Dry Tortugas: Hell and History in Paradise
Scroll DownDry Tortugas has one of the most interesting and compelling histories of any National Park in the entire country.
If you looked at how many people visit the park annually, you might not believe this. Dry Tortugas gets around 50,000 visitors a year, compared to the 4-6 million that Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon claim. Plenty of listicles claim this is one of the most remote Parks in the nation, and that’s mostly fair. The park is on a small piece of land at the end of the Florida Keys, a series of islands jutting out from the southern tip of Florida. From the party town of Key West, you have to catch a boat or seaplane and continue another 70 miles west into the Gulf of Mexico.
Let’s rewind. The story of how Dry Tortugas got on my radar is worth telling too.
📕 A Story Far From Home
It was mid-November, 2016. I was unemployed and in Patagonia.
Specifically, I was in Puerto Natales, a small Chilean port town a bit under 1,000 miles from Antarctica. One of my best friends and I had just finished backpacking the 50 mile “W” trail in Torres del Paine National Park. The trail and park are world-famous for their unparalleled nature – glaciers, wild animals, striking rock formations, and just about everything else you could imagine.
I hadn’t planned on being unemployed – due to some mistakes on my part, the work contract I’d had at the time had been terminated a week before the trip. This gave me plenty to think over when my friend and I left Torres del Paine to spend a night in Puerto Natales before journeying out to Argentina the next day.
My friend had caught a terrible cold on the flight down there, and was spending the entire day attempting to sleep it off. Healthy, wide-awake, and a bit hungry, I picked up a book from my suitcase and left our hostel to find a beer.
Assassination Vacation was the name of the book I picked. Ann, my girlfriend at the time, lent it to me for the trip. It’s written by Sarah Vowell, an editor of the This American Life radio show and the voice actor for Violet from the Incredibles.
The book details her pilgrimage to important sites pertaining the assassinations of U.S. presidents. Only 4 presidents have ever been assassinated. Almost everyone knows about John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, but most don’t know about William McKinley and James Garfield. It’s an interesting book, I’d definitely recommend it.
Now that I’ve set the scene, put yourself in my shoes. My ego was still bruised from being fired, my legs were still aching, and I was the furthest I’d ever been from home with only a beer to keep me company for the moment. This is where I found myself when I got to the section on Abraham Lincoln, and one of the most ridiculous stories I’d ever read unfurled in front of my very eyes.
🏴☠️ Pirates at the Border
The year was 1825, and the U.S. was worried about pirates. It had been 5 years since Spain had sold them the land that would become Florida, and the country was suddenly a lot closer to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean.
With this in mind, the U.S. Navy started considering a naval fort at the southern edge of their new territory. The tip of Florida curves sharply to the west, petering out into a series of keys (a key or cay is just a small island on top of a coral reef). 150 miles from the mainland (and 100 miles from Cuba), they found a group of keys called the Dry Tortugas.
The Spanish explorer Ponce de León found the keys in the 1500s and fondly named it Las Tortugas because of the large turtle population – he and his crew took about 170 back home. Shortly after, someone changed the name to Dry Tortugas to indicate that there was no fresh water on the keys.
The first time the Navy went out there, one of their commodores reported back that none of the islands would be suitable for a fort. There was no fresh water, he didn’t trust the ground, and they were all only a few feet above sea level.
The next time the Navy sent someone there, they decided that it could be helpful to have a lighthouse on the largest key in the Tortugas, Garden Key. There were a lot of small islands and coral reefs in the area, so ships would appreciate a guiding light.
The third time the Navy sent someone there, that officer sent back a glowing report. The Tortugas were moderately defensible, overlooked major shipping lanes to the south, and could serve as the first line of defense if the U.S. was ever attacked by Cuba or its neighbors.
Governments rarely move quickly. It took almost two decades, but the Navy eventually did a detailed assessment of Garden Key and the rest of the Tortugas. One year later, plans were approved to build a fort on Garden Key. Named after the country’s third president, Fort Jefferson would become the largest brick structure in the Americas, a title it still holds today.
🛠 Building the Country’s Largest Fort
You really have to wonder how much of a threat pirates were at the time.
The fort was designed in the shape of a hexagon: ~325ft high on two sides, and ~475ft on the other four. The entire fort was to be two stories, with massive openings in the walls to house the cannons. Yes – the cannons. Each floor was to have 150 of them, with another 150 on the roof of the fort itself. 450 mounted guns in a fort that was only 16 acres large. And each opening was to have a 1,500lb retractable iron curtain to protect it from incoming cannon- and gunfire.
For added security, there was going to be a moat around the whole fort. A fort, surrounded by a moat, surrounded by the open ocean.
Fort Jefferson was never completely finished, but it got a lot closer than you’d think. Most of the work was done by black slaves that were either brought down from the north or leased out by their owners in Key West for what would be $600/month nowadays. The company that was contracted to build the fort didn’t originally intend on using slaves, but quickly discovered that their white employees were easily exhausted by the unrelenting sun, and decided it was easier to use slaves that might be accustomed to the heat already.
The moat was finished. Most of the fort itself was finished. There was a water purification system that rivaled what people had on the mainland. But there was very little housing, most of the cannons did not arrive, and the fort was constantly short on ammo for them. And most importantly:
The fort was never attacked.
You could argue that this was a great example of “speak softly and carry a big stick” diplomacy. You could also argue that the U.S. wasted several decades, 16 million bricks, and an uncomfortable amount of slave labor on a hexagon in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Make of that what you will.
On the subject of slaves, the U.S. went to war over them around this time (1861). The southern half of the country split to form the Confederate States of America, and the north kept its original name. This would mean that the Confederacy got Fort Jefferson, but Union soldiers (from the north) quickly saw its importance and took it over.
For the entirety of the war, Fort Jefferson was integral in stopping supply shipments to the Confederacy. Of course, this ringed hexagon of death was overkill for stopping cargo ships, so it was repurposed and turned into a prison.
This is when the assassination of Abraham Lincoln comes into the picture.
🔫 Lincoln’s Assassination
Lincolns assassination was part of a much larger plot. After 4 years, the civil war had ended, and in an attempt to revive the Confederate States, a group of men decided to assassinate the three heads of government in the U.S. - the president, vice president, and secretary of state.
This conspiracy plot wasn’t exactly well-organized. The man assigned to the vice president got drunk and ended up stumbling aimlessly around D.C. until 2am. The man assigned to the secretary of state managed to sneak into the man’s house only to have his gun jam and fail to assassinate him with a backup knife.
Meanwhile, Lincoln was attending a play at Ford’s Theater. It was during one of the funniest lines in the play that John Wilkes Booth snuck into the presidents viewing box and fired his gun point blank into Lincolns skull.
Side note: Booth wasn’t just a random citizen with radical thoughts. He was an extremely famous actor, had been called ‘the handsomest man in America’, and had actually been one of the first actors to perform in Ford’s Theater. He had always been pro-slavery, and had actually been invited after a play to meet the Lincolns, but declined.
After a brief scuffle with security, Booth jumped 12 feet down from Lincoln’s viewing box to the stage. For a brief moment, the audience thought he was part of the play, and chaos ensued shortly after. Booth escaped through a back door, stumbling every other step.
After meeting up with another conspirator, the two immediately made an unexpected stop at a local doctor’s house. Dr. Samuel Mudd had met Booth before – they had talked after a church service before and Mudd once let Booth use his guest bedroom for a night. Other than that, no one knows how close the two men were, or if Mudd was even aware of the assassination plans.
Knocking on Mudd’s door, Booth asked for help and reportedly gave few details. As a doctor sworn to the Hippocratic Oath, Mudd took him in. Booth and his conspirator only spent half a day in Mudd’s house, but in that time Booth was given a splint, a new shoe for his injured foot, and a pair of crutches.
The two left Mudd’s house the next day, and while in town for errands, Mudd learned of the assassination. Afraid the conspirators would come back to harm his family, Mudd claimed he did not want to leave his wife and children home alone, and waited a full day for a cousin to visit the house. He told the cousin to inform the police of what had happened at his house the night of the assassination.
The police were suspicious that such important news would come in so late, but they were able to confirm Mudd’s story and determine what direction Booth was heading.
Booth and his conspirator remained on the run for about a week before the police found them sleeping in a barn. The other conspirator immediately surrendered. Booth decided to remain in the barn with an arsenal of guns. The police set fire to the building, and while Booth was escaping through the back door (again!) he was fatally shot in the neck. His last words were reportedly: “useless…useless.”
⚖️ Post-Assassination
The entire group of conspirators was brought to trial after Booths death. Among them were two curious additions – Dr. Mudd and a stagehand from the Ford Theater. Mudd initially claimed he had never met Booth before the man came to his house the night of the shooting. Later, he admitted that he had met Booth at church several years before. During their investigation, the police found out that Booth and Mudd had gotten together for drinks multiple times as well.
The stagehand was just standing outside when Booth arrived at the theater and asked him to hold his horse for a few minutes. Talk about bad luck.
One of the conspirators was missing though, and this story is too ridiculous to not include. John Surratt somehow defied all odds and escaped to Quebec, where priests helped hide him until he could board a ship to England. He bounced around Europe for a bit and eventually joined the Pontifical Zouaves, the Vatican’s official military.
An old school-friend from the States visited the Vatican on vacation, recognized him, and reported him to the U.S. consulate. Surratt was immediately placed under arrest, escaped again, and travelled through Italy until he could board a ship to Egypt, where he was captured upon arrival.
Brought to trial in the States, it was decided that the statute of limitations had run out on his crimes, and he lived the rest of his life peacefully around the state of Maryland. He remarried, had seven children, and worked as a schoolteacher and accountant.
Okay. What about the rest of the conspirators?
Almost all of them were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were not though – the stagehand from the Ford Theater, Dr. Mudd, and Samuel Arnold, who was only involved with the group for a short time. His excuse was that he was unemployed and bored.
If you’re not going to hang them, what are you going to do with three people implicated in a plot to assassinate the highest ranking politicians in the country?
Simple. You sentence them to prison for life.
You send them to Dry Tortugas.
🏝 An Island Prison
Living conditions at Fort Jefferson were not the best, especially for the prisoners. While the area was beautiful, the heat and humidity were oppressive during summers. Prisoners were forced into hard labor for 12 hours a day and cells often flooded with rain and ocean water. Food was mostly shipped in from the mainland, and the fresh meats went to the guards and prison staff first.
Two years after the conspirators arrived at Fort Jefferson, a particularly bad case of yellow fever swept through the prison. It wasn’t long before dozens of guards got sick. The isolated island was quickly becoming filled with people bleeding from their eyes and ears and vomiting blood.
After the prison doctor and his family died, the guards made a decision to free Dr. Mudd from his cell and put the situation in his hands. Despite knowing very little about yellow fever, Mudd made several assumptions about the disease and managed to nurse everyone back to health. By the time help from the mainland arrived, the situation was mostly under control.
Numerous guards wrote to the president (now Andrew Johnson), pleading for Dr. Mudd to be pardoned and released from prison. After reviewing the case, Johnson pardoned not only Mudd, but the theatre stagehand and Samuel Arnold.
As they returned to the mainland, bad press about prison conditions and yellow fever outbreaks led the government to close down Fort Jefferson. Several decades later, it was used as a refueling station for ships going to Havana to fight in the Spanish-American War.
Shortly after that, the Navy took over the Fort. They held it for two years before deciding the frequent hurricanes proved to be too much of a problem. The Tortugas were converted into a federal bird reserve, and in 1935 it became a National Monument. In 1992 it was upgraded to a National Park and hosts a large amount of shark and turtle research projects.
“Huh,” I said, back in Chile. I put the book down to take a sip of beer, and added the Dry Tortugas to my bucket list.
🌉 Step 1: Getting to Key West
Three years later, I found myself in Florida for its three National Parks. It was a peaceful Friday afternoon when I drove down to Key West. The drive itself is scenic in a strange way – countless bridges connect the tiny keys so it feels like you’re driving into the ocean. The most extreme case is the Seven Mile Bridge, which is, well… you can figure it out.
Key West itself is the polar opposite of what I look for in a place. It’s one of the biggest party destinations in the country, a melting pot of club remixes, shitty beer, and frat bros. I wake up every day actively hoping I don’t end up in a place like Key West. But here we are.
Every morning, a boat named the Yankee Freedom III leaves from Key West’s marina for Garden Key and Dry Tortugas. My plan was to catch it the next day. That left me with a few hours in Key West though, and I was pleasantly surprised with how laid back it was. I guessed everyone was going to be driving down Saturday morning.
Hotels and Airbnbs aren’t cheap in Key West, but thankfully there is an affordable hostel. I had settled in and was getting ready to go look for a bar when I heard a strange sound outside. Was that….rain?
I opened the door to the hostel courtyard and sure enough, the rain was coming down in sheets. I hadn’t seen a rain this hard in years, it was really pouring. By the time I was able to call an Uber to a restaurant, the streets had begun to flood over the curbs and onto the sidewalk. Four drivers in a row cancelled on me before someone in a Subaru Outback was able to get to me and ford the flooded roads.
The driver told me this usually happened one or two times every year. Lucky me!
By the time I had finished my food and beer, the streets were mostly dry. I called a ride back to the hostel and set an early alarm.
The next morning, you couldn’t even tell it had rained.
🚢 Step 2: Getting to Dry Tortugas
“We have dramamine for $2. If you are getting on this boat, YOU SHOULD HAVE DRAMAMINE. THE CONDITIONS WILL BE VERY ROUGH.”
I’m at the marina, and that’s our captain speaking to the crowd. As I’m trying to finish my coffee and breakfast sandwich, concerned families all around me are rushing to the front desk to buy some dramamine, a drug for seasickness and motion sickness.
This would be my fifth or so time on a boat. How bad could it be?
The weather outside was absolutely blissful. There was a slight morning chill, a few wispy clouds in the sky, and the sun was lazily climbing above the horizon. I felt like I’d ascended to heaven when the Yankee Freedom took off. I hadn’t picked up any dramamine.
Whenever I’m on a boat, the first thing I do is rush to the front of it and immediately try to get as much air and seafoam on me as possible, along with feeling the ship rise and fall as it zooms over the tides. This is probably what dogs feel like when they stick their heads out of car windows. I don’t know why I’m like this, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. While on the bow, I met Erik.
Erik lives up in Miami and was one of the few people camping on Garden Key that night. He and his girlfriend were from Chile and had moved to the states a few years back. I mentioned to him how much I’d enjoyed the drive from Miami to Key West, especially since Avis had given me a 400hp Dodge Challenger. With a big smile, Erik told me he had the exact same car.
“When we moved up here I wanted a Jeep.”
“You went from a Jeep to a Challenger?? How’s that work?”
“Well, I had a Jeep in Chile. Back home you have everything – the beaches, the mountains, the forest. If you could go offroad you could go anywhere, so if I wasn’t on the sailboat with my dad I would be in the Jeep with some friends. But then my girlfriend and I moved to Florida.”
“Uh huh.”
“Obviously, I couldn’t take the Jeep. So I go to a dealership to get one and I ask the guy where I can take it off-roading. And he tells me there are some backroads I can take it if I wanted to get some mud on the sides. Why would I buy a Jeep if I can’t go offroading? That’s just useless. So I told him I didn’t want it. I asked what else he had, and he told me someone traded in a Challenger. So I figured if I can’t have a Jeep, I can at least have a fast car.”
This entire time, we were loosely gripping the railing, shouting at each other over the wind. Both of our voices were getting a bit tired.
“Do you want to come inside and sit with my girlfriend and I?” Erik shouted.
“I’d love to!” I shouted back.
The lower level of the Yankee Freedom is filled with tables. Erik led me to one where his girlfriend was sitting with a father and daughter from Virginia.
“Did you hear the announcement out there?” Erik’s girlfriend asked us.
“No,” Erik replied. “The wind was too strong. What did he say?”
“They’re closing the outer decks and everyone has to come inside.”
“I thought they said they’d only close the decks if it was unsafe for people to be out there?” I said. “It’s fine right now. Nothing but smooth waters.”
Erik smiled at me and didn’t say a word.
🌊 Rocky Waters
Ten minutes later, we were in hell.
The sun had all but disappeared, and the waves seemed to be coming both quickly and slowly at the very same time. The boat constantly shifted on all axes – forward and back, up and down, left and right. It was impossible to move from your table or stay upright.
I looked from the window next to our table to the window on the other side of the boat. On our side, the horizon was dangerously low. On the other side, it was all the way up near the top of the window frame. Seconds later, the boat righted itself and jolted to the side. While the front end rose up and the entire boat fell from a wave.
There was chaos everywhere. The crewmembers constantly walked up and down the boat, shoving a barf bag into someone’s hands if they looked uneasy. I saw an unfortunate family all fail within seconds of each other – the daughter started vomiting, which set off the mother, then the son, then the father, then the grandpa. It wasn’t long after that that someone at another table screamed, “Can we get a bag over here?!” and a crew member sprinted by at a 45 degree angle to hand one over.
Erik was having no problems.
The entire time I stared out the window, focusing on the horizon like my life (or the contents of my stomach) depended on it. Staring at the horizon is a proven way to fight seasickness and it seemed to be working. Barely.
“Are you okay, Richard?” Erik would ask, staring at me with that same smile from before. “Do you need a bag? You don’t even need to say anything. Just nod if you do.”
“God dammit Erik, stop talking – I’m trying to watch the horizon.”
Erik went back to people-watching and never stopped smiling.
☀️ Arriving at Garden Key
After almost an hour of this, the waters smoothed out, and we began to close in on a looming mass of bricks. The front deck stayed closed for the rest of the ride, so I peered at angle through the window as we began to dock.
While I was obviously here for the history, most people come to Dry Tortugas for slightly different reasons. For the older crowd visiting Key West, it’s a good way to spend some time on the water and have a pleasant picnic on a deserted island. A lot of people come here for a calmer beach experience and some fantastic snorkeling. And every day, a small group has the pleasure of camping outside Fort Jefferson overnight. Permits for camping sell out months in advance and there aren’t many to go around.
I was just there for an afternoon, though. Your time on the island is limited, since there’s only one boat going to and from Fort Jefferson each day. For a day trip, you’ve got 5 hours between docking and departing.
Stepping onto the dock, I was immediately struck by how bizarre a prison this must have been. The brickwork was a beautiful shade of reddish brown, the beaches pristine, and the sky and ocean were both beautiful shades of blue. Despite all of this beauty, hundreds of people suffered here with rotten food, forced labor, and flooded cells.
Walking through the fort was surreal. This was the first time in my life I’d connected strongly with a story from history, and then gone to see where it all happened in person. Most of the fort was just as it was when Dr. Mudd was here, save for a few repairs. Time had not been kind to the fort, and decades of hurricanes had collapsed one of the side walls. A private company had been brought in to repair the wall, but the Park Service hadn’t gotten around to fixing up a section of the moat wall that had fallen apart.
Honestly, the state of things was extremely impressive, given that the structure was original from the 1820s and had spent its entire existence being hit by hurricanes and saltwater.
There was a lot of empty space inside the fort. This sounds weird, but the hallways are massive in width and height, and the courtyard in the center of the hexagon is bigger than you’d think – it even has a few small groves of trees in it!
Walking around the ground floor, you come across a cell that has a sign placed next to it and a large metal plaque attached to the inside wall. Here was where Mudd spent his days. With children laughing in the distance and small waves rolling over the moat wall, it seems impossible to imagine suffering here.
There were no bars on the cell windows either. But what are you going to do if you climb out? Swim 70 miles to Key West?
Exploring the Fort
There are a few things conspicuously missing from Fort Jefferson nowadays – the hundreds of cannons. In 1900, the government sold them for scrap metal, but ten were deemed too heavy to be worth moving and left behind. Four of those are ~27,000lb ‘Parrot Cannons’, and the other six are 50,000+lb ‘Rodman Cannons’.
This is a bit interesting because it means the Fort is a living museum in yet another way – there are only 13 surviving Parrot Cannons and 25 Rodman Cannons left in existence. Dry Tortugas has about a quarter of the remaining stock for both. On top of that, they’re still where they were originally placed – at the top of the fort, watching over the surrounding ocean.
The Park Service did a stellar job restoring the cannons – when the Dry Tortugas became a National Park, they had endured 140 years of sun and salt corrosion. Nowadays they look new enough to be used in whatever war we’re currently waging.
Another thing that’s missing is guardrails – the Park Service is concerned with keeping visitors safe, but also concerned with preserving history. The latter won out in this case, because there are plenty of places where you could tumble several stories into the courtyard or the moat. It was a bit unnerving watching large families walk over to the edge of the fort’s roof, but no one fell so it surely isn’t too bad.
🤿 Snorkeling
One of the things included in your ticket for the Yankee Freedom III is snorkeling equipment to use while on the island. The Tortugas are great for snorkeling, given that they’re so isolated and the waters are so clear. When I asked about this though, the crew told me that the storm had churned up the water too much, and they wouldn’t be handing out snorkels and fins that day.
Having already explored the fort, that left me with some time to kill. While walking around the moat, I ran into Erik again. It turns out he’s a pretty skilled kitesurfer and had just come back with several long conversations with the Park rangers. There weren’t any rules saying you couldn’t kitesurf around Garden Key, but there were a lot of places where they wouldn’t allow him to launch off from. Eventually, they approved a small area near the campsites for him.
I told him about my unsuccessful conversation with the boat crew, and without any hesitation he told me that he had brought his snorkel and fins along and I was more than welcome to borrow them while he was kitesurfing.
With that, I was able to enjoy Dry Tortugas in peace. An hour or two of snorkeling later, and I was running back to the Yankee Freedom III before it sailed back to Key West.
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