11/4 Meticais - Maria II Countermarked with a Rosette

Portugal's Mozambican possessions ran chronically short of fractional gold coinage throughout the mid-nineteenth century, and the colonial treasury's solution was to countermark existing Spanish-American and Brazilian gold rather than wait for freshly minted supply from Lisbon. The rosette punch applied here authenticated the piece for local circulation at a revalued tariff rate, a practice the Portuguese crown sanctioned formally in 1851 specifically to address the liquidity problem in the Indian Ocean territories.

The underlying host coin is a Maria II meia-coroa or similar fractional gold of the 1830s–40s Portuguese metropolitan series. Gomes records very few examples with the rosette countermark surviving in collectible condition.