Our first sight of Fort Jefferson from our excursion boat, the Yankee Freedom, was of a thin dark scratch across the teal surface of the Gulf of Mexico. As we drew nearer, the fort’s massive brick walls seemed to float on the sea, majestic and forbidding, filling almost the entire 10 acres of Garden Key, the largest of the islets known as the Dry Tortugas.
Where to go and what to know in Key West and the Dry Tortugas.
Finally, we’d arrived at the place I’d wondered about for more than 50 years, ever since, as a child, I’d seen “The Prisoner of Shark Island,” John Ford’s riveting (if relentlessly pro-Confederate) 1936 film about Samuel Mudd, the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg during his flight into Maryland after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Subsequently convicted of conspiracy, Mudd became the fort’s most notorious prisoner, confined in what seemed on screen like a hellish limbo at the edge of the Earth. After planning a trip to Key West, Fla., with our daughter, Chloe, my wife, Jean, and I were delighted to discover that we could easily make a day trip to the fort.
We’d left Key West at 8 a.m. Two-and-a-half hours later, we were docking and crossing the fort’s moat — once patrolled by sharks — on a plank bridge. We passed through an arched gate onto the vast hexagonal parade ground, studded with gnarled buttonwood and gumbo-limbo trees and ringed by three tiers of casements, or gun rooms, some of them still mounted with cannon.
We toured the fort first with a guide approved by the National Park Service, which maintains the site, and then on our own, using a short history of the fort, “America’s Fortress,” available in the small museum. We wandered among the casements and peered through their gun ports at the shimmering vastness of the gulf. It was utterly empty but for the sandy scraps of the six other Tortugas — the islets were named by early Spanish explorers for the abundance of turtles they found — and a colony of brown pelicans perched like portly sentinels on the ruins of coaling docks dating from the Spanish-American War.
Once known as “America’s Gibraltar” and still the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere, Fort Jefferson was a linchpin of the United States’ first comprehensive national defense system. It protected the sea route between the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico ports, deterring invasion at a time when Britain and Spain were considered serious foreign threats. During the Civil War, it was one of the few Southern forts to remain in Union hands. Although it was designed to mount 450 guns, only about 75 were ever installed. But that was sufficient: the Confederacy never dared to attack.
During the war, the fort served primarily as a prison for Union soldiers convicted of crimes ranging from murder and pillaging to falling asleep on guard duty. Only a handful of prisoners, such as Mudd and the other men — Michael O’Laughlin, Samuel Arnold and Edward Spangler — imprisoned in the Dry Tortugas for their connections to Booth, were classed as traitors.
Loading...
Comments