1 Bit

The "bit" denominations of French Caribbean colonies were not purpose-struck coins but rather the product of counterstamping — Spanish colonial reales were cut, plugged, or stamped to create subsidiary currency where metropolitan coinage rarely arrived in sufficient quantity. Martinique's chronic shortage of small change in the 1770s forced local administrators to authorize these makeshift solutions, which circulated alongside Spanish, Portuguese, and British silver indiscriminately.

KM#17 is among the scarcer documented types from this intervention period, as many examples were later recalled or restruck when French colonial monetary policy tightened in the following decade.