Copper coin, 1713 or 1317

About This Coin

A heavy copper coin, recorded as weighing one and a half ounces, was found on Oak Island at some point after 1895. Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, two geotechnical engineers who spent close to two decades analyzing the island's underground workings, list it among a small group of finds made in the decades after the Halifax Company abandoned its operations in 1867. The date on the coin has come down in two versions, 1317 and 1713. Harris and MacPhie consider 1713 the more probable reading and point out that it is the year the Treaty of Utrecht transferred Acadia from France to Great Britain. They do not connect the coin to the construction of the Money Pit, but note that a reliable 1713 date would place people on the island in the early eighteenth century.

The object raises questions the surviving account cannot settle. European coins did not carry dates in Arabic numerals until the fifteenth century, which counts against 1317 as a European date. A reading of 1317 on an Islamic coin would instead correspond to 1899 or 1900 in the Hijri calendar, a possibility the record neither supports nor excludes. A weight of one and a half ounces is roughly four times that of a British copper halfpenny of the period, and no regular British copper coinage was struck in 1713 under Queen Anne, so a coin of that date would more likely be a foreign issue, a token or a medal. The findspot, the finder and the coin's present whereabouts are not recorded.