In 1784 a boy named Domingos da Motta Botelho was grazing cattle on a farm near what is now Monte Santo, in the interior of Bahia, when he came across something that did not belong in the caatinga: a slab of metal 2.20 meters long, 1.45 wide and 0.58 thick, sitting half-sunk in the ground. Word reached the colonial authorities quickly — the governor's official dispatch went out that September. At the time of the find, it was the second-largest meteorite known anywhere on Earth. Underneath it lay a crust of oxidation roughly four inches deep, and part of its lower surface was simply gone, corroded away. Both facts point the same direction: the thing had been lying exactly there for thousands of years before anyone noticed. It took its name from the nearby Bendegó stream.

In 1785 the governor, D. Rodrigues Menezes, ordered the meteorite hauled to Salvador. This was ambitious. Five and a third tonnes of iron went onto an ox cart, the ox cart went down a hill, the brakes failed, and the whole arrangement ran away. The meteorite came off and finished its journey in the dry bed of the Bendegó, 180 meters from where the boy had found it. Nobody moved it again for 103 years. It sat in the streambed through the end of the colonial period and most of the Brazilian Empire, a local landmark that had beaten the government once already.

The second attempt, in 1887, was planned to match the object. A retired officer, José Carlos de Carvalho, led the expedition, with the civil engineers Humberto Saraiva Antunes and Vicente José de Carvalho. Their method was slow and unglamorous and it worked: a heavy wagon dragged by teams of oxen, sliding along rails that had to be lifted from behind the load and relaid in front of it, over and over, across open caatinga. They set out on 7 September 1887, taking the route from Bendegó through Gameleira and Cansanção toward the railhead at Jacuricy. It took 277 days. The wagon reached Jacuricy on 14 May 1888 — one day after Princess Isabel signed the Lei Áurea abolishing slavery in Brazil. A ship carried the meteorite out of Salvador on 1 June, and on 15 June 1888 it arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where Isabel received it in person. The monarchy that had finally collected it had seventeen months left to live.

Bendegó is an iron meteorite: core material from a body that formed early in the solar system, melted, separated into metal and rock, and was later broken apart. By mass it is overwhelmingly iron, with about 6.6 percent nickel, 0.47 percent cobalt, 0.22 percent phosphorus, and traces of sulfur and carbon. Cut a slice and etch it and the Widmanstätten pattern appears — long interlocking bands of nickel-poor and nickel-rich alloy, arranged in a lattice. That structure only grows when molten metal cools over millions of years, which is why nobody has ever produced one in a laboratory. You need an asteroid, and you need to let it cool for a very long time. Bendegó also carries inclusions rich in phosphorus and sulfur.

It has been on public display at the National Museum since 1888, for most of that time the single heaviest object in the building. The 2018 fire destroyed the museum around it and left the meteorite with no major damage, and it was among the first pieces recovered from the ruins — which is why a lump of space iron became the emblem of a national loss rather than a footnote to it. It remains the largest meteorite ever found in Brazil and still ranks among the twenty largest in the world, though the discoveries of the intervening centuries have pushed it well down from the second place it held in 1784. Out in the sertão near Monte Santo, the spot where a boy found it and the streambed where a runaway cart dropped it are 180 meters apart, and both are still there.