A dog or a black dog was a coin in the Caribbean of Queen Anne of Great Britain, made of pewter or copper, typically worth 1½ pence or 1⁄72 of a dollar. The name comes from the negative connotations of the word "dog," as they came from debased silver coins,[1] and the dark color of those same debased coins.[2] Black dogs were also at times called "stampes" or "stampees", as they were typically the coins of other colonial powers—French coins worth 2 sous or, equivalently, 24 diniers—stamped to make them British currency.
A dog and a stampee were not necessarily of equal value. For example, the Spanish dollar was subdivided into bits, each worth 9 pence, 6 black dogs or 4 stampees. Before 1811, 1 dollar equalled 11 bits (making a dog 1⁄66 of a dollar and a stampee 1⁄44 of a dollar); after 1811, 1 dollar equalled 12 bits (making a dog 1⁄72 of a dollar and a stampee 1⁄48 of a dollar). In 1797, however, a "black dog" is equated with a "stampee".[3]
Mary Prince's narrative tells of slaves in Antigua buying a "dog's worth" of salted fish or pork on Sundays (the only day they could go to the market).[4]
References
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- ^ "Black dog", definition 1, Oxford English Dictionary.
- ^ "Modern Philology", Volume 13 By Modern Language Association of America. Victorian Literature Group. Page 603.
- ^ William Bullock in Naval Chronicle X 128, quoted in Oxford English Dictionary under "dog, n.1", definition 11.
- ^ The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Supplement by the Editor. London: Published by F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831. Page 16.
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