A dog or a black dog was a coin in the Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 of Queen Anne of Great Britain

Anne of Great Britain

Anne ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.Anne's Catholic father, James II and VII, was deposed during the...

, made of pewter

Pewter

Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...

 or copper

Copper

Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...

, typically worth 1½ pence or a 72nd of a dollar. The name comes from the negative connotations of the word "dog," as they came from debased

Debasement

Debasement is the practice of lowering the value of currency. It is particularly used in connection with commodity money such as gold or silver coins...

 silver coins, and the dark color of those same debased coins. Black dogs were also at times called "stampes" or "stampees," as they were typically the coins of other colonial powers—French coins worth 2 sou

French sol

The sol was a coin in use in Ancien Regime France, valued at a 20th of a livre tournois. The sol itself was subdivided into 12 deniers.Over the 17th century the term sol was, apart from in a few instances, progressively replaced by sou, reflecting its pronunciation. In 1787 a sol's buying power was...

s or, equivalently, 24 diniers

French denier

The denier was a Frankish coin created by Charlemagne in the Early Middle Ages. It was introduced together with an accounting system in which twelve deniers equaled one sou and twenty sous equalled one livre...

—stamped to make them British currency.

A dog and a stampe were not necessarily of equal value. For example, the Spanish dollar

Spanish dollar

The Spanish dollar is a silver coin, of approximately 38 mm diameter, worth eight reales, that was minted in the Spanish Empire after a Spanish currency reform in 1497. Its purpose was to correspond to the German thaler...

 was subdivided into bits

Bit (money)

The word bit is a colloquial expression referring to specific coins in various coinages throughout the world.-United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries:...

, each worth 9 pence, 6 black dogs or 4 stampees. Before 1811, 1 dollar equalled 11 bits (making a dog a 66th of a dollar and a stampee a 44th of a dollar); after 1811, 1 dollar equalled 12 bits (making a dog a 72nd of a dollar and a stampee a 48th of a dollar). In 1797, however, a "black dog" is equated with a "stampee."

Mary Prince

Mary Prince

Mary Prince was a Bermudian woman, born into slavery in Brackish Pond, now known as Devonshire Marsh, in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. Her autobiography, 'The History of Mary Prince', was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom...

's narrative tells of slaves in Antigua

Antigua

Antigua , also known as Waladli, is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua means "ancient" in Spanish and was named by Christopher Columbus after an icon in Seville Cathedral, Santa Maria de la...

buying a "dog's worth" of salted fish or pork on Sundays (the only day they could go to the market).