THE UNITED STATES acquired the island of Key West through neither military conquest nor diplomatic treaty. In good American fashion, it was purchased with private funds.
The island was uninhabited except by foliage and flamingos when John Whitehead spotted it while sailing from Nassau in 1819. It had little to recommend it—not even a source of fresh water—except a deep harbor, fortuitously placed between America’s Eastern Seaboard and the busy gulf port of Mobile, Alabama.
Sensing the potential in that location, Whitehead and a business partner, John Simonton, tracked down the island’s owner, a Spanish citizen named Juan Pablo Salas, and made him a $2,000 offer. “Salas accepted, no doubt believing he’d gotten the better part of the deal,” writes Maureen Ogle in Key West: History of an Island of Dreams.
The island began to fill with settlers and just as soon acquired a reputation as a “deadly nest” of pirates and disease. “In another time and place, such a reputation may have killed the settlement,” Ogle explains. “But in early-nineteenth-century America—alive with the pioneering spirit—that reputation only added to Key West’s allure.” As Simonton himself put it, “Capital and capitalists will always go where profit is to be found.”
Wrecking, or salvaging the cargo of distressed sea vessels,, “but governed by firm rules of honor: The first wrecking vessel to arrive at a distressed ship became the wrecking master of record, directing the salvage and earning a larger share of the proceeds. Other wreckers received shares in proportion to the amount of tonnage they saved.”
