H.M.S. Feversham

His Majesty's Ship Feversham, a Royal Navy 32 gun frigate sailed from New York on September 17, 1711 under the command of Captain Robert Paxton. Captain Paxton's mission was to escort three transport ships around Nova Scotia and up the St. Lawrence River in support of an English attempt to capture Quebec. Unknown to the unlucky Captain the English fleet had run afoul of bad weather coupled with navigational ineptitude. Without a shot being fired by a single enemy, the English lost eight ships and over 900 men, consequently forcing cancellation of the invasion. While the bulk of the surviving fleet promptly departed for England, word was immediately sent to New York directing Captain Paxton to remain in port. Unfortunately, the Feversham had departed 24 hours before this vital edict arrived. On Oct 7, 1711, Captain Paxton's ill-fated expedition encountered gale force winds that spelled doom for his imperiled fleet. HMS Feversham was impaled on the jagged shoals of Scatari Island, off of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

English efforts to salvage the guns and valuable portions of the ships cargo were unsuccessful. Almost three centuries later, a three-year effort commencing in 1985 resulted in the recovery of many Feversham artifacts including the Spanish coin shown in the accompanying photograph.

At first, one wonders why an abundance of Spanish coins would be found on an English ship. The reasons are many. England's North American colonies were always short of coins with which they could transact commerce and trade. English coins had never been imported in sufficient quantity. Perhaps this was done by design in a misguided attempt to force the colonies to trade only with the mother country. Moreover, colonial efforts to mint adequate quantities of coins were for the most part unsatisfactory.

Meanwhile, the Spanish colonies in the new world had produced immense quantities of rather crude hand-struck coins called "COBs." These coins, although in many instances underweight for silver content, poured into English and English colonial coffers through normal trade as well as through the plunder captured by greedy English pirates and buccaneers who preyed on the Spanish treasure fleets. Consequently, the Feversham has given to modern historians a virtual time capsule of common coinage in use in North America during the 16th And 17th centuries. Heavy North American reliance on Spanish coinage continued through the revolutionary war period as well as into the early years of the independent Unites States. In fact, the Spanish "Dollar" and its fractional parts continued to circulate as an officially sanctioned monetary instrument until 1857. The Spanish eight real had circulated as the equivalent of one dollar, thus a one real coin was the equivalent of twelve and one-half cents or "one bit." Consequently, "two bits" equaled twenty-five cents, a term still in use today.