50 Dollars - Elizabeth II Leif Ericson

Cook Islands issued a remarkable volume of commemorative silver through the late 1980s under licensing arrangements that had little to do with the islands themselves — this Leif Ericson piece is a product of that era, when Hamilton Mint and similar private contractors produced coins for nominal Pacific island issuers primarily for the collector market. The historical hook is legitimate enough: Ericson's landfall at Vinland, likely somewhere on the northern tip of Newfoundland, predates Columbus by roughly five centuries, a claim given archaeological weight by the L'Anse aux Meadows site excavated in the 1960s.