Our Treasure of the Month for November is a tiny piece of last month’s Treasure of the Month. In October, we featured a recent find of over 1,000 silver eight reales coins recovered in July 2025 by Captain Levin Shavers and the crew of the M/V Just Right. Our treasure is a beautiful eight reales from the Spanish colonial mint located in Lima, Peru.
The obverse of this coin reveals an almost perfectly centered feature with a bold “703” designating the year the coin was minted — 1703. Likewise, the reverse displays a perfectly centered cross with visible lions and castles.
The assayer “H” (for José Hurtado) is located on the obverse at the 7:00 o’clock position and on the reverse at the 3:00 o’clock position. Hurtado was the assayer at the Lima mint from 1696 to 1711 and accounts for many of the Lima silver coins found on the Fleet. Lima eight reales coins are relatively round and well struck, as exemplified by our featured treasure. When compared to other colonial mints such as Potosi, it is apparent that the mint workers in the Lima mint were better artisans.
Notably, our Treasure of the Month was only recently recovered from its watery grave after being submerged for 310 years. This submersion did have an effect, as can be seen below. Before conservation, our coin was covered with more than three centuries of corrosion and ocean deposits. After conservation, it looks very much like the day it was minted. What corrosion there was did not have a great impact on the coin as it still retained much of its original weight.
As previously indicated, coins from the Lima mint were well struck and characterized by excellent die engraving. Several examples (below) from the 1715 Fleet Society’s Research Collection attest to this fact.
Special thanks to Sal Guttuso, Operations Manager of 1715 Fleet — Queens Jewels, LLC, and Mike Perna, Captain of the Mighty Mo, for providing images used in this post.
