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Updated: June 18, 2025
My grandfather reduced or shortened the coin of this country by three processes. By aquafortis, by clipping, and by filing. Filing and clipping he employed in reducing all sorts of coin, whether gold or silver; but aquafortis he used merely in reducing gold coin, whether guineas, jacobuses, or Portugal pieces, otherwise called moidores, which were at one time as current as guineas.
This, said he, was true but, there being no affidavit made of my death he could not act as my executor. And, indeed, this he performed very faithfully in a few days, making himself indebted to me 470 moidores of gold, over and above what had been lost at sea, after I had left the place.
Not yet has the seaman's chest, brass-bound, with its secret compartments full of "fair rose-nobles and bright moidores," been lighted upon; but who can say? Perhaps it has come ashore but now, after leagues of aimless wanderings, and awaits in some cosy cove the next Beachcombing expedition.
The children had discovered the glittering hoard, and when in mischievous mood used to fling showers of moidores, diamonds, pearls and pieces of eight to the gulls, who pounced upon them for food, and then flew away, raging at the scurvy trick that had been played upon them. The stave was still there, and on it Starkey had hung his hat, a deep tarpaulin, watertight, with a broad brim.
On the twenty-fifth of September, 1726, he attacked the Bicester wagon as it was coming from London, and committed the following robberies therein, viz., he took from Thomas Eldridge, fifteen moidores, two hundred and ten guineas, eighty half-guineas, and the goods and money of Mr. Burrows.
Again, the bishop wished me to marry the niece and heiress of the Dean of Lincoln; and my uncle, the alderman, proposed to me the only daughter of old Sloethorn, the great wine-merchant, rich enough to play at span-counter with moidores and make thread-papers of bank-notes; and somehow I slipped my neck out of both nooses, and married poor, poor Sophia Wellwood.
A mongrel collection of coins could be found, passing at varying rates in the different States English pounds, shillings and pence, Spanish dollars, joes, half-joes, pistoles and moidores, French guineas, carolins and chequins but no United States coins. Even this money was soon drawn off to Europe, because British exporters demanded cash until the Revolutionary debts had been settled.
The carpenters had brought all their tools, the doctor all his instruments and medicines, and indeed we had a great deal of baggage, that is to say, on the whole, for some of us had little more than the clothes on our backs, of whom I was one; but I had one thing which none of them had, viz., I had the twenty-two moidores of gold which I had stole at the Brazils, and two pieces of eight.
Secondly, There was the account of four years more while they kept the effects in their hands, before the government claimed the administration, as being the effects of a person not to be found, which they call civil-death; and the balance of this, the value of plantation increasing, amounted to crusadoes, which made 3241 moidores.
In those days of scarcity most of them did not set eyes on so much as $50 in the course of a year, and happy was he who had tucked away two or three golden guineas or moidores in an old stocking, and sewed up the treasure in his straw mattress or hidden it behind the bricks of the chimney-piece.
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