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MEXICO, Mexico City, cob 8 reales, Charles II, assayer not visible, plugged for use in the U.S. colo

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Coins: Shipwreck Coins Start Price:2,400.00 USD Estimated At:3,000.00 - 6,000.00 USD
MEXICO, Mexico City, cob 8 reales, Charles II, assayer not visible, plugged for use in the U.S. colo
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MEXICO, Mexico City, cob 8 reales, Charles II, assayer not visible, plugged for use in the U.S. colonies (regulated), extremely rare, PCGS F details / contemporary plug (Feversham), ex-Christie's. KM-46; Cal-Type 108. 19.40 grams. The history of circulating silver coinage in pre-Independence United States contains a dark chapter in the very early 1700s, when the New England Pine-Willow-Oak Tree hammered coinage (having ended in 1662) was but a memory and new Spanish milled pistareens were just starting to enter the local economy. Prior to the 1720s, this was the heyday of piracy and the consequential influx of Spanish American silver cobs, which were reliable in metal content but impossible to keep from being shaved or clipped. The remedy, as least as far as New York was concerned, was "regulation" in the form of drilling cobs and plugging them with refined silver wire to bring them back up to standard. Typically done by jewelers and silversmiths, this was the precursor to the very rare and important regulated gold coins executed by Brasher, Burger, and other names well known to U.S. numismatists. The early silver, however, was not marked by the silversmiths, and was generally relegated to short lives as mutilations begging to be melted. In truth, we have seen no examples outside of the Feversham finds.

It was a revelation when the finds from the Feversham shipwreck first hit the market via Christie's in 1989, which presented several such coins as "entirely unprecedented." New York was Feversham's last port of call, and documents show its purser requisitioned the value of 569 pounds, 12 shillings, 5 pence in silver coinage from the British Treasury Office in New York to buy supplies; whatever was left over sank with the ship, giving us what Christie's called the "only known example of a typical cross section of New York's change in the Colonial era."

On the present piece, the plug is most evident on the cross side, where it protrudes from the lower-left quadrant, below a patch of scrubbed dark horn silver. The cross detail is otherwise nice, with one castle full. Only about half the shield is visible on the other side, partially due to corrosion and more dark horn silver, but mostly from flat strike. While the coin was no doubt clipped in its time, it is the corrosion that accounts for the low weight now, as presumably the plug would have brought this piece up to full weight back in 1711.

Such coins are virtually unavailable today, as the market quickly absorbed these regulated silver cobs from the Feversham years ago. They remain in high demand as evidence of what the city of New York was using for money in the early 1700s. Pedigreed to the original Christie's (New York) Feversham auction of February 1989, with original lot-tag 904. Recovered from: Feversham, sunk in 1711 off Nova Scotia, Canada
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