Hi, A friend has shown me a coin which he says came from the wreck of the Batavia which sank off the coast of Western Australia in 1629. Could anyone please identify this coin for me?
Your friend's coin appears to be an 1567 Dutch half-daalder and may be very rare as described by this article, and could very well have been from the Batavia which carried mostly Dutch and German coins.
Thank you ahearn for the information on the coin. I will let him know the information next time that I see him.
Entirely different coin than this. This one is dated 1583 and has totally different legends. I cannot identify off hand, but I will see if I can look it up when I get home.
It's a Rixdaler, 1583 struck at the Deventer mint with a mintage of 68,189; Delmonte #680 classified as an R coin which means it is not common but by no means rare. Now then, it may well be a shipwreck coin but it doesn't really look like one. What it does look like is a cast counterfeit. Silver shipwreck coins are always corroded and once the corrosion is removed there is plenty of pitting remaining. But the pitting is completely random and most often will appear in bunches or large groups affecting a large area. Cast counterfeits on the other hand will typically show similar pitting, but the pits will show up the most on the edges and the tops of the legends and devices. The pits are the result of casting bubbles, small air bubbles in the liquid metal as it is poured in the cast that rise to the top. If you closely at this coin you will see that the pits are much more prevalent on one side than they are the on the other. They are also fairly evenly spaced and nearly all of them are perfectly round. Pitting from corrosion just doesn't occur that way.
