Spanish 8 Reales From Famous Ship Wreck El Cazador, Real Or Fake?

Unfortunately, without a recognized certification, such as what NGC provided when they cleaned and slabbed many of the recovered El Cazador coins for Franklin Mint, it is not easy to authenticate these as actually being from the shipwreck let alone genuine issues. There are many counterfeits of 8 reales and its easy to pass them off as shipwreck salvage because they don't have to have the correct weight or original surfaces.

Read this article and then ask yourself how some Norwegian company could get authentic El Cazador coins if the Franklin Mint acquired "virtually all recovered contents" and "The ship's treasure coins have been professionally evaluated and graded by the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC)".

It's certainly possible that you have the real item but you have no guaranty it is genuine -- you just have marketing material. That may be fine for you as long as you can find someone else to sell it to when you want to get rid of it.

The other thing to consider is how much you paid for it. Decent NGC certified examples sell for about $150 on eBay. If you paid far less than that then you might wonder whether your deal was too good to be true.

I started collecting 8 reales in this exact way and when I did a little research I was disappointed. So I started to learn about ways to acquire nicer quality 8 reales and now I have a fairly advanced collection.

Kaikun
Your coin is most likely fine. Samlerhuset is a reputable company that has been in the collectibles business for years and has a stellar reputation. They are the company chosen by the Smithsonian to handle the European display tour of the Smithsonian's 1933 Double Eagle.
I agree with Jgenn, if you want to be positive the coin is legit, an NGC cert is nice. But not a requirement for these coins, tens of thousands were sold uncertified early on to finance the ongoing salvage.
As for the article on the Franklin Mint acquiring "all" the Cazador treasure, that is a marketing exaggeration on the part of Franklin Mint, which acquired the remaining inventory, not the total 400,000 approx. coins that were found. The Cazador coins were first found in 1993 and the first batch to hit the market, after a harsh cleaning, were sold with and without various certificates. The earliest certs I recall having seen were from a company named Grumpy Inc. back in the late 1990's. These coins have been marketed in magazines, Grocery Store Newspapers, coupon flyers, TV shows, even the Smithsonian Magazine by many different companies, often with the tag line "the coins that changed America". I have a few raw examples bought at the Long Beach Coin show around 2000 when raw ones without certs were selling for $35 with very few takers. The problem with this hoard of coins is they are (almost) all the same date, the original salvagers put them through a very harsh cleaning process (most of the original salvage (there have been several trips to the bottom to get them) look like they were polished in a rock tumbler, and might have been. They have minimal numismatic appeal so they are marketed to the "history" buff and the general public. Nice addition to your collection and truly a piece of history you can hold in your hand.

Thanks for the clarification, jfransch. I bought one of those "America's first dollar" items in 2009 -- a few years after the Franklin Mint merchandising had started. I wasn't able to find any info on the earlier salvage/sales on the internet.

As the years go by, I think the distinction between certified examples and non-certified examples will be even greater. As I mentioned earlier, there's only so much authentication that you can do on a damaged coin.

@jgenn
Nice collection. very, very nice!

I find NGC's Princess Louisa "Salvor's Reserve Hoard" to be a particularly notable and trustworthy proof of pedigree...

Perhaps tangentially relatedly, there have certainly been other groups besides Franklin Mint that acquired a decent amount of El Caz material (hearsay is that there was an awful, awful lot of it). And keep in mind, in general, coin wholesaling can be a bit of a merry-go-round.



You know... people do sometimes lie and scam customers, right?

That, I don't believe, is the case here... but there are several notorious direct marketing-type sellers which have peddled outright fake coins.