An English wooden merchant vessel en route to England from Madras,India the Fame ,succumbed to a heavy swell
and found herself driven onto the rocks at Sea Point,Cape of Good Hope,in June of 1822
The wreck was rediscovered in 1965 and yielded a wide variety(but not a big quantity)of coinage,not a cargo
but most likely from among the personal belongings of the passengers and crew
The treasure of the Fame
While many man have spent long years and huge amounts
of money searching for real or imagined treasures,one of
the more successful recoveries of treasure on the coast of South Africa was the result of an accidental discovery. In1965 the Bell brothers, Geroge and James, were ooking for perlemoen in the ndense kelp beds opposite Graaff's Pool in Sea Point when they came across the scattered remains of an old sailing-ship in the deep rocky gullies. The two began excavating an drecovered a large number of British and Indian gold and silver coins. The latter included Spanish-American silver portrait-dollars and silver Indian rupees and in addition copper Indian coins and British pennies wre found. The site also yielded watch-cases, nails and a broken ship's bell. The remains proved to be those of the 629-ton British vessel Fame which was wrecked on 14 June 1822 whille leaving Table Bay on her way to Britain from India. On board were a numnber of prominent people returning home after a spell of duty in the East, among them Francis Farewell: after the wrecking he decided to stay on at the Cape, and eventually established a trading post in the Bay of Natal, the start of what eventually became the city of Durban.
Form : Shipwrecks & Salvage in South Africa :Malcolm Turner:1988 :Page 83
This stunning Gold Full Mohor from British East India Company was recovered from the wreck.It is a huge coin weighing 11.6 grams(nearly one and half times the weight of a Gold Pond or Sovereign).The condition is pristine and minted in 22-carat gold (the eternal metal) it hardly shows any sign of being submerged in the sea for one3 and a half centauries
THE COIN IS GRADED BY NCS,THE ORIGINAL CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY WAS KEPT BY
NGS.
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