consignment of ale, and the Key West wreckers had been aboard for three days. The inference from the conjunction of circumstances was inevitable: the wreckers had been looting ale.

"Well, Jim," said the surveyor to the master wrecker, "how do you account for those bottles?"

wrecker, blandly; "all washed out in the storm."

"Hole?" the surveyor mused-" and not a cork in a single bottle!"

When evidence was taken in the Admiralty Court, a curious lawyer pried into the matter of the reef of ale-bottles. No underwriters' lawyer has any com

It is a difficult thing, too, if it ever has been done; great honor would accrue to the man who could accomplish it. Upon this occasion it was not accomplished. Looting ale from the hold of a wreck is of course a criminal offense, as the wreckers and underwriters very well know; but extracting drink and provisions from the ice-box of a wrecked steamer to support life until the arrival of the underwriters' agent is quite another matter, as both the wreckers and underwriters very well know. In this case it was testified to that the wreckers had taken nothing except food and drink from the ship's icebox, and there was of course no conviction. The wrecker had committed no perjury. Perjury is not in the line of these cautious fellows. In all that they had done they were at least in their technical rights. It was explained afterward to the underwriters' agent who had been outwitted-this was after the expiration of the statute of limitation upon conviction for such offenses-that every case of ale with which the wreckers had indulged themselves had first been put in the ice-box.

"As fast as one man put a case in," explained the wrecker, with a guffaw, "another took it out."

The underwriters' agent must laugh too. In all the world, possibly, there is no more reckless sailing done in small craft than is done by the Key West wreckers in the pursuit of business. In general, of course, steamers go ashore in a gale of wind; it is often a hurricane of fearful strength, and if anything is to be accomplished in way of salvage to themselves, the wreckers must be on the scene at the earliest possible moment. There can be no waiting for fine weather; the fleet must be put out and take its chances. These chances are necessarily fearsome; the craft are small, ranging from sloops of less than a ton to schooners of not more at most than thirty tons; the gale has lessened a little, perhaps, but has not yet by any means subsided; the seas are running enormously high and crested with perilously breaking water; and as ships are stranded on a lee shore the wrecking craft find themselves in just the same situation, in this respect, off a lee shore in a gale of wind. When the Andonia went ashore on Rampidias Reef

the fleet stood by in steady blow of wind for fourteen days. Upon one occasion three schooners and their crews, bent upon salvage in a gale of wind, were lost. That these chances are taken is not at all surprising. In the first place, the wreckers are bred to the sea. Their physical situation, inhabiting an unhospitable island practically in midocean, has taught them how to sail. In the last hurricane, for example, a wrecking-master, bound in from Knight's Key in a small sloop without a crew, was caught offshore with no time to run to shelter; but he survived the great wind, which wrecked a half-dozen tramps, blew the shipping out of Key West harbor, and submerged the outlying keys in four feet of breaking water.

Good sailors as they are, there is enough to tempt them to take extraordinary chances when "Wreck ashore!" is reported. The percentage of gain to the salvors varies with the risk run and the value of the cargo. It may mean, in proportion to the worldly estate of the wreckers, small fortunes for them all. Nobody can tell until the wreck is boarded. The ship ashore may be loaded with phosphate, which is practically valueless in Key West-they call a phosphate-ship a forlorn hope or she may be a big tramp with a general cargo running to a million dollars in value, of which twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars would accrue for distribution among the wreckers.

West. policy. ship a

66

"Over half the wealth of Key West," it was asserted in the town, came directly or indirectly from wrecks." There is no wrecking - tug at Key This is a matter of deliberate It is true that in salving a steam - vessel is awarded more salvage than a schooner, because her usefulness in the operation is greater. Where a number of sailing-craft are involved, however, the total award is greater and is at least more widely distributed, consequently there is no tug in the wrecking service at Key West harbor.

In floating a stranded ship by means of sailing-craft the islanders have developed a marvelous skill. They floated a big Spanish coal-steamer, with eighteen feet of water in forepeak, and brought

her into Key West harbor. It was Key West divers that drove the wedges into the wide-open seams in her bottom, working in twenty-five feet of water to do it. It was a Key West schooner, too, that went around to the Isle of Pines after a hurricane and stripped the sunken hull of the San Domingo. "It was no easy job for our fellows, working from a little sailing-craft, without proper equipment," said a master wrecker, describing the operation, but we got her anchors and gear aboard our schooner just the same. We saved her bronze propeller, too. We had a skin diver along to lay the dynamite charges that blew it off the shaft and to make tackle fast to haul it aboard. There is a lot in knowing how to use what you have at hand," he added.

In case of total loss the vessel is stripped for the underwriters; and it is the Key West wreckers who do the work; everything of value is taken-anchors, chains, brass fittings, and copper pipes from steamers, and all the sailing-gear, sails and masts, from sailing craft. Nothing that a junk-dealer would be likely to buy is abandoned. From wooden vessels even the copper sheathing is stripped by the skin divers. The wreck ing-schooner, with its crew of divers, anchors alongside the wreck. It may be that only the masts are sticking out or water, that the hull lies in four or five fathoms. The divers, negroes, all go down without helmet or suit, and are therefore called skin divers. They are big-bodied, small-headed, watery-eyed fellows, who can be watched through a water-glass, distinct against the clear bright coral sand in the shadow of the hull. They strip the sheathing with a chisel a dozen of them at work at a time. It takes about three minutes for a diver to release a sheet of

copper, then up he comes to the surface, grabs a life-line, and is hauled aboard, where he lies gasping until, five minutes later, he is ready to go down again. He is good for six hours' continuous labor of this sort, unless sharks interfere. But if a shark is seen loafing in the shadow of the keel on the listed side of the hull, there is no getting a diver over the side that day. As Bub Smart, the most famous of wrecking craftsmen, says: "No blame to them. It's a creepy business, keeping a shark off with your chisel while you shoot to the top of the water, even if you only scrape your naked skin against his sandpaper hide."

Bub has been a diver himself.

Wrecks ashore spell loss for some one -loss of lives, cargo, and ships. Salvage is salvage, and wreck must come to most crafts at the end of the last voyage. The captain stands on the bridge, watching the lightering of cargo, listening to the straining of the cables as they are hauled in on the winches, and for a week or a month, as it may be, he thinks of his stranded ship, his lost freights, the prospect of hunting a job ashore, starting life anew if the wreckers fail to float the ship. Anxiously he watches the setback caused by the storm. He paces the deck at night. "I'm sorry to have brought you here," he says to the marine surveyor. Then comes the day when he leaves the ship stripped of everything, the broken skeleton of the proud craft he had taken down the Clyde on her trial trip. The wrecking-schooner lands him in Key West, where he sails for home, a passenger. Then the wrecking-schooner lazily puts to sea again, bound turtlefishing or sponging, but all the while keeping one eye open for another wreck.

VOL CXXIII-No 731-36