Mystery Solved
p. 89 · Read in the full issue
La Perouse Coin Mystery Solved
A mysterious gold coin,
which Vila skindiver Reece Discombe recovered at Vani koro in 1962 from the wreck of La Perouse’s ship Boussole, has finally been identified as a
gambling token.
ITS identity has been established by Admiral Picard Destelan, the Admiral commanding the French Naval Forces in the Pacific, who is a keen coin col lector.
This follows the failure of numismatists in Sydney and London last year to say positively what the coin was (JPIM, July, 1964, p. 110).
Admiral Destelan, who paid an official visit to Vila in April, had with him a copper token of the same era as the gold one which he bought in France recently for the equivalent of about £l.
On comparing his copper token with the gold one (which is now on display in the Vila Cultural Centre), Admiral Destelan found them to be almost identical.
The admiral said that inquiries he had made in Europe revealed that great numbers of such tokens,
The coin depicts King Louis XVI (sovereign of France from 1774 to 1793) on one side, and a human figure riding on what appears to be a dolphin on the other. and similar ones of bronze, had been minted in King Louis XVl’s time in Nuremburg, where they could be produced much more cheaply than in France.
In gambling, the tokens were used to represent an agreed value, and were bought by players before a game in the same way as “chips” or matches in poker.
On French warships, the gold tokens were used only by officers of flag rank and admirals—the others being used by the junior officers.
Admiral Destelan added that the fact that the token found by Reece Discombe was of gold was further evidence that the wreck from which it came was that of the Boussole, La Perouse’s flag ship, and not that of the other ship in his expedition, the Astrolabe.