41/2 Bits Counterstamp on Mexico 2 Reales KM# 86.1

Saint Vincent's colonial monetary system ran chronically short of small change throughout the Napoleonic Wars, a problem shared across the British Caribbean. The solution, improvised and officially sanctioned, was to counterstamp circulating Spanish colonial coins and assign them new fixed valuations in local currency. The 4½-bit denomination is peculiar to just a handful of Caribbean islands and reflects the awkward arithmetic of converting reales into bits.

The host coin, a Mexican 2 reales of the Ferdinand VII period, was among the most common silver pieces in Atlantic circulation at the time.