A guy at work has ten of these he found on a beach. can anyone identify this and give an approximate value? Thanks.
FAKES! Just kidding, I have no idea. Cobs seem to be kind of hard to identify. I think for average pieces they hover around the $150 range (from what I've seen).
This is the only picture he supplied. I'd like to get my hands on the coins and post some better pictures. He just wanted a rough guess about the identity and value for now.
That's why I wanted larger pics, so I could indentify it. Yeah, it's a Spanish colonial cob - but is it a 2, 4 or 8 reale ? What mint, date etc. Is it genuine ? We need all that to approximate value.
Better than that! I would find out which Beach and go looking for more coins on the Beach and in the water as well as look for the Spanish Galleon that they came from. That is, if they and the story that guy at work told are genuine. Frank
I agree they are more than likely Spanish Colonial. Looks to be hand punched which tells me it probably wasn't made in Mexico City. Probably from Cuba or Grenada, but of course, thats just a guess. Guy~
Frank: Please don't be too mean to those poor folks from Florida, after all, they have to dream up new ways to louse up their state.
I don't know, I've just never seen one with spilit rims from the Mexico City mint before. Usually when the rims split it is because it was hammered with very crude dies on subpar silver stock, not a classic sign of MC coins. Thats just been my experience, but I haven't seem specimens from every year stuck there either, so it's just an observation rather than stating a fact. Guy~
Doug is correct on this! If the coins are genuine, then from their appearance, IMHO they could have been struck anywhere from the mid 1500's to the mid 1600's. Frank
The guy at work, (We call him 'Bubba') , found ten on a beach in Florida several years ago. We are in Pennsylvania and the coins are in Fla, so no more pics available for a while.
Well, I hope Bubba did not make the story up, that he actually found them and did not purchase them from someone that was lurking around the beach looking for unsuspecting tourists saying that they had found them and were willing to sell them! There are a lot of folks that sell this type of stuff at beaches and other areas where tourists flock to in Florida and tell a story how they found the coins while metal detecting. In most if not all cases, the coins are cheap Counterfeits sometime made in Shanghai, China but sometime produced locally or elsewhere. Frank
