Watch List notes:

Quito, Ecuador, gold 8 escudos, 1842 MV-S, PCGS AU detail / repaired. Seppa/Anderson-ECG91; Sed-4; KM-23.2. Super sharp strike, choice detail and rims, luster in legends, just a few marks and lightly hairlined but overall an impressive example of a type made popular by Herman Melville in his iconic book Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab describes them 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." PCGS #43998453.
($5000-10000)