gorgeous 1753 Brazil 6400 Reis from the Clive of India wreck! A unique piece and not my typical pick up, I just can’t resist anything with a shipwreck provenance! Here’s a little history of this amazing wreck and treasure aboard…
In 1755 Captain Robert Clive (1725-74), the decorated military hero of the British Navy, decided after a brief stint as a politician, that he was ready for a return to India where he had made his fortune. Packing up by his estimation some £3,000 worth of gold coins in a chest marked "R.C." with his belongings, he and his wife tried to book passage on the ship Dodington where the cargo was accepted. "One chest of gold marked R.C." is recorded on the Dodington manifest as weighing 653 ounces and 6 pennyweights and was the only gold recorded as being carried upon this ship and the two ships with several others set sail from England on 22nd April 1755. The Dodington was the more efficient ship of the group and pulled ahead of the others on the long voyage to India south down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, and lost sight of them by the end of May. Unfortunately the Captain of the Dodington following inefficient charts turned from an easterly bearing to a east-north-east too early and ended up on a collision course for rock and reefs of what was then called Chaos Island which is Bird Island today in the Indian Ocean. Stormy weather was encountered further hiding the breakers over the reefs until too late on the 17th July 1755 when the ship was wrecked within a mile of the shore at Bird Island and smashed to pieces within a twenty minute period. Only 23 of the 270 people on board survived to make the shore. The treasure was not eventually salvaged until the 1990s and the auction at Spink in 2000 contained over 800 Brazilian and Portuguese gold coins recovered from the wreck. To date, there are only 17 of these coins in the NGC database!