This 1908s Philippine piece is known in the American coin-hobby as a “sea-salvage peso.” This coin was one of the pieces packed into cloth bags of 2,000 pesos each, then placed into wooden boxes each containing three of the cloth bags, for a total of 6,000 pesos per box.
This coin (and about 15+ million others like it) were then dumped from an American naval barge into the deep water of Caballo Bay south of Corregidor sometime in April or May 1942, just before American and Filipino forces surrendered the island to the invading Japanese.
What else can we say about this particular piece? That it was almost certainly brought up before the end of salvage operations in ‘58, and probably, given its light encrustation, was a prize of one of the earlier postwar efforts. (From the deck of the USS Elder, AN-20, November 1945 through May ’46, for example.) Perhaps it’s also a good guess that the box carrying this 1908s peso didn’t break when it hit the sea bottom in ‘42. (Many of the loose coins were never recovered.)
We might also say, given the EF or better condition of this coin, that it had likely spent much of its prewar life within the vaults of the Philippine Treasury, as backing for paper pesos.
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