^Lot 37 PERU, Lima, gold cob 4 escudos, 1709 M, very rare, NGC MS 63 (1715 Fleet Shipwreck Label), finest kn

PERU, Lima, gold cob 4 escudos, 1709 M, very rare, NGC MS 63 (1715 Fleet Shipwreck Label), finest known in NGC census, ex-McGregor, ex-Stack's. S-L28; Cal-2003; KM-unl (37 for type); Fr-8. 13.43 grams. Fabulously lustrous, with full pillars-and-waves and cross-castles-lions that are just off-center enough to allow a full king's name PHILIPPVS, this date unlisted in references until noted by Dr. Frank Sedwick in his 1988 Coinage of the Americas Conference presentation (published in The Coinage of El Peru) as "unlisted but exists," this example in fact one of only two we have seen or heard of (the other listed as AU 58 in the NGC census) outside of the State of Florida Collection, which has two. All four examples are struck from the same pillars-side die, which (as one of the State specimens shows) are the only 4 escudos to have legend ending in REXA (a curious precursor to dates in the legend, as the A stands for ANNO), and, a bit more trivially, feature P-V-A with the A punched over another A that was way too far to the left. There are two different cross-side dies, one appearing on three of the coins and the other die on just one of the State coins. Because the tail of the 9 in the date dips into the waves, at times these coins have been confused for issues of the date 1700, the assayer for which is H and not M, as we see here. From the 1715 Fleet, pedigreed to the McGregor Collection (stated on label) and to the Stack's auction of June 1998 (lot 458), with Sedwick photo-certificate.
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