A 8 reales minted in 1538, in the reign of Charles and Joanna of Spain, known as “The First Crown of the Americas” will be offered by Numismatic auction house Daniel Frank Sedwick, LLC at auction on November 6 in Orlando, Florida. This coin is widely acknowledged as the first dollar-sized coin struck in the New World and is one of only three known, all of which were found on a shipwreck in the early 1990s, prior to which their existence was known only through contemporary documentation.
For over four centuries the survival of these coins was doubted, for they were only briefly made and quickly withdrawn just two years after the opening of the mint in Mexico City, the first mint in the Americas. As double-striking on each of the three known examples demonstrates, the mint had difficulty making these coins, to which legal testimony in 1545 also attests. Two of the three coins found on the shipwreck have been sold at auction already, in 2006 and 2008, before it was known with certainty that only three existed. Those coins sold in the range of $300,000-$400,000, one of them corroded and deemed inferior, and the better specimen held down in price by false suspicions of further examples. This third specimen, never published before and a rival for the best in quality, was rumored to have been offered privately by its owner for $1 million. This is the first time it will be offered publicly.
“We cannot overstress the importance of this auction, both for the history of Mexico and the larger field of North American numismatics,” says company president and founder Daniel Sedwick. “These coins are the absolute root of the concept of the American dollar.”
“The auction estimate for this coin will be $500,000 to $1 million, with an unreserved starting price of $475,000,” points out company Vice President Agustin Garcia-Barneche, who also stresses that financial and collectible investment markets in 2006-2008 were not as healthy as they are today. “We already have interested parties, which means this coin could break the record for the highest price ever paid for a ‘dollar’ that was not struck at a US mint. There will be worldwide interest, not just for the coin’s historical importance but also because collectors are confident about its extreme rarity.”
“It will be interesting to see the reaction of the US-dollar collector community for this coin,” says Cori Sedwick Downing, the company’s Administrative Manager and Researcher and author of the NLG award-winning article “The Charles and Joanna Coinage of Mexico City, 1536-1571.” “As a longtime researcher of Mexico’s first coinage, I appreciate what a privilege it is to hold this amazing piece of history in my hands.”
Most important is the fact that this Mexican “first American dollar” is not represented in any public numismatic museums anywhere, particularly the Casa de Moneda and Banco de Mexico in Mexico City, and the Casa de Moneda and the Museo Arqueológico de España in Madrid, Spain. This piece is lacking in even the largest, most globally encompassing museums, which must adhere to the principle of including the world’s historically most important coins, of which this coin sits undeniably among the top ten.
Daniel Frank Sedwick, LLC will hold the live floor auction on Thursday, November 6, 2014, at the DoubleTree Hotel Lake Buena Vista at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Lot viewing will be available the day before the auction at the hotel as well as at two coin shows around the US: The U.S. Mexican Numismatic Association Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona, October 16-18; and the Whitman Baltimore Coin & Currency Convention in Baltimore, Maryland, October 30-November 2. Lot viewing will also be available by private appointment at Sedwick’s office in Winter Park, Florida, with a minimum of 72 hours’ notice.
Source: www.sedwickcoins.com
