Queen Takes a Break From Tour to Visit Florida Island

Queen Elizabeth II became an honorary citizen of the Florida Keys during a visit Saturday to a remote island fort in the Gulf of Mexico.

Monroe County Mayor Wilhelmina Harvey, a 79-year-old scuba diver, gave the British monarch a Queen conch shell to commemorate the occasion.

“It’s the prettiest of all the conch species,” Harvey said.

The royal yacht Britannia was anchored a few hundred yards off the coral rock island, part of the Dry Tortugas chain some 70 miles west of Key West. The island is surrounded by a red brick fort used as a prison during the Civil War.

Discouraged by hurricanes and yellow fever epidemics, the Army and Navy abandoned it in the late 1800s. It is now a national park, uninhabited except for a dozen rangers and unreachable except by boat or seaplane.

The two-day sail aboard the 412-foot Britannia was to be a restful interlude between last week’s busy ceremonial agenda in Washington and Miami and the second half of the trip, which will take the queen to Tampa, Fla., Texas and Kentucky.

The queen asked to visit the monument after learning that Dr. Samuel Mudd had been imprisoned there for treating the broken leg of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Accompanied by Prince Philip, who wore a Panama hat and Hawaiian-style print shirt, the vacationing queen came ashore in a 42-foot launch.

Harvey greeted her on the dock, giving the queen a framed certificate declaring her an “honorary Conch and citizen of the fabulous Florida Keys.”

“Most of us are of English descent in the Keys,” Harvey said.

Harvey presented the prized Queen conch shell to the monarch, having predicted beforehand: “She’ll be thrilled beyond all repair.”

As the queen crossed the fish-filled moat to enter the fort, she was greeted by a burst of applause from some 70 campers, most clad in bathing suits and T-shirts.

Braving the blazing tropical heat, the queen went without her customary hat and gloves. She wore a red, yellow and blue flowered cotton dress, sandals and nylon stockings, appearing more casual than she normally does.

The queen’s entourage, which included British Ambassador Sir Antony Ackland and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and their wives, followed the tour with a picnic lunch under the palm and gumbo limbo trees on neighboring Loggerhead Key.