Coins


	Under Sea Adventurers Dive Club

The early coins of Spain & America

Ray McAllister

In the course of research on Spanish galleons and Spanish treasure, for I am still an ardent underwater treasure hunter, although I prefer underwater archaeology, it suddenly dawned on me how we came to have the coins we take so much for granted in the United States. The whole story is quite interesting. So, ready or not, here it is!

In the early days of Spanish colonization of the new world, great quantities of gold and silver were stolen from the natives. In some cases they were forced to mine these precious metals for the Spanish at great cost to health and quality of life. Rather than transport all of the precious metals to Spain, leaving the colonies devoid of necessary coinage, mints were set up in several places in Central and South America to manufacture coins from the bullion. Meanwhile the ships of the Plata Flota carried the coins back to Spain and for more than 100 years, they kept Spain a great and prosperous nation, except on those years when the fdleets were wrecked by a hurricane or sacked by pirates or privateers.

At this time it was common to take a bar of silver or gold and slice off small discs from which the coins were struck. The disc was placed on a die and the other half of the die was placed on the disc. A heavy blow with a hammer and the imprint of both halves of the die would be struck in the soft metal. An offcenter blow would result in an imperfect obverse or reverse face of the coin, something often seen on "pieces of eight".

The main coin in silver was the eight reales coin, hence "pieces of eight"! However this method of striking these coins was so imperfect that it was necessary to weigh them and remove small pieces from the coin's edges until it weighed the proper amount. To do this, small pieces were clipped from the edges making the coins odd shaped and no longer round. The cobs resulting were wildly different, one from another. This in turn led to other problems.

It is said that many merchants in the New World employed a clipper to chisel off another small bit from the coins that came into his shop. This resulted in constantly smaller coins until it became obvious that something was the matter. This is almost certainly the origin of our term "chiseler" for someone illegaly cheating us out of our just rewards. Look at a collection of "pieces of eight" and note the dramatic difference in shape and sometimes size.

The gold coins were escudos and appeared somewhat less susceptible to chiseling for they must have been more carefully struck, bevcause of their much greater value. But, always ingenious, the merchants had a way to handle that, too! Since a slave was fairly cheap and inexpensive to feed and house, they are purported to have used a slave as a "whirler" to get an additional share of the gold coins coming into their possession. The whirler put the days gold coins into a chamois or similar bag and whirled them around at the end of a thong, causing the coins to rub against each other and simulate wear. At the end of the day, the coins were washed and put back in circulation but after the bag had accumulated significant gold dust from whirling, it would be burned and the gold reclaimed for the merchant.

Well, all good things came to an end around 1732 when someone got the bright idea of notching the outside of a round coin, perhaps cast in a mold to insure uniformity. This process was called milling and is used today on coins of valuable metal. The resulting coins had a pair of pillars on one side and became known as "piller dollars" to modern collectors. The first shipment of these milled coins was lost when the 1733 fleet was wrecked in the Florida Keys, off Islamorada and Indian Key.

The milled Spanish coins were legal tender all thru the New World for many years. It was not uncommon to hear a cowboy speak of "One Spanish dollar" for a drink, or a number of them for a horse, etc. Since the Spanish dollar was a piece of eight, half a dollar was a piece of four, and coins of this denomination were also struck as well as pieces of two. Naturally the term piece of four was soon corrupted to "4 bits". Remember when your could get a "shave and a haircut, 4 bits?" So we keep part of the old Spanish eight reales coin every time we say two bits or four bits or when we look at the American silver dollar, which was struck as a milled coin, almost exactly like the milled Spanish dollar. This is part of the exciting story of Spanish treasure which excites even the most blase human. I have been involved in treasure hunting for such coins since 1958, when I hooked up with Edmund Downing and Rex Heird in Bermuda, and briefly with Teddy Tucker. Later I worked, for fun, with Bob Weller and his company, Royal Fifth, on the 1733 fleet in the Keys. Still later I searched for treasure on my own in the Keys and in the Bahamas, always as a volunteer. And what a success I was. I found a piece of two on the "San Pedro" off Indian Key. My former wife did not recognize it when I placed it on the kitchen table next to my plate for all to wonder at, and she thought it was a piece of burnt toast and brushed it into the garbage.

That was all the coins I found until I worked the Santa Margarita, in the Quicksands area off Marquesas Key, where I uncovered 10 very badly sulfided pieces of eight, looking for all the world like black rocks. Don Kincaid gave me the three plumpest coins but they were so badly corroded that no inscription was recovered even after careful conservation. Beyond that the only "coins" that I have recovered on 8 or 10 old wrecks were a large handfull of "money cowries" on the Tuddy Tucker 1594? wreck in Bermuda. She was apparently taking them back to Spain as souvenirs.

This doesn't mean that my wreck hunting has been in vain. I have an excellent collection of old spikes in copper, bronze and iron, a few musket balls and musket flints, and tremendous memories of the exxcitement of scrabbling in the bones of ships lost several hundred years before I was born. I particularly remember a pewter plate off HMS Cerberus, in Castle Harbour, Bermuda. The owner had used the point of his knife and put his regiment, his initials and so on on the back before the Cerberus went down. I had done exactly the same thing on my canteen cup during WW II. The other great memory was of a wreck in Bermuda where the hands prints of the people, that had patted the tar into the inside of the hull, were still clearly visible after all that time. Fingerprints still showed clearly and there were footprints where they had walked in the bilge.

I've found cochineal and indigo dye on one wreck, and bar shot and a wooden projectile with the hollowed halves bound together with hemp and the inside filled with rocks and nails and musket balls. Buried under the bottom, in anoxic sand, it had survived from about the late 1500s. But this is a long way from old Spanish coinage so.....until next month.