1 Pound - Elizabeth II Smith Island

Smith Island sits at the northern end of the South Shetland Islands and was almost certainly sighted by British sealer William Smith in February 1819 — the same voyage that gave Britain its earliest territorial claim in the region. The British Antarctic Territory itself was only formally separated from the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1962, largely as an administrative response to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which froze but did not resolve competing sovereignty claims from Argentina and Chile.

Coins issued for the Territory circulate notionally but function in practice as collector pieces — the permanent civilian population is zero.