1733 8 Reales 'Pillar Dollar' (1733 MX-F, first-year milled)

On 13 July 1733 the annual Spanish treasure convoy left Havana bound for Cádiz with the silver and gold of New Spain. Two days later, on 15 July, a hurricane caught the fleet in the shallows of the Florida Keys. Of the 22 ships that sailed, 21 were driven aground or wrecked across an 80-mile arc from north of Key Largo down past Duck Key. The 1733 Fleet disaster was less catastrophic in human terms than the famous 1715 Fleet - the storm was less severe, the wrecks lay in shallow water, most of the crew survived, and four ships were even refloated and sailed back to Havana. The Spanish then mounted one of the most successful contemporary salvage operations in colonial history, recovering more than the 12 million pesos listed on the official manifest (the surplus accounted for by the universal reality of contraband silver). Modern divers have therefore found relatively little compared to the 1715 wrecks - but what they have found includes some of the rarest early Mexican milled "pillar dollars" of 1732-1733 and the transitional klippe issues, all struck only months before the fleet sailed.

This 8 reales is a piece of that story. It is a first-year Mexico City milled pillar dollar - the design that would become the most influential trade coin in the world for the next century, the so-called "Spanish milled dollar" that the United States Constitution still implicitly references. The obverse carries the crowned Spanish royal arms with the legend PHILIP[PUS] V D[EI] G[RATIA] HISPAN[IARUM] ET IND[IARUM] REX, the date 1733, and the assayer / mintmark. The reverse shows the two crowned Pillars of Hercules wrapped in scrolls inscribed PLVS VLTRA, framing the twin globes of the Old and New Worlds resting on waves above the date and mintmark, with the legend VTRAQUE VNUM ("both are one") - the unified motto of the Spanish global empire.

The mintmark itself is a famous error. Jorge A. Proctor, in his article "The MXo and MX variations in the Mexican Mint Mark," explains that Madrid initially believed the correct silver mintmark for Mexico City to be MX, and dispatched dies engraved that way to the New World. Once they arrived, the Mexico City officials notified the metropolis of the error - but were instructed to use the dies anyway until they wore out. The corrected dies that followed used the now-familiar Mo monogram. The handful of MX-marked pillar dollars from these first dies are therefore among the rarest of the entire pillar series. This issue also sits exactly at the moment Spain mandated the addition of a second assayer's initial - so MX pillar dollars exist with both one and two assayer marks, a transitional rarity within a transitional rarity.

NGC has graded this piece AU Details with the Shipwreck Certification specifically attributing it to the 1733 Fleet, and the surfaces show the classic light, even crystallization of silver that spent close to 300 years in salt water before recovery - not the destructive porosity of a long-corroded find, but the soft, frosted "sea-salvage" texture that collectors of shipwreck silver actively prize. All major devices remain sharp: the crown, the pillars, the scrolls, the date, and the all-important MX mintmark are all clearly legible.

When a 1733 Fleet MX pillar dollar last came to public auction, in the Stack's Bowers sales of 2014, it brought USD 6,462. Genuine, attributed, first-year MX-mintmark pillar dollars from the 1733 Plate Fleet are about as direct a connection to the Spanish silver-treasure system as a coin can be.