You all have been a quiet bunch of late. I was in Hong Kong for a week and then took some time off. During my vacation, I got out to the Dry Tortugas, 70 miles West of Key West. It's a 2.5 hour boat ride each way and the wind was howling which made for a few upset tummies, but fortunately not mine.
The Dry Tortugas is a National Park, and I hope to visit all of them over time. The most notable man made part of the park is Fort Jefferson, the largest masonry structure in the Americas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_Tortugashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Jefferson,_FloridaConstruction on the Fort was started well before the Civil War, but the fort was unfinished at the time the war started. In fact, there were no big guns there at the onset of hostilities. A CS ship came out to claim it after Florida seceded, but sailed away when the US garrison refused to surrender. There was no active fighting there during the Civil War, but the fort shelters a very strategic anchorage. In fact, it was from here the USS Maine sailed to her fateful next stop in Havana after taking on coal and other supplies.
Originally, the fort was built from brick from Pensacola which is yellowish in color. Because the Union could not get brick from there after the war started, the top layer has a dark red brick brought down from Maine. The same company that supplied the brick during the war is today supplying some of the brick for the massive masonry restoration work being undertaken, shown here:
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The anchorage lies to the right of the area between this 15" Rodman gun and the lighthouse on another key in the distance. That lighthouse is about 3 miles away which is the range of this gun.
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The fort was abandoned by the military in 1874. Contractors were sent to remove all the iron, but the biggest cannon (10" Parrotts and 15" Rodmans) were left atop the structure because they were too heavy to move. The rest of the fort's 125 guns and other iron was stripped away. The big Parrotts arrived in May 1865 by the way and the big Rodmans in the 1870s and are dated then as well!
Fortunately the guns have been recently cleaned up a bit, but only the one shown above has been put back on a repro carriage.
A cool thing at the fort is the hot shot furnace. I never appreciated how elaborate these things were. It was essentially a ramp down which the shot would pass over coals to get cherry red hot.
Here is a picture of the bottom where the shot would come out hot:
Fort Jefferson was used as a prison for Union deserters after 1864 when Lincoln changed the sentence for that crime to hard labor from death. These guys sweated it out mining coral from a nearby island for use in the fort's construction.
The most famous prisoner at the fort was a civilian, Dr. Samuel Mudd. He set John Wilkes Booth's leg after Booth broke it jumping down to the stage at Ford's Theater. He was sentence to life here, and only missed the death penalty by one vote. But he was pardoned after only a few years. One reason for this leniency was that he took over the doctoring of the soldiers afflicted with yellow Fever at the fort after the regular Dr. and his assistant both died of the disease. Mudd knew there was nothing much he could do for the men, but he kept their spirits up and kept them active and eventually the disease burnt itself out there. He would've been pardoned earlier perhaps, but the first courier with the pardon petition paperwork to President Johnson from the grateful soldiers promptly died of Yellow Fever upon reaching Key West.
We know where Mudd's cell was because it is the only spot in the fort with these three slit windows.
He wrote his wife of being beneath them and digging a channel in the floor to divert water away from his bed.
Here's a good video summarizing all this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/fort-jefferson-island-excursion/
