Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Fort Pierce South Beach Monday Morning from Surfguru.com. |
The surf is decreasing but many beaches are building.
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I thought you might be interested in some of the details of a sample of sea salvaged 1715 Fleet silver cobs. I looked a little deeper at the 2000 -20002 salvage records that I talked about two days ago. Here are a few interesting observations.
First, very few of the salvaged silver coins showed a date. Without doing specific calculations, it looks like for the 2000 -2002 seasons (which is probably pretty close to what is still happening today) only around four percent of the salvaged silver coins showed ANY date when tagged. There were no examples in the three years of records of a full date. I suspect that more coins would show a date after cleaning, but the fact remains that salvaged coins showing a date are fairly rare, and you can see that in auction prices. Dated coins are more desirable.
It surprised me to see in these records that as rarely as dates are found, assayer initials are similarly rare. From my own beach finds, it seemed that assayer initials were not as rate as dates, but I didn't really keep exact count. When neither a date or assayer initial can be found, the date range can still often be narrowed down by other features of the coins design.
Going through the three years of salvage records, 113 of the coins (excluding those described as fragments or unknow) were half reales, 13 were one-reales, 17 were two-reales, 32 were four-reales, and 37 were eight-reales. So, half reales were by far the most common, followed by eight and four reales. That appears to me to be not too dissimilar from what you might expect from the beach, although personally, I've found greater proportions of the one and two reales along with the very common half-reales. Of course, that changes from beach to beach. Some beaches, Bonsteel perhaps being the best example, is known for a preponderance of half reales.
Going through a small sample of the half reales listed on the first page of the salvage records, which included a total of 18 half-reales, the average weight of a half reales was 0.9 grams with a range 0.3 to 1.2 grams. That contrasts markedly from what you would expect from newly minted half reales, which should be close to 1.7 grams. So, a majority of the salvaged half reales were significantly underweight. Part of that is probably due to corrosion or sea-wear.
One nice thing about half reales is that even when you have a extremely underweight example, you can often still determine the denomination of the coin as well as date range corresponding to the king and corresponding monogram. You can often identify the monogram from a small fraction of the half reale.
Here are the two common most common types you will find on 1715 beaches.
Most common are those minted under Phillip V, which display the following style of monogram.
Second most common would be those minted under Charles II, displaying the style of monogram shown below.
Most often you won't see the entire monogram, but enough to identify it. There are many slight variations too. These are stylized versions of the monograms.
Here is a post in which I talk more about the monograms.
Looking at a relatively small sample of salvaged eight reales, the average weight of the sampled salvaged reales was 23.8. A newly minted eight should weigh around 27.5 rams, so it seems that salvaged eight reales are also underweight something like four grams.
So eight reales are about 3.7 grams underweight while half reales are about 0.8 grams underweight on average. So half reales lost a lot less material than eight reales but a higher percent of their original weight. Half reales lost nearly 30 percent while eight reales lost only about ten percent on average.
I won't make much of the exact numbers right now because they are based on very small samples. However, after browsing additional salvage records the general findings seem to hold pretty well.
Of course, the salvage records could present several sources of error. They weren't meant to be scientific studies. Maybe in the future, I'll look at the records in more detail to see how well these findings hold up.
These observations offer several clues that will be useful for the beach detectorist. For example, you can expect silver cobs to be significantly underweight, especially the half reales, which are small as minted but will often be found to be very underweight when found. I could theorize about how and why they are so often very underweight when found but won't get into that now.
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Once again I found Copilot making significant errors. I've learned to use Copilot for my less serious and less complicated queries. I don't put a lot of trust in Copilot. Grok is more accurate and generally does a better job. Both are useful though. Copilot is sufficient for many routine queries. It will, though, seem to miss important words in your question or use less than the most accurate sources for answering questions. The way I use AI is evolving and I suspect will continue to evolve.
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| Surf Chart from SurfGuru.com. |
As you can see, we're expectiig a gradually decreasing surf.
Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net
