It was discovered in 1873 by a 12-year-old Scottish schoolboy, Louis Vernon Vaughan, in the Guyanese county of Demerara (whose postmark the stamp bears), amongst his uncle's letters. There was no record of it in his stamp catalogue, so he sold it some weeks later for six shillings to a local collector, Neil Ross McKinnon. In 1878 McKinnon's collection was sold to a Liverpool stamp dealer, Thomas Ridpath, for £120. Shortly afterwards, in the same year, Thomas Ridpath sold the 1c to Philipp von Ferrary for about £150. His massive stamp collection was willed to a Berlin museum but following Ferrary's death in 1917 the entire collection was taken by France as war reparations following the end of World War I.