On May 8,1897, the three-masted ship Francis, out of San Francisco and bound for New York City, caught fire and was beached south of Beach Haven. The nation was in the throes of the worst depression since the Civil War and, according to the belief of most shoremen of the day, when a captain and crew abandoned a ship, its cargo was fair game – and so it would be with the Francis. Charles Edgar Nash described what happened next in his 1936 book, The Lure of Long Beach.

“When the ship began to break up under the pounding of the waves, the cases of salmon floated ashore and were hastily…