On August 17 an extremely rare Spanish silver coin brought $528,000 at Heritage Auctions’ Platinum Night auction of world coins in Philadelphia.
Why Call it the First Dollar?
The 1538 coin, known as the Carlos and Joanna 8 reales, is one of three recovered in the 1990s from a chest aboard a Spanish shipwreck in the Caribbean known as “The Golden Fleece.” It’s often referred to as the first dollar of the New World because it’s the earliest known “crown” coin (royal or real in Spanish) minted in the Western Hemisphere.
Where Did it Get the Name “Dollar”?
With the scarcity of British coins in its American colonies, large amounts of a Dutch silver coin known as a thaler found their way into the colonies, by hook or by crook. The word thaler was soon anglicized to dollar and shortly any coin of comparable size and value become known by that name. That included the Spanish 8-real that was beginning to appear widely throughout North America.
The Dollar Becomes Spanish
In the 16th century the Dutch thaler was widely accepted due to its quality and predictable silver content. When Spain began dominating world trade in the 1500s it wanted a coin of its own for commercial use.
In 1497 currency reform in Spain brought the 8-real silver coin into existence to mimic the Dutch thaler and take advantage of the large silver deposits in Spanish American colonies. The coins were first minted in Spain from imported silver, but with the amount of inter-American trade it made sense to make the coins in the west, too.
Mints were established in several colonial locations including Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. The Mexico City mint began making a New World version of the 8-real in 1535 with a small run of hand-stamped coins. Some of the coins found their way onto the ill-fated galleon where they were discovered some 450 years later.
They were the first of the Spanish “dollars” that would dominate American commerce for centuries and become the basis of the US dollar in 1792. The so-called “pieces of eight” would remain legal currency in the US until 1857.
Why Is It So Valuable?
Only three Carlos and Joanna 8-real coins are known to survive, all in private hands. The one auctioned is graded Almost Uncirculated (AU-50), remarkable condition for a coin of its provenance. Of the three known coins of its type, it is considered the finest example.
The coin originally contained .885 ounces of silver, nearly all of which has survived the half-millennial of submersion in salt water, as has some of the original mint luster.
The design of the coin is highly symbolic and artistic, representing Spain’s emergence as a world power and the dominant colonizer of the Americas.
Learn more about this remarkable coin on the Heritage Auctions website.