11/2 Pence Black Dog

The "Black Dog" was a colonial cut-and-countermarked obsidional currency — emergency money born of chronic small-change shortages that plagued British Caribbean colonies throughout the late eighteenth century. Tobago's 1798 issue involved cutting Spanish colonial silver into fractions and countermarking them to assign a local valuation, a practice the colonial administration tolerated precisely because no official remedy was forthcoming from London.

Billon composition here reflects the debased nature of the source material rather than any deliberate alloy choice.