Historic 19th-century coins unearthed beneath HMS Victory

If you’re a millennial trying to make sense of the modern world, you’ve probably found yourself engaging in little rituals. Maybe it’s lighting a specific candle before an important Zoom meeting or avoiding walking under a ladder just in case. We would like to believe that we are all logical, but man has always been deeply, beautifully superstitious.Nowhere is this better illustrated than in a recent mind-blowing discovery made across the Atlantic. Shipwrights working on a huge conservation project called HMS Victory: The Big Repair at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard have discovered something incredible. Six 19th-century coins and tokens were hidden under the huge foremast of Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson’s famous flagship. For 132 years, they had sat there in total darkness, silently bearing the crushing weight of 50 tons of timber, rigging and maritime history.This discovery ties us directly to a long-standing maritime custom where shipbuilders would place coins beneath a mast as they built a ship to buy safe passage and luck. This ritual, although it’s the stuff of quirky pirate legends, is steeped in history around the world. If you want to know why old-school sailors did this, you can reference a fascinating study published in the Mast-step Coins in Roman Ships: Votive Offerings to Isis Pelagia? research paper. The study examines how ancient Roman sailors offered coins to the gods of the sea at the foot of their masts as sacred gifts to avoid the crew being destroyed by devastating storms. The gods changed over the centuries, but the human need for a little extra luck did not.The multi-ton secrets in plain sightNaval experts have known for decades that HMS Victory had secrets, but no one expected a literal jackpot to be found under the front mast. The ship is famous for its role in the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, and it’s currently getting a $42 million glow-up to ensure it’s preserved for many more generations to come. The conservation team saw a bunch of heavily corroded metal pieces lying flat against the base plate when a giant crane carefully lifted the foremast from the hull.The team were “absolutely stunned”, said Andrew Baines, executive director of Museum Operations at Royal Navy Museums. They had previously found one lonely, humble farthing under the ship's main lower mast, and they secretly hoped to find a single coin again. Rather, it was a great surprise to find six separate pieces.The coins were so corroded from over 100 years of metal-on-metal pressure and salty humidity that they appeared to be smooth slugs. Karoline Sofie Hennum, the museum’s lead conservator, had to turn to high-tech science to find out what they actually were. Her team used microscopes, tiny wooden skewers and X-ray imaging to cut through the layers of rust and time. An Empire frozen in a moment of timeFinally, the X-ray results came back, showing a beautiful time capsule from 1894, the year that the ship’s original wooden masts were replaced with sturdy wrought iron masts. Among the haul were three one-penny pieces with the famous "bun head" portrait of Queen Victoria, a halfpenny and a tiny farthing.But the real showstopper of the collection was a very weird and mysterious token from Prince Edward Island, Canada, dated all the way back to 1835. The token is marked with an elaborate picture of a sailing ship and an iconic engraved slogan: “Ships, Colonies and Commerce.”This one coin under the mast ritual shows how intentional these things actually were. Sailors didn’t just toss spare change into the dark. They chose pieces of great significance. This behaviour fits perfectly with the findings highlighted in an extensive historical analysis from the Hidden Treasures - USS Constitution Museum research paper. The project chronicles the specific historic coins deliberately chosen by shipwrights of the navy to be placed beneath the masts of historic vessels, such as the USS Constitution, to commemorate the exact years of the ship’s historic accomplishments. The 1835 Canadian token, on board HMS Victory, was a proud physical reminder of the vast global trade networks the Royal Navy protected for centuries.Why old superstitions still matter to us todayIt is profoundly moving to discover that the rough and tough sailors of the 19th century were just like us. They stopped and stepped a massive 50-ton iron mast into place, reached into their pockets and left a secret message of hope for the future. They knew they'd never see those coins again, but they decided to keep up the tradition anyway.If you happen to be travelling to the United Kingdom this summer, you can actually get a glimpse of this tangible magic yourself. The original mainmast farthing, newly discovered coins and tokens will officially go on public display in the Victory Gallery from 23 May.Beautiful reminder, seeing these flattened, battle-tested pieces of copper up close. No matter how far technology takes us, there will always be comfort in a little bit of magic, a pinch of good luck, and the timeless traditions that connect us all across the centuries.