nation. However, these machines, which had seemed somehow to have resisted the inevitability of rust, were clearly not designed to be powered by electricity or steam (in fact electricity was a recent arrival in Guaramiranga). It seemed to my mind that they were clearly designed with human power in mind.

Their function eluded me, though their sleek cogs and huge wheels suggested the backbreaking labour of processing sugar cane. The farm hand shrugged, he too did not know what purpose these machines once served, and it seemed that he cared very little. To me, it seemed profoundly sad, both as an engineer and as a humanitarian. We left them alone in that dark barn, like ghosts from the past.

The final abolition of slavery, which occurred largely as a result of British pressure, is usually regarded as the most immediate cause for the fall of the monarchy. With the Emperor Dom Pedro II, who had recently made a rousing speech declaring that he would rather loose his crown than allow slavery to continue, away in Europe, his daughter, Princess Isabel, acted as Regent. On May 13, 1888, responding to the collapse of slavery as a workable system and yielding to pressures from the abolitionists, she signed the so-called "Golden Law" (Lei Áurea) that abolished slavery in Brazil.

For once I felt a slight glow of patriotism. I felt proud that it was British pressure that had bought this terrible trade in humanity to an end. However, a few days later I read a more comprehensive account, which left a bitter taste in my mouth. I read that "the end of slavery in Brazil came by the way of the British influence, because of the British colony of the West Indies, where slavery had been abolished."

This didn't seem bad until I continued to read "both the West Indies and Brazil were sugar-producing colonies. The British interest in abolishing slavery in Brazil was to insure that Brazil did not gain a financial advantage, by using slave labour, in selling sugar to world markets at a lower price than the British colony could compete with."

I left the library, ironically enough, in search of a coffee.

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