16th-century silver coin discovered near Strait of Magellan marks the spot of a doomed Spanish colony

Archaeologists have discovered a Spanish coin placed beside the Strait of Magellan in southern Chile as part of a ceremony carried out by colonists more than 400 years ago.

The coin is a vital clue for archaeologists investigating a colonial settlement there, as it matches a surviving 1584 account of the Christian ceremony involving the coin, a standard practice when Spanish colonial settlements were founded. The find also helps to validate an old map of the long-lost settlement.

"This discovery provides a rare and powerful point of convergence between written sources and archaeological evidence," Soledad González Díaz, the lead researcher on the project and a historian at Bernardo O'Higgins University in Santiago, told Live Science.

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"It not only helps to confirm the location and layout of key structures within the settlement but also opens new possibilities for reconstructing [its] spatial organization," she said.

The "8-real" coin ("real de a ocho" in Spanish and the original pirate "piece of eight") was minted out of silver in the 16th century. It was discovered in March during archaeological excavations at the site of Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, a doomed Spanish colony that was founded on the north side of the Strait of Magellan in 1584.

The coin was found atop a stone within the underground foundations of the settlement's first church. (Historic reports suggest there may have been more than one church.) González Díaz said all Spanish colonies in the New World were founded with similar ceremonies and that an account of the exact location was given in the writings of the Spanish navigator Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who had placed the coin on the stone.

Many of the same researchers had used Sarmiento de Gamboa's writings to locate two bronze cannons at the site in 2019, and the latest find is further evidence of his accuracy, she said.

Doomed colony

The Spanish crown founded the Rey Don Felipe colony in 1584 in response to reports that the English privateer Francis Drake had used the Strait of Magellan to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1578. (The English were Spain's enemies at that time.)

The strait had been navigated in 1520 by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who was then sailing for Spain, and for many years, it was the only known passage to the Pacific. Spain claimed the land on both sides of the strait and hoped to fortify it so that enemies could not pass.

But the colony founded to support the fortifications — dubbed Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, after the Spanish king Philip II — was a disaster. Most of its roughly 350 settlers died of disease, starvation and extreme cold within a few years of the colony's founding. Spain had tried to resupply the Rey Don Felipe colony. But the ships were wrecked by storms, and the whole idea was abandoned after Sarmiento de Gamboa was captured by the English in 1586. The crew of an English ship in 1587 reported that the colony was in ruins, with only a few survivors.

Historic find

In their investigations of the doomed settlement, archaeologists mapped it with metal detectors and geolocation instruments, which enabled the researchers to pinpoint the location of the underground stone and the coin, Francisco Garrido, an archaeologist at Chile's National Museum of Natural History in Santiago, told Live Science.

The location gave the team a better understanding of the 16th-century settlement's layout. "Now we can know for sure that this is the place where the church was located, and from there, it is easy to know where all the other structures were built," Garrido said.

Another member of the research team, Southern University of Chile archaeologist Simón Urbina, told Live Science that the coin helped validate the map of the colony made by Sarmiento de Gamboa but that the other structures still need to be verified.

"The evidence for huts, churches, and defensive palisades is not yet entirely clear or archaeologically confirmed," he said in an email, adding that further excavations are needed to confirm the existence of those structures.

The team's work showed that the site had been populated by Indigenous people both before and after the time of the colony, which suggested it was chosen by the Spanish in the hope they'd have a chance of surviving there.

But the Spanish quickly ran out of food. "The first winter must have taken a severe toll on the adult population that had arrived from Spain and was expected to hunt in an unfamiliar territory," Urbina said.