Owner Comments:
This coin along with more than 6,600 others like it were recovered from the Akerendam shipwreck (sunk March 8, 1725). There were also 14 rare Holland gold ducats dated 1715, one of which was auctioned with this particular common Utrecht ducat in my collection. Also, there were about 40 Utrecht ducats dated 1717 in the treasure.
There are 11 of these graded higher at NGC, and plenty in this grade MS-64.
Akerendam was a ship of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), built in 1724.
On 19 January 1725, Akerendam left in convoy with two other ships, heading for Batavia (Jakarta in Indonesia - to trade the gold and silver for spices) with a crew of 200 people and 19 chests of gold and silver on board. They went up the long way, around the top of England, instead of down the English Channel like you'd expect.
Why were they way up by Norway? Because they were trying to avoid pirates in the Channel, and that's where the good winds catch ship and pull them fast down around to the bottom the Atlantic and shoot them right east past the Cape of Good Hope. That was the plan. But on 8 March 1725 Akerendam drifted in a snow storm and sank near the cliffs of Runde island (Norwegian west coast). Despite the fact that the ship was wrecked close to the shore there were no survivors.
In the morning of March 8th 1725 the inhabitants of the farm Goksøyr at Runde noticed that the storm had washed ashore part of the wreckage. After the county commissioner had examined the salvage, a public auction was held! Does anyone still have the catalog?
The rescue (of coins) continued through the summer and autumn in 1725, but when winter came it was hard to keep up the work. People at Runde continued to look for coins in rock cracks at the shore, but over the years the shipwreck was forgotten
Swedish and Norwegian sports divers rediscovered the wreck site in 1972. Although little remained of the ship, about 57,000 gold and silver coins were recovered. The 6,600 gold coins were mostly the rare Dutch gold ducats, minted in Utrecht in 1724; prior to this find only a handful of these ducats were known. Norway's largest coin treasure is also referred to as "the Runde Treasure".
The Norwegian share of the Runde treasure was divided between the Museum of Cultural History's Coin Cabinet and Bergen Maritime Museum. In January 2011, some of the coins from the Maritime Museum were transported back to the island for an exhibition at Runde Miljøsenter. The divers' portion of 75% of the treasure was auctioned in Switzerland in 1978.