Sale: CNG 69, Lot: 2065. Estimate $500.  Closing Date: Wednesday, 8 June 2005.  Sold For $2400. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

INDIA, British India. British East India Company. Bengal Presidency. 1780-1784. AR Pattern Fulus-Quarter Anna (24.6 mm, 11.83 gm, 6h). Prinsep's Coinage. Dated AH 1195 (1780/1 AD). Name of Mughal emperor Shah Alam II; AH date, star above / Regnal year with five stars. Edge: wire edge separating bands of reeding. Cf. Pridmore 196 (copper pattern); type of KM 127. EF, toned. Extremely rare. ($500)

Ex Virgil Brand Collection (Spink 50, 6-7 March 1986), lot 229.

In late 1780, John Prinsep, recently retired from the British army in India, won a contract to work copper mines at Fultah, and set up a mint for striking coins there. Altough these coins, in four denominations, were of better quality than the current production at Calcutta, they failed to gain local acceptance, and by 1784 Princep had abandoned his project. There are apparently no other examples known of his coinage struck in silver, but in a letter to Governor-General Warren Hasting dated 4th January 1785 Prinsep pleads for reimbursement of some of his expenses and presents the Board of the EIC "two complete Setts of Gold, Silver & Copper Coin" as a sample of his work. (Wodak, "John Princep's Copper Coins for Bengal", in NumCirc 1985, p. 61). If this coin is part of the later presentation issue, it was struck from different dies than the circulation types; the borders are beaded rather than reeded, and the edge 'security" reeding is otherwise unknown.