Caribbean Coins

They used to chop up Spanish dollars in St Lucia, didn't they?

Yes we are in the right church with the Pridmore reference, but what pew, I mean Island? The top coin is loosely attributed to Dominica. The bottom two are infamous Birmingham Side-Cut-Bitts of Barbados, the Sugar Colony. These two were dug in Virginia where I have seen a total of five dug. Two points of the triangle trade were Barbados to obtain the sugar for their tea, and Virginia for smokes, before ship captains caught the gulf stream off the Virginia Capes, sailing up north and east with the flow, back to England's familiar shores. A keg of old pistareens discovered in Birmingham, England in 1789, were cut into three slivers and the center triangle, retained by the businessmen doing the cutting as profit. The slivers, termed "a fraudulent imposition" by Pridmore, of approximately 1.15g, were to pass as Bitts in Barbados, where they seem to have been delivered and circulated for a short time in the 1790s. Some traveled with sailors to Virginia (a packet fleet of sloops sailed to Barbados fortnightly from Virginia) near the end of the age of sharp silver, with most all examples melted into coin silver tableware. These would have been forgotten by the War of 1812. No collector of U.S. coins thought fit to mention them in early numismatic reference books which focused on Americana, not "Caribbeana." Those dug in Virginia are found near colonial landings and waterways. Now the story of the Pistareens/Side-Cut Bitt's travels before their ill-fated discovery in Birmingham, is a longer, more interesting story that must wait for another day. As a hint, if you are keeping up with their passport stamps you will find excursions in Mexico by mule, ship travel to Havana, Florida, Oceana, and by native divers back to Florida, then Seville, Segovia, Cadiz, Islands of the Caribbean, Birmingham, Barbados, Tidewater Landings during the turbulent times about the year 1800, and finally a long "dirt nap" ever since Thomas Jefferson was President, at napping places like an earthworks in Prince William County, when they were recently bulldozed into the sun, pocketed by a fellow with a beeping machine in his hands, and eventually traded to me. Where to next? I like a coin with a past.