1780s silver dollar from a Gunwalloe wreck (RCM)

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This silver dollar is from the collections of Royal Cornwall Museum (@RoyalCornwallMuseum). Finds of Spanish silver dollars at Gunwalloe are recorded before the mid-19th century. Eight were said to have been found in 1866. Some accounts mention that local farm boys would come to the beach to eat their dinners and search for coins. From their dates, the dollars have been attributed to a wreck of c1784, not identified in documentary records.

Stories are likely to have been distorted by the promoters of salvage companies that developed a ‘dollar mine’, on the Castle headland. However, some coins survive, including these, transformed by the wear of the waves and by coatings of concreted sea-bed silt and pebbles.

3D scanned by Tom Goskar (@tomgoskar) as part of the Wreck and Rescue at Gunwalloe project commissioned by Cornwall Archaeological Unit (CAU) and funded by Historic England to mark the 50th anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act, 1973.