Key West's Wreckers

Key West grew rich in the middle of the nineteenth century without farming or manufacturing anything at all. The money came from wrecking, the licensed business of salvaging ships that struck the coral reef a few miles offshore, in a strait that funnelled almost every vessel moving between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic seaboard past a shallow barrier with very little safe water through it. Federal law from 1825 required that salvage be landed at a United States port of entry, and Key West was the nearest one, which is the practical reason the trade settled on this island rather than in the Bahamas. When a ship went onto the reef, licensed wreckers raced out to refloat it, or to take off its cargo before the sea could. A federal court established here in 1828 heard every case and set the award, usually somewhere between a quarter and a third of the value of what was saved. The trade paid for the warehouses and the shipyards and for a good many of the houses still standing in Old Town, and it made Key West, by most accounts, the wealthiest city per capita in the country. What ended it was not one thing but several: new lighthouses on the reef itself, at Carysfort in 1852 and Sombrero Reef in 1858, better charts, and then steam power and steel hulls, which together made the reef survivable. The last great salvage came in 1905, and the court closed its book of wrecking licences in 1921.