While chatting to an acquaintance-stallholder at the local flea-market, I was approached by her friend who wanted to know if I was interested in buying a coin. I’d met this fellow a couple of times before and we’d always had fascinating conversations about antiques, silverware and coins, and so I agreed to have a look at whatever it was he was willing to show me. He took a badly cracked and chipped coin-case out of a plastic bag he had with him, and presented me with a very, very, VERY worn and battered Spanish Piece of Eight encapsulated therein.
To say that the coin was in bad condition was putting it mildly. The surface was so pitted and scratched and the edges were so worn and chipped that it looked like someone had tried to sandblast it or something. And in a way, that’s exactly what had happened!
The damaged coin-case, bearing serial #3498007-073, said that the coin was from the “El Cazador” shipwreck of 1784. At once, I was interested – I’ve never owned any real shipwrecked treasure before! We haggled back and forth and finally settled on a price that I was comfortable with, and I added another piece of eight to my collection…which now numbers five pieces! (Only three more to go! Haha!!).
I decided to remove the coin from the case and add it to my collection, but I also decided to keep the case (damaged as it is) as proof of provenance, should I ever need it in the future.
So What Is This Coin and What Makes it Special?
The coin in question is a 1783 Spanish Dollar, also called an 8 Reales or Peso de Ocho coin. To most people, it goes by a far more common name, however.
The Piece of Eight.
What makes this coin stand out from other pieces of eight is that it’s a shipwreck coin. That’s why it’s in such terrible condition – it’d spent two hundred years at the bottom of the ocean! And that sort of treatment has caused the coin to take on a particular patina and toning which is unique to shipwreck coinage, and that’s what makes it more desirable and more interesting than other coins.
Even without the case, would it still be identifiable as shipwreck treasure?
Oh yeah, sure! Yes, coins like these are faked, but there are ways of telling genuine ones. Mostly, what you’re looking for are genuine signs of aging. Natural wear, grime and toning/patina which have built up over the coin over the course of hundreds of years. This is something that you cannot replicate on a fake coin (or at least, not easily). About the only way you can is to make a copy of an original shipwreck coin by making a casting of it. But that won’t work because the accumulated encrustations on the real coin would show up as metal on the fake one – which obviously wouldn’t happen if the coin had really spent the better part of two or three centuries underwater.
The blackened areas on the coin are the result of salt corrosion and discolouration from 200 years spent at the bottom of the Mexican Gulf. Even if you tried to polish this, you’d never be able to move those spots entirely, so I haven’t bothered to try.
Determining whether a coin is real or fake is a matter of close examination, the balance of probabilities, and understanding what you’re looking at, how it was made, and how metal ages over time. It’s something gained through experience and careful study.
What is “El Cazador” and what happened to it?
El Cazador (“The Hunter” in Spanish) was an 18th century warship (specifically, a brig of war), which was commissioned by the reigning king of Spain (at the time, Charles III), to deliver several tons of silver coinage from mints based in Spanish Mexico, to the capital city of Spanish Louisiana (New Orleans) in 1784. At the time, the United States was still limited to the eastern coastline and much of the Americna interior was still divided up between the French and the Spanish.
Paper currency and promissory notes being used in Spanish North America at the time were heavily prone to counterfeiting and forgery. This led to a lack of confidence in such currency, as a result, it meant that soldiers and sailors living in New Orleans at the time refused to accept it as payment since there was no guarantee that the notes were actually worth anything!
It was to prevent a complete financial meltdown that El Cazador was chartered to make this vital mission, and to restore the colony’s faith in Spanish currency, by replacing flimsy paper notes, not worth anything, with cold, hard cash that could be trusted!
The bust of King Charles III of Spain and the year “1783”. The heavily pitted and worn-down surface is the result of centuries of sand grinding against the metal as it was washed over it over and over again by the action of waves and currents. The coin was essentially sandblasted for two hundred years, which also wore down the edges of the coin, which is why they look so irregular.
To achieve this goal, the El Cazador sailed from Spain to the Mexican port city of Veracruz, where it was loaded with the silver which it would then transport to Louisiana, departing from Spain on the 20th of October, 1783, and arriving in Mexico three months later. Here, the ship was loaded with the required cargo os silver. All told, El Cazador was loaded with about 450,000 coins – Spanish Reales of various denominations. Roughly 400,000 pieces of eight, and 50,000 other Reale coins of small change – 4 Reale and 2 Real coins, etc., an amount totaling upwards of 37,500lbs (or 18.75 tons) of silver!
This coin was one of those 450,000 which vanished into the depths of history…
The Last Voyage of the El Cazador
Once loaded, the El Cazador departed Veracruz on the 11th of January, 1784, setting a course North-Northeast, across the Gulf of Mexico towards New Orleans. At the wheel was Gabriel de Campos y Pineda, a captain selected personally by the King of Spain himself, to command this vital mission.
Exactly what happened to the El Cazador will never be known. Spanish treasure ships lost to hurricanes were extremely common occurrences in those days (read my post about the history of the piece of eight to see just how many fleets were lost in storms back in the 1600s and 1700s!) and it’s likely that the ship succumbed to such a storm.
“The Shipwreck that Changed the World”
The impact of the loss of the El Cazador was great. When it failed to arrive in New Orleans, divers and ships immediately went out into the Gulf of Mexico to determine what had happened to it. No trace of the ship could be found, and the loss of so much money became a disaster for the Spanish and their new world colonies. In June, 1784, the ship and its priceless cargo were officially listed as being lost at sea. While further attempts to ship silver to Louisiana were attmpted, the situation there, already so precarious due to the local distrust of the currency, finally collapsed altogether.
A few years later, the French revolution, and war with Napoleonic France only made things even worse, and eventually, Spain ceded its Louisiana colony to the French in 1800. This was the same territory which was sold to the United States in 1803, in the famous “Louisiana Purchase”. So basically, the United States of the early 1800s doubled in size because of a shipwreck.
What Happened to the El Cazador?
So, in 1784, a ship went down in the Mexican Gulf and was never heard from again. Right?
Well, sort of. The El Cazador was certainly not heard from for the better part of 200 years. This changed in 1993, when some guys out in the Gulf decided to go fishing. On a boat ironically called the Mistake, they sailed through the Gulf and tossed their nets overboard to see what they could find. When the nets snagged on something, they winched them up to find that they had caught large clumps of rock!
Initially, the men were frustrated and disappointed. That is, until one of the men broke one of the clumps open and took a closer look at it. He suddenly realised that it wasn’t a rock after all, but coins! Hundreds and hundreds of silver coins, fused together by two hundred years of corrosion and age!
Clumps of coins from the El Cazador, fused together by the sea after 200 years under water.
The Mistake’s captain, Jerry Murphy, suddenly got really excited, and rang up his lawyer as soon as he could, in order to obtain salvage rights on what he was sure, had to be a sunken ship. Further research identified the wreck as being El Cazador, and soon, huge clumps of silver coins were being winched and hoisted up from the deep, along with loads of other artifacts, including various cannons, and also the ship’s bell.
The coins were eventually cleaned and carefully pried apart. They were eventually sold off, either as single coins with certificates of authenticity, or as cased pieces in plastic frames with the name of the wreck printed on labels and stuck on them. Given that the El Cazador had 400,000 pieces of eight on board, getting your hands on one isn’t too difficult – just make sure that if you’re going to attribute your coin to the El Cazador wreck, that you get as much documentation and proof of it as you can. When it comes to antiques and history – provenance is power!
So Now What Happens?
Well, the coin is now part of my collection! Although the case is damaged, the frame with the authentication sticker is still intact, and I’ve kept it aside as proof of provenance. I’ve researched coin cases (or ‘slabs’ as they’re called in collecting circles) and removing coins from their slabs doesn’t deteriorate or damage the coin’s value or desirability in any way (provided that you keep evidence of the coin’s history, should it have any, and you didn’t damage the coin when it came out of the slab). So excited to have my first real piece of Spanish sunken treasure!
“I want a Shipwrecked Piece of Eight!…Where do I get one!?”
Believe it or not, you can just look them up online. There are a number of websites which act as official agents for various discovered shipwrecks. Simply find the right website and you’ll actually be able to buy genuine shipwreck silver coming from specific wrecks. Each coin comes with some form of authentication, either a framed certificate, or a slabbed coin in a plastic case.
Personally, I think a loose coin and a framed certificate is better, because slabbing a coin and encasing it in plastic can cause all kinds of problems later on, should you want to rehouse or re-display the coin in some other manner. Various coin-dealers I’d spoken to were all of the opinion that slabbing really isn’t the best thing to do with coins, since it can make them less desirable (what’s the point of buying a coin if you can’t pick it up, basically…).
More Information about the El Cazador and its Treasure?
Sure, here’s a few handy sites about the wreck, and its treasure, and how you might be able to buy a genuine piece of shipwreck silver or gold. These websites relate to the wreck of the El Cazador, but also to another famous Spanish treasure wreck: the galleon Atocha. If you’re interested in shipwreck treasure, then definitely check that one out!
http://artifactexchange.com/index.php/shipwrecks/el-cazador
http://www.elcazador.com/
Hi my name is Steil I am 12 years old and I live in Colorado I want to buy some of those coins if you are interested I want them for my own personal museum in my bedroom I am really interested in collecting those chunks of coins not cleaned up still in their original place still stuck together?and how much do they cost? Are you interested in selling them? Just like the coins on that last picture of all those other pictures. Thank you so much.