50 Dollars - Elizabeth II John Cabot

Issued in 1988 to mark the 490th anniversary of John Cabot's 1497 voyage to North America aboard the Matthew, this Cook Islands commemorative sits within a crowded field of late-1980s Commonwealth silver issues capitalizing on exploration anniversaries. Cabot's landfall — almost certainly Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island, though historians still dispute the exact location — was made under a commission from Henry VII, who paid him a modest £10 upon return. Bristol merchants, not the Crown, financed the voyage itself.