When I see tales of buccaneers fighting over pieces of eight, I always wonder, just how much was one of them worth at the time. How much could a single coin purchase? Was it a day’s wages? A month? An hour?
I realize that the term “piece of eight” was applied to many different coins over a long period. But they were all worth 8 reals. Did the value of a real vary much over the period?
If you need a specific date, lets say mid 18th Century, about the time of Treasure Island. I think that would be the Philip V 8 real piece, from 1739.
This has proved hard to Google. There are thousands of web sites telling me the history, showing various designs, or offering to sell me one. That’s not what I want. To be clear, I’m not asking for the current value.
The Spanish dollar circulated widely and was internationally acceptable because it reliably contained a fixed quantity of silver — about 25.56g. Its value was based entirely on the silver content and therefore fluctuated with the value of silver.
The value of silver varied from place to place, and also varied over time. Supply and demand moved independently - silver supply could be increased by the discovery of new supplies and the opening of new mines and reduced by the closing of exhausted mines, and this would have an impact in the region where the mines were located before its effects spread further. Demand for silver was dominated by China, whose currency was silver and whose population doubled, and whose output more than doubled, over the course of the eighteenth century, resulting in a higher and higher demand for silver, tending to push the price up over the course of the century.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the piece of eight didn’t have a fixed value; the value fluctuated considerably, both from place to place and from time to time. Its attraction was not that it had a steady value, but that it was widely trusted and accepted.
It is difficult to extract good information from the provided cite, but if you believe the people who took the effort, an 8-reales in the late 1700s would be worth roughly 90 EUR or 100 USD in today’s purchasing power.
Valuing silver against gold, the ratio has been tricky for a very long time. It’s interesting to note the Comstock lode discovery in Nevada (basically an entire mountain of high grade silver ore) permanently buggered the historical 16 to 1 gold/silver ratio. Lots of thought went into the ratio, valuing too high or too low meant shortages of one kind of specie or another, arbitrage opportunities and other problems.
“Pieces of Eight” - the name alone indicates they were pretty valuable in terms of purchasing power because small subsidiary coinage was always in short supply, so merchants resorted to cutting them into pieces to make change. This is the etymology of archaic monetary slang like “Two bits”
Which is two eighths of a Spanish dollar. Or one quarter.
So the literalist answer to “what is a piece of eight worth” is “12.5 cents.”
But 12.5 cents had a fair bit of buying power when these things were in circulation, and the bullion value may have been higher, given the right value ratio between gold and silver.
This cite gives day labourer rates for around the 1750s in Mexico City as pegged at 3 reales/ day. So just under three day’s wages for the meanest kind of paid labour.
From 1750 to 1812 laborer nominal wages were pegged at three reales per day …
It was only in 1813 when nominal wages began to increase reaching four reales by
1817
Probably more like a peso a day for anyone skilled.
Note that despite what some may be thinking, Mexico City wasn’t some backwater during this period, at least at the start (1750) so using its wages isn’t far off the mark.:
Mexico City started out with high real wages, almost at par with Amsterdam and London*
The article also gives another way of looking at value: contruction workers who were fed on-site during the workweek had 1 real/week deducted from their wage:
One real (one eighth of a peso) roughly represented the weekly costs of food for one person in the colonial period
Note that the old US silver dollar was of course more or less worth a Piece of Eight. So that might give you a better idea- during the old West a “dollar a day plus found” was pretty standard wages. However, the “found” included three meals and a bunk.
Well - the “two bits” = a quarter or 25c part is correct anyway. The US stock market didn’t get rid of this 1/8ths business for equity pricing till 1997! I’d forgotten that.
Yeah, you can easily find a thousand web sites repeating the legend. It doesn’t make it accurate.
Sam was a coin dealer, and expert. Is this site written by a coin expert? If not, I take Sam’s word over theirs
But very rarely, and not with pieces of eight.
Please note - a ‘bit’ was an actual coin worth 1 real.
Yeah, the more I think about it, ole Sam was likely correct. If they were widely cut up, there would be a healthy supply of the bits remaining in collections, found in hoards, detectorists, museum collections. Some attrition over the years would be expected, would have been lost due to smelting, but it’s a matter of percentages. If the practice was so widespread, where are they? I’m going to ask our local coin guy about this, he’s been around forever and likely heard this tale before.
