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In all the history of America there is no story stranger than the story of Fort Jefferson.

And its strangest feature is that, until just yesterday, no one knew this story—or at least no one remembered it.

Yet of the score or so of forts that safeguard our coasts, Jefferson has had the most troubled and tragic past. Without once engaging in a warlike action, it has seen enough agony to supply a war. In times of peace, it has killed enough men to people a city. The money it cost must have staggered the Treasury. During an entire decade, when it served as a prison, it had the most sinister renown of any spot in the United States. It was our own Devil’s Island, filled with traitors, political offenders, spies. The most notorious miscarriage of justice in our records had Fort Jefferson for the scene of its fulfilment.

But during the three decades preceding 1930, not one person in ten thousand, visiting Fortress Monroe or Fort Sumter or Fort McHenry, even so much as knew that Fort Jefferson existed.

While it is difficult to understand how we could have forgotten the history of this astonishing place, it is wholly impossible to understand why the sheer size of the structure has not made it a celebrated monument and kept it in the public eye.

Built by the Federal Government from 1846 to 1860, on one of the coral keys of the Dry Tortugas, the fort remains the largest mass of unreinforced masonry ever raised by Americans. Four hundred guns were lifted to its battlements. Fifty million bricks, brought thirteen hundred miles from Philadelphia, were used to build its walls. No other American fort was ever erected at such fantastic cost.

Nor did any other fort ever turn out to be such a colossal folly. This titanic project, planned for heroic deeds, was carried to completion only to serve, for a while, the most wretched ends, then be abandoned, and allowed to become a vast and desolate derelict whose very name has only recently been rescued from complete oblivion.

But the mystery of its abandonment is not as great as the mystery of its building. Who ordered it built? Who chose the lost little island—barren, waterless, hurricane-swept—for its site? Who supplied the mountains of material and the army of workmen for this stupendous white elephant?

Nobody knows. Some forgotten file in the government archives may hold the secret, but there are almost no public records. Fort Jefferson is just there, blocking out the horizon with its grim and inscrutable presence, giving shelter only to the ghosts of prisoners who perished there by the hundreds, and to the sea birds that have come in to take possession of this vastest ruin in all America.

Visualize, if you can, a huge fort such as this, isolated in the sea with scarcely another human trace from horizon to horizon. Now cover it with half a century of rust and decay, and strew it with the wreckage left by a score of hurricanes—and you will see the sight that greeted me at dawn on the day my fishing boat carried me out into the Gulf of Mexico.

I knew in advance, more or less, what I was to find. But I was still not prepared to come upon so foreign-looking a structure within the boundaries of my own country. It was difficult to believe that this could possibly be part of Monroe County, Florida, U.S.A.... perhaps I’d drifted off my course to one of the twelfth-century Crusadic strongholds in Syria, or upon some Norman keep from which William the Conqueror set sail for England. Bastion and battlement, salient towers, crenellations, ramparts—all anchored immovably to the coral key, and all surrounded by a moat and a breakwater wall that wars perpetually with the waves.

The reason the government chose this location for a fort in 1846, is obvious. At that time one of the greatest trade routes for American shipping lay through the Straits of Florida and right past the Dry Tortugas, islands which command (as a glance at the map will show) the northern entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. The military authorities in President Polk’s administration decided that this rich avenue of trade must be protected by the greatest of forts—against the Spaniards in Cuba, or any enemy who might come from over the Atlantic. It would dominate the entire Gulf region.

So a super-fortress was designed, apparently in secrecy. And despite the fearful obstacles which the situation offered, the foundations were laid, deep down in the coral rock, at the very edge of the sea. Just above the waves two huge stories of brick arose, built around a fifteen-acre parade ground, solid-faced on the seaward side except for the cannon-ports, but opening into galleries and alcoves toward the court. On the roof were placed the heaviest artillery, bomb-proof shelters and powder magazines, all protected behind masonry barricades.

Almost invariably, in the construction of other castles and forts, stone and earthworks are extensively used. But Fort Jefferson is a mountain of solid brickwork—brick pillars twenty feet in diameter, brick walls ten feet thick, avenues of ponderous brick arches staunch enough to support a thousand tons of brick ramparts and to uphold fifteen-foot, fifteen-inch guns, the very firing of which must have shaken the entire coral key.

And remember, all these bricks, along with tons upon tons of general supplies, had to be brought by sea all the way from Delaware Bay and the Hudson River.

Before setting foot in this strange sea-castle, I had my boat sail completely around the walls. No matter from which side one approaches the fort, it turns a stern, forbidding face. Each of the six sides is five hundred feet long, fifty high and fifty thick. At each of the six corners a huge squat tower bulges out, from which the tower-garrison could rake the wall and moat. From each wall three rows of guns, seventy to a side, once glared down so menacingly that few enemies ever dared come in range of them. Most of the guns are gone, stolen by Cubans for scrap iron, but the biggest ones still remain on the topmost ramparts and reveal clearly what a Gibraltar of defiant strength Fort Jefferson once was.

My fishermen landed me at the crumbling iron dock. This leads to the moat of still water thirty feet wide, separated from the sea itself by a six-foot wall. Across this moat is a wooden bridge, which gives access to the castle’s only entrance. In former times a drawbridge was raised and lowered here, but that is gone. Across the top of the portal, carved in the granite facing of the arch, is the ironic name ARCADIA.

Alone, into this frowning and deserted place, I found my way. Within, the view is anything but Arcadian. One comes upon the parade ground, a thousand feet across, strewn, choked, with the most appalling wreckage. In 1898, at the beginning of the Spanish-American War, Fort Jefferson, because of its proximity to Cuba, was temporarily re-occupied. New and elaborate three-story barracks for officers and men were erected on the parade ground, and for a brief period inhabited. But the terrible hurricane of 1919 shook these buildings, long deserted and dilapidated, in its teeth, and strewed their wreckage all over the great court. The weeds and cactus thickets then seized upon these hillocks of debris, and soon a miniature jungle spread across the ruins.

But the original fort is undisturbed, except for the missing guns and the trifling damage done by looters. Down its endless corridors of arched and groined brick rooms I walked, noting that each room enclosed a single gun emplacement, which commanded the sea through a port. Signs of prison occupation were all about—names, drawings, comments, scratched and painted on the walls. And dates: 1852, 1865, 1898. There is no plaster, no wood, no glass—just brick.

By means of worn spiral stairs, I climbed to the ramparts overhanging the moat. Here the enormous cannon, the fallen giants, are strewn about, dismounted and half buried in the sand. For three-fifths of a mile I made the circuit of these battlements. Always the moat was below, fifty feet beneath the parapet. In the old days this moat was stocked with sharks. These man-eaters kept enemies out—and prisoners in.

At the time of my visit, there was not another human being in sight, My boatmen had put out to sea again to fish. Was the stillness then so noticeable, so disconcerting? Far from it. A constant, a strident, a nerve-shattering noise filled the air: the screaming of a million sea birds.

These birds swarm around the fort, in flocks, in clouds, terns and noddies flying swiftly overhead and down into the shallow sea to dive upon the schools of minnows which darken the water with their countless multitudes. The birds do not live within the fort itself, but on a small island, Bird Key, a government preserve, a hundred yards away. When later I visited the islet I could scarcely walk for the thousands of eggs and chicks strewn across the sand. The birds have never learned to be afraid of men. I stroked the neck of a mother noddy sitting upon her single egg. She closed her eyes and purred like a kitten. I walked through a flock of terns that carpeted the beach. They wouldn’t even move out of my way.

But tame as both species are, they keep up their screaming day and night. One would have to shout to be heard above the tumult. The air, the land, the sea, vibrate with darting frantic wings and petulant piercing cries. One becomes dizzy and deafened after a few minutes’ visit to this whirling world of shrieking birds.

Fort Jefferson is a good friend to all these creatures. To it, as to a beacon light, the terns and noddies steer their course each spring. They will not nest elsewhere. They are safe here, and they know it, protected by the grim walls and the tumbled cannon of Fort Jefferson.

As I continued my exploration of the ramparts and battlements, a hot wind from the Gulf beat against my head. I could look out over the water and see ten thousand whitecaps dancing in the sun. And the wind and the waves made me think of the tropical hurricanes that have so frequently swept across this region.

What a fearful battle such a storm must bring about. One hundred and twenty miles out from the mainland, the fort, shunned and desolate, has to face the full fury of the tempest.

Imagine the Gulf, hurricane-driven, raging in the lightning-split darkness against this citadel in the sea. The six-foot brick frame at the outer edge of the moat only serves to trip the giant rollers. They dash across the moat, and fling themselves with a roar against the fortress’ walls, sending their bursting spray up over the cannon on the battlements. And the ally of the waves—the wind—racing past at a hundred miles an hour, tears at the huge unyielding blockhouse, determined to blast it from the coral key.

The outer walls themselves face the onslaught unperturbed as granite cliffs. But inside the court, the storm seizes the wrecked barracks, and flings flying timbers, bits of roofs, bricks, furniture, tree-tops, cactus plants, weeds, into a wild maelstrom that beats against the imprisoning inner walls. The wreckage falls to the ground, and is seized again and flung again and shattered again for the hundredth time.

And the terns and the noddies—what happens to them when the hurricanes blow? Do they stay on and struggle with the storm, or do they sense the approach of doom and hurry from its path?

Perhaps no man can tell, for when the barometer drops and the skies blacken, every fisherman or trader runs for his life away from this shallow, reef-strewn, harborless chain of coral islets. The hulks of a hundred ships, from fishing boats to Atlantic liners, lying in pieces on the ocean floor and visible through the clear water, remind seafarers of the deadliness of Fort Jefferson and its neighborhood when these tropic twisters strike the Gulf.

And so, year after year, the fort fights its wild battles in utter loneliness. The wind howls and the waves crash against its sides, and the garrison of ghosts flees, panic-stricken, back into the deepest dungeon. Only when the sea is calm again can one approach the battlefield and view the desolation. One finds the wreckage in the parade ground smashed to smaller bits than before, every tree and bush uprooted, bodies of dead terns in the corners of the court, dead fish floating in the moat where they have fallen after being hurled by the waves against the walls.

For eighty years Fort Jefferson has withstood every assault. But like the very rock which water wears away, the fort’s defenses are breaking down. On two of the six sides, the storms have driven great holes in the moat’s outer rim, and filled the moat with sand. On these sides the great fortress is now left unprotected—the front-line trench is gone. How many years more can the brick walls themselves, solid and massive though they are, hold back the relentless sea?

It was not the hurricanes, however, that caused the government to abandon this military monster. Scarcely was it finished when the builders realized that for all practical purposes it was going to be a complete failure. For two reasons: the Straits of Florida here are a hundred miles wide, while the fort’s largest guns could not command even a tenth of that distance; and there was no harbor nearer than Key West where supporting naval ships could anchor. Terrifyingly armed though it was, it could dominate only a small radius of shallow sea, so that hostile men-of-war could, and did, pass safely by, well out of range even when they were in sight.

Useless as a fort, perhaps—but as a prison Fort Jefferson was, theoretically, ideal. And from 1860 to 1870, the Federal Government, beset with more political and military enemies than during any other period of its history, had need of just such a penal island, escape-proof and isolated.

So, along with the six hundred soldiers in the garrison, all kinds of Federal prisoners (numbering at times more than a thousand) were sent to fill up the great vaulted compartments of the fort. Escape, with the shark-filled moat to face, and the open sea, was almost impossible. Yet to remain was nearly as dangerous, for within the prison there lurked an unrecognized enemy—the mosquito. In the rain-water cisterns beneath the fort, these villainous insects bred, and scattered their terrible yellow-fever germs.

Fort Jefferson stands today as a monument to yellow fever. Not the Confederates, nor the Spaniards, nor the hurricanes, ever daunted the garrison or caused the loss of a single life. But the mosquito annihilated thousands of prisoners and guards alike, turned the fort into a pestilential death-trap, and finally drove the few survivors back to Florida.

Into this morgue, in July, 1865, one of the most tragic figures in American history was delivered—Dr. Samuel Mudd.

On April fifteenth of that year, at four o’clock in the morning, two men rode up on horseback to Dr. Mudd’s house in southern Maryland, thirty miles below Washington. One of the men had a broken leg and was suffering intensely. Dr. Mudd skilfully set the leg and bound it in splints. Being a kindly, hospitable man as well as a good doctor, he persuaded his patient to rest the remainder of the night in the guest-room. The next morning the two travelers, having paid their bill, rode away.

Because of this merciful act, Dr. Mudd was subsequently arrested and charged with being an accomplice in the most monstrous of crimes, the murder of Abraham Lincoln. The traveler with the broken leg was John Wilkes Booth. He had broken it five hours before, as he leaped from the President’s box onto the stage of Ford’s Theater, after firing the fatal shot. Escaping despite his accident into Maryland, he sought frantically for a doctor, and found one.

Dr. Mudd insisted, indignantly and consistently, that he knew nothing of the conspiracy. For him the suffering patient, heavily disguised, was just one more anonymous case, which he had treated professionally as was his duty. But the military prosecution, vengeful beyond all reason and looking for victims, guilty or not, to throw to the mob, made a sacrifice of Dr. Mudd. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Fort Jefferson.

Arriving at this even then notorious place, Dr. Mudd was singled out for especially harsh discipline. He was kept chained in his cell and guarded by blacks.

Two years of this he endured, then once more the yellow fever struck. As usual, everyone went down before it. A most graphic account of this plague of 1867 is given by Dr. Mudd himself in his letters to his wife—letters mailed from the prison. He reported that the disease spread so quickly that the afflicted died faster than they could be buried. Bird Key was turned into a cemetery. There the noddies built their nests in coffins uncovered by the waves, and the terns laid their eggs among the corpses and the skeletons. At one time, every officer in the place was stricken. Nobody knew the cause of the epidemic, nobody knew the cure. Everybody lived in terror, wondering if he were going to be the next victim of the scourge.

Discipline and guard duty were abandoned, for the guards were all dead or dying. The fort doctor perished—one doctor with a thousand delirious patients—and Dr. Mudd, chained in the depths of his cell, volunteered to replace him, and was accepted.

Day and night he worked. He had the gun ports bricked up “to keep out the miasma from the moat,” not knowing he was only keeping the mosquitoes in. The mosquitoes finally overtook Dr. Mudd himself, but he did not die. He lived, and as soon as possible returned to his ministrations.

By the time the pestilence had passed, Dr. Mudd had become a hero among those few who survived. They prepared a long petition requesting his liberation, and sent it to Washington. But Washington had not yet recovered from its misdirected fury. Instead of liberty, the authorities sent back orders for the courageous and self-sacrificing doctor to be put back into his cell and his chains.

Is it to be wondered that his next letter to his wife was a bitter cry of complete despair?

Meanwhile, Mrs. Mudd had been as tireless in her efforts to liberate her husband from his prison, as he had been in his efforts to relieve the sick inside it. And in 1869 she succeeded.

The doctor, back in his Maryland home, lived another thirteen years, more or less an invalid, but serving to the last whoever called at his door.

I had read this tragic story before my visit to the Dry Tortugas.^[1] How grimly real it seemed, now that the actual setting was around me. I found the Doctor’s cell; the portholes he had bricked up; and I spent half the afternoon deciphering the inscriptions scrawled on the walls, wondering if some of them were not the only epitaphs of prisoners whose fate was no less tragic than that of Dr. Mudd.

When darkness made it dangerous to continue my wanderings about the corridors, where hidden openings might drop me into the cisterns below, I mounted again to the ramparts faintly luminous beneath the stars.

How many ghosts the starlight evoked as the shadows crept across the ruins.... I could not persuade myself that Fort Jefferson, where so much suffering has been endured, where so many have died in anguish, is not a haunted place. The night-flying, night-crying terns were still darting about the walls. But at night their cries sounded subdued and distressful, like the complaints of slaves dragging cannon to the battlements, like the far-off moans of convicts dying in their subterranean cells. What eerie things one can imagine when watching and listening, alone, in the nighttime, on this island of the dead.

Suddenly a mosquito drifted past my ear, whining its murderous little song—the song of death that killed Fort Jefferson.

This was reality ... the tiny assassins still ruled the domain they had conquered. Shivering, I retreated through the blackness, down the spiral steps, along the black arches, across the shining moat, away from the portals of Arcadia, and told my fishermen, waiting in their boat, to turn their prow toward Florida and take me back to the land of living men.

[1]	A fascinating account of Fort Jefferson and Bird Key is given by George Allan England in Isles of Romance, published by The Century Co., 1929.