20 Crowns - Elizabeth II Christopher Columbus

Issued the year before the United States Bicentennial touched off a flood of commemorative coinage across the Caribbean, this piece belongs to an early wave of crown-sized silver issues from British overseas territories that were produced almost entirely for the collector market. The Turks and Caicos had virtually no domestic coin circulation to speak of — the U.S. dollar served as the functional currency — making commemorative releases the territory's primary engagement with numismatics.

Columbus made landfall in the general vicinity of the Turks and Caicos in October 1492, with Grand Turk having a plausible historical claim as the first island he encountered, though the exact landfall site remains disputed among historians.