I’m a long ways from Maine, but this may help.
The cache was scattered and coins continued to be unearthed through 1841 after the initial find in 1840. No record exists of the total figure, with various sources putting the number between 500 and 2,000 (but contemporary records suggest it must have been at the upper end of those estimates.) An unknown number of coins were undoubtedly found and sold by some of the searchers without being documented.
George Augustus Wheeler in his “History of Castine, Penobscot, and Brooksville, Maine; including the ancient settlement of Pentagöet” (published in 1875) has this to say:
A lengthy account of the discovery of these coins, and of the coins themselves, has been given by Mr. Joseph Williamson, in the sixth volume of the Maine Historical Collections [although he doesn’t give the actual total number found]. The following account is, however, mainly that of Doctor Joseph L. Stevens, who visited the spot at the time and obtained the facts from the party who found them.
“Late in November, 1840, a respectable farmer, Captain Stephen Grindle, of Penobscot, and his son, Samuel P. Grindle, now of this town, while hauling wood from the side of a rocky hill to the shore, distant about twenty rods, found a silver coin. It was a French crown. The path is impassable by wheels, requiring the wood to be 'snaked out' - as the rustic term is. This, of course, made a furrow, in which the coin was found, new and bright as though recently issued from the mint - although two hundred years old. This led to further search, and about twenty more were found. Night coming on, with severe cold, followed by snow, prevented any further discovery until the next spring. On searching then, another crown was found on top of a large rock, covered with moss, and by the side of this rock the bulk of the money was found. In April,1841, the writer, in company with some friends, visited the spot. It had been quite thoroughly dug over [i.e. other searchers had likely already recovered and probably sold an unknown number of undocumented finds], but several French half-crowns were found by our party, without much searching, several feet from the rock, which on its lower side, shelved downwards towards the path. On going to the house, we examined all that had not been disposed of, and each of us purchased a number of them. The writer selected, as nearly as he could, a specimen of each, nineteen in number. There must have been in all nearly, if not quite, two thousand pieces, but a large proportion of them were only small fractions of crowns and dollars.
The French money largely predominated; next, the old Spanish "cob" dollars. These last were irregular in shape, and much worn, yet of full weight, as compared with present standards. The dates on these were mostly illegible, but the pillars, emblems of Spanish sovereignty, were quite evident. There were quite a number of Belgic and Portuguese coins. The most interesting of all were the Massachusetts pine-tree shillings and sixpences, all of date 1652, and in number about twenty-five or thirty. I saw but two English coins, shillings - worn nearly smooth. One, now in my possession, is of the reign of Carolus I or II, and the other, owned by a lady in town, is of the reign of Jacobus I. As the latter monarch died in 1625, it must have been coined prior to that date, and is, probably, the oldest of the whole collection. My theory was, at the time, that they were left accidentally by the Baron de St. Castin, when driven from here by the English, under Colonel Church, very near to the close of the seventeenth century. They probably followed the course of the river up to its head and source in Walker's pond. From the south side of this pond the carrying place is only half a mile to the waters of the ocean in Eggemoggin Reach. From thence to the French settlements in Acadia, there could be no difficulty.”
Note that in the second half of a paper by Joseph Williamson, published posthumously in 1859 as “Castine; and the Old Coins Found There” and reproduced in the Wilson Museum Bulletin of Summer 2003 (which you can retrieve from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/20031130032655/http://www.wilsonmuseum.org/bulletins/summer2003.html ) Williamson has this to say:
“Most of the coins were French crowns, half-crowns, and quarters, all of the reigns of Louis XIII. And Louis XIV., and bore various dates, from 1642 to 1682; and “
A large part of the money, numerically considered, consisted of the old Massachusetts or Pine Tree currency, of which there were fifty or seventy-five shillings, and nearly as many sixpences”; and “
the next largest proportion consisted of the clumsy, shapeless Spanish coinage, commonly called ‘cob money’ or ‘cobs,’ and sometimes ‘cross money,’ from the figure of a cross, which always characterizes it.”
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You might also be interested in the Colonial Newsletter article from Volume 56, Number 1 of April 2016, titled “The Castine Hoard Revisited: Dating of the Hoard” by Dennis P. Wierzba, which you can download for free from the Internet Archive at:
https://ia903003.us.archive.org/7/items/CNL160/CNL160.pdf
