1842/1 2 Quarts

Gibraltar has been British since 1713, but for well over a century it had no coinage of its own. Trade on the Rock ran on Spanish silver and a chaos of foreign copper, with accounts kept in Spanish reales and quarts. In 1842 the merchants finally got a local currency: a small copper series of 1 quart, 2 quarts and 1/2 quart, ordered from the Royal Mint's contractors and issued under Queen Victoria.

The obverse shows the young head of Victoria facing left, VICTORIA D:G: BRITANNIAR: REGINA F:D:, with the date below the bust - and on this piece the 2 of 1842 is punched over an earlier 1, the overdate that marks dies prepared in 1841 and pressed into service the following year. The reverse is pure Gibraltar: the Moorish castle with its three towers and the key hanging from the gate, the arms granted to the town by Isabella of Castile in 1502 and still the emblem of the territory today, with GIBRALTAR above and TWO QUARTS below.

Because the issue was small, local and heavily used in a garrison town's daily trade, survivors are almost always brown, worn and often corroded by the Mediterranean climate. High-grade examples are a different matter entirely. This one is certified PCGS MS-64 BN: fully struck castle towers, sharp overdate, glossy chocolate-brown surfaces with no meaningful contact and the light red-brown highlights of an unworn copper coin that was set aside rather than spent.

Gibraltar issued no further coinage of its own until the twentieth century, which makes the 1842 series the entire local coinage of the Rock for its first two hundred years of British rule.