History Calls on the Dry Tortugas

One after another we came upon them--half a dozen little piles of feathers and bits of flesh that, hours before, had been migrating cuckoos trying to return to the North American mainland. Others, still alive but exhausted and near starvation, clung pathetically to the innermost branches of shrubs, trying to make themselves unnoticeable to the falcons and hawks perched in the treetops, watching for the flash of movement that would signal the opportunity for another easy kill and meal.

Until that moment, the Dry Tortugas, a clutch of tiny islands 70 miles into the Gulf of Mexico from Key West--and 70 miles from electricity, telephones, television and any source of fresh water--had been for me just what a trip brochure had described them as: “. . . among the most tranquil places we know.”

Besides the spectacle of birds I had come to see--hundreds of thousands of them, familiar migrants headed for summer nesting sites across the United States and Canada, as well as exotic West Indian seabirds that never come to the mainland--there is snorkeling and scuba diving among coral reefs and wrecked ships, secluded swimming and abundant fishing.

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There are flaming sunrises and phosphorescent sunsets, and a canopy of high-wattage stars over an abandoned but still majestic 19th-Century Ft. Jefferson, the largest brick fort in the Western Hemisphere. There are artifacts and ghosts of nearly five centuries of history, from the time of the islands’ discovery by Ponce de Leon in 1513 through their use as pirates’ hideaways during 300 years of Spanish rule and, later, as an American military outpost before they became a wildlife refuge in 1908 and a national monument in 1935.

But I knew too that, for a dark period of their brief military use, this hauntingly beautiful fort and islands now uninhabited by humans had been a devil’s island of suffering and sickness and death when, in 1867, an epidemic of yellow fever ravaged its Union troops and their prisoners, most of them deserters from the Union Army.

I had read how Dr. Samuel Mudd, the fort’s prize prisoner, mistakenly convicted as a conspirator in the assassination of Abra ham Lincoln for setting the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, had courageously worked for three months, nursing the sick and finally quelling the epidemic, but not until it had stricken 270 of the 300-man garrison and killed 38 people, including the post surgeon and his 6-year-old son.

I had gone to the top deck of our boat long after dark the first night, following a full day of enjoyment watching trees full of birds, and walks through the old fort and its dark passageways and sun-baked parade grounds. As our boat’s crew put out fishing lines to catch the next day’s meal, I looked at the silhouette of the fort, looming silently out of the softly lapping water, and then at the dark mass of a barren island of sand a few hundred yards away called Hospital Key, where the worst of the yellow-fever cases were taken to die. I tried to imagine what it had been like for Mudd and the others there 125 years before.

Fresh from the Miami International Airport and the commerce-driven Florida Keys, I couldn’t, although in an exhibit in the fort earlier in the day, I had come upon a letter in which Mudd, even before the yellow fever struck, sent home to Maryland a desperate account of his life in the Dry Tortugas: “My legs and ankles are swollen and sore . . . Imagine my gait, with a bucket and a broom and a guard, walking around from one corner of the fort to another, sweeping and sanding down the bastions.”

But finding the dead and dying cuckoos gave me a glimpse of nature’s power to turn the tables with isolated bits of terrain that provide little or nothing to sustain most forms of life.

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Jeff, one of our guides, drove the point home the next day, with a sobering response when one of our group exulted at the fact that we were still seeing small flocks of the colorful migrating warblers that had filled the trees the day we arrived. “Most of them are doomed, unfortunately,” Jeff said. They had been forced down onto the islands by bad weather three days earlier and now were trapped--but didn’t know it. There was little for them to eat and less to drink.

“Birds are not creatures with a lot of reserves,” Jeff said. “If those that are still here try to leave now, they won’t have the energy and they’ll die on the way. If they stay here, they’ll be unable to replenish their reserves and rebuild their energy. They’re doomed.”

But what about those tens of thousands of terns and pelicans making such a hearty ruckus the next island over? And the hawks and merlins and kestrels, fully alert in those treetops and poised for attack? Well, the former eat fish and squid, which are there for the taking, and the latter do just fine with weakened migrating birds. They belonged there, but the migrant birds--and humans, who had tried sporadically with no success over centuries to live on the inhospitable islands--were well advised to do no more than visit, bringing what they needed to live on and leaving before it ran out.

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The Dry Tortugas, which became a national park last October, are no resort. Except for a handful of primitive campsites, there are no sleeping accommodations and non-campers spend the nights on their boats. There are no food concessions, not even vending machines. The only public amenities provided by the National Park Service and the half-dozen rangers who live in a refurbished portion of the fort are two water fountains with rainwater from cisterns and saltwater flush toilets.

“You must provide for your own existence,” a Park Service leaflet bluntly warns. “No housing, water, meals, bathing facilities, fuel or supplies are available. You must bring it all with you.” There also are no trash cans. You get the message.

I had been attracted to the Dry Tortugas in theory for several years, but had always been put off by the Spartan conditions of public boat travel to them, described variously in brochures I’d gathered as “college-dorm-style” sleeping accommodations, or “a throwback to summer camp days.” I could have taken one of the 20-minute charter seaplane day flights, but that seemed like cheating--and i wanted to look for birds en route.

In the last couple of years, though, I’d detected a shift of tone, however slight, in the brochures’ descriptions. “Moderately cramped,” one now said, with what I took to be emphasis on the “moderately.” Another company’s brochure spoke of “on-board showers and air-conditioning.” It seemed time to go. A small number of tour companies offer birding excursions to the Dry Tortugas, mostly during the spring migration months of April and May, and several others provide fishing, scuba or snorkeling charters much of the year. I chose a trip in early May that included three days in the Tortugas on a 45-passenger vessel called the Florida Fish Finder, plus two days of land birding and sightseeing in the Florida Keys and a half-day warmup cruise out of Islamorada, Fla.

When our group boarded the Fish Finder at Key West, the sun was only a sliver of red on the horizon, the sea was dead flat and the boat gave promise of living up to its brochure billing. It had (in landlubber’s terms) a kitchen, dining area and sleeping accommodations inside and, on top, a spacious deck with visibility in all directions--a necessity for satisfactory bird-watching. Except for a barbecue at Ft. Jefferson, we ate our meals on the boat, one of them featuring a tasty cobia, a large, spindle-shaped fish that the crew had caught the first day, with spaghetti, fresh vegetables and homemade Key lime pie.

Bunks were stacked three high, floor to ceiling. I had a bottom bunk and mercifully didn’t learn until after my last night in it that I had been sharing it with a six-inch chameleonlike lizard. Another passenger had spotted it, resting on my pillow after I’d gotten up, and a young naturalist into such things identified it as “a Cuban anole--harmless and quite common in southern Florida.” It turned out to have its sleeping quarters between my mattress and the wall.

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For birders, the chief excitement of a trip to the Dry Tortugas is the opportunity to see several species of seabirds that are abundant there but are rarely, or never, seen from the U.S. mainland. Some, such as the “magnificent frigate bird,” a black, sepulchral-looking creature with a long, hooked beak, a streaming, forked tail and an eight-foot wing span, can also be seen on Florida’s coasts, and we saw them in growing numbers, soaring, sometimes seemingly suspended motionless, as we neared the Tortugas, one of their prime nesting sites. Some, but not all, of us were hoping to witness a stomach-churning ploy that frigate birds use to get a meal. They attack a flying bird that has just swallowed a fish, force it to regurgitate, then catch the product in midair and consume it. We didn’t see any of that, but the backup nature-in-the-raw show was watching a pomarine jaeger, a tough, gull-like predatory seabird, attack a handsome great egret in the air, force it into the water and kill it.

We passed a swimming loggerhead sea turtle, for which Ponce de Leon had named the Tortugas, where they were abundant at the time, and squadrons of flying fish erupting from the sea. I timed one of them as it stayed airborne for 13 seconds--one more second than the Wright brothers’ first flight.

When we saw a pair of masked boobies, gannet-like seabirds, circling off our bow, we knew we were close to the Tortugas, and within a few minutes, Ft. Jefferson was visible.

Garden Key, the island that Ft. Jefferson virtually covers, lies inside a protective cluster of shoals, sandbars and coral reefs that provide nesting sites and feeding grounds for the thousands of birds that breed there, most of them on Bush and Long keys--narrow, sandy islands that extend eastward from Ft. Jefferson and together are about a mile long.

The first, distant impression of the two keys is that they are covered by swarms of insects. Then it becomes apparent these are thousands of birds, managing somehow not to collide as they swirl just above the surface, where other thousands are scrunched down on nests in the sand and in the low, mean vegetation or in the scrubby mangrove and bay cedar trees. Closer still, the squawking can be heard--constant, raucous, a sound that we were not without in the daylight hours for the next three days.

There’s territorial order, it turns out. The 7,000 brown noddy terns use one section of Bush Key, the 70,000 sooty terns use another, frigate birds use Long Key and masked boobies use Hospital Key. Standing huddled together like nervous penguins in a little weed patch at the tip of Bush Key were 20 cattle egrets, resting in their migration--or trying to, amid the hubbub. They were gone the next day. Humans are barred from the nesting islands. “Island closed. Nesting area. Do not approach,” signs warn.

We unloaded in early afternoon at the Park Service’s small dock at Ft. Jefferson, and our boat then anchored in the sheltered harbor, among 30 smaller fishing vessels and pleasure craft.

After a quick look around the grounds at the familiar migrants resting there--this tree full of Cape May warblers, that one with a flock of blackpoll warblers, a swath of parade ground covered with bobolinks (migratory blackbirds), ovenbirds pecking the gravel at my feet--I decided to escape the scorching sun and explore the shady interior of the fort.

A self-guiding tour takes the visitor through most of the imposing, open-air hexagonal structure, surrounded by a moat and jutting out into the sea. The fort is three stories high, built with 16 million bricks brought by ship from Pensacola, 500 miles north, and is more than half a mile in circumference, encompassing a 10-acre parade ground and courtyard. In all, it was to have 450 gun positions on its upper levels, to control the chief navigation route from the Atlantic into the Gulf of Mexico.

Vast cisterns with a capacity of 1.5 million gallons--rainwater and distilled seawater--were built to provide fresh water for the 1,500 soldiers expected to use the fort.

But by the time the structure was completed, it was a white elephant. The development of rifled cannon, which could penetrate its eight-foot-thick masonry walls, had made it obsolete for combat. After the Civil War, Ft. Jefferson was used only infrequently by the military, as a coaling station in the 1890s--the last stop made by the battleship Maine before it went to Cuba, where it was blown up, touching off the Spanish-American War--and briefly later as one of the U.S. Navy’s first wireless stations.

Most of the interior, including the grim cell where Mudd spent four years before being pardoned, is open to visitors, as is much of the top, but crumbling stones, holes and gaps in the parapet can make the walk perilous. The long-term plan for the fort, a ranger explained, is “stabilization, not restoration,” and only “as long as the money is there.” Current studies show it “should stand indefinitely, barring earthquake or hurricanes,” she said. That was good news, but meanwhile it was 95 degrees and we didn’t even have a breeze, so several of the group headed for the island’s 100-yard white-sand beach, while others borrowed snorkeling gear at the ranger’s office. Four of us boarded a skiff that could maneuver close to the islands of nesting birds.

Among the 7,000 brown noddies, one black noddy had been seen--an insignificant difference to most people, but exciting to birders because of the species’ relative rarity. Earlier in the day there had been a stampede out of the fort when someone shouted that the black noddy was visible in a high-powered telescope on the dock. I didn’t run because experience has taught me that usually the next thing I hear will be, “It flew.”

“It flew,” dejected people were telling me minutes later as I saw them returning from the direction of the telescope. So I was going out by boat to get as close to the island as shallow waters and the boatsman’s conscience in the face of the stern warning signs would let us. Within a surprisingly short time we had spotted the black noddy and, satisfied, we sailed on to the next island, where a remarkable courtship display by two frigate birds was under way.

Seeking to attract a spouse, the male frigate bird inflates what looks like a reddish wattle into a brilliant scarlet pouch almost as big as he is, edged with black polka dots and extending from him like an air bag billowing out of a steering wheel. And as if that, in itself, weren’t enough, he drums on the top of the inflated pouch with his long bill, then clacks upper and lower bills together, all the while tossing his head--for hours on end if no female takes up his offer.

The day before we left, we sailed west four miles to Loggerhead Key, the largest of the Dry Tortugas and the only one heavily wooded--mostly non-native palms and Australian pines planted in the 19th Century. The island is about a mile long and a couple hundred yards wide, with a lighthouse, a beach, what is said to be the Tortugas’ best snorkeling waters and, enjoying pride of place on a modest rise of ground, the Coconut Grove Pool Hall, a wooden structure just big enough to house one well-worn pool table that had no takers at the moment.

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Trails crisscrossed Loggerhead Key, penetrating the woods, climbing the low-lying dunes and hugging the grass line above the sandy beaches. It was in these open, vulnerable stretches that we found the remains of the cuckoos killed by the island’s grim executioners.

We timed our return to Ft. Jefferson to allow ourselves to moor a few hundred yards off Hospital Key for sunset, no doubt one of the most tranquil happy-hour settings any of us had experienced. Where dying yellow-fever victims had once been shipped to end their days, three dozen masked boobies now gather nightly to roost in the bare sand.

As dusk came, we watched these elegant, goose-sized seabirds, the dazzling white of their bodies contrasting starkly with jet-black wing tips and facial masks, wing home like commuters, after a day of plummeting into the sea for food. It was beautiful there, in the dying light, as Hospital Key and Ft. Jefferson, in the distance, were turning again into dark silhouettes. It had been a good trip, and tomorrow we would be going back to a world that now seemed even more distant. For three days, the conversation had been virtually nonstop bird talk, the common bond that had brought us here together. But now things were winding down and reentry time was near.

As the sun disappeared, and with it the prospect of seeing any more birds, a dozen conversations on a dozen different subjects suddenly broke out. A Franciscan priest and a Christian brother made plans for a private Mass on our return to Key West the next day, a Sunday. People who, at the trip’s start, had warily eyed an 82-year-old woman, the oldest member of our group, skeptical as to whether she was up to the trip, were commending her spirit and stamina, especially in light of the broken arm she had suffered three days before setting out.

In a quiet corner of the deck, as the stars came out and Hospital Key faded into darkness, an Easterner and a Texan, who had talked of little more than birds since the trip began, shifted conversational gears. “The Gatlin Brothers sang with the Ft. Worth Symphony once,” the Texan was explaining.

GUIDEBOOK

Flocking to the Dry Tortugas

Getting there: The Dry Tortugas can be reached by commercial seaplanes and boats, many of the latter with living accommodations aboard, as well as by a number of companies that specialize in bird-watching tours. The prime birding period is April and May, but other recreational activities, including fishing, snorkeling, swimming, sunbathing and historical studies, continue year-round. While individual travel to the Dry Tortugas by air is available, travelers would have no means of visiting islands other than Garden Key, the site of Ft. Jefferson as well as beaches and coral formations, and would have to arrive fully provisioned for camping and meals.

A number of tour companies offer package birding excursions by boat to the Dry Tortugas, most of which include some transportation, accommodations at sea, guides and some meals, but generally not land accommodations. Most of these excursions are booked far in advance. It is not too soon, however, for travelers to inquire about 1994 schedules (or hope for openings on this year’s trips due to last-minute cancellations). Among the companies:

* Field Guides (P.O. Box 160723, Austin, Tex. 78716, telephone 512-327-4953), which offers a five-day trip (this year, May 6-10) for $735, double occupancy, including round-trip transportation from Miami, ground transportation, accommodations aboard the 100-foot Yankee Freedom (which sleeps 40 in semi-private bunk rooms) and most meals.

* Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (P.O. Box 33008, Austin, Tex. 78764, tel. 800-328-8368 or 512-328- 5221), which offers a four-day trip that costs $535, double occupancy, including round-trip transportation from Key West, ground transportation, accommodations aboard the Yankee Freedom and most meals.

* Wings Inc. (P.O. Box 31930, Tucson, Ariz. 85751, tel. 602-749-1967, fax 602-749-3175), which I used for my six-day trip out of Miami, with stops in the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas in April and early May for $350, including accommodations aboard ship, but not meals (although full galley service is available).

* Yankee Fleet (P.O. Box 5903, Key West, Fla. 33041, tel. 800-634-0939 or 305-294-7009) offers three-day bird-watching trips through May out of Key West, and trips and charters for other purposes throughout the year. Many of its vessels have accommodations for living on board.

Where to stay: Private boats may moor at the Ft. Jefferson dock for two hours maximum daily, during daylight hours only, but may anchor overnight in either of two harbors at Ft. Jefferson.

Ten primitive campsites at Dry Tortugas National Park are available. Groups of more than 10 must obtain a permit in advance from the National Park Service, Everglades National Park, P.O. Box 279, Homestead, Fla. 33030, tel. (305) 242-7700. Campers will then be instructed to mail in their reservations directly to Dry Tortugas National Park. Campers must take all provisions with them, including fresh water. The campground provides picnic tables and grills and the dock provides saltwater flush toilets but no sinks or showers.

For more information: Short lists of companies providing commercial amphibious plane flights to the Dry Tortugas and charter fishing or diving boats are available from the National Park Service, Everglades National Park, P.O. Box 279, Homestead, Fla. 33030, tel. (305) 242-7700.

More extensive lists of companies providing air and sea trips to the Dry Tortugas from Key West, Marathon, Key Largo, Naples, Ft. Myers and St. Petersburg are available from Chambers of Commerce at these addresses: 3330 Overseas Highway, Marathon, Fla. 33050, tel. (800) 842-9580 or (305) 743-5417; 402 Wall St., Key West, Fla. 33040, tel. (305) 294-2587, and 3620 N. Tamiami Trail, Naples, Fla. 33940, tel. (813) 262-6141.