These stamped lumps of silver come from deadly shipwrecks all over the globe. Others come from caches buried in the ground or hidden in caves. A few pieces have survived as keepsakes stuffed in the back of a drawer. Fewer still were lost in the dirt after a stumble. We are lucky to have them no matter the source, as most cobs were melted to produce new coins.
 |
| Here we have 8R, 4R, 2R, and 1R (left to right, bottom) of Ramirez cobs. The mintmark (P) is left of the shield above the assayer mark (R). |
Some series of cobs are worse (more perfect) than others -- especially when they were hammered on under-weight flans made of debased silver alloy. It is storyline that is all too familiar.
This kind of malfeasance was a recurrent problem at the old Potosi mint. It got so bad that the "Peruvians" as they were called were shunned by merchants in the mid-1600s. Cobs with a P mintmark traded at a discount.
The cobs from mid-1640s were particularly bad. One of the chief offenders was Felipe Ramirez de Arellano. He was an assayer at the mint who produced cobs from about 1645/6 to 1648. His assayer mark -- a straight-leg R -- is rare, as most of his pieces were melted by order of the king. Some of these cobs were purported to be only 35% silver. Felipe Ramirez was garroted for his sins.
This group pictured is a denomination set of his pieces: 1 real through 8 reales. They are crudely minted. Ugly. The flat spots and cracks tell a story of a rushed production. The two-reales piece in particular appears to be stamped on a piece of thin slag: it is cracked and bent, with the design running off the flan at top. It is a wonderful piece that tells the story as soon as you put it in your hand.
