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509

“RF” Countermark of the type found on the 1767-A French Colonies Copper Sous – but here on a 1785-A

Currency:CAD Category:Coins & Paper Money Start Price:150.00 CAD Estimated At:400.00 - 450.00 CAD
“RF” Countermark of the type found on the 1767-A French Colonies Copper Sous – but here on a 1785-A
SOLD
150.00CAD+ buyer's premium (30.00)
This item SOLD at 2019 May 02 @ 20:37UTC-4 : AST/EDT

Buyer’s Premiums will be added on all items as per the Terms & Conditions of the sale. Invoices will be emailed out after The Toronto Coin Expo.

“RF” Countermark of the type found on the 1767-A French Colonies Copper Sous – but here on a 1785-A copper French Half Sol! Fine or so overall, the host coin with full legends on either side, and design detail as expected for the grade. Light mottled coloration, the surfaces evenly rough. This is a fascinating specimen, and one that will certainly need some dogged research. While ostensibly the type of countermark used on the 1767-A Sous, the stamp used on the present coin does not match up to any of the 15 known marks illustrated in Vlack – note especially the short top to the F and the distance of R from the dotted oval border at the left. In his book on coins for French North America, Syd Martin illustrates a 1722-H 9 Deniers with an RF countermark in his appendix (p. 414), which he describes as “a non-contemporary countermark that can be found on various coins” – though even if non-contemporary, that coin was cool enough for Martin to include on the color dust jacket for the book! The present coin does not match up to the one illustrated in Martin – easily seen by the placement of the dots in the oval to the left of R, including the very large central one. In looking closely at the coin, some of the surface roughness is clearly within the RF countermark, which suggests (but of course does not prove) that there may be some age to the countermark, unlike the specimen illustrated in the Martin book. This could certainly be a contemporary or near-contemporary counterfeit countermark, done as late as the early 1800s while these coins were still circulating in Guadeloupe and, presumably, elsewhere in the vicinity. Nearly all of the French Colonies coinages used in North America were counterfeited, and there was extensive counterfeiting done for coins that used a countermark (like the 1640 issues) or overstruck on other coins (like the Recoined Sols), so the precedent is certainly there. It is also not hard to understand why such a thing would exist on a coin like this. The RF countermark raised the value of the 1767 Sous by 375% - and that coin weighed nearly double the Half Sol here, so a contemporary counterfeit countermark would have yielded an even larger percentage profit if the coin was successfully circulated. The countermark itself is undoubtedly not genuine – the researcher will have to figure out just how old it is! Certainly an important and unusual specimen!
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