The Awful Allure of a Shipwrecked Piece of Eight. Part 2.

Eight Reales from the Hollandia sunk in 1743

On my desk (as I write this) rests the 1741 Pillar dollar that I profiled two weeks ago. Even after owning it all these years, I still find it amazing that this coin found its way here -- on my desk. 
   It is quite amazing after what this coin has witnessed. Indeed, the secret lives of objects -- particularly, the relics that have survived for generations -- is mind-boggling.
   This Pillar dollar was minted on a screw-press in Mexico, counted and stacked in a chest, trekked overland on a wagon pulled by mules, then hoisted into the hold of a Spanish Galleon. It arrived in Seville months later having survived a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic. The contents of the chest was paid out, ending up in the hands of Dutch merchants. Finally, it was loaded on Hollandia.
   Alas, this piece of eight never arrived. It never circulated. Rather, it went down with the ship.
   There it sat, among the fishes, at the bottom of the sea. This piece of eight was a still-point (one of many) in a busy world moving above it. In limbo. Herein lies part of its allure: what I like to call the pause.
   There is something about the discontinuity of use that makes folks pay attention to relics like this one. It is the pause that transforms a shipwrecked coin into a direct link to the past. No layovers. Add to this, the tragedy of a ship breaking apart on the rocks, and you get a relic with unequivocal authority.
   Relics that have come directly from the sea (or the ground) possess an immediacy that evokes strong emotions. Consider this: Your touch is one of the first touches. Only the diver and the dealer handled it before you did -- perhaps a few collectors also touched it (but not many). Before this, the coin was on a ship bound for the East Indies.
   This immediacy born of the pause elicits a reverence that borders on idolatry with a dash of necromancy. Collectors of shipwrecked relics like to imagine their pieces coming directly from the sea and into their hands, as if the manna of history passes -- like an electric charge -- directly into the new owner.
   I am reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne's description in the The Old Manse when he said that: "... picking up for one's self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago, and has never been handled since" was like getting it "directly from the hand of the red hunter."
   Relics don't get much better than this.