Teodoro Fernandes Sampaio

Teodoro Fernandes Sampaio (Portuguese pronunciation: [teoˈdɔɾu feʁˈnɐ̃dʒis sɐ̃ˈpaju]) (7 January 1855 – 11 October 1937) was an Afro-Brazilian polymath and public intellectual who worked as an engineer, geographer, politician, and historian.

[2] His father was Manuel Fernandes Sampaio, a white priest, and his mother, Domingas da Paixão do Carmo, was an enslaved woman.

[5] Sampaio graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the Polytechnic School in Rio de Janeiro in 1877 and returned to Santo Amaro.

The expedition explored the river from its mouth, on the Atlantic Ocean, up to the navigable limit at the time, near the town of Pirapora in the then province of Minas Gerais.

[8] The return journey, inland through the north-eastern Brazilian state of Bahia, led to Sampaio's major cartographic work, the topographic survey of Chapada Diamantina, a mountain range in Bahia State, and his book O rio São Francisco e a Chapada Diamantina,[9] published in 1906, which later became a classic of Brazil's history and geography.