Coins

Canada, Hudson’s Bay Co, East Main, brass 1 Made Beaver, Half-, Quarter- and Eighth-Made Beaver, c. 1857, brass, 29, 27, 24 and 19mm, first two with punch-marks (Charlton FT 1-4; Haxby/Willey 206-9; Breton 926-9; Gingras 220-220c) [4]. Very fine and better, especially the smaller denominations; an attractive and very rare set £1,000-£1,500

The brass tokens of the Hudson’s Bay Co are erroneously valued in ‘new beaver’; the unit of the fur trade was the ‘made beaver’, an adult beaver skin in prime condition. The skin was never cut up, so the Company thought that tokens were the ideal way in which to express fractions of the made beaver. However, the native American first peoples in the East Main district (south and east of Hudson’s Bay) preferred to trust the Company accounts rather than take the tokens and for this reason they never circulated widely. When it was decided to redeem them, c. 1860, the tokens, which were struck in England to the order of George Simpson McTavish, were punched on their reverses to cancel them