2 Dollars Commercial Bank of Newfoundland

The Commercial Bank of Newfoundland was chartered in 1857 and failed spectacularly in December 1894, one of two Newfoundland banks that collapsed simultaneously — an event that wiped out savings across the colony and triggered years of fiscal crisis. Notes from this issue, printed by Perkins, Bacon & Petch in London during the early 1880s, predate that collapse by roughly a decade and circulated in a colony still a full generation away from Confederation.

Perkins, Bacon's intaglio work for colonial issuers of this period is consistently fine, and their security engraving held up well against contemporary counterfeiting attempts. The 1894 bank failure itself became a direct argument for Newfoundland joining Canada — though that didn't happen until 1949.