The Dry Tortugas

Fort Jefferson National Park

The Tortugas are small sand islands that were discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513. He saw all the nesting turtles (tortugas) and lack of water and called the small island group the Dry Tortugas.

The Dry Tortugas National Park Ferry leaves Key West at 8AM daily. Its a fast catamaran  that covers the seventy miles west to Fort Jefferson in a little over two hours. The trip includes breakfast, lunch and snorkeling gear. You pass the Marquesas island group on the way to the fort. That's where Mel Fisher recovered half a billion in treasure from the Atocha in the late 1970s.



The three level fort is surprising in its size. It is 45 feet tall with eight foot thick walls. There were an estimated 16 million bricks  used in the fort's construction. The yellow bricks came from Pensacola before the Civil War. The red bricks were shipped from Maine during the war. It is the largest masonry fort in the Western hemisphere.

These flowers grow wild next to the fort's salt water moat.



You can also reach the fort by seaplane out of Key West. Both the boat and the plane offer the option of camping in the sand and returning at a later date. .

This is the "hot shot" oven where 15 inch iron cannonballs were heated to cherry red temperatures. They were fired by using wet packing and a light powder load. Even after skipping in the water a few times they were hot enough to start a serious fire on a wooden ship. The light powder load kept the shot from burrowing too deeply so that it would have access to air for the fire it was intended to create.

After the unfinished fort was abandoned in 1875, the Navy still used it for a coaling station. It was the last stop of the battleship "Maine" before it blew up in the harbour in Havana. The fort takes up most of the island. I went snorkeling in the ruins of the coaling dock.  You can see these on the extreme left, next to a concrete pad, although they are partially cut off in this shot.

The fort was under construction from 1847 to 1875. It was never completed. Much of the work was done by slaves before the war. The two openings in the brick below lead to one of the many cisterns that were built into the fort and designed to hold 1.5 million gallons of fresh water. Most of these cisterns sprung leaks and filled with salt water.

The lower level gun ports were finished and furnished with 140 cannon, including Rodman guns, the largest and most modern available. You can see the unfinished 2nd and 3rd level gun ports above the umbrella.

There are six "bastions"jutting out from the walls of the fort. These had gun ports providing lines of fire directly along the moat. The bastion cannon were filled with small shot to kill anyone crouching in the water below the gun ports.

The water in August is very warm.

Guns were never fired in anger from the fort. During the war the Union used the fort as a prison for its own soldiers. About 2,000 of these were confined there for rape, robbery, murder, cowardice, sleeping on guard duty, desertion, desertion in the face of the enemy, abandonment of post and so on...
 
The most famous prisoner was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg of the assassin John Wilkes Booth.  Mudd helped at the fort during a Yellow Fever outbreak and was eventually pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.

Higgs Beach

Key West, Florida

We like to swim at Higgs Beach when we visit Key West. There are unmarked graves here that have been located by ground penetrating radar.

In 1860 slave trade was illegal in the United States. Slave ships were considered pirates, subject to the death penalty. the American-owned vessels Wildfire, William, and Bogota sailed into the Caribbean attempting to deliver their human cargo to Cuba, they were seized, along with nearly 1500 African men, women, and children. The Africans were off loaded in Key West. Records indicate that 294 of them died as the result of the conditions suffered on the Atlantic crossing. They were buried here on Higgs Beach. The surviving Africans were shipped back to Liberia and hundreds more died  on the return trip.

In 1860 slaves were selling in Cuba and Brazil for as much as $1,200. That's roughly equivalent to $30,000 in 2016 money, so a ship with 500 slaves might have a value equal to $15,000,000 in current money. U.S. marshal at Key West, Fernando Moreno, erected housing and a hospital for the Africans using thousands of dollars of his own money.. The building was divided into nine large rooms so the sexes and children of different ages could be separated. Moreno petitioned Congress to be reimbursed but was unsuccessful.

In 2006 they fenced of this area where the ground penetrating radar found burial sites.\

It's hard to know what kind of truck this is under all the conch shells.

Mrs Phred on Stock Island.

The Hog's Breath Saloon on Duval Street.

People donate their old license plates to the local bars and pubs.

The Conch Republic

 Grassy Key, Florida 

The Conch Republic celebrates Independence Day every April 23 as part of a week-long festival of activities involving numerous businesses in Key West. The organization — a "Sovereign State of Mind", seeks only to bring more "Humor, Warmth and Respect" to a world in sore need of all three.

You can usually find conch in grassy sea beds in warm tropical waters. A Cayman Islander taught me to cook them chemically by soaking them overnight in lemon juice. Conch fritters and conch chowder are widely available in Key West as is Key lime pie. In case you wondered "what's a conch fritter?" please see my blog.

In 1982, the US Border Patrol set up a checkpoint at the choke point on the north end of the Keys and began to randomly search motorists’ cars for drugs and illegal aliens. This is not an unusual tactic for the border patrol. If you drive in Texas, New Mexico or Arizona today you will be stopped and interrogated somewhere on a road north of the Mexican border and subjected to similar scrutiny.

Once, coming out of Laredo, Texas at night, I was directed off the interstate and stopped in front of a blinding searchlight. The uniformed officers questioned me about smuggling parrots and waved me on. As I pulled past the searchlight, I saw several officers with assault rifles pointed at me and I was very glad that for once I had no parrots.

When the Border Patrol tried the same tactic in the Keys in 1982, the citizens resented both the inconvenience to themselves and the impact on tourism. After their protests went unheeded, the mayor of Key West decided that if Key West was to be treated as a foreign country, then it might as well be one.

The city announced its independence from the United States of America on April 23, 1982 and declared itself to be the Conch Republic. The Mayor visited the Admiral in charge of the Key West Naval Air Station and broke a loaf of stale Cuban bread over his head. After that, Key West immediately ceased hostilities and applied for a billion dollars in foreign aid from its giant neighbor to the north.

The Conch Republic still sells passports to tourists. The 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, bought a set of these online in early 2001, demonstrating both an abysmal lack of understanding of the American culture and a missing sense of humor.

 The Republic later annexed the old abandoned “seven-mile bridge” after a boatload of Cubans landed on it a few years later. The Coast Guard sent them back to Cuba after stating that since the bridge was severed on both ends, the refugees had to be returned under the "wet feet/dry feet" policy. Under that policy, refugees who make it to dry land can stay. Those intercepted at sea are returned to their country of origin. The courts overturned that theory but the Cubans were already back in Cuba.

In a place where invasive species like iguanas abound, the most common of all, the chicken, draws a lot of ire. They crow at all hours of the day and night and they strut the streets like they own it. While they don’t get any special protections in the Keys, residents cannot shoot them, and cruelty laws are enforced. In case anyone is wondering—these are wild, feral chickens and don’t make a good dinner. The chickens don’t have many natural predators..they do eat anything you drop on the restaurant floor.

The Fantasy Zone

Key West

The Fantasy Fest in Key West is held every year near Halloween. Some of the costumes (or lack thereof) are somewhat ribald. I've edited out the raunchiest of these, but there are some shots here that might not be suitable for viewing by those persons under 21 years of age.