pieces of eight

I was melting down some gold scrap the other day and wound up with a neat little pile of flattened nuggets which brought to mind lost pirate treasure. I like to 'research' on google as a handy work avoidance technique and came across some pretty fascinating trivia, for example did you know that the word for the currency 'peso' comes from 'pieces of eight' or in Spanish 'peso de ocho'? Yep, those are the pieces of eight of pirate lore. They were the most widely used coin in circulation internationally from the late 16th to late 19th centuries. One piece of eight was equivalent to eight 'reales', which was the unit of currency used in Spain at the time, and so the coins were often cut into eight pieces. The full coin is called a piece of eight and the eight small pieces are called bits. Confusing much? Sixteen full pieces of eight were equivalent to one gold doubloon. Millions of coins were minted over the course of three centuries and a lot of that minting happened in the new world since thats where the Spanish empire quite literally struck gold with vast deposits of gold and silver. All that treasure needed to be transported back to Spain and so naturally those ships became a get rich quick target for pirates. In response to this Spain started sending their ships in convoy which they deemed safer, unfortunately there was a downside to this and in 1715 the entire treasure fleet was sunk in a hurricane off florida after they made a spectacularly bad decision to wait until the onset of hurricane season as a further deterrent to pirates. It deterred the pirates alright. Some of that treasure is still out there waiting to be found….