Owner Comments:
Composition: Copper
Countermark: Crowned arms
Note: Countermark on 1/2 Macuta, KM#28.
The Obverse shows a crowned globe with the legend:
JOSEPHUS I REX P.ET.D. GUINE
This very large copper 1 Macuta from 1786 was countermarked in 1837 with a deep crowned escutcheon. The countermark doubled the coin’s value.
The Portuguese arrived on the coast of what is now called Angola back in the late 15th Century. By 1575 the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais had founded Luanda as “São Paulo de Loanda” and confirmed their occupation of the coastline. They were primarily interested in slaves.
From 1575 to 1820 over a million people were taken as slaves to Brazil and North America by the Portuguese... ” For 200 years, the colony of Angola developed essentially as a gigantic slave-trading enterprise”(1) Jesuit priests came too, in the wake of military conquest and slave-taking, bent on wholesale conversion.