There is, as everyone knows, more than one kind of fish in the sea. And, as some bunco artists will tell some poor fish, there is more than fish in sea water.

Near the turn of the present century, Prescott Ford Jernegan, a respected Baptist minister from Edgartown, Massachusetts, claimed that a dream had revealed to him the way to extract gold from the ocean. The process involved passing an electrical current through a submerged, zinc-lined wooden box (an “accumulator”) containing chemically treated quicksilver. The gold was supposedly absorbed by the mercury.

A pair of wealthy parishioners, A. B. Ryan and A. N. Pierson, had a box constructed to Jernegan’s specifications. Jernegan hired Charles Fisher, a deepsea diver who later became his partner, to submerge and connect the device for preliminary testing. Then, on a cold February night in 1897, Ryan and Pierson themselves lowered the box into Narragansett Bay. After a full running of the tide they hauled it up. Government assayers found five dollars’ worth of pure gold—not sensational but promising, promising.

Ryan, Pierson, Jernegan, and two others put up $20,000 for a more extensive test at a remote inlet near Lubec, Maine. Some of the investors were sure they had another Klondike. In December of 1897 they formed the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, capitalized at ten million dollars. “Mining” operations were centered at Lubec, but the company’s headquarters were set up in Boston. Wealthy eastern Baptists bought most of the first 350,000 shares. Within six months another 350,000 were issued and snapped up. There were now 250 accumulators yielding $1,250 on each turn of the tide. The firm made well-publicized shipments of gold every week to New York City.

Jernegan declined to get a patent, maintaining, among other things, that sea water was public domain. He preferred to rely on secrecy: only he and Fisher, who remained in charge at Lubec, knew the formula.

There were skeptics, but even the press was guarded in its comments. Gold was known to be in suspension in sea water, and others had worked to try to get it out. Maybe Jernegan had hit on the right method.

The clincher came when a dubious Boston investment counselor named Tibbetts hired a chemist, one Dr. Carmichael, to investigate. Picking an accumulator at random, Carmichael demanded that salt water be scooped up at a spot he designated. Jernegan said that the process required a continual flow. “Use your hand to stir the water,” said Carmichael, “and keep it open .” The clergyman complied. At his laboratory, Carmichael analyzed the contents and found gold.

Lubec boomed. The firm now had 700 workmen; the goal was 10,000 accumulators and an annual potential of $17,500,000.

But there were hitches and suspicions. A workman was found murdered. Then, one day in July of 1898, the