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[ANSON] PINGO, Thomas.
Silver medal for Anson's voyage and his defeat of the French.
London, 1747.
Silver medal, diameter 43.3 mm., with Anson crowned by Victory at right, on the reverse Victory on hippocamp, the names of Anson's officers in wreaths around; with a suspension loop; some minor marks, at some time cleaned; "extremely fine".
Rare silver medal honouring Anson's circumnavigation of 1740-44, with the names of his officers, intertwined in wreaths, appearing on the reverse of the medal: Keppel, Saumarez, Saunders, Brett, Dennis, and Campbel. The medal also commemorates Anson's 1747 defeat of the French at Cap Finisterre. Eimer suggests that the medal was commissioned by Thomas Anson, George's brother and himself a collector of medals.
Anson, who had returned from the extraordinary Centurion voyage just three years earlier, was possibly the most famous Englishman at the time, not least on account of the fabulous prize money that he had earned from a voyage that was in every other sense a disaster. The return of HMS Centurion in the summer of 1744 was the occasion of popular celebration and intense interest in the events of the tumultuous four-year voyage round the world, which had culminated in the capture of the Manila treasure galleon. 'After the fleet's failure off Toulon in February the navy stood in need of a popular triumph, and the capture of a treasure galleon was in the public mind the next best thing to a fleet victory. Day after day the newspapers carried reports of the homecoming: the procession from Portsmouth to London, with thirty-two wagons laden with treasure; the feting of Anson and his men; details of the prize money and the dispute over its allocation…' (Williams, p. 229).
This is an example of the earliest issue of the medal, with the name Campbel mis-spelled "Camphel". Some interim versions attempt a correction of this by super-imposing the letter 'B' on the incorrect 'H', while a later version has the letter more efficiently corrected.
Betts, American Colonial History Illustrated by Contemporary Medals, , 382; Eimer, British Commemorative Medals,, 38; Hawkins and Grueber, Medallic Illustrations of British History, 325.
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