Hey gang! here is one that's going to be going off to NGC here soon. Here is a cool website that talks about them. http://www.coins-of-panama.com/vernon.html Here is the piece I picked up. Apparently these are scarce in grades higher then fine.
Very cool lookin' medal ... man, ya gotta love coins with "ships" and/or "animals" on them!! (my favourites!!) :u*meY:
Thank you for the interesting link. On reading all this I am amazed that there can possibly be so many varieties and so many examples in so many states of preservation. As a collector of coins (ancient mostly) that circulated as legal tender I understand how we get coins in worn slick grades. What escapes me is how enough medals received the handling needed to make them aG. Were these popular enough as pocket pieces over a long enough span of time that they got honest wear in the same sense that we expect from a large cent? I would have thought that people who bought these in their day would have put them away in a drawer where they might expect to pick up a little handling over a period of years until they reached a time where people would wonder why grandpa had the thing. After all how many of you have regular contact with medals or anything your grandpa may have collected in his heyday? The linked listing makes it sound like owning such a medal must have been quite fashionable. The OP medal is a beauty and interesting but it is what I would expect to survive from such an issue having spent 200 years in a sock drawer rather than an equal time lost in a field or buried in a pot. I would have expected it less common to be found worn below VF than the other way around. Is this spread of wear states common in medals of this period? How many gentlemen carried how many medals in how many pockets for how many years?
