Sixty miles west of Key West, Florida, lie a small group of islands that have had an unusual influence on the sea power of the United States—the Dry Tortugas. Though they once served as a naval coaling station, at another time as a naval radio station, and at still another as a seaplane base, their influence on sea power rested on their strategic location as the site for a fortress to control the door to the Gulf of Mexico. Garden Key in the Tortugas was the site of Fort Jefferson, key to the Gulf. It was from Dry Tortugas that the U.S.S. Maine sailed to Havana and disaster. At Tortugas Doctor Mudd served his sentence for the crime of performing his duty as a surgeon in setting the leg of John Wilkes booth. The isolated position of this old fort has kept it in much the same state as it was nearly a century ago. The mariner entering the Gulf of Mexico sees Fort Jefferson today overlooking the passage which it once controlled.
The Dry Tortugas form the southwestern tip of the Florida reef. They comprise the only true atoll in the Western Hemisphere. It was the explorer Ponce de Leon who discovered the islands in the year 1513 on his voyage around the Florida Peninsula. He named them Tortugas because of the large number of giant turtles found in the adjacent waters. The arid nature of these islands, rain supplying their only source of water, earned for them the rest of their name.
In the two centuries following their discovery, the islands were put to use by no one but pirates. Legitimate trade bent on canvas to hurry past the islands, and only those who wished a secluded anchorage steered for the harbor formed by dangerous reefs and shoals. From this vantage point buccaneers who frequented the Florida Straits preyed on Spanish treasure vessels bound home from the colonies in Central America.
In 1819 Florida passed from Spain to the United States. The King of Spain, faced with the fate accompli of General Andrew Jackson’s possession of East Florida, ceded the Floridas to the United States for $5,000,000. Commodore David Porter was assigned the task of policing the many hiding spots of the new stretches of sea coast and removing the menace of the pirates who made these their bases. In 1825 the United States erected a lighthouse on Garden Key which served to mark the Western end of the Straits until 1856, when the present structure, 151 feet high with an 18 mile light, was constructed on Loggerhead Key.
Our military strategists and statesmen were quick to recognize the importance of fortifying the islands. A report of the Navy Department on their strategic importance made in 1830, after a survey of the entire area, slated that a military base at Tortugas could “ . . . control navigation of the Gulf. . . . It overlooked Havana, Pensacola, Mobile, the mouths of the Mississippi, and both the inlets and outlets of the Gulf of Mexico. ...” An enemy blockade of the Gulf could be prevented by fortifying the Tortugas, while naval forces operating from this base would be effective even against a superior force.
The location of the islands, only sixty miles from Key West, linked the two strategically, and long before the Civil War their joint importance was understood. During this period the West Indies became one of the richest markets in the world. Tobacco and sugar came to mean wealth, and political control of these keys was of concern to every important maritime nation. Britain, France, and Spain were developing their West Indies possessions as rapidly as possible. The young United States still had keen memory of Jackson’s fight with the British at New Orleans. Trouble in Cuba seemed unavoidable. The Lone Star Republic was seeking either the protection of France and England or union with the United States of America. Our statesmen had no intention of allowing any nation, particularly a European nation, a stronghold on any point of the Gulf, and it was in this light that Key West and Dry Tortugas appeared valuable if properly fortified. To the present day a monument to the strategic importance of control of the Straits of Florida in this era is historic Fort Jefferson, located on Garden Key.
On December 17, 1845, the United States reserved Garden Key for military purposes, and plans were begun for the construction of a giant fortress to command this salient point at the westernmost end of the straits. Lieutenant Horatio G. Wright, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, was detailed as engineer in charge of construction. The mammoth structure was to occupy virtually all of the Key, to be six sided, and to consist of three tiers. A garrison of 1,500 men was planned.
Construction began in 1846. For thirty years it continued spasmodically but was never completed. Tremendous difficulties were encountered. Materials were brought in by sail. The Florida reefs, noted for their treacherous currents, proved a dangerous passage. Salvage had become the primary industry in Key West. A fleet of salvage vessels raced with each other for victims that wind and current were constantly furnishing. Aids to navigation were few, the lights unreliable. The salvage vessels prospered. It was through this strait that all the materials for the fortress had to be brought, for the Tortugas offered none. At first the brick was brought from New England, but later during the 1850’s it was determined that handmade brick from southern ports was better able to withstand the climate of the Tortugas than the northern product. The records show that about 40,000,000 bricks were used, at an average cost of one dollar per brick for transportation alone.
The labor was performed by negro slaves, rented from their masters in Key West and Saint Augustine. The work progressed slowly; the food was poor, and fever frequently incapacitated more than half the workmen. Hurricanes destroyed thousands of dollars worth of property and set back the work of construction time and again.
The fortress, a giant hexagonal case- mated structure, was to be the largest in a chain of seacoast defense fortifications built in the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Temporary structures were first built in the center of the fortress site. This was followed by the construction of the barracks, officers’ quarters, the arsenal, and powder magazines. The main structure which was to surround all these was not commenced until the year 1851.
The giant foundations were laid on coral rock, several feet below sea level. Each of the six sides was 450 feet long and 45 feet high. The outer wall was six feet in thickness, pierced by gun ports for 450 cannon. Immediately outside the walls was a moat 70 feet wide and 30 feet deep, open to the sea at several points. Only strips of coral shelf separated the moat from the sea. In legend the fortress is known as “sharks island” and the name is merited, for the waters of the Tortugas abound in game fish, and shark are frequently found in the moat and adjacent waters.
At the beginning of the War between the States the work was only half done. Prisoners of war gradually replaced the negro slaves as laborers, and the construction went slowly on. The year 1866 marked the end of systematic construction. The invention of the rifled gun made the brick fortress obsolete before its completion. The walls had been designed to withstand round-shot and could not hope to resist projectiles from the rifled guns of naval vessels. In addition, the engineers learned all too late that the foundations rested not on coral reefs as they had believed, but upon coral boulders that had begun to shift under the immense weight.
On January 19, 1861, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, the fort was garrisoned under the command of Major L. C. Arnold, United States Army, who immediately mounted six 8-inch guns and six field pieces in the empty casemates. To bolster the external appearance, dummy muzzles were constructed to fill the remaining ports, and the fort presented the false appearance of being fully armed. The guns, columbiads, were heavy chambered weapons designed for firing at high elevation, and poorly adapted to their purpose in the fort. A small supplementary battery was mounted on Bird Key, 700 yards to the south-east. Despite the almost helpless state of the fort, these efforts on the part of her commanding officer had their effect and kept the position in Union hands when a Confederate vessel arrived in the harbor of Tortugas to demand surrender. An initial ranging salvo (for so it appeared) of six guns, backed by the appearance of many muzzles, caused the Confederate to make a hasty withdrawal. In the latter part of 1861 an expedition to relieve Fort Pickens, Pensacola, was sent from Tortugas. The role of the fort in the war was not active, but its strategic position in Union hands strengthened the Northern blockade and aided Union naval forces.
The major function of Fort Jefferson was that of a Federal prison. It was on this barren island that Dr. Samuel A. Mudd served his sentence for alleged conspiracy in the assassination of President Lincoln. Charged with complicity in the conspiracy, he was tried by a military court and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. He was transported to Fort Jefferson to serve his punishment.
Escapes from the prison fortress were made from time to time by those lucky enough to have outside assistance. A few trading schooners lying-off managed to leave with a prisoner in the hold. Dr. Mudd believed that if he could reach a Federal Court, where the writ of Habeas Corpus would issue, he could successfully question the jurisdiction of the military tribunal that had sentenced him. The nearest Federal court was in Key West. With this in view he succeeded in boarding a topsail schooner anchored in the harbor, but a search by the garrison led to his discovery and return to imprisonment with added penalties imposed for his attempt. For four years he suffered hardship at the hands of his jailors and received no reprieve despite his valiant efforts on behalf of the garrison when an epidemic of yellow fever swept the Tortugas in 1867. The post surgeon, Brevet Major Joseph Sim Smith, was among the first to die. Dr. Mudd offered his services, which were hastily accepted by the commanding officer. So great were his sacrifices in caring for the sick and dying, that Major Stone, the commanding officer, promised to see that a petition originated by the officers and men of the fort in the Doctor’s behalf, reached the Washington officials in whose hands the power of clemency lay. The Major, as fate would have it, died from yellow fever himself on the way to Key West. After the epidemic Dr. Mudd was again placed in confinement until the efforts of his family finally secured his pardon by President Johnson in 1869.
A second famous prisoner of Fort Jefferson was Dr. Cunningham. Cunningham was convicted of attempt to infect the city of Chicago with yellow fever by the introduction into drinking water of trunks of clothing of those who had died of the disease. The attempt seems rather futile in the light of Chicago’s water supply and the subsequent discovery that the fever can be transmitted only by the hypodermic action of carrier mosquitoes who transmit the fever from a person having the disease to a non-immune.
Another and more terrible epidemic of yellow fever swept the fort in the year 1873. So devastating was this siege that the garrison was removed and only caretakers and lighthouse keepers remained. Thorough disinfection was instituted and the island made tenable once more.
Toward the close of the century, with war against Spain a growing certainty, the Navy Department took over Fort Jefferson. It was to be a naval coaling station. The fort was in poor condition. Vandals had stripped it of movable objects, hurricanes had left their mark. The Navy had begun to eye the location when during the 1880’s a naval building program created interest in the need for bases. It was from the anchorage at Dry Tortugas that the U.S.S. Maine sailed on her last voyage, to Havana. When the Maine was lost, the Department commenced in earnest the task of establishing a base at Tortugas. Construction was begun on coal sheds, and steel structures rose on the key outside the fort to coal ships by machinery. The war was over, however, before the work was completed. The coal sheds were finished in 1904. Each had a capacity of nine thousand tons of coal. A thirty foot channel had been dredged to their piers, and for the period the station was a valuable Fleet base. Since there was no water on the island except that collected from rain, two distilling plants were brought to Fort Jefferson. A unit of Marines was ordered to the fort in 1901 and garrisoned the island until the Navy decided to abandon the base in 1906. The distilling plant was dismantled, loaded into barges, and towed to Guantanamo for use by the naval station there. A naval radio station had been set up at Tortugas in 1903 to experiment with the then new wireless communication, and after the withdrawal of the Marines in 1906 this was the only naval activity which remained. This too was abandoned in 1910, and once again the installation become a ghost fortress, swept by tropical storms and ransacked by seafarers.
During the first World War the Navy Department established a seaplane base at Tortugas and rehabilitated the naval radio station at the fort. Then Fort Jefferson again lapsed into obscurity. In 1934 a group of World War I veterans employed by WPA were sent to the islands to clean up the fort and to a degree rehabilitate it. Because of the historic significance of the fort, President Roosevelt on January 4, 1935, proclaimed the Dry Tortugas “The Fort Jefferson National Monument” and placed the group under the cognizance of the Department of the Interior as a function of the National Park Service. Today the sole inhabitants of Fort Jefferson are Forest Rangers.
If you have the opportunity to drop the anchor off the Tortugas and run the whaleboat in, this is what you will see:
You enter through the sally port from the small landing on the key outside the fort. Your first view as you enter the hollow center is the officers’ quarters, once splendid in their decoration and construction for this out of the way post, but now so long neglected that it is unsafe to enter them. To the right of the sally port are the troops’ barracks, now crumbled to a single story. Next to the barracks stand the magazines, whose sturdy arches support a bomb-proof roof. At the head of the parade ground is a monument to Brevet Major Smith and his son, who died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867. A hot-shot furnace is located near the magazines, the hope of a mid-nineteenth century gunner to set fire to wooden ships with plenty of canvas. A series of trenches cross the fort, part of a sewage system designed to be flooded and drained to the moat by the tide.
Beneath the walls of the fort are a series of cisterns, one below each casemate. These were designed to store rain water collected from the roof, or terraplein, of the walls. So adequate was the system that the distilling plant was found to be unnecessary, and even today two of the cistern's are still tight against salt water and are used by the forest ranger as his water supply.
During prohibition the Coast Guard was kept busy in the vicinity of the Tortugas with the many rum-runners that made this a waiting point, anchoring here until a landing could be made on one of the isolated keys between Key West and Miami. Today the islands harbor from time to time a vessel attempting to run aliens into the United States, and the Immigration authorities have to keep a check on persons traveling north on the Overseas Highway.
Of value only in an historic sense, Fort Jefferson stands today a monument to ever changing concepts of defense. This valuable position of a century ago looks silently on as men, ships, and arms constantly change.