Part of a micro-gold series aimed squarely at the bullion collectibles market, this piece was issued the same year the Solomon Islands — a Commonwealth realm — was publicly debating its constitutional relationship with the Crown, adding a quiet irony to a coin bearing Elizabeth II's effigy struck just months before her death in September 2022. Darwin himself spent five weeks in the Pacific aboard HMS Beagle in 1835, observing reef formations in the Cocos Islands that directly informed his coral atoll subsidence theory.
Part of a micro-gold series aimed squarely at the bullion collectibles market, this piece was issued the same year the Solomon Islands — a Commonwealth realm — was publicly debating its constitutional relationship with the Crown, adding a quiet irony to a coin bearing Elizabeth II's effigy struck just months before her death in September 2022. Darwin himself spent five weeks in the Pacific aboard HMS Beagle in 1835, observing reef formations in the Cocos Islands that directly informed his coral atoll subsidence theory.