In the years before the American Revolution and the establishment of a federal mint, the North American colonies relied on foreign coins for their primary currency. With control over colonial trade and manufacturing in the hands of Britain, a country without access to major sources of precious metals and with no gold or silver to be mined in eastern North America, colonists turned to coinage from other countries (Lasser et al. 1997: 1). Spanish silver and gold pieces were obtained through trade with the southern Spanish Latin American colonies and were predominantly used by wealthy colonists for large transactions and the import of goods (Smoak 2017: 472). The poor and middling colonists, as well as the enslaved, relied more on coins of a smaller denomination to conduct commerce (Kelleher 2016: 49).

As in North America, colonies in the Caribbean also struggled to provide sufficient currency for use in towns and on plantations. Goods such as tobacco, rum, and sugar were often used as a form of currency but the Caribbean islanders also found other innovative ways to deal with the lack of coinage, such as cutting Spanish silver coins into more usable pieces, or counterstamping coins for use in a specific colony (Salamanca-Heyman 2004: 57; Kelleher 2016: 50). The most common silver coin was the Spanish dollar, also called a “Piece of Eight” from the way it was cut into 8 pie-shaped wedges (Figure 1). Counterstamping was the act of applying a stamp to a coin to change its value and/or to indicate it would be accepted as legal tender in a place other than where it was originally issued (Doty 1982: 75). Various types of European coins of small denomination were counterstamped for use in several of the Caribbean colonies. 

It’s not difficult to imagine this small French Caribbean coin dropping from the pocket of a dock worker, a sailor, of perhaps even an enslaved individual being transferred to Baltimore from the Caribbean for sale, only for it to be excavated by archaeologists over 200 years later.