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Moby Dick gold piece
Raci
Posts: 24
Does anyone know what the Spanish gold piece was that Grgory Peck as Captain Ahab nailed to the mast as a reward to the first sailor to spot Moby Dick? It was a large gold coin about the size of a silver dollar.
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<< <i>NICE!.
Your PM is off so I cannot respond via PM to the PM you sent me. From WIKIPEDIA:
The term doubloon (from Spanish doblón, meaning double) refers to a seven-gram (0.225 troy ounce) gold coin minted in Spain, Mexico, Peru, or Nueva Granada. The term was first used to describe the golden excelente, either because of its value of two ducats, or because of the double portrait of Ferdinand and Isabella. Later, it referred to a coin worth two escudos (0.1905 troy ounce gold), first minted in 1566, during the reign of Philip II of Spain.
The Spanish dollar or peso (literally, "weight") is a silver coin that was minted in the Spanish Empire after a Spanish currency reform in 1497. The peso had a nominal value of eight reales ("royals"). The coins were often physically cut into eight "bits", or sometimes four quarters, to make smaller change. This is the origin of the colloquial name "pieces of eight" for the coin, and of "quarter" and "two bits" for twenty-five cents in the United States.
eBay is a good place to start looking for and pricing Escudos. If you are interested in bigger and heavier gold coins than the 8 Escudos from the same time frame, I recommend looking at the British 5 Guinea gold coins.
<< <i>Chapter 99 - The Doubloon >>
<< <i> It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing coc.k; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. >>
So this was like the 1843 example posted by trozau!!
<< <i>Koincollect, where'd you get that great excerpt from? >>
From the link Scioto posted earlier.
The 1956 Warner Brothers film "Moby Dick" has a famous scene where the captain of a whaling ship
nails a gold coin to the mast as a reward for the seaman who first spots a "special" whale.
The film is based on Herman Melville's famous 1851 novel about an 1840's whaling voyage commanded by a
Captain Ahab who is obsessed with pursuing and killing a white whale named "Moby Dick".
The film stars Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Richard Basehart as Ishmael, Friedrich Ledebur as Queequeg,
and was directed by John Huston.
01. Captain Ahab with the gold doubloon
02. The gold doubloon nailed to the mast
The coin is a gold Ecuador Republic 8 Escudos or "doubloon".
These particular types were minted from 1838 to 1843 in Quito, Ecuador.
The coin reads "REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR / QUITO / M.V."
Although the captain calls the coin an "ounce", it is actually around 8/10 of an ounce of gold,
worth then around $16 US dollars.
The coin in the film is no doubt a prop coin, possibly minted on one side only.
Real coins of this type sell for $10,000 to over $20,000, they are sometimes called "Moby Dick coins"
due to their mention in the book.
The Mysterious Egyptian Magic Coin
Coins in Movies
Coins on Television
--Severian the Lame