Captain Cook, 1769 Tahiti £2 (2019)

The 2019 Captain Cook £2 exists only as a brilliant uncirculated coin from Royal Mint packs and sets, so it is priced as a collector's piece from the outset. A coin in its original pack, which fits into the puzzle packaging begun in 2018, commands more than a loose one. Marks on the sun and sails are easy to see and pull the price down. Opened packs and loose coins with fingerprints or toning sell for less.

The Captain Cook, 1769 Tahiti £2 was not issued for circulation, so it has no rarity rank.

Look for a sun in the middle of the coin with the symbol of Venus, a circle over a small cross, on its face. Below it are the sails of Endeavour, not the stern or bow shown on the other two Captain Cook coins, and there is no map. Read the outer ring from the lower left: it starts with the voyage date, then 2019, then CAPTAIN JAMES COOK. Like the rest of the series, the 2019 Captain Cook £2 was never put into circulation.

From Rio de Janeiro, Cook and his crew sailed on for Tahiti, where a rare event was due: Venus would pass across the face of the Sun. On the island they built an observatory to record it, because scientists hoped the measurements would let them work out the size of the Solar System. Once the observations were done, Cook opened his sealed orders and learned his next task, to search for the great southern continent that scholars had long imagined. Gary Breeze's second coin for the series turns on that astronomical moment. The sails of the middle section of HM Bark Endeavour fill the lower half of the reverse, and above them a sun bearing the symbol of Venus takes the centre, with the anniversary numeral above it. The legend on the outer ring begins at the lower left with the two dates and runs clockwise into CAPTAIN JAMES COOK. The Royal Mint released it on 21 May 2019, again with Jody Clark's portrait of the Queen on the obverse.

In the Captain Cook set it followed the Captain Cook, 1768 departure £2 of 2018 and came before the Captain Cook, 1770 Australia and New Zealand £2 of 2020.