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Lovely 1737  8 REALE PILLAR - ROOSWIJK shipwreck 1739 Dutch East India Co
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Lovely 1737 8 REALE PILLAR - ROOSWIJK shipwreck 1739 Dutch East India Co
Price: GB $257.76
This is just a beautiful ROOSWIJK coin ! It is a 1737 Pillar Dollar or 8 Reale from the Mexico City mint.. It was recovered from the shipwreck of the Dutch East India co ship ROOSWIJK which sunk on the Goodwin Sands off the South or England in 1739. It weighs in at a nearly full weight of 26.5 gm and is 38 mm dia .It comes complete with a lovely detailed certificate of authenticity and in a presentation capsule.

ROOSWIJK-Dutch East Indiaman

Holland gets its sunken treasure back

The silver had been on a Dutch East India Co. ship that vanished in a stormin the English Channel in 1739.

Although wreckage was found at the time on Britain\'s south coast, nobodyknew precisely where it had sunk. The disaster meant that the Dutch East IndiaCo. lost around 250 crew and soldiers, and a large silver treasure, which wason the way to the East Indies to be converted into local coinage.

Despite the disappearance of the ship, the Rooswijk, the lost vessel and itstreasure remained the property of the Dutch East India Co. When the company wastaken over by the Dutch government in 1798, the Netherlands became the legalowners of the vanished bullion.

In 2005 a British sports diver, Cambridgeshire carpenter Ken Welling, foundthe wreckage. The Dutch Government was contacted, and the discovery was keptsecret until this week, when Holland\'s Finance Minister, Joop Wijn, tookpossession of original wooden chests full of bullion.

The silver was handed over at a ceremony in Plymouth Harbour aboard afrigate of the Royal Dutch Navy, the De Ruyter.

The loss of the Rooswijk in December 1739 was a financial disaster for theDutch East India Co. and for Holland as a whole, as well as being a catastrophein human terms.

There were no survivors, and the world learned of the disaster becauseEnglish fishermen, looking for potentially valuable storm debris found a woodenchest full of letters that identified the ship as the Rooswijk.

It had sank just a day after sailing from the Dutch coastal island of Texel.

Underwater excavations have recovered all the silver bullion, and more thana thousand artefacts. Other cargo seem to have included substantial quantitiesof sheet copper, sabre blades and masonry, presumably for some constructionproject in the Dutch East Indies.

Evidence of life on board was found in layers that reflected the vessel\'ssocial and architectural stratification.

When some time after the disaster the floor timbers had collapsed, thecontents of each deck had simply fallen on top of one another.All the silverhad been stored near the officer\'s dining area. The archaeologists knew howmuch they were looking for because the Dutch Government still has preciserecords of what was lost.

The silver, mainly in 1.9-kilogram bars, had all been mined in Spanish-ruledMexico. Originally it had been carried by Spanish vessels from Mexico to Cadiz.

It had then been sold to the Dutch and shipped to Holland, where it had beenmelted down and converted into silver bars bearing the imprint of the AmsterdamChamber of the Dutch East India Co. The \"re-branded\" treasure wasthen loaded onto the Rooswijk, bound for Batavia, modern Jakarta.

There, some of it would have been converted into Javanese currency, whilemuch would have been shipped to Siam (modern Thailand) or Bengal to beconverted into local coinage.

Before the handover to the Dutch, a full archaeological study has beencarried out into the recovered. Most were still in their original wooden chests.

The discovery of so many silver bars complete with \"packaging\" isunique, and is helping archaeologists understand the scale and nature of the18th-century international bullion trade, which financially underpinned most ofthe European colonial ventures of that time.


On 25-Nov-14 at 23:02:14 GMT, seller added the following information:


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