Description and research notes
A fully issued, hand-signed, and dated Mauritius Commercial Bank note — one of the earliest known examples of circulating paper money from the island.
Dated 2 August 1842, this note bears manuscript signatures, serial numbers, and the characteristic oval CANCELLED stamps applied upon redemption. The engraving by Myers Frs. & Co. depicts the busy Port Louis waterfront, with ships and warehouses illustrating Mauritius’s role as a maritime trading hub between Africa, India, and Europe.
Unlike the earlier 1839 $20 design, which only mentioned its sterling equivalent on the front, this issue introduced a red reverse overprint reading 'TWO POUNDS STERLING'. That innovation formally established Mauritius’s dual-currency layout, pairing silver-based dollars with their pound-sterling counterparts — a visual and accounting refinement adopted from 1841 onward.
Each note was printed on watermarked paper, completed by hand, and countersigned by bank officials. Surviving examples such as this are among the earliest tangible records of Mauritius’s entry into formal banking and British colonial monetary structure.
This 1842 note represents the second evolutionary stage in the island’s early paper-money system. After the Mauritius Commercial Bank was founded in 1838, the island faced acute shortages of hard coin, forcing banks to issue promissory paper redeemable in sterling. The initial 1839 notes displayed a single-currency format with only textual sterling equivalence; by 1841–1842, the bank introduced dual-face printing with an engraved red sterling panel to simplify conversion between local dollars and British pounds.
The Port Louis harbor vignette — one of the earliest engraved Mauritian landscapes — encapsulates the colony's economic identity as a port of transshipment for sugar, textiles, rice, timber, and re-exported Indian goods. The docks, bonded warehouses, and anchored vessels evoke the commercial confidence the bank sought to project in an era when Mauritius was emerging from the post-abolition labor transition and integrating more tightly into imperial trade networks.
Printed by Myers Frs. & Co. of London, this note belongs to the very first phase of British-engraved Mauritian currency, predating the later involvement of Perkins Bacon, Waterlow, and De La Rue. Myers was known for fine but relatively small-scale security printing, making these earliest issues scarce even at their time of production. Their survival rate is extremely low due to heavy circulation, environmental humidity, and routine destruction during bank redemptions.
The manuscript signatures, cashier validations, and pen script date confirm authentic circulation. The oval CANCELLED stamps — struck at redemption — document the bank’s auditing cycle, which removed exhausted notes from the economy and destroyed them thereafter. Fully issued and redeemed notes from the early 1840s are particularly rare because high-value dollars were usually handled only by merchants, shipping firms, and sugar estates, leaving little chance for survival.
As a complete, fully signed, dual-currency $10 / £2 note dated 1842, this specimen stands as one of the most historically significant pieces of the Mauritius Commercial Bank’s first decade. It is a primary reference for researchers tracing the origin of Mauritius’s dual-currency monetary structure and one of the island’s earliest surviving pieces of private-issued colonial paper money.