Watch List notes:

Quito, Ecuador, gold 8 escudos, 1841MV, small size, NGC XF 45. KM-23.2. First year of type in smaller diameter with cruder bust (much rarer than the previous type for this date), with bold legends but weaker inner details as usual, pleasing overall, particularly desirable as the type of coins famously described by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby Dick as "noble golden coins of South America... as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks and stars, ecliptics, horns of plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic. It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra." NGC #2292435-001.
($4,000-$6,000)