FGV 2026.2Questão 31de 60MONEY By Samuel M. Wilson 1. On 12 June 1667, London was in a panic. The English fleet was under attack to the

MONEY

By Samuel M. Wilson

1. On 12 June 1667, London was in a panic. The English fleet was under attack to the southeast. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) wrote in his well-known journal of his fear that if the Dutch [os holandeses] destroyed the fleet, they could sail up the Thames and capture London.

2. For Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator whose diary offers such fascinating insights Into London of the 1660s, the crisis was that the largest part of his money might be taken. He kept most of his wealth in gold coins, locked in a strongbox [cofre, caixa-forte] in his house. Desperate with worry, he loaded them up in cloth sacks and sent his wife and father to hide the money on a country estate outside of town.

3. The Dutch did not raid London, and Pepys recovered his gold from the garden of a country house—where to his dismay [consternação] it had been buried, in broad daylight, only six inches deep [15.24 centimeters]. It is not easy to hold on to wealth in coin form. Buried hordes of coins [grandes depósitos enterrados de moedas] have been found in many parts of the world. A cache of 40,000+ Roman coins was recently found in the little town of Senon, in northeast France. Well over 1,000 caches of coins have been found in the UK. There have been many more hidden, buried, or submerged deposits that have been recovered.

4. Modern methods of saving wealth seem easier and safer. On the other hand, can anyone say with confidence where one's life savings are? Does the money exist anywhere, or is it just an entry in a computer database? One could buy gold with one's savings, but in the last 100 years the value of gold has ranged between US$20 and US$4,300 per ounce—not exactly a steady anchor. Preserving wealth has been a vexing problem for as long as money has existed.

5. For the longest part of human history we had no money. If we needed something that someone else had, we could trade [trocar] for it. People living in barter-based societies [sociedades baseadas na troca de mercadorias] have long been bewildered [confusas] by the idea of currency [moeda]. According to an account in the document, "Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791," an indigenous Huron tribesman living near Québec City told a Jesuit missionary: "You French are crazy. The paper you chase is nothing."

Adapted from Natural History, February 2026

According to the information in the article, on 12 June 1667,