Archeologists at a dig near the southern shore community of Ferryland have unearthed the first whole gold coin ever found in Newfoundland.

The Scottish coin, a Sword and Sceptre dated 1601, was found at the Colony of Avalon archeological dig on June 10. It went on display at the Colony’s interpretation centre on Friday.

According to a news release, the coin was issued during the reign of King James VI of Scotland two years before he ascended the throne of England as King James I following the death of Queen Elizabeth I.

The coin is about the size of a loonie, weighs about five grams and is made of 22 karat gold. It had a value of six pounds (120 shillings), which represented a lot of money at the time.

“If you do it based on wages, that amount … would be about four months wages for the person who did all the marketing for the King’s household,” archeologist Jim Tuck told CBC Radio.

The coin, discovered on the second day of this season’s digging season, was found on top of a footing that Tuck thinks dates from the very early years of the Colony.

“We were exposing that footing and scraping off the top layer … scraping the dirt and leaves and bottle caps and junk off the top where we had stopped last year and lo and behold, here was this gold coin which I thought first was the inside … the liner for a bottle cap or something like that, but within a few seconds it was pretty obvious that it was real gold and that it was something we had never seen before,” he said.

Even though the coin has a split in it, Tuck said it’s in very good shape, and he wonders how it survived not only 400 years, but how it remained hardly worn between 1601 to 1621 - the time between when the coin was struck and the settlement was established. (more…)

A 500-year-old ship-wreck laden with treasure has been discovered off the coast of Namibia.

While one usually associates the diamond business with mines, there are companies who hunt for gems in the open sea. A popular hunting ground is the coast of Namibia, where ships comb the sandy sea bottom in hopes of sucking up diamonds that were washed offshore in ages gone past.

De Beers is one such company and it announced a significant find on Wednesday — though not of diamonds. The company believes it has located a treasure ship that could date back to the 15th century. The ship was laden with thousands of gold coins and a hoard of more than 50 elephant tusks.

“If the experts’ assessments are correct, the shipwreck could date back to the late 1400s or early 1500s, making it a discovery of global significance,” said Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture between De Beers and the Namibian government. Company sources are speculating that the ship may be linked to Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, who went missing in 1500 after becoming the first European seafarer to round the Cape of Good Hope.

Company spokesman Hilifa Mbako said the Portuguese government had been alerted and they expected a team of experts to be dispatched to the site shortly for further investigations. “The shipwreck holds more questions than answers,” he said.

The granddaughter of an early polar explorer has attended a ceremony to mark the launch of the first Antarctic coin. The coin has been created by the Pobjoy Mint in Kingswood, Surrey, to commemorate the centenary of the Granting of Letters Patent in 1908 when the UK first claimed the British Antarctic Territory.

The striking ceremony was attended by Philippa Foster Back, chairwoman of the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust, whose grandfather Frank Debenham accompanied Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole from 1910 to 1913.

The £2 coin, which has been issued on behalf of the British Antarctic Territory, features the territory’s coat of arms which includes a lion standing on grass to represent the UK and an emperor penguin standing on ice to represent the native wildlife of Antarctica.

It is the first ever legal tender commemorative coin issued by the British Antarctic Territory, making it the world’s first Antarctic coin. (more…)

By Diana Aydin, Jewish Exponent Feature

When Tom Pilitowski was about 6 years old, and at home because of the flu, he took out his brother’s coin collection, kept in Whitman folders, and cleaned the coins “with a pencil eraser.”

“Not sure why I decided to do that,” he said. “He’s my older brother, Billy, and as the younger brother I probably wanted to do something to help him out. And noticing his coins were ‘dirty,’ I decided to clean them.”

The act of kindness wasn’t appreciated when his brother saw what he had done.

Pilitowski, a coin dealer and president of U.S. Rare Coin Investments (www.usrarecoininvestments.com), knows better now, but the experience was his “very first exposure to coin collecting.”

“The passion slowly developed over time, and it was others around me that noticed that [development],” he said. “I didn’t realize that I’d become a ‘lifer’ in the profession [till] years later.”

Like Pilitowski, a collector’s passion for collecting items like stamps or coins can start in childhood.

Editors Note: Tom also did an interview on 3-12-08 with CoinChat Radio

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