UnderMiner
Silver Member
- Jul 27, 2014
- 3,818
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- Minelab Excalibur II, Ace 250
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
This is going to sound unbelievable but I just picked up an 1801 Spanish 1 Real for 25 cents. It was in a bin of foreign coins at an antique shop. I bought two other coins too - a 1919 French 5 Centimes and a 1967 50-year-anniversary Soviet 20 Kopeck. In all everything cost me $0.75, so cool! Just goes to show you never know what you're going to find next - or where you'll find it!
I later went to my favorite beach and found a silver bracelet among the pebbles. It's beat up from being tossed around the rocks by the waves for so long - weighs 25 grams.
History lesson time: The date on the Spanish Real is not very clear, but I have determined it to be 1801 (the last coin featuring the image of Charles "Carlous" IV was made in 1808). 1801 is the same year Thomas Jefferson was elected as the 3rd president of the United States. His vice president Aron Bur would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel 3 years later in 1804. During Jefferson's first year in office he ordered Commodore Richard Dale to take a U.S. naval fleet to the Mediterranean to confront an unsettling matter that had arose there. Pirates, loyal to the kings of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, were attacking American merchant ships, robbing them, and holding them for ransom. Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the pirates or their kings and by the fall of 1801 American ships were engaged in their first ever American-led war since the Revolution. The first Barbary War had began. Over the course of four years the alliance between the three Barbary nations was splintered, soon only Tripoli held out, the king refusing to call off his pirate fleet. The US Navy bombarded Tripoli and then launched an invasion. Before long the American flag was flying high over the conquered land - the first time the stars and stripes ever flew over foreign soil. The pirates and their leaders were defeated, for the time... it would be another decade until history repeated itself in the Second Barbary War
I later went to my favorite beach and found a silver bracelet among the pebbles. It's beat up from being tossed around the rocks by the waves for so long - weighs 25 grams.
History lesson time: The date on the Spanish Real is not very clear, but I have determined it to be 1801 (the last coin featuring the image of Charles "Carlous" IV was made in 1808). 1801 is the same year Thomas Jefferson was elected as the 3rd president of the United States. His vice president Aron Bur would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel 3 years later in 1804. During Jefferson's first year in office he ordered Commodore Richard Dale to take a U.S. naval fleet to the Mediterranean to confront an unsettling matter that had arose there. Pirates, loyal to the kings of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, were attacking American merchant ships, robbing them, and holding them for ransom. Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the pirates or their kings and by the fall of 1801 American ships were engaged in their first ever American-led war since the Revolution. The first Barbary War had began. Over the course of four years the alliance between the three Barbary nations was splintered, soon only Tripoli held out, the king refusing to call off his pirate fleet. The US Navy bombarded Tripoli and then launched an invasion. Before long the American flag was flying high over the conquered land - the first time the stars and stripes ever flew over foreign soil. The pirates and their leaders were defeated, for the time... it would be another decade until history repeated itself in the Second Barbary War
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