1988 Bermuda 5 Cents — Elizabeth II / Queen Angelfish — Copper-Nickel — VF+ to EF

☢️ Fished from a pocket after a morning at Horseshoe Bay, this five-cent coin carried two queens — one on each side. The queen angelfish on the reverse, rendered scale by individual scale, and Elizabeth II on the obverse, wearing the State Diadem. Both face right. Both are named for royalty. Only one of them was designed by Raphael Maklouf.
 
This 1988 Bermuda 5 cents features a queen angelfish — Holacanthus ciliaris — swimming left with every scale individually engraved on the coin's surface. The queen angelfish is named for the dark-ringed spot on its forehead that resembles a crown, and its presence on the five-cent denomination gives Bermuda the distinction of having a queen on both sides of the same coin. The fish fills the reverse almost entirely, and the level of anatomical detail — gill plates, pectoral fins, the dorsal spine ridge — makes this one of the most finely rendered marine life designs on any circulating coin in the world.
 
The obverse carries Raphael Maklouf's crowned portrait of Elizabeth II, the same sculptor whose rendering appeared on coins across the Commonwealth from 1985 to 1998. Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic — not the Caribbean, though it shares the region's numismatic traditions — and has maintained the Bermudian dollar at a one-to-one peg with the US dollar since its introduction.
 
💡 Everyday Life at the Time
 In 1988, five Bermudian cents — equal to five US cents — contributed toward a fish sandwich from a roadside truck or a bottle of ginger beer at a Hamilton shop. Bermuda's economy ran on tourism, international insurance, and the offshore financial industry that had made the island one of the wealthiest territories per capita in the world. The pink sand beaches drew visitors year-round, and the reef system that surrounded the island — home to the queen angelfish on this coin — was both a tourism asset and an ecological treasure.
 
📜 Historical Context
 Bermuda introduced its own decimal dollar in 1970, and the coin designs immediately turned to the island's natural world: a wild boar on the one cent, the queen angelfish on the five cents, a Bermuda lily on the ten cents, a white-tailed tropicbird on the twenty-five cents, and a Bermuda-fitted dinghy on the dollar. The wildlife series was a statement of island identity, even as every coin carried the British monarch on its obverse — a territory that defined itself through its reefs and its gardens while remaining under the Crown.
 
The queen angelfish is one of the most visually striking reef fish in the western Atlantic, distinguished by the electric blue and yellow of its body and the dark crown-shaped marking on its forehead. On a copper-nickel coin, the colors vanish but the form survives — the scale pattern, the flowing fins, the slightly downturned mouth give the fish a presence that compensates for the absence of its famous coloring. Bermuda's reef system, where this fish lives, is the northernmost coral reef system in the Atlantic Ocean.
 
🧾 Coin Details
 Country: Bermuda
Denomination: 5 Cents
Year: 1988
Government: British Overseas Territory (Elizabeth II)
Composition: Copper-nickel
Weight: 5.00 g
Diameter: 21.21 mm
Thickness: 1.90 mm
Mintage: Circulation strike, Royal Mint
Condition: VF+ to EF — the queen angelfish retains exceptional scale detail across the entire body; individual gill plates, fins, and the dorsal ridge are sharply defined; Elizabeth II's crown and hair detail fully legible; warm copper-nickel tone with natural patina
 
At five grams and just over twenty-one millimeters, this coin has a substantial feel for a five-cent piece — heavier and wider than most Caribbean small denominations. The copper-nickel has developed a warm golden patina that gives the fish a tonal depth it would not have had fresh from the Royal Mint. Turn the coin slowly under a light and the individual scales catch and release the light in sequence, creating the illusion of movement across the surface. The queen on the obverse has the State Diadem. The queen on the reverse has a crown of her own.
 
⭐ Why This Coin Is a Great Collectible
 • Features the queen angelfish — one of the most finely rendered marine life designs on any circulating coin, with individual scales engraved across the entire body
• Two queens on one coin — Elizabeth II on the obverse and a fish named for the crown-shaped marking on its forehead on the reverse
• From the northernmost coral reef system in the Atlantic — Bermuda's reefs sit hundreds of miles north of any Caribbean island
• Part of a wildlife series spanning five denominations — boar, angelfish, lily, tropicbird, and sailboat
• British Overseas Territory that has maintained a one-to-one peg with the US dollar since 1970
• Raphael Maklouf portrait in the middle of the Cold War era — the same sculptor's work appearing simultaneously on coins from Britain to Bermuda to New Zealand
 
💡 Collector Tip
 Once you start assembling reef fish from different island coinages, you realize each territory chose a species that said something specific about its waters — Bermuda chose the queen angelfish, the Cayman Islands chose a crayfish, the Bahamas chose a starfish. The kind of collector who arranges coins by marine ecosystem instead of by country is the kind who starts to see a coin collection as a reef survey, each island contributing a different creature to a portrait of the Atlantic and Caribbean seafloor that no single coin captures alone.
 
You will receive the exact coin shown in these photographs. All coins are authentic and unaltered — we don't enhance patina or touch up surfaces. Grades are conservative; circulated pieces show honest wear from actual use, not damage or mishandling. Carefully packaged. Ships promptly with tracking.
 
Two queens on one coin. One wears a diadem. The other wears a crown-shaped spot that evolution put there for reasons that have nothing to do with monarchy.