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Small cut piece of a gold "finger" bar, 1.3 oz troy (40.38 grams), marked with fineness XXI: (21.5K)

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money / Coins: Shipwreck Ingots Start Price:7,000.00 USD Estimated At:10,000.00 - 20,000.00 USD
Small cut piece of a gold  finger  bar, 1.3 oz troy (40.38 grams), marked with fineness XXI: (21.5K)
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Small cut piece of a gold "finger" bar, 1.3 oz troy (40.38 grams), marked with fineness XXI: (21.5K), foundry/assayer SARGOSA | PECARTA, and tax stamp, very rare, ex-"Dry Tortugas Wreck" (ca. 1622), Oceans Odyssey Plate. Roughly 1" x ¾" x ¼". In their time, complete Spanish gold bars represented massive amounts of value, too much for the average person, so typically they were cut into small, coin-like pieces like this one, which approximated the value of an 8 escudos plus a 4 escudos. It was for this reason that the bars were marked with fineness and tax stamps multiple times, and this particular piece was strategically cut to show both a partial tax stamp and the -SA end of foundry or assayer cartouche SARGOSA | PECARTA (scratched with an X, perhaps deliberately), over-stamped with the fineness of XXI inside an incuse box with two dots inside a separate box to denote an additional half-karat. The cuts are quite sharp, consisting of a single heavy through-chop at one end and several small jagged chiselings at the other end. On top of its appeal as a rare cut piece, this little trophy was published as one of the featured finds from a deep-water wreck that was eventually identified as the Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario, another ship in the same 1622 Fleet as the Atocha and Santa Margarita of Mel Fisher fame.

While PECARTA probably refers to the name of an unknown assayer, no doubt SARGOSA refers to Zaragoza, on the shores of the Rio Nechí in the province of Antioquia, Colombia. Zaragoza was home to one of the most prolific gold mines in the early 1600s, producing some 20 million pesos of gold from 1590 to 1645, and held a caja real (royal treasury office) as early as 1582. Bars with this marking are well known from the 1622 Fleet, but this is the first time we have seen it on a cut piece. From the "Dry Tortugas Wreck" (ca. 1622), with Sedwick photo-certificate, plated on page 73 of Oceans Odyssey 3 (2013), ed. by Greg Stemm and Sean Kingsley.