 Florida. Proclamation 4 Reales, 1789. Charles IV Proclaimed King by Vicente Manuel de Zespedes. Breen 1079, Benjamin Betts 10, Herrera 133, Medina (1917) 148, Grove C.58. Struck silver. 32.9 mm. 212.5 gns. Reeded edge. Obverse: Armored and draped bust right of Charles IV. Inscribed around: CAROLUS IV. D. G. HISPAN. REX. (''Charles IV by the Grace of God King of Spain''). Reverse: A jasmine flower with six petals, a small castle above it and a lion below. Inscribed around: LA FLORa: ORIENTAL PER. ZESPEDs. PROCLAM:tus 1789. (continuing on from the front ''Proclaimed Throughout East Florida by Zespedes''). Extremely Fine. Nice, light golden brown color to the silver. Excellent detail showing, more so than on any cast specimen seen. Minor tooling around the obverse rim. According to the late Mr. Ford, struck on a cast planchet. Extremely rare: if not actually unique. The cataloguer has seen or heard of no other records of another struck silver specimen.
The Florida 1789 Proclamation 4 Reales was ordered by then governor of East Florida Manuel Vicente de Zespedes in two forms, struck and cast in silver. It is likely that the struck specimens were made at the Mexico City Mint but that only a very few were struck. These would have been for presentation to the king and his council of the Indies and for Zespedes and his close friends. The cast silver pieces could have been made locally or not. They are distinguished from the struck piece in having the word PROCLAM end in TUR whereas the struck silver piece ends that Latin word in TUS. For the reverse type Zespedes chose to show a flower, again a play on words, but also a type that was in keeping with de Peña's 1760 proclamation 4 Reale's reverse and the even earlier 1747 Montiano coinage proposal for Florida. Zespedes himself described the flower as a jasmine.
The pieces were ordered to be ready for the gala celebration of the new king's accession to the throne that Zespedes had scheduled for December, 1789. For three days, St. Augustine residents and guests marched in procession, feasted, danced and sang, and generally forgot their worries. As the high point of the celebration, Zespedes led his military in a parade that was watched by the entire town. Along the parade route, Zespedes threw handfulls of the cast silver proclamation 4 Reales to the bystanders. Each one of them represented a day's worth of average wages and the scramble to get one or more of the prizes can be imagined. Naturally, most were spent as coinage and subsequently lost to later collectors.
The best recent discussion about the 1789 proclamation 4 Reales is by John W. Adams and was published by the Medal Collectors of America in the premiere issue of The Medal Cabinet (Summer, 2000). John distinguishes four kinds of these pieces in the article: struck silver, as the present piece; cast silver; after-cast (i.e., a cast made from a cast) silver; after-cast bronze.
Ex Henry Christensen's sale of September 20, 1967, lot 458.
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| Hammer Price: $200,000.00
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