NEW BOOK: HOLEY DOLLARS OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

I've been following the thread on the recent acquisition of a New South Wales Holey Dollar by the National Museum of Australia. I was especially interested in the calculation of the percentages of extant specimens from various Spanish and Spanish colonial mints. In an act of shameless self-promotion for my forthcoming book on the Holey Dollars of Prince Edward Island (Spink, 2012), I can give you similar percentages for mints that produced the hosts for the PEI 5 shilling coins. Unlike the case with New South Wales, however, all surviving examples of the Prince Edward Island Holey Dollar may be contemporary counterfeits. There is simply no way of telling the difference between a Government issue Holey Dollar and what are referred to as merchant counterfeits.

In any event, of the 79 PEI Holey Dollars I have been able to track down - many fewer than the numbers for New South Wales - the percentage of the total for each of the mints is surprisingly close to the figures for NSW:

Durango - 1 coin - 1.26 %
Lima -- 11 coins - 13.92 %
London - 1 coin -- 1.26 %
Madrid -- 1 coin - 1.26 %
Mexico - 57 coins - 72.15 %
Potosí -- 3 coins -- 3.79 %
Santiago - 2 coins - 2.53%
Unknown - 3 coins - 3.79%

By comparison, the web site's calculations showed 10.87% of the NSW hosts were provided by Lima dollars and 76.81% by Mexican. Your percentage for Potosí was a somewhat higher at 9.42%, but all the rest were in the same ballpark as those for PEI.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: ANA MUSEUM LOOTED OF $1 MILLION IN RARE COINS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n03a05.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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