by Jørgen Sømod (numis@vip.cybercity.dk)
In connection with the introduction of a new monetary system in 1850 in the Danish West Indies, it was decided that, instead of minting coins specifically for the territory, that North American coins would be bought and placed into circulation in the islands. To prevent the coins from being re-exported, the highest denominations were counterstamped with the king's monogram surmounted by a crown.
When the interest in collecting American coins developed, it became obvious that it was impossible to satisfy collector demand for counterstamped coins, not only from the Danish West Indies, but from the Caribbean as a whole. For this reason several issues of forged counterstamps were produced, both on coins that were legitimately counterstamped and on many others besides. The latter caused difficulties for both museums and private collectors, and also hindered the understanding of monetary history in the areas in question.
Fonrobert's catalogue (Berlin 1878), edited by Adolph Weyl, has until now been seen as the authoritative bible on American coins. However, it is clear that the collection contains hoards of forged counterstamps, probably all manufactured in Germany.
Only five years later, in 1883, there appeared a new series of forgeries, likely originating in France. The Danish West Indian ones were imported into Denmark and many of them were bought by Vilhelm Bergsøe, who sold them at an auction in Amsterdam in 1903.
A third series turned up in 1914. The strange thing is, however, that silver coins only turned up in the USA and copper coins with the same counterstamp only in Denmark. Until about 1960 there was a lull in the manufacture of new forgeries. The forged and genuine counterstamps observed to that date in the USA, with the exception of the 1914 silver issues, can all be traced back to old Danish collections. At the same time, no-one doubts the authenticity of any counterstamp
In the USA in 1963 a forgery was recorded which is very easy to detect, because the cross at the top of the crown is missing. It was published by the American collector Ray Byrne in 1967. But he did not observe that nearly all the other counterstamps in his own collection were fakes too, manufactured in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. When these were published in Los Angeles in 1975, in the auction catalogue covering his collection, my suspicions were aroused and a close investigation proved that, with the exception of a very few pieces, all the counterstamps were produced with the intention of cheating collectors and museums.
Copyright © Jørgen Sømod 1997
Brought to you by Association des Numismates Francophones du Canada