PREVIEW: THE TANKERSLEY COLLECTION OF COINS & TOKENS: 24 JANUARY

When Spanish rule came to an end in Jamaica in 1655, the conquering British added the island to their growing portfolio of claims under colonial rule. However, it took nearly a century to establish a controlled currency, part of British efforts to remould the island’s economy to meet its needs.

The Act of 18 November 1758, during the reign of George II, placed an enhanced fixed value on a specific number of Spanish-Colonial ‘milled’ coins and these would be identified by the application of the floriate GR countermark. This is the earliest documented instance of local action to countermark coins in the British West Indies.

 

This sale includes a countermarked dollar (valued at six shillings and eight pence), converted from a Ferdinand VI 8 reales, minted in Lima. Both sides are centrally countermarked with a floriate GR within a circular indent. The estimate is £1,000-1,200.

The Tankersley Collection also includes a varied selection of trade tokens for the West Indies, each acting as a miniature time capsule of commercial activity during the British Colonial period.
They range from a c.1880 token for three halfpence issued by I J Mordecai & Co, for dry goods / Hardware / Crockery in Morant Bay in 1878 (with an example listed here for £500-600) to advertising or fare tokens issued by Thomas Lundie & Co of Kingston (£100-150).

Lundie operated as ironmongers and manufacturers from 1837 at 3 Water Street and Peter Lane. The tokens they produced offered here were stamped with two- and three-masted images of the paddle steamer the Earl of Elgin. Built by Lairds in Birkenhead, Liverpool and launched in June 1844, from August that year it plied its trade as a freight and passenger steamer around Jamaica before being sold to the Haitian government three years later.