Belated thought about pirates.....

...or particularly the booty some of these guys got away with.

When Captain Morgan raided Porto Bello in 1668, he reportedly got away with 240,000 pieces of eight in coin, plus other stuff.

One piece of eight contained one ounce of silver.

240,000 pieces of eight in coin equals seven and a half TONS of metal. That's a lot of plunder-- worth more than the annual wages of the English New Model Army.


Incidentally, for aspiring booty connoisseurs, the difference between pieces of eight and doubloons was that doubloons were gold coins worth 32 reales, and pieces of eight were silver coins worth eight reales. Gold was usually traded as being worth 13 to 15 times an equivalent weight in silver.