1778 Mexico 8 Reale Colonial Silver Coin America's First Silver Dollar

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1778 Mexico 8 Reale Colonial Silver Coin This 8 Reales coin is the size of a US silver dollar.It was discovered by divers at a 200 + year old Caribbean shipwreck sight.It is 90% silver and was struck at the Mexico city mint. by order of King Charles III between 1772-1783.This type of coin was used as a model for the US silver dollar. France, Spain and England ventured on long voyages to expand their empires from the 1600's to the 1800’s and established colonies outside of their homelands. One of the ways to keep the new colony under control for the mother country was to command its currency. Usually the monarch or some other symbol of power from the initial country would be minted on these coins. The coins would also bear symbols and other devices that would tie the coin to that colony. The money would have some kind of fixed exchange rate with the mother country. Another way to keep the colony in line was to make the currency worth less than the money from the main country. No country was more successful in colonial coinage than Spain. Their colonial coins are easy to identify; they used the Pillars of Hercules and the crest of the ruling family on many of the colonial coins. Their coins had the richest content of precious metals of all the worlds' coins during the colonial period. There were twelve Spanish colonial mints: Mexico, Santo Domingo, Lima, La Plata, Potosi, Panama, Cartagena, Bogotá, Cuzco, Guatemala, Santiago, and Popayan. During Spain's almost 300 years of colonial rule the Spanish colonies produced a total of five different types of silver reales coins: pillar, shield, pillar and waves, milled pillar, and milled bust. Cob coins were minted at many Spanish Main Land and Spanish colonial New World mints. The crude coins, called "cobs" (from the Spanish word cabo), were hand-struck, irregularly shaped objects of various denominations in silver, copper, and gold. Cob-style coins are divided into two basic groups based on their obverse markings: the "pillars and waves-type" and the "shield-type." Their reverses typically bear a cross or a quartered shield with the arms of Castile and Leon. Weight and fineness were primary considerations in coin production: after the metal was smelted, purified, and alloyed (this last to prevent brittleness), large strips were measured for proper thickness and cut into basic sizes corresponding to their denominations. The silver reales coins came in the denominations of: 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, and 8 reales. Further snipping and chiseling produced the requisite weight at the expense of the coin's visual integrity, and later unofficial alterations to the cobs were rampant. Many of these coins were circulated in the Spanish colonies, but others were shipped to Spain to be melted down and refashioned as jewelry or coins of the realm. On August 2, 1993 fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, a small fishing trawler discovered coins in their fishing net. At a depth of 100 meters they had uncovered the final resting place of the long lost Spanish brig, El Cazador, and its treasure of Spanish 8 reale coins. In the late 1700’s, the Port of New Orleans in Louisiana was the center of the Spanish Louisiana territory which encompassed most of the center of North America. The Louisiana territory was suffering great economic difficulty because of the American Revolutionary War between the American colonists and the government of Britain. Vast quantities of near worthless paper currency were circulating in the territory. King Carlos III of Spain sent the Spanish ship El Cazador to Veracruz Mexico to take a large load of Spanish silver coins from Veracruz, to New Orleans to redeem the paper currency. El Cazador sailed from Veracruz on January 11, 1784. It disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico and no information was known about its fate until the fishing trawler found the coins in 1993. The largest quantity of coins recovered was the 8 reale, also known as the Spanish milled dollar, or the Piece of eight. The ... read more

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