One of the most famous
phrases in pirate lore, the term “pieces of eight” is the phrase uttered by
Long John Silver’s parrot, the first real proof that Silver is really a pirate.
But the coin is not only piratical, it is the basis of the American dollar, the
Canadian dollar, the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. It was the first “world
currency” starting in the late 18th century. It’s definitely the
most famous Spanish coin.
Although Spanish gold is
a byword for the riches of the Caribbean, Spain was also looting the Americas
of vast quantities of silver. While much gold was found already refined and in
use by the natives, silver was mined by the conquerors. In 1554 a Spanish merchant
named Bartolomé de Medina developed a method of refining low-quality silver ore
using mercury and sea brine.
An 8 Reales piece minted in Mexico in 1650 |
The concept of a large
silver coin with high purity (sometimes known as "specie" coinage) had
become popular throughout Europe. In the 16th century, Count Hieronymus Schlick
of Bohemia had begun minting coins known as Joachimsthalers (from German thal,
or valley), named for the areas where the silver was produced. Joachimstaler
was later shortened to taler.
The first thaler from 1525 |
So successful were these
coins that similar thalers were minted in Burgundy and France. After 1575, the
Dutch used currency with a daalder depicting a lion, hence its Dutch name
leeuwendaalder. (Many traders did not think the picture of the lion was very
good, and traders, especially in the Caribbean, gave the coin the name “dog dollar.”)
Specifically to
facilitate export trade, the leeuwendaalder was lighter than the large
denomination coins then in circulation. Thus, it became the coin of choice for
foreign trade. Dutch traders were traveling all over the world, and the coin
became popular in the Middle East, and colonies in the east and west.
Money in Spain was based
on a system of reales (pronounced re-al-es’). Spain was commonly using an 8-real coin of
very high quality in 1497. In 1537 the Spanish escudo gold coin was introduced,
which was worth 16 reales. The later Gold Doubloon was worth 32 reales or 2
escudos. It is this divisibility into 8 which caused the silver coins to be
named "pieces of eight".
Since the leeuwendaalder
and the 8-reales piece were of very similar size, purity and value, they began
to be commonly referred to by the same name. “Dallder” was easier to say than “8
reales piece” so it became the more common term. English voices quickly slurred
“dallder” into “dollar”
Legend has it that the Spanish
coin’s markings made it easy to cut into 8 pieces in order to make change
during a purchase. The coin wasn’t planned like this, but coinage in the New World
was in a state of chaos for a long time. Coinage was scarce, people were poor,
and defacing money wasn’t a crime. It’s likely that coins were cut up in some
establishments and by some individuals.
This leads us to the
common breakdowns of the dollar value – half dollar (coin cut in half), ¼ or
one quarter dollar, usually called just a quarter (half a dollar cut in half
again, or four pieces), and the “bit” which was half of a quarter.
The word “bit” is no
longer used in used in the US, but it survives in the old song, “Shave and a
haircut, two bits.” One programmer
friend of mine wonders of the “bit” coinage was the inspiration of the term “bit”
in computer programming, since it was the smallest piece into which a coin
would be cut.
Thanks to the vast silver
deposits that were found in Mexico (for example, at Taxco and Zacatecas) and
Potosí in modern-day Bolivia, and to silver from Spain's possessions throughout
the Americas, mints in Mexico and Peru also began to strike the coin. The main
New World mints for Spanish dollars were at Potosí, Lima, and Mexico City.
By far the leading specie
coin circulating in North America was the Spanish silver dollar, defined as
consisting of 387 grains of pure silver. Spanish dollars came into the North
American colonies through lucrative trade with the West Indies. The Spanish
silver dollar had been the world's outstanding coin since the early 16th
century, and was spread partially because of the vast silver output of the
Spanish colonies in Latin America. More important, however, was that the
Spanish dollar, from the 16th to the 19th century, was relatively the most
stable and least debased coin in the Western world.
Before the American
Revolution (and possibly one contributing factor to the Revolution) there was a
chronic shortage of British currency in Britain's colonies. Trade was often
conducted with Spanish dollars that had been obtained by dealing with Caribbean
pirates. Spanish coinage was legal tender in the United States until the
Coinage Act of 1857 discontinued the practice.
But some traditional
characteristics of the old pieces of eight lingered in America’s monetary
system until very recently. The pricing of equities on U.S. stock exchanges in
1⁄8-dollar denominations persisted until the New York Stock Exchange converted
first to pricing in sixteenths of a dollar on 24 June 1997, and shortly after
that, to decimal pricing.
8 Reales from 1739. |
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