The Strange "Recycled" Coins of the New World

In the days prior to the Euro dollar replacing some foreign currencies, visitors to the West Indies (Caribbean) regularly exchanged their Dollars, Pounds, Deutschemarks, Lira or Yen for local currency. In many instances it's the Eastern Caribbean Dollar, legal tender on St. Kitts and Nevis; Antigua, St. Lucia, Montserrat, Grenada, Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

And chances are more than a few tourists return home with a few of these coins as conversation pieces and mementos of their visit.

But it wasn't always so. The convenience of having a local currency for commerce simply didn't exist for many islands in the West Indies until the mid-Nineteenth Century. So they simply 'recycled' other nations' money by countermarking them with their own identification.

Actually, the idea wasn't original and had been practiced world-wide for centuries whenever coins were needed but not easily available. Countermarking a foreign coin made it acceptable as legal tender and established its value in the place it was stamped while at the same time often made it worthless in the issuing country. The intent was that the coin would remain and continue to circulate in the place where it was countermarked.

The process involved striking an identifying impression (usually the initials or name of the confiscating colony, territory, etc.) and, in many cases, a value, on obverse surface of the particular coin.

There are currently more than 100 different known countermarked series by Caribbean islands, including three by St. Kitts and nine by Nevis. Another 41 still remain unattributed to any island.

St. Kitts, settled in 1623, was the first English colony in the West Indies. All English language colonization that followed in the Caribbean Sea can be traced back to St. Kitts, which is also identified as St. Christopher in early records and maps.