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Maxwell: Fort Jefferson's maritime legacy

 
The ominously black Garden Key Lighthouse sits on top of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, some 70 miles west of Key West. Its location gave the islands a vital role in the nation’s maritime, cultural and political history. Fort Jefferson was a military prison during the Civil War.
The ominously black Garden Key Lighthouse sits on top of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, some 70 miles west of Key West. Its location gave the islands a vital role in the nation’s maritime, cultural and political history. Fort Jefferson was a military prison during the Civil War.
Published Oct. 30, 2015

DRY TORTUGAS NATIONAL PARK — We visit our Western national parks such as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon for their flora and fauna, awe-inspiring vistas and other natural wonders.

Although Florida's Dry Tortugas National Park, a string of seven coral reef islands, is beautiful, that beauty belies a one-of-a-kind past. Dry Tortugas is a treasure because its strategic location, 70 miles west of Key West, gave it vital roles in the nation's maritime, cultural and political history.

From the beginning, in 1513 when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon saw the islands, the region was one of contention. Ships from different countries competed with the Spanish for dominance in the deep waters and in the narrow passageways among the islands.

In 1819, the Spanish sold Florida to the United States, which included the Dry Tortugas. Immediately, a plan was hatched to build a fortress on Garden Key, the largest of the islands. Over time, after piracy became widespread, the U.S. Army began construction of Fort Jefferson, a formidable gunnery post that would control ship movement.

Although construction continued for 30 years, the fort was never completed. The big guns never fired a shot at an enemy, and no enemy ever fired on the fort. It became a military prison, and at the peak of the Civil War, it had a population of some 2,000, a wild mix of military personnel, civilian workers, Union Army deserters and black slaves.

Fort Jefferson was an expensive experiment in folly, a behemoth appropriately dubbed "America's Devil Island." An armada of skilled workers, including stone masons, specialty carpenters and blacksmiths, labored on the project. Not surprisingly, slaves were the largest group of workers, enduring years of degradation sanctioned by the U.S. government and Florida.

Key West, which did not have slaves, had a large population of white Northerners who brought their black servants south with them. Once in Key West, many of these Northerners leased their servants to Fort Jefferson for $20 a month — quite a sum. Once in the Tortugas, these black servants were reduced to the status of slaves.

Fort Jefferson was also a staging site for slave ships destined for other places. Few slaves attempted to escape because of the miles of dangerous reefs, unpredictable storms and unknown destinations.

The best-known escape attempt began shortly after midnight on July 10, 1847, when seven slaves fled in a small boat belonging to the lighthouse keeper.

In a hastily repaired boat, a crew of eight men pursued the slaves who somehow survived a violent storm. They were captured days later on Key Vaca, 120 miles east of Fort Jefferson.

Such stories have remained an alluring force in art, literature and popular culture worldwide. One of the earliest references to the Dry Tortugas appears in Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1881 serialized novel. Billy Bones, the drunken pirate, would hypnotize his audiences.

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"His stories were what frightened people most of all," the narrator says of Billy Bones. "Dreadful stories they were — about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds."

Although maritime exploits and piracy provide many plot lines and themes, nothing attracts authors to Fort Jefferson like its history as a federal prison for some of the nation's most notorious bad guys. The prison's most infamous inmates were four of the conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. One was Samuel A. Mudd, the doctor who set the fractured leg of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin.

Novelists such as Sarah Vowell, who wrote Assassination Vacation, visited Fort Jefferson to experience the place of Mudd's confinement until he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869. One of Mudd's best-known criticisms of the prison, as Vowell notes, was that Fort Jefferson was a place of "bad diet, bad water, and every inconvenience."

Not to be outdone, Brad Meltzer focused his novel, The President's Shadow, on Lincoln's assassination. The third installment in the Culper Ring series, the novel cleverly combines history and fiction as the president's death is linked to scoundrels in Fort Jefferson. The narrative, held together by Meltzer's research, is a thrilling trek back in time.

While the Dry Tortugas is beautiful and romantic, it is where the ghosts of slaves cry out for freedom, where the ghosts of pirates commit wild deeds and walk the plank, where the ghosts of murderous conspirators languish in guilt.