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National Geographic : 1950 Jan
Contents
From Indian Canoes to Submarines at Key West Drawn by Harry S. Oliver Key West, Motorists' End of the Line. Florida's Seagoing Highway Stops Here his novel, To Have and Have Not, has a Key West background. The town's picturesque water front is alive with painters (page 69). One group conducts an art school in an old tobacco factory. Spaniards named this place Cayo Hueso, or Bone Key. That was because they found here so many skeletons of Indians scattered about like match stubs on poolroom floors bones left when one tribe rubbed out another. But, so goes one explanation, early English sailors couldn't say "Cayo Hueso"; they mis pronounced it "Key West." That name stuck. But that bone strewing didn't stop with the Indians. In all our seven seas few graveyards for ships are more dangerous than these coral ledges along the Florida Keys, that long string of flat, brush-grown, barely-above-sea level islands that dangles southwest from the Florida mainland. Before lighthouses rose to aid mariners, literally hundreds of ships piled up on these treacherous coral reefs. That's why so many professional Bahama wreckers moved here from Nassau. Some loaded their wooden houses on schooners and hauled them to Key West, where you still find a few-pioneer examples of prefabricated homes! Just how many skippers, mates, cooks, crews, and passengers disappeared in these wrecks and mixed their bones with those of the Indians of Cavo Hueso and other keys, nobody will ever know. Key West had so many wrecks that in 1828 Uncle Sam set up a court here to try prize and other admiralty cases. Judge William Marvin, of this new court, wrote A Treatise on the Law of Wreck and Salvage, published in 1858, which became a standard authority. After lighthouses multiplied along the reefs (page 58) and steam followed sail, wrecks became less frequent. But people remember. I talked with one aged wrecker who migrated here from the Bahamas. He told me the biggest salvage fee he ever got was $12,000. "Is it true," I asked, "that you once held a dead man for ransom?" "That wasn't me," he insisted. "Some sal vagers I knew were taking cases of goods from a wreck. They opened one long box, thinking it might be laces, cotton goods, shawls-anything. But it was an embalmed man, shipped from New Orleans to New York. When they opened the box, he looked straight up at 'em. It's a rumor they charged his family a salvage fee." When Navy Chased Key West Pirates With wreckers and pirates our Navy shared many a stirring adventure when Key West was rough and reckless. Since 1822, shortly after Commodore David Porter came chasing buccaneers and protect ing our sea trade from local "Brethren of the Coast," this has been a naval station, though often almost abandoned. Even early as Porter's day our sea trade
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