Wow, the mint screwed this up http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wc...ctId=12689&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=10111
Every thing looks just fine to me? Ocean in View is part of the Westward Journey Series and O! the joy is correct, at least if you lived and wrote back then. Is there something else?
I don't see it either. Interestingly, the original L&C diary used the phrase "Ocian in View. O! the joy" (or something like that), and the Mint decided not to use their spelling of "ocean", even though they were quoting from their diary. I think the Mint made the correct choice.
OUCH! The green and blue just doesn't do it for me. That hurts my eyes just looking at it. I thought the previous wrappers were classy but this new one looks like they were colored with crayons. Yuck.
My view on the spelling of ocean is that a quote is a quote. Misspelled or not, they should have left it the way Lewis and Clark spelled it. I think the MInt was worried that they couldn't handle the calls when the coin came out so they caved in to political correctness. And after seeing how the Mint handles coin orders on the first day of sales, they were probably right.
I can see that viewpoint, too. I wouldn’t fault them with the “ocian” spelling. I think they were afraid that most folks wouldn’t understand that it was a quote from the diary, and would think the Mint had illiterate proofreaders. Similarly, I read someone complaining that the word “liberty” was scrawled and not in the block letters it usually is. The complainer didn’t realize that it was taken from Jefferson’s own handwriting. Knowing that, it’s my favorite element of the new nickels.
If the artist on these coins hadn't been from Maryland and used to seeing the Atlantic and it's green water, we might have the blue of that Pacific and a two tone blue wrapper.
