16th-Century English Shilling Found in Gorge Waterway

The recent discovery of an English shilling, ca 1551-53, in Victoria’s Gorge waterway by treasure hunter Bruce Campbell brought back warm memories of my own metal detecting days.

Not that I ever found anything of consequence let alone value. Ah, but the joy of the hunt, the hope that the next shovelful would yield, if not treasure in the form of gold, silver or gems, some historically significant find always kept me going.

Mind you, if you saw what I had for a detector, made of plastic and plywood, you’d probably wonder how I found anything at all! I’m writing of the early 1960s when I sent away to Texas for a kit advertised in a western magazine, for about $35 that cost me half as much again to bring it through customs–as a Geiger counter, according to the only related category they had.

It was probably the first privately owned metal detector (Saanich Municipality, where I lived, were using one to find underground pipes and wiring) on Vancouver Island.

My friend Dave and I took it to 1860s Leechtown to look for Rattlesnake Dick Barter’s buried boot filled with $40,000 in gold. Too bad that, as I later found out through research, the gold, which really did exist, never left California!

But little things like that never get a real treasure hunter down. It’s the thrill of the hunt, after all, and if you really do find something worthwhile, it’s just icing on top of a day of fresh air and exercise.

All these years and two detectors later, I feel the same way. Treasure hunting is just an excuse to get out in the woods or to walk a sandy beach. So what, that my most ‘valuable’ coin to date is just a Canadian 1904 silver five-cent piece. The fact that I dug it up in a really historic dump makes it valuable to me.

In fact, I’ll go for the story every time. I don’t care if it’s just a rusty bit of metal to you, if it came from an historic site or has some other tangible link to B.C. history then that’s good enough for me. The real gold, you see, is in the provenance. Where did it come from? How did it get to where I dug it up? How long has it been there? Who lost or buried it?

That, in a nutshell, is the writer’s mantra: Who, What, Where, When, Why?

Works for me!