The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them and certainly they shall lie there for me. The cabin boy Jim, who narrates the tale, reflects many years later on his adventure. The Piece of Eight was made famous in pirate folklore when Robert Louis Stevenson published his famous novel, Treasure Island, featuring the villainous pirate Long John Silver and his sidekick parrot, which he named Captain Flint after his former pirate captain. In fact, it was expected that, to make change, they literally cut the coins into 8 pieces or “bits.” Hence, the British called the Spanish dollar a “Piece of Eight,” and when they said something cost “two bits,” they meant it cost a quarter of a dollar. Cutting money was not illegal, like it is now. Spanish coins were preferred over other currency because they had a milled, or patterned, edge, which prevented dishonest traders from shaving slivers off the coins without being detected. The most common coin used during this time was the silver Spanish dollar, which was worth 8 “reales,” a unit of currency in Spain.īack then, coins were valued by their actual weight in silver or gold, not just on what they looked like.
Instead, they resorted to using whatever coinage they could get their hands on. Colonists in British North America were not allowed to mint money of their own, even though they often ran out of English coins to use in day-to-day business.
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