1/2 Stampee François Duclos

The Stampee was a distinctly Trinidadian unit of account — equal to half a cent in the island's pre-decimalization system — and these pieces were privately issued by François Duclos rather than by any colonial authority. Duclos was a Port of Spain merchant, and the coins functioned essentially as trade tokens, filling a gap in small change that British colonial administrators had not bothered to address. The twenty-year span of the issue reflects how persistent that gap was.

Lyall's documentation of this piece places it firmly in the merchant token tradition of the Caribbean, where private issuers routinely substituted for official coinage well into the latter half of the nineteenth century.