The Treasure That Sent Its Owners to the Gallows - Pirate Silver

The Treasure That Sent Its Owners to the Gallows - Pirate Silver... Everyone pictures pirate treasure the same way: a chest of gold coins and a map with an X. The real thing was silver. It was lopsided, it was routinely shaved and cheated, it was almost never buried, and it could put a noose around the neck of the man carrying it. This is the life of one Spanish piece of eight. It begins as ore inside a mountain in the high Andes, where conscripted Andean labourers were sent down by candlelight and mercury fumes sickened the men who refined it. It is struck by a hammer in a colonial mint. It crosses an ocean in a treasure fleet and goes down in a hurricane off Florida in 1715. Enslaved divers bring it back up one breath at a time. Pirates take it off the beach at gunpoint. It sinks again with Samuel Bellamy's Whydah off Cape Cod in 1717 and stays in the sand for 267 years. And then it turns up in your pocket. The word "dollar", the phrase "two bits", the dollar sign, and the fractions that priced American stocks until 2001 all trace back to this one crude, off-round coin. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Books Colin Woodard, "The Republic of Pirates" (Harcourt, 2007) — the 1715 fleet, Admiral Salmón's salvage camps and enslaved free-divers, Henry Jennings's raid, Bellamy and Williams at the wreck site, the taking and loss of the Whydah, John Dann's arrest at Rochester, and the colonial wage and price tables quoted in this video. David Cordingly, "Under the Black Flag" (Random House, 1995) — how Stevenson's "Treasure Island" invented the buried-chest-and-X image, Captain Kidd's cache on Gardiners Island, and how rare genuine buried pirate hoards actually are. Peter T. Leeson, "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates" (Princeton University Press, 2009) — pirate articles, share ratios, injury compensation, and the rules against cheating shipmates. Alexandre Exquemelin, "The Buccaneers of America" (first published in Dutch, 1678) — the buccaneers' compensation schedule, including 600 pieces of eight for the loss of a right arm. Captain Charles Johnson, "A General History of the Pyrates" (London, 1724) — Bartholomew Roberts's articles, the ban on gambling for money, and the 800-dollar fund for a man who lost a limb in service. Documents "The Examination of John Dann," 3 August 1696, printed in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., "Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents" (Macmillan, 1923) — Dann's own account of Every's crew, the clipped gold, and the division on Réunion. Archaeology and numismatics Jim Bailey's research on late 17th-century Yemeni silver coins found in New England, published in "The Colonial Newsletter," a research journal of the American Numismatic Society, August 2017, and reported by the Associated Press in April 2021. His first intact coin was recovered in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm, Middletown, Rhode Island, and was struck in Yemen in 1693. Roughly fifteen more have since been found, mostly in Massachusetts. The ANS has published a note qualifying some of the individual coin attributions; the broader pattern still stands. The Whydah: Barry Clifford located the wreck off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1984, and in October 1985 his team recovered the ship's bell inscribed "THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716" — the find that authenticated the site. Artifacts are held at the Whydah Pirate Museum, West Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The 1715 fleet: the wreck sites were rediscovered after contractor Kip Wagner began picking blackened silver coins off the beach near Sebastian Inlet in the 1950s. Licensed salvage on the Treasure Coast continues today. Money and the long aftermath The Coinage Act of 21 February 1857 ended the legal tender status of foreign coins in the United States, closing out Spanish silver after more than two centuries in American hands. The New York Stock Exchange completed its move to decimal pricing on 9 April 2001, retiring the eighths inherited from the Spanish dollar. On the dollar sign: Florian Cajori, "The Evolution of the Dollar Mark," Popular Science Monthly, December 1912, and "A History of Mathematical Notations" (1928). Cajori traced it to the merchant's shorthand "ps" for pesos, best evidenced in Oliver Pollock's New Orleans papers of 1778. It remains the leading explanation rather than a settled one; the rival account points to the ribbon wound around the pillars on the coin itself. On the coins: Spain's American mints struck hammered cobs by hand for well over two centuries. The Mexico City mint produced the first round, machine-struck pieces of eight with milled edges in 1732; Potosí went on hammering until 1773. T If you like maritime history told slowly and carefully, subscribe.