Pieces of 8, Seagull Dinners, and Gelignite

Beginning of Interview

Sam Longley: Sunken treasure that has made its way to find a home in the State Library's rare coins collection. The coins come from a 1656 shipwreck near Ledge Point and a 1727 wreck the Dutch ship Zeewijk (and I'm sure I have pronounced that wrong) near Gun Island on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands. The coins were donated by Alan Robinson, and Dominic Serventy. We've got Peter Edwards from the State Library. He joins us today. G’day Peter, how are you?

Peter Edwards: I'm good, yourself?

Sam Longley: I am not bad at all. Hey, how old are the coins that we are talking?

Peter Edwards: The coins were 1656 for the Gilt Dragon, so that's the De Vergulde Draeke. 

Sam Longley: Aw, you say it so much better than I do...so much better...

Peter Edwards: For those speaking Dutch out there, please forgive me if I butchered it, and they're silver coins. The ones from the 1727 wreck, the Zeewijk, they're both copper doits, so copper coins.

Sam Longley: Yeah, right, and does…I can see how silver lasts; copper lasts that amount of time obviously.

Peter Edwards: That's right.

Sam Longley: Are they worth anything now or are they just more worth like a piece of history? If you try and sell a piece of copper, it's nothing, right?

Peter Edwards: Yeah, well, the copper – I’ve had a look online, looking at...numismatic values for these coins. 

Sam Longley: Right.

Peter Edwards: Copper, the copper doits, the copper coins you can get for about $15 American in some instances. The silver though, is more interesting because there's going to have...they're going to have a gold [sic]...well, a silver value in its weight. 

Sam Longley: Right…

Peter Edwards: The weight of the silver, the quality of the silver…which varies. I mean back in the day...in the 1640s, a silver reale or a piece of eight - that was worth about four shillings and sixpence which was the equivalent of about 18 British pounds. 

Sam Longley: Right, but now.

Peter Edwards: Now, it's more of the value, about the history involved with it...these coins have frankly travelled so far from...through time and across the face of the planet. They've sat at the bottom of the ocean, they've been in who knows whose hand. We know a few people and we'll mention those today.

Sam Longley: Sure.

Peter Edwards: But the stories that they could tell, the fact that they've journeyed so far and it's less than a handful of coins...you could hold all of this in one hand but there's so much history and so much connection with individuals from our collective past. That's where the real value of these items rest.

Sam Longley: How many coins - what's the collection like at the State Library? Is this a big thing or just this one tiny little collection that you're in love with?

Peter Edwards: It is...well...I am in love with the entire State Library

Sam Longley: [Laughs]

Peter Edwards: ...private archive.

Sam Longley: Who isn’t? Yes, of course...

Peter Edwards: Oh my...it is fantastic, don't get me started. But about the coins themselves, the main ones we have - I mean the only ones that I am aware of anyway, are the three coins from the Gilt Dragon and the two copper coins; so the three silver coins from the Gilt Dragon and two copper coins from the Zeewijk. That is the sum total of the collection of coins that we have at the moment. These are in the most secure special rare materials facility that we have at the State Library so we can look after them, make sure they are secure and ensure that they, like many other private archival collections that we have, are going to be around for the public of West Australia to enjoy going forward through time. 

Sam Longley: Do you lend them out to museums or are they on display or are they just too valuable to even make it out of there?

Peter Edwards: Well at the State Library what we aim to do with all of our West Australian heritage materials, within reason of course, and there are restrictions on some things, we digitise them all so we are very conscious of the fact that, well we here in Perth...that's great if you can walk into the building and have a look at the coins or look at the historical documents - but WA is a big place so there are people who can't get here, so we aim to digitise as much as we possibly can to ensure that people remote from Perth have access or a way at least of viewing and coming to grips with these special heritage collections. 

Sam Longley: So, Alan Robinson…

Peter Edwards: Yes, 

Sam Longley: … donated them along with Dominic Serventy. Where did they get them from because they're shipwrecks. Were they...are they old pirates? Are they hoarders?

Peter Edwards: Yes.

Sam Longley: Who is Alan Robinson?

Peter Edwards: Alan Robinson, I mean is as close as you can come to an Arrr moment when it comes to this story because he was a diver...an open sea diver...into marine salvage and he actually came across, whilst diving, the location of the Gilt Dragon.

Sam Longley: Oh.

Peter Edwards: I believe that was on the 10th of August in 1957. He then lost the location, so he was not able to relocate it and it wasn't until 1963 that he went out diving with a friend of his, a 15-year-old by the name of Graeme Henderson, and Graeme relocated the wreck site that Alan had found in the past; so there was a lot of contention and challenge that went on from that point forward. Unfortunately for Alan, he believed that he was being denied credit for the discovery and he ended up removing artefacts from the site, sometimes using gelignite to do so. So I'd imagine...

Sam Longley: Explosives.

Peter Edwards: Yes, like TNT, 

Sam Longley: Yeah, right.

Peter Edwards: Dynamite, effectively to basically blow up the coral, to free up the artefacts and so he had the appellation assigned to him the Gelignite Buccaneer. 

Sam Longley: [Laughs]

Peter Edwards: And that's a part of WA...folklore now really, I suppose.

Sam Longley: Yeah.

Peter Edwards: But he went through a lot...to get those coins. There was a lot of…there were legislative changes that occurred as a result of what happened with him and that's how we got…he got those coins from the wreck. But Dominic Serventy - very different story.

Sam Longley: Uh huh...

Peter Edwards: Dominic was a world-famous ornithologist, and he had the coins given to him by a fellow called George Pitt Morison. They came to...George gave them to Dominic in around the 1920s and Dominic was always wondering, well where did these come from? Now George had told him "I got both of these coins, which he said were from the Abrohlos Islands, probably from the Zeewijk wreck but he never understood. He was never told where George got them from and we still don't know; however, the museum, our wonderful West Australian Museum – we’re able to...through them, find out that the two coins that I'm talking about the copper doits...one's dated 1716, the other one is dated 1787. Now that's really interesting and the look you're giving me right now…

Sam Longley: [Laughs]

Peter Edwards: I could imagine Dominic having that quizzical expression on his face as well.

Sam Longley: I'm not good at maths, but...if the wreck happened 60 years before the minting of the coins...

Peter Edwards: Correct.

Sam Longley: There is...it's wrong, something happened there.

Peter Edwards: Absolutely...and even the museum's analysis said Hmmm, this is Zeewijk but it's...the date range is wrong...so they've recognised it's a Dutch coin of course but hang on a minute, this wasn't minted in Holland until 60 years after the Zeewijk had sunk, so there's a big question there and Dominic always wondered, George never told him, and the beauty of our collections that we have...we have George Pitt Morison's journals and papers and unfortunately or in a wonderful unfortunate way this is – we’re digitising those but we are digitising them now just when I need to look at them to see if I can figure out the history of these coins and where George may have got them, so right now we don't know where he got them. But we are hopeful when we have a look at the papers, they may include a bit of information about it, so the history is a mystery at this point for those two or at least one of those two coins.

Sam Longley: Now I've heard stories of people back in the 70s and 60s just sort of snorkelling and finding stuff and then keeping it and handing it down...is it legal to trade stuff that is antiquities from the past...is it...is that something that people are allowed to do? Or should they just...I'm casting a long one here. Should they just give it to the State Library?

Peter Edwards: Well, I think all WA documentation, historical documentation, heritage material should go to the State Library.

Sam Longley: Great.

Peter Edwards: And you might ask the question, why are there coins in the State Library collection. Right?

Sam Longley: I was going to ask that.

Peter Edwards: Well, we're a library, we should have documentation and we do, but what happens across the history of the library? People have donated materials. You got to remember we, Alan donated his coins to us in 1968 and so these donations that have come in as part of a collection, so it's not just the coins, it's the papers, it's a copy of a manuscript copy of his In WA Treasure Is Not For The Finder, which came as a result of all of his tumultuous relationships with the government about the treasures from the Gilt Dragon. So, when we get a collection of materials like that, where there's paper, where there might be coins or other you would consider museum items, the library has to make a decision - do we keep this collection together or do we separate it? And sometimes that decision making ties in with the wishes of the donor. 

Sam Longley: Mmmhmmm.

Peter Edwards: Donor wants to keep it together – we’ll keep it together. If there's a really strong argument for a certain massive element, a physical element to go to the museum, then that might happen as well.

Sam Longley: Umm…what is the connection between the Dutch coins and the WA coast? 'Cos I know we've got some Dirk Hartog going on there and I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. Could we have been part of Holland at one point?

Peter Edwards: [Laughs]

Sam Longley: Could we have been Dutch?

Peter Edwards: We were on the maps back in the day, we were all called, well the land was called New Holland right. There was another name that I can't recall right now. But there was a lot of Dutch traffic in the waters off our coast. And WA is called the shipwreck coast for a reason – there’s many many shipwrecks off our coast, not all Dutch of course. The earliest one that I am aware of, for sure, is the English ship the Tryall and that was sunk...in 1622. 

Sam Longley: Mmmhmmm

Peter Edwards: That's pretty early. But a lot of the time these are European travellers particularly the Dutch because they had the Dutch East Indies Company. They would travel along through the roaring 40s and then come up past the WA coast, on their way to Batavia, which is modern day Java of course. So unfortunately, sometimes they sailed a little bit too much to the right or to the east and they ended up running into the islands off the coast or into the shore itself.

Sam Longley: So they found the land, 

Peter Edwards: They found the land…

Sam Longley: …in the most brutal way they could. Did they find anything else?

Did they help discover other parts of WA or flora, fauna, anything that was…helped grow the knowledge of the southern continent? 

Peter Edwards: That's a really really interesting question...I can't speak to flora and fauna but mapping - Dutch mapping or cartography from Europe was an amazing, is an amazing thing to look at - because we have a series of maps which date back into the 16th century which show the progressive discovery of the West Australian coast. So if you look at a map from the 1560s or the 1620s, you might see the map of the world all Latin text and their various markings and there would a tiny little sliver, literally a wobbly line which we would recognise today as the WA coast; and then there's the maps and cartography and as exploration progressed that line started to grow and grow and grow until as we get to the 19th century and so on, we have the full and relatively accurate outline of the coast of the entire continent. [Laughs]

Sam Longley: Phew…how many shipwrecks were there on our shipwreck coast? Do you know? Does the State Library have that kind of information...are you privy to it?

Peter Edwards: Well, that's a good question as well. In our books about West Australian history we are going to have information about the numbers of wrecks but I would always go… everyone out there have a look at the WA Maritime or the WA Museum's website. They have what's called a shipwreck database and it shows all the shipwreck locations that they know of to date and it gives all this fantastic information about what happened with the wreck, the exact dates of the wreck, there’re even pictures, in some cases, for the dives that happened on the wrecks while they were exploring and finding and making all of their records about what they had located on the seabed.

Sam Longley: If I'd ask you a favourite - Gilt Dragon or the Zeewijk?

Peter Edwards: Oooh, I'd have to say the Gilt Dragon…I’d have to say the Gilt Dragon because we have pieces of 8...Arrr...I love pieces of 8! 

Sam Longley: [Laughs] Yeah, you do.

Peter Edwards: It's fantastic! And the history - what is a piece of 8? Hang on a minute, that's interesting in itself and it's not everyone, a lovely round coin. This piece of 8 and there's a piece of 4 and a piece of 2. Now, they're all silver, but they're not - like we get a 20c coin today, it's not perfectly round. It's all ragged and that's the way that they made these coins...back in the day, these things were known as cobs and Alan actually writes that into his little presentation slip that contain the coins which we have of course, we have the slip as well as the coins in the collection. And cob is an English derivation of the Spanish cabo de barra which is meant to mean end of the bar, so the idea was a cob is going to be a piece of silver that was hacked off the end of a silver bar and then hammered into shape. Right? So that's the theory. I haven't found any actual proof that a cob comes from cabo de barra but what I do know is they were called in Spanish macuquinas I think it is in Spanish and that's basically a reference to the hammering process for the creation of the coins themselves. 

Sam Longley: I want to see those coins. I'm going to see them when they're online. I have to let you go Peter Edwards from the State Library. But before I do, red frog green frog question vanilla slice or a chocolate eclair.

Peter Edwards: Well, firstly what's this ‘or’ business?

Sam Longley: [Laughs]

Peter Edwards: I'd say vanilla slice and I heard what you're saying before about the snot block. I think you’ve only got part of the name there.

Sam Longley: Well, you work in the State Library, you've probably got the official record. What are they really called?

Peter Edwards: Well, in my family, and I've known this for a long time, we've always called them high calorie, low fibre snot blocks and if it comes down to one of those, or a chocolate eclair, I'd say you're missing something else there. There's a coffee éclair as well.

Sam Longley: Awww...

Peter Edwards: And I'd always go for the coffee éclair.

Sam Longley: Well, we could keep going on and on of the desserts.

Peter Edwards, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us. 

Peter Edwards: You’re welcome.

Sam Longley: An absolute pleasure. 

End of Interview