While we were in Key West, we visited two different museums that provided some history of the island city, which was once the richest city per capita in the United States. The source of this wealth originally was from the wreckers—boats and crews that went out when a ship went down on the reef around the island. They saved a lot of the people on the ships, but they also salvaged the cargo, which created a lucrative economy on the island, as well as creating the basis for salvage law in the U.S.   The Shipwreck Museum in Key West Wrecked Spanish galleons began littering the Florida Keys with gold and silver as early as the 1540s, but the heyday of the wreckers was from the 1830s to the turn of the 20 th century—it started when folks in Key West started encroaching on Bahamian wreckers in the area. In the 1820s, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring any wrecks taken in U.S. waters to be valued solely by a U.S. court. Key West became the primary hub for selling the salvage...

 We spent a week in Key West at the beginning of March, but we didn’t go there in the Scamp. Parking is hard in Key West, and there’s also a lot of rules about vehicles you can sleep in not being allowed to park anywhere down there, so we winterized Scamp Shrimpi and found a place for it to rest next to a ferris wheel that made it look even smaller than it really is. Then we took an airplane to the Keys. Our friends Mark and Anne picked us up at the Key West Airport, which is still under construction and probably will be for a few more years, but that’s okay. We were quickly on our way to their house in paradise, and as usual the warm weather and blue skies never end when you’re down there. We went for a walk down to the harbor not long after we got there, just to get a glimpse of the turquoise sea. We found that the wharves and walkways extend a long way between the many restaurants and resort hotels, so we wandered for awhile. Looking out from Key West wharves at the Straits ...