The pound was the official currency of Jamaica between 1840 and 1969. It circulated as a mixture of sterling coinage and locally issued coins and banknotes and was always equal to the pound sterling. The Jamaican pound was also used in the Cayman and Turks and Caicos Islands. History The history of currency in Jamaica should be considered in the wider picture of the currencies of the British West Indies. Jamaica was the only British West Indies territory to use special regional issues of the sterling coinage. (rare exceptions to this are a copper penny issued in the Bahamas in 1806, and the four pence coin which was specially issued for all the British West Indies, and later only for British Guiana.) The earliest money used in Jamaica was the Spanish copper maravedí. For nearly four hundred years Spanish dollars, known as pieces of eight were in widespread use on the world's trading routes, including the Caribbean Sea region. However, following the revolutionary wars in Latin America, the source of these silver trade coins dried up. The last Spanish dollar was minted at the Potosi mint in 1825. The United Kingdom had adopted the gold standard in 1821, and so 1825 was an opportune time to introduce the sterling coinage into all the British colonies. An imperial order-in-council was passed in that year for the purposes of facilitating this aim by making sterling coinage legal tender in the colonies at the specified rate of $1 = 4s 4d stg. (one Spanish dollar to four shillings and four pence sterling). As sterling was pegged to a gold standard, this exchange rate did not realistically represent the value of the silver in the Spanish dollars compared to the value of the gold in the British gold sovereign. Therefore, the order-in-council had, in many colonies, the effect of actually driving sterling coinage out rather than encouraging its circulation. Remedial legislation had to be introduced in 1838 so as to change to the more realistic rate of $1 = 4s 2d. However, in Jamaica, British Honduras, Bermuda, and later in the Bahamas also, the official rating was set aside in favour of what was known as the 'Maccaroni' tradition in which a British shilling, referred to as a 'Maccaroni', was treated as one quarter of a dollar. The common link between these four territories was the Bank of Nova Scotia which brought in the