Doctor Mudd and the Dry Tortugas

1993

    It is a dark, if not stormy night.  At 4:00 a.m. you are awakened by a knock on your door.  You are a trained physician, but you do not leap from  bed.  You do not actively practice medicine; you are a prosperous farmer, owning and working 500 acres of good Maryland soil.  Still locals sometimes come to you in an emergency.  The problem is, as you have often said, what seems to be an emergency to them, isn’t always an emergency to you.  You lie there waiting.  If they knock again, you will go downstairs and find out who it is and what they want.  But you hope that they will simply go away and come back later in the morning, or perhaps that one of your farm workers will hear the commotion and see what it is all about.

    After a few moments, the knocking resumes.  Louder, more insistent.  Time and chance and geography and fate will not be denied.  If you had just rolled over and covered your head with a pillow and gone back to sleep, nothing much would have been different, Dr. Mudd, and no one would remember you. 

    With a sigh, you swing your legs over the side of the bed, pull a robe over your bedclothes and slip into slippers, and shuffle down the stairs.  “I’m coming.  I’m coming,” you mutter to yourself.  You open the door and step into history, although of course you do not realize it at the moment.  You have also just won an extended all expense paid vacation to Florida.

    Two men are standing on your front porch.  One of them has a gray beard.  A muffler is pulled up to his face. 

    The younger man speaks, “We are strangers on our way to Washington.  My friend, Mr. Tyser, has injured his leg.  My name is Henslow.”

    You look down at the older man’s feet.   Even through the boots he is wearing, you can see the odd angle of his left ankle.

    “Come in.  I’m afraid you are going to have to try to get up the stairs.  Can you manage?”

    The man is in obvious pain, but he nods, and Henslow and you help him hop up to the second floor, where you cut away the boot and find a broken bone, which you splint.

    It is dawn by the time you are finished and there is work on the farm that requires your direction.   Before you go out to the fields, you tell the men that they can rest in your house until they are ready to continue their journey.  Something about the older man seems familiar, but you cannot place him.  When at midmorning you return, the men are gone.

    Soon enough you learn that their names are not Henslow and Tyser, but Davey Herold and John Wilkes Booth.   Months earlier, while he was reconnoitering escape routes, Booth bought two horses from you, which was why he disguised himself when, after his spur caught as he leapt to the stage from the Presidential box at the Ford Theater, he thought to seek medical treatment from you.   And too soon, to your complete amazement, you, Dr. Samuel Mudd, respected, humorless, prosperous, a man who minds his own business and wishes other people minded theirs, are, in a wave of public hysteria, convicted of conspiracy in the assassination of President Lincoln and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Federal Penitentiary at Albany, New York.  Secretary of State Stanton, the most powerful man in the newly re-United States, decides that you should be sent someplace even harsher than the prison at Albany, and has you packed aboard a ship for the passage south to Fort Jefferson, the Dry Tortugas, Florida. 

    People think that Key West is the end of the keys, but the chain of reefs and specks of sand and mangroves continues for another sixty miles.  The Dry Tortugas are the true southeast corner of the United States.

    The distance is easily made by powerboat during a single day, but  is just on the edge of a daylight run in a sailboat.  Not wanting to make the approach after dark, I stopped part-way at the Marquesas Keys.

    The Dry Tortugas consists of three major keys.  Major here is rather minor.  The largest is Loggerhead Key, which is only a mile long, and situated a mile west of Garden Key and Bush Key.  When I last visited the Dry Tortugas, Garden Key and Bush Key were separated by a narrow channel; but I have read that in the past few years the channel has been blocked by sand and the two are now one.     

    The main anchorage is in 20-25’ of water southeast of the narrowest part of the old channel and can still be reached by another pass from the southwest.  Though protected from the prevailing winds only by the off-lying reef, It was, in fair weather, an unexpectedly smooth anchorage.  It is also possible in settled weather to anchor to the west of Garden Key and on either side of Loggerhead Key.  In unsettled weather, there is no place to anchor at all.  The Army abandoned Fort Jefferson in 1876 after hurricane damage and advances in artillery design rendered it obsolete.

    Fort Jefferson is a red brick hexagon with walls four stories high in charming disrepair, occupying almost the entirety of misnamed Garden Key.  One small patch of land outside the fort is a campground.

    All of the Dry Tortugas are a National Monument.  It is a very relaxed monument.  The fort is open during daylight hours, and signs lead the visitor on a tour around the various levels.  Although Florida seceded from the Union, Fort Jefferson remained in Northern hands throughout the Civil War and served primarily as a prisoner of war camp.  Among the other bits of information I picked up on this self-guided tour, was that in the best tradition of government planning, the fort was never actually completed, because it was too heavy for Garden Key, and even as it was being built, it began to sink.

    Toward the end of the circuit of the fort, the signs lead you to Dr. Mudd’s cell.  Not planned as a prison, gun positions and other interior parts of the fort were converted to house prisoners.  The cell was reasonably cool when I was there in late April.  Water seeping through lime in the masonry is forming cave-like stalactites and stalagmites.

    Dr. Mudd was held at Fort Jefferson from 1866 to 1869.      In 1867 one of the frequent outbreaks of yellow fever, whose cause was then unknown, killed the prison doctor.  Dr. Mudd voluntarily treated the ill, although he wrote that he could not do much beyond offer words of comfort.  For this, and perhaps because the nation realized that he and other “co-conspirators” had been hastily and unjustly convicted, he was pardoned and allowed to return to his home in Maryland.

    During the spring and summer, visitors are not permitted to land on Bush Key, which is a breeding ground for seabirds.  Clouds of  terns, gulls, and frigate birds, rise from the island.  Their cries and calls and squabbles are constant background in the anchorage,  sometimes crackling like fire and sometimes sounding like a stream of rushing water.

    After you visit the fort and listen to the birds, what else is there to do at the Dry Tortugas?  The answer is not much, and that is its charm.  There is nothing to buy.  No tee-shirt shops; no trendy Key West restaurants offering pheasant with mango sauce.  The door to the bookstore in the fort has a sign saying that it “opens only on request.”

    If you want something in the Dry Tortugas, you  bring it with you.   Running out of tonic, I had to invent what may be the world’s worst drink:  no-name vodka in instant ice-tea, naturally with no ice.  Henceforth known as a very dry tortuga.   Later desperate experimentation proved that no-name vodka and air temperature Gatorade is better.

    You can fish.  I am not a fisherman, but obviously all those birds eat fish; and each evening sport-fishing boats came into the anchorage, so I assume the fishing is good.

    And you can swim and snorkel. 

    The best snorkeling I found was on the west side of Loggerhead Key, where the water is perfectly clear, and there is a nice reef complete with an interesting wreck in 10’ of water.

    But mostly what you do at the Dry Tortugas is simply be there.

    It is possible that I liked the place so much because of a serendipitous conjunction of place and time.  After spending much of the preceding year in New York City, the vast openness of sky and sea, with only a few bits of land, was just what I needed.

    I spent my last night in the Tortugas anchored off Loggerhead, watching creatures in the water below me:  an eponymous tortuga; two barracuda, who lingered in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s shadow; a stingray; many other fish; even a lobster, who I thought about having for dinner, but, remembering Dr. Mudd, decided he was minding his own business, so I should leave him alone and mind mine.

    The sun set over the open water to the west and the moon came up over the trees on the key to the east, and I thought:  this might just be the nicest place on the entire east coast. 

    Dr. Mudd would not agree. 

    But being able to leave when you want to does make a difference.