Gold cobs are the original doubloons, the very treasure sought most by pirates. Struck by hand at the mints of Mexico, Peru and Colombia, and also at mainland Spanish mints like Seville and Toledo, gold cobs denoted extreme value even in their own day and facilitated the movement of vast sums of money across the seas, where inevitably many of them ended up. In fact, the single largest source of gold cobs remains the Spanish 1715 Fleet off the east coast of Florida, which is where many of the cobs you see here were found.