Question about Atocha coin jewelry and COA

WorldCoinsDmitry

Recently got this pin made from an Atocha recovered cob, but I noticed that the COA shows a silver bar rather than the actual piece. I looked up some similar pieces online and found the same thing, whereas non-jewelry coins and other artifacts are represented accurately on the accompanying COA. I also found another pin which had a different serial number, but appeared to be exactly identical to mine.

My question is... does all this mean that the original bars were melted down to make facsimile coins to be used for these jewelry pieces?
I would imagine an original bar to be more valuable, but I don't know what the lay of the land would have looked like in the 1980's. I also recall reading some rumors about extremely rare dated 8 reales purported to have been recovered from Atocha, but were actually manufactured from melted bars and coins from the wreck and fraudulently sold as genuine by Mel Fisher and gang, though I have no idea if there is any truth to this.

I greatly appreciate all of your insight

Zoins

It does look like these pieces were made from one of the bars of silver that were found:

This piece has been hand crafted from one of the silver bars that went down on the Nuestra Senora de Atocha
Bar number: 85A-S208

As for whether the original bar is more valuable or not, prices of bars can be found on HA. It wouldn't be too hard to calculate the breakeven for a project like this given the amount of silver in a bar vs the amount of Atocha silver in each piece.

Sapyx

Yes, your piece is a replica, "made from" silver from the melted ingot.

How did they make their profit? Several ways.

First, you can make an awful lot of replica coins from a single ingot. The ingot would have been damaged by immersion and not worth very much more than bullion price. There's not terribly much collector demand for such giant artifacts, and he found over a thousand of the things. That's market saturation by any definition. The replicas altogether would have been sold for much, much more than the price he might have obtained from the intact ingot.

Second, you only have Mr Fisher's word that the "silver" is genuinely and fully derived from the ingot. It is entirely possible that the raw material for these replicas were "diluted" with silver from other sources. "Made from" is not a technical definition, but a vague, weasel-word phrase that is open to a wide interpretation. National Collectors Mint got into some trouble after 9/11 by making medals that claimed to be "made from" silver recovered from the WTC vaults; they were actually "made" of base-metal that was then plated with a very, very thin layer of WTC-derived silver. I do not know if Mel Fisher might have done a similar thing with his replicas... but you've only got his word that he didn't.

WorldCoinsDmitry

Thank you for confirming Zoins and Sapyx. Now I feel dumb that I missed that part when skimming through the COA

Timbuk3

Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing !!!

asheland

You could have an X-ray done on the surface. Silver from that period would have a LOT of trace elements in it. It would help.

291fifth

Relic items such as that may or may not have much of a secondary market. Personally, the fact that it was made of silver from an old silver bar does not excite me.

JBK

Weird. I am all in favor of "made froms" but this is a replica coin without the COPY marking....

Sapyx

Well, they were made back before the Hobby Protection Act was passed, so technically, they didn't need to have COPY stamped on them.

Technically, now, you're supposed to have COPY stamped on them before you sell them, even old ones like this that were made before the Act....

topstuf

Shades of the Franklin Mint "moon medal."