1800 “CROLUS” Chilean Error

At the 2014 COINEX fair in London, Numisor founder, Miguel Lehmann share in a Coinweek video a dramatic error coin that he found in Amsterdam. I knew Miguel as I was living in Europe at the time and I had visited his shop in Geneva. He showed me the coin personally at the show. It was an 1800-So AJ 8 Reales with the kings name Carolus, misspelled as Crolus. He suggested that the coin was potentially unique and was clearly excited by the find.

In 2020, Numisor offered the coin for sale and it realized ~$15k to @MrEureka. I was able to acquire the coin from Andy recently after having been aware of the coin for over a decade.

Initially, I was skeptical that the coin was real. My concerns stemmed from the fakes which have come out of central and eastern Europe, and the lack of documentation of this error in previous published materials. The odd placement of the letters, not following a uniform arc around the legends as noted by the CR in CROLUS and the H in Hispanic, gave me further pause. I mentioned this to Andy and he said (paraphrased) appropriately, “what do you expect from such a dramatic error?”

The first evidence I can find of the coin is in the 1991 Ponterio sale of the Viceroy Amat collection where a dark oxidized coin marked the first appearance of the issue in a public auction. I did find one other example, though I have to go back through my research to figure out where I found it.

After acquiring the coin, I reached out to some of my contacts in South America to see if there were other examples that were notable in local collections. One individual owns the Amat piece while another suggested to me that he had seen one which was the host coin for a Brazilian 960 R.

Surely if I could find the Brazilian 960R this would provide contemporary evidence that the coin in fact was legitimate. So I set out to do so and just yesterday I finally got images of it from a collector in South America. Regrettably, he said he will die with his collection and has never sold a single piece so I doubt that I’ll be able to own it in the near term. But as you can see from the visible CR and the H being visible in HISPAN on the reverse (near STAB), the dies match. He noted that he also knows of a second coin on a CROLUS host.