DATED 1730 Piece Of 4 Or 4 Reale Cob - ROOSWIJK Shipwreck Dutch VOC Ship
Item History & Price
| Reference Number: Avaluer:9977587 |
This is a super condition RARE DATED 1730 Piece of 4 or 4 Real COB which was recovered from the wreck of the Dutch East Indiaman ROOSWIJK which sunk on the Good win sands in 1739. It weighs in at weight of 12.6 gms and comes complete with a signed certificate of authenticity with photo's of the coin referenced and numbered to the certificate. It also comes in a presentation box.ROOSWIJK- Dutch EastIndiamanHolland gets its sunken treasurebackThe silver had been on a Du...tch East India Co. ship that vanished in a stormin the English Channel in 1739.Although wreckage was found at the time on Britain'ssouth coast, nobody knew precisely where it had sunk. The disaster meant thatthe Dutch East India Co. lost around 250 crew and soldiers, and a large silvertreasure, which was on the way to the East Indies to be converted into localcoinage.Despite the disappearance of the ship, the Rooswijk, the lost vessel and itstreasure remained the property of the Dutch East India Co. When the company wastaken over by the Dutch government in 1798, the Netherlandsbecame the legal owners of the vanished bullion.In 2005 a British sports diver, Cambridgeshire carpenter Ken Welling, foundthe wreckage. The Dutch Government was contacted, and the discovery was keptsecret until this week, when Holland'sFinance Minister, Joop Wijn, took possession of original wooden chests full ofbullion.The silver was handed over at a ceremony in Plymouth Harbour aboard a frigate of theRoyal Dutch Navy, the De Ruyter.The loss of the Rooswijk in December 1739 was a financial disaster for theDutch East India Co. and for Hollandas a whole, as well as being a catastrophe in human terms.There were no survivors, and the world learned of the disaster becauseEnglish fishermen, looking for potentially valuable storm debris found a woodenchest full of letters that identified the ship as the Rooswijk.It had sank just a day after sailing from the Dutch coastal island of Texel.Underwater excavations have recovered all the silver bullion, and more thana thousand artefacts. Other cargo seem to have included substantial quantitiesof sheet copper, sabre blades and masonry, presumably for some constructionproject in the Dutch East Indies.Evidence of life on board was found in layers that reflected the vessel'ssocial and architectural stratification.When some time after the disaster the floor timbers had collapsed, thecontents of each deck had simply fallen on top of one another. All the silverhad been stored near the officer's dining area. The archaeologists knew howmuch they were looking for because the Dutch Government still has preciserecords of what was lost.The silver, mainly in 1.9-kilogram bars, had all been mined in Spanish-ruledMexico.Originally it had been carried by Spanish vessels from Mexicoto Cadiz.It had then been sold to the Dutch and shipped to Holland, where it had been melted down and converted into silver bars bearing theimprint of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch East India Co. The"re-branded" treasure was then loaded onto the Rooswijk, bound for Batavia, modern Jakarta.There, some of it would have been converted into Javanese currency, whilemuch would have been shipped to Siam(modern Thailand)or Bengal to be converted into local coinage.Before the handover to the Dutch, a full archaeological study has beencarried out into the recovered. Most were still in their original wooden chests.The discovery of so many silver bars complete with "packaging" isunique, and is helping archaeologists understand the scale and nature of the18th-century international bullion trade, which financially underpinned most ofthe European colonial ventures of that time.
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