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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Burton Strauss III, post: 24619442, member: 59677&quot;]Nice collection.</p><p><br /></p><p>For completeness, &quot;Spanish&quot; is an inaccurate and confusing term.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Spanish Colonies included mints in Mexico City, Lima (Peru), and Potosi (Bolivia) plus about a dozen other locations. Most of the coins were shipped to Spain, where they were melted, recoined as Spanish coins, and used to pay the Kings of Spain&#039;s vast debts. At least those that didn&#039;t get sunk in shipwrecks, stolen by the English, or generally otherwise diverted.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>(I have a cob from the Capitana wreck of 1654, which is one of the &quot;lucky&quot; ones. When the Capitana sank, there were supposedly 3 million pesos of silver on board. 4.5 million were salvaged in 1654 and the next few years [and 10 million supposedly were on board]. Those 4.5 million were put on board the Maravillas, which sank in 1656 off Grand Bahama Island. 2 million (ish) Pesos were salvaged from that wreck and sent to Spain, where the English seized them off Cadiz in 1656.)(And to thoroughly confuse things, the Capitana is not the name of a ship, it&#039;s the name given to the ship of the Captain of the fleet. It was actually the Jesus de Limpia de Consolacion that sank in October of 1654 off the coast of Chanduy, Ecuador.)</i></p><p><br /></p><p>By the time of US Independence, the cobs were mostly gone, replaced by milled coins, e.g. <a href="https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces15059.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces15059.html" rel="nofollow">https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces15059.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p><i>(My interest is the time of the 2 Charlies, Carolus III and Carolus IIII. Carolus III had a large and distinctive nose, and when he died on 14 December 1788, the colonies continued to mint coins using the bust of III but often numbered IV. Eventually, everyone got the memo and a picture to use for new coins, numbered IIII and without the nose that arrived 5 minutes before the rest of the king)</i></p><p><br /></p><p>After independence (27 September 1821), Mexico continued to mint 8 Reales and (gold) Escudos. The &quot;Cap and Ray&quot; design coins (<a href="https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces7394.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces7394.html" rel="nofollow">https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces7394.html</a>) were the most common coins used in the US until the Coinage Act of 1857.</p><p><br /></p><p>After independence (6 August 1825), Bolivian coins were minted in Sols (Silver) and Scudo (Gold), not Reales or Escudos. 1 Peso which used to be 8 reales was now 8 Soles. 1 (Gold) Scudo = 16 Soles. Throw the bums out, change the names, but don&#039;t screw with commerce!</p><p><br /></p><p>Peru (28 July 1821) (all in all it was a bad decade for Spain) continued to mint Reales (and gold Escudos) until 1857/1856.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>BTW, the Coinage Act of 1857 did not (as it is commonly described) outlaw the use of foreign coins. It ended the practice of Federal Tax Offices, Land Offices, and Post Offices of <b>accepting </b>them and then <b>paying them back out</b>. Instead, the coins were accepted (at a discount - the act imposed a 20% haircut) and sent to the US Mint to be recoined into Federal money. The 1857 act required the Secretary of the Treasury to report each year on the fineness of foreign coins commonly in circulation - you can see these tables in the Mint Director&#039;s annual reports at least until 1913.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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