1750 L R Peru Ferdinand Vi Gold Cob 8 Escudos NGC AU55 Rare Final Year of Issue

1750 L R Peru Ferdinand VI Gold Cob 8 Escudos NGC AU55 Last Year of Issue Lima, Peru mint for Hand Struck issues.

One of the most fascinating areas of world coin collecting is that of Spanish colonials. These coins circulated freely during the colonial period of the New World, both North America and South America. You can find essentially the same coins minted in the Spanish colonies of Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, from the early 1600s to the early 1800s. They circulated as far north as Canada and as far east as Florida.

The rich deposits of precious metal in the New World were too much for Spanish royalty to resist. They were therefore exploited and carried back to Spain. To hasten this process, bars of silver and gold were hacked into chunks of proper weight and struck with heavy hammers between crude, hard-metal dies. The strike imparted a Spanish pattern, or part of a Spanish pattern, into the coin. The Spanish word cabo (English cob) refers to the end of the bar. The size, shape and impression of these cobs was highly irregular. However, they were of proper weight, and that is what mattered to Spanish officials. If a cob was overweight, the minter simply clipped a piece off.

But it is the execution of this design that is remarkable in Peruvian gold cobs, for practically every specimen is well centered, with clear date and assayer and mintmark and usually with most of the characters in the legends at least partially visible, on a round flan of uniform thickness and consistent weight (albeit about an eighth of a gram below the standard of 27.064 grams). Compare this to the odd-shaped and haphazardly struck gold cobs of Mexico and Colombia, which seldom show clear dates, mintmarks and assayers.

Most likely this coin came from Nuestra Senora de La Luz shipwreck (1752)

According to historians. No Gold Cobs were struck at the Lima Mint after December 16, 1750.

1750 L R Peru King Ferdinand VI Gold Cob 8 Escudos NGC AU55

L = Lima Mint

R= Assayer Rodriguez

This is an investment grade rarity that will highlight any rare coin portfolio.