Hello,
For me it's a contemporary counterfeited half real.
The ruler in 1813 was Ferdinand VII and not Charles IV and the metal seems to have been made with a low content silver.
I agree with Cyncos, contemporary fake to me as well- not sure if it's just your photos but it has a yellowish, brass-like colour that gives it away. If not billon, it might have once been silver plated or dipped.
Why would someone go ahead and fake this coin? Value is not that high....
Weird part is that I got this coin from a guy who probably had this coin for 30-40 years. Older fellow who gave me his collection since his kids had no interest. I wonder how and when he got it. I asked him if he remembers and he didnt. He did says that he hasn't bought a coin for at least 25 years. After his wife passed in 1992 he stopped buying coins.
Just to make sure we're all on the same page, contemporary counterfeit means a fake made at the time the coin was in circulation, with the intent to use it as money, as opposed to modern fakes intended to fool collectors.
Not sure how reliablethis source is but it claims that in the early 18th century, a piece of eight , or 8 reales had the purchasing power of around $50 USD today, so a 1/2 real coin would have 1/16th the value, or roughly $3.12 USD- presumably by the early 19th century inflation would have reduced the value of the 1/2 real further, seeing as smaller Spanish real fractions were discontinued earlier on.
Cass,
Thanks for that. Someone went thru so much effort to produce so little.... what a shame. Also, why do a date that would not have existed? Wouldn't it have made more sense after all that effort to do a date that would make sense for the coin? Interesting link you posted. I'd assume our counterfeiter probably made a ton of these to make it worthwhile for him. At +/- $3.25 per coin (based off your estimate) if he did 30-40 coins an hour he would probably be making enough to pay his lawyer fees after he gets caught ...
No problem, I got my first contemporary counterfeit a few weeks ago and I've been doing a lot of reading and research into them recently.
About the date, I have two theories; the first, is so they can claim they weren't really counterfeiting coins per se if caught, since Carlos IV abdicated in 1808; and no real coins with his portrait dated 1813 exist. The second theory (more likely IMO) is that the counterfeiter was just careless or uninformed, like how modern Chinese counterfeiters sometimes make fake US coins with impossible date-mintmark combinations for example.
I think that the purchasing power of this coin, when it was probably counterfeited, is much higher than this string would imply.
The 1/2 real was important enough in commerce that the Spanish Postmaster of San Antonio was ordered to mint and distribute 500 pesos (8,000 coins) of 1/2 real coins, to alleviate a coin shortage in 1818.
The peso, or 8 reales (official name: peso de ocho reales) was equivalent to a US dollar, and the dollar is based on that coin.
About that time, land could be bought in Texas for about $1 per acre.
The pay for a soldier was about $18 per month.
The average person earned about 10 cents per day (one real would equate to 12.5 cents).
The USA issued half cent denominated coins as late as 1857--the 1/2 real would have bought 12.5 of them.
I also believe that this coin is a contemporary counterfeit, on the basis of its color and the crude design. If you want to attribute it closer to what it was intended to pretend to be, focus on the initial at about 10 o'clock on the reverse of the coin. Use that to compare to the various Spanish Colonial Mints for 1813.
If counterfeiting two of these per day was more than the counterfeiter could expect to earn in a day at an honest job, I think that he was making a significant earning with them.
By the way, there are a number of collectors who collect contemporary counterfeits--especially those minted during the Mexican Revolution from Spanish control.
In some cases, a contemporary counterfeit is actually more valuable than the genuine coin.
By definition, a number of coins collected as U. S. Colonial Coins are actually contemporary counterfeits of British coins.
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