The coin pictured above was struck in Mexico City in 1739, under Philip V of Spain, and it is worth looking at closely because it is exactly what pirates were actually after: not chests of loose gems or gold bars, but silver coins like this one, minted by the millions and recognized from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. Its name, the “piece of eight,” describes its value rather than its shape: it was worth eight Spanish reales, and that number mattered more to the people who carried it than almost anything else about it.
What the name actually meant
The Spanish dollar, as it was formally known, was a large silver coin equal to eight reales, the basic unit of Spanish currency. Reales were often in short supply as small change, so it became standard practice, not theft or vandalism, to cut a piece of eight into eight wedge-shaped “bits” to make exact change in everyday trade. Two of those wedges, a quarter of the coin, gave English-speaking colonists the phrase “two bits” for a quarter dollar, an expression that outlived the coin by well over a century.
Where the silver came from
Spain minted these coins from silver drawn out of its American empire, above all the enormous deposits at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, and mines in Mexico. From the 1570s until the French Revolution, the piece of eight functioned as something close to a global reserve currency, the main vehicle for moving silver around the world and a coin recognizable in ports on nearly every inhabited continent. That reach is why a coin minted in Mexico could turn up in a pirate’s hands off the coast of Madagascar or the American colonies with no questions asked about its value.
Why pirates wanted it specifically
Pieces of eight and the rarer gold doubloon were the two denominations pirates prized above all else, because both were valued by their actual precious-metal content rather than by the promise of a government that might not be trusted. A piece of eight was portable, divisible, and instantly recognized by any merchant, tavern keeper, or fellow pirate a crew might deal with. That combination made it far more useful plunder than most of what appears in fictional treasure chests.
The coin’s afterlife
The Spanish dollar circulated as an unofficial currency in Britain’s American colonies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and Americans went on using Spanish and other foreign coins as legal tender well after independence, until Congress finally banned the practice in 1857. The word “dollar” itself traces back through the Spanish and Habsburg coinage tradition to a 16th-century silver mine at Joachimsthal, in what is now the Czech Republic, whose coins were called Joachimsthaler, shortened to “thaler.” The piece of eight carried that lineage directly into the currency that replaced it.
Sources consulted: National Maritime Historical Society’s “Pieces of Eight”; the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Liberty Street Economics blog, “Historical Echoes: Aye, That Piece of Eight You Be Thinkin’ of Were a Precursor to Today’s Dollar.”
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