- Hi, I'm Terry Shannon.

I'm a treasure hunter, and this is my Artifact Spotlight.

(gentle music) These are Spanish coins.

These are, this is a 8-real, and these are what they call cob coins.

In 1715, down at the Treasure Coast, there was a fleet of 11 Spanish treasure ships that come up along the coast, and a hurricane caught them and all 11 of them sank.

And out of the 11 that sank, they've only found six, and the average salvage has been 41 million per ship.

And these are the coins that they were carrying to take back to Spain.

When they went back to Spain, these would be melted down and turned into regular coins.

They were shipping so much silver over, they did it the easiest and fastest way.

So they'd have a bar of silver, or they'd pour out a strip of silver, and then they'd whack off about one ounce.

And then the slaves would stamp them.

They had the cross on the one side and the shield on the other side.

Every coin is different, but they're all the correct weight.

So an 8-real is one ounce of silver.

This would be a 4-real, which would be a half ounce of silver.

And this is a 2-real, and that would be a quarter ounce.

A 1-real is one eighth of an ounce of silver, and a half-real, they're just a very small coin, and that would be one 16th of an ounce.

What they did is they had an assayer, and they would check every coin and they would weigh it.

So the weights are spot on.

And if you looked at these coins, you'll see where they shaved off the extra.

So, in other words, when this one was cut off and it was stamped, it was too heavy.

So they shave it off to get it down to the proper weight.

And that's how it's very seldom you will find a cob coin with a date on it.

They used to cut these coins to make change.

You've heard of the expression "pieces of eight."

That's where that come from.

It's the same thing for the gold coins.

They're called escudos.

And a 8-escudo is one ounce of gold, a 4-escudo is a half ounce, a 2-escudo, right on down.

They went down to a 1-escudo, they didn't have a half-escudo.

They did later on, when they started making the round coin.

These other coins here, these are called maravedis, and they're called pirates' coin.

Everybody calls them a pirates' coin.

They're made out of copper.

They don't have a lot of value.

You know, they're all different.

They're very rough and crudely stamped.

This is, I believe it's called a Carlos and Juana Spanish coin, and it's a 2-real.

And if you look in the front here, it'll have an M, meaning it was minted in Mexico.

G, that's for the assayer.

And we able to date this coin by the assayer.

And in the the records, he only worked from 1544 to 1548.

They believe this is probably the oldest coin ever found in the Treasure Coast.

If not the oldest, it's one of the oldest.

When I got this one, I got two of them.

And the other one, it doesn't have much detail.

When a ship sank with a lot of silver, the salt water causes like an electrolysis effect and they'll get a coating over them, they call coin silver.

And if you can get that off, oftentimes you can get this pattern back.

And that's what they're trying to do with that other coin.

It's quite a treasure.

There's a lot of people that have detected the Treasure Coast for many, many years and have yet to find one.

So I've been real lucky.

I've done really well.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.