Written by his grandson Walton Stowell II, based on the original eulogy
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On behalf of my family – my mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins – this eulogy is a thankful expression of our collective thanks to Albert and the holy spirits who gave him life, and gave him to us.
Dr. Albert Manucy was a special man. Al was unusual not just because he was shorter and thinner than many men, or wore a jazzy Spanish Minorcan beret since the 1920s in Capitalist anti-Communist Florida, but because he was so accomplished in the field of historic preservation, and specifically in Spanish American history of St. Augustine, Florida. Even at the end of his life, Al was still working on his projects and published a final book. Albert wrote and published many books and articles over a long life.
To his family and friends, Al was more than the significant body of his work. Who Al was matters to us, because he was kind to us. Albert was a kind soul, and a gentle man. He was so calm most of the time, with positive approaches to problems. He could be quick to action on occasion, and played the electric organ and other musical instruments with high energy; but he listened well. Albert could be calm in a storm, and reassure us with humility and stoicism.
We remember Al’s honesty and lack of guile. He had a dry humor, filled with intense intelligence and deep cultural memory. He lived with Clara in Richmond, Virginia where he bought a new Nikon camera, and sold his old camera to a young man for less than he was offered. When I was a child grand-dad sent me presents and cards for my birthday, as did his children (my aunts and uncles). I did not feel like I deserved so much attention from people I rarely saw or even heard about, except on holidays, but I was very appreciative, and am still thankful for those granted memories today. Albert gave to others without expectations because he was a man of God, and trusted that market-place dealings were ultimately out of his control, as all things in life are on the grandest transcendental scale.
I never felt like I had anything I could give to Albert, because he seemed so solidly content. He never asked me for anything, and I never felt like he wanted anything from me. The respect and admiration I gave him during our limited interactions seemed to be enough. Grand-father was politely matter-of-fact, and was direct when he felt it was needed or rationally helpful. Albert Manucy’s life could be displayed for all to see in public, without embarrassment due to his humble piety.
Albert was a man of peace because he was at peace with himself, and God. He accepted life as it was, given to him by his god naturally, without common complaints or bitterness. Al did not seem to get angry like normal people. I am told that Al felt he owed his life to God, and it was God that gave him strength and grace through prayer practice. Al had a practical higher consciousness he was connected to, which gave his life a subtle sustaining flow of will-power and creativity. He was slow to speak, because he thought before he spoke words, and when he did speak he was verbally quiet. Often Al was utterly silent, in his own world.
Finally Al was a man of integrity. His life was literally integrated to make a consistently whole person. Al was content to be himself, without much need to compete or show-off, and no need to brag or belittle others. Albert was authentically Albert. Few could hurt him, because he looked and acted beyond petty battles of mortal failings. These are the reasons why we admired Al.
In conclusion Al was small in stature, quiet, non-combative, unaggressive, and warmly gentle.
Mean people, unfortunate events, and bad moods bring out the worst in us, in general. A Baptist Minister once called these vile people “death dealers”. However we are protected by angels, and gentle spirits like Albert, simply by their presence in our lives. These good spirits have energy that heals our wounded spirits, and stabilizes our lives. Like Christ, they are able and willing to sacrifice for others with less limits than is deemed reasonable by conservative culture. There is truth that we must take care of ourselves before we can help others, but some like Al are more successful at giving and patient with our failings because of their access to higher powers.
Albert cared about us, we mattered to him too. We should be not only thankful, but happy for him and us. We are part of his legacy, in living on to honor his memory for his spirit. His life he lived was his legacy to us, it is our inheritance. As St. Paul wrote “Love is patient, love is kind… It is not proud… but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves.”
Albert was not perfect, but he was an epic scholar and a gentle-man.
[many large “color photos” of Fort Jefferson by Ivan Dmitri with captions]
The great walls of Jefferson enclose seven of Garden Key’s 10 acres, lying 68 miles to sea from Key West.
In the foreground and background what is left of the Navy’s 1900 coaling rigs wrecked by a hurricane.
The farthest north rookery of the spectacular and mysterious sooty tern. Reduced to 10,000 in 1900, they number 100,000 again. Margaret Felton (with sooty), Jefferson’s First Lady, back again.
The Gibraltar of the Gulf had its teeth pulled long since. This is the citadel as the tourist sees it by boat. The moat is not actually shark-infested; despite rumors.
The 50-foot walls from the inside. The lighthouse long ago was replaced by a taller shaft on Loggerhead Key, another of the Dry Tortugas. Looking down from the upper deck on a section of barracks ruins, dynamited for wrought iron recycling.
Below – Off one of these casemates or gun rooms lay Dr. Mudd’s dungeon.
Sixty-eight miles to sea from Key West, on a 10-acre key, the last outpost of the US in the Gulf of Mexico, stands a great 6-sided ghost, three-decked brick-and-granite fort designed to house a garrison of 7,500 men manning 450 cannon, intended to be the most powerful citadel under the American flag. One of Napoleon’s generals planned it. It was building for 30 years and never completed. Doctor Mudd was imprisoned there.
Today a man and his wife live alone on it almost as cut off from the world as if they were stranded on a South Seas atoll. They are Mr. and Mrs. Robert R. Budlong. Since 1935 Fort Jefferson has been a national monument and Mr. Budlong is its superintendent, transferred last winter to this watery waste from Inscription Rock, New Mexico.
You still are welcome at Fort Jefferson if you can get there. There was public transportation even before the war. Until January first, the National Park Service operated a Diesel tug which ferried mail, supplies, and labor from Key West once a week, but accepted no passengers. Then the Navy took…
[Bond Street Tobacco Ad]
… over the tug for inshore-patrol duty and now it is 15 days between the visits of the Navy or a patrol motor-boat which brings mail and supplies. The ERA project on the key closed down last November and there are no more relief laborers to share the isolation with the Buildings.
Imagine a new early-American-type home in a $12,000 to $18,000 bracket residential development. Such is the rebuilt commandant’s house in which the Budlongs live, served by electric light and refrigeration and by the most modern plumbing, though the only water on the Dry Tortugas is that caught in cisterns.
They have a radio-telephone on which they may talk to the mainland daily at fixed intervals. But the nearest human society, except twice monthly, or when a rare yacht puts in, their nearest movie, drug-store, news-paper, or restaurant is 6 hours away over a shallow and treacherous sea. Between January first and mid-Feb 1942, just two yachts and no planes called at Fort Jefferson.
Before this is published the Navy may have taken over the fort, as our military has during wars. The Dry Tortugas have diminished in military value each time. Fort Jefferson was designed to command the gulf and was aimed primarily at Great Britain, but the invention of the rifled-cannon made it useless before it could be finished. The eight-foot thick brick walls, impregnable to round shot from smooth-bore naval guns, were worthless against rifled shells.
Simon Bernard was brought from France by Jefferson to build a chain of impregnable forts along the whole coast of the young republic. Fortress Monroe is the perfect Bernard fort. He was an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, the last officer the Emperor noted at his side at Waterloo. Bernard rejoined Napoleon after Elba, remained at his side until the end, then was recommended to Jefferson by Lafayette. After the accession of Louis Philippe, Bernard returned to France to become inspector general of engineers, aide-de-camp to the king, and minister of war in 3 cabinets, created a baron finally.
The first of Bernard’s brick bastions to fall was Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River in 1862. The Union forces planted 36 rifled guns and mortars on Tybee Island and Federal gun-boats maneuvered into the rear of the fort. In two days they blasted it apart.
American Gibraltar
In General Gillmore’s report on Charleston he said: “110,643 pounds of metal produced a breach in Fort Pulaski which caused the surrender of that permanent and well-constructed brick fortress in 2 days, while 122,030 pounds of metal failed to open the bomb-proof Fort Wagner, a sand work extemporized for the war.”
Pulaski taught the South how to defend Sumter and other Bernard designed forts. Any yielding substance (earth) which would slow down and finally stop heavy rifled shells, and which could be shoveled back into position, was vastly better than just brick or even granite walls. The shells plowed through these, the flying particles were murderous and the walls once breached, remained so.
But when Jefferson’s walls first began to rise in 1846 on Garden Key, one of the Tortugas, it was to be an American Gibraltar. The Louisiana and Florida cession had made the Gulf an American sea, and had uncorked Mississippi trade. Through the narrow Florida channel flowed 9/10ths of the Gulf’s shipping. If we did not fortify the Keys, an enemy would. Spain was a few miles away in turbulent Cuba. Great Britain was near at her West Indies, and the Texas Republic was flirting with the British. Jackson’s rifles had slaughtered the musket-equipped British, but this revolutionary invention was not yet applied to naval cannon.
Fighting the Jungle
How could such a fort have commanded the Gulf (tourists ask)? Its’ cannon could not shoot more than 2 or 3 miles, so enemy could by-pass at a further distance. The fort was there mainly to defend and supply a fleet of ships, which deterred enemies from entering the Gulf. In 1846 an officer of engineers not long out of West Point, Horatio G. Wright arrived at the Tortugas with 2 fellow yankees, Peabody and Phillips. They found a cluster of 8 tiny key islands covered with mangrove and button-wood thickets and inhabited by one light-house keeper.
Garden Key site of the fort, was barely 3 feet above sea level. Terns come to the key in the summer. Bernard made the master-plan of coast defense forts from Maine to Mississippi, but Fort Jefferson itself was designed by Montgomery Meigs; supervised by old General Joe Totten, who has a fort on Long Island Sound named after him.
Wright, Peabody, and Phillips laid out sites for frame barracks to house workmen and materials; while in New Hampshire lumber actually was being prefabricated for these buildings. They were to be up in 60 days in theory, but they were built a year later. Five years passed and the fort was barely begun, 10 years and the walls were started. Contract slave labor did the heavier work, supplemented by NY Irish migrant hands. The climate enervated workers, making them lazy (according to officers). All labor toiled 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. On the 7th day they could swim and fish. Granite came from Vermont, cement from NY, big yellow hand-made brick and lumber from Pensacola Florida; but ships had problems chartering the Dry Torgugas.
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Wright was succeeded by another yankee, Captain Daniel Phineas Woodbury of New Hampshire (a character). Woodbury left the impression that his four years were miserable on the island, until the great naturalist Louis Agassiz, dropped in the 50s and interested the captain in microscopic marine life. Actually Woodbury was away from his post too many times to too know any better than dereliction.
When the Fort was half finished, $1,250,000 spent by the eve of the Civil War, the walls were sinking. Engineers had supposed Garden Key to be a coral island. It was simply a heap of shell and sand eddied up by powerful ocean currents, and the island was slipping from beneath the great mass of masonry as jam oozes out between slices of bread. Yet the work went on.
In 1860 Woodbury was relieved by Captain Meigs, the fort planner (14 years earlier). There were rumors that Floridians intended to seize the Tortugas. Meigs hastily closed the construction holes in the walls. Then Meigs built a drawbridge for the sally port and transformed the half-built brick pile into a stronghold (with no guns).
On January 18, 1861 two vessels dropped anchor along-side, bringing the Key West sheriff and the expected proclamation that Florida had seceded. Meigs sent a fishing smack boiling to the Key West Navy Yard for cannon. But the following morning he found a steamer showing no colors hove to off the reef. Meigs was sure that it was a rebel warship come to demand his surrender, but it was Major L. G. Arnold, U. S. A., with sixty-six artillerymen and guns. “The work now is secure to the United States,’’ Meigs wrote fervently to his superiors, “and I trust that its flag once raised upon these walls will never again be lowered.”
The Prisoner of Devil’s Island
More guns and more reinforcements arrived until the garrison numbered more than 600, armed with ninety-seven cannon. The first prisoners of war came in September, 1861; there were as many as 500 of them later, all put to hard labor. With the garrison and the labor force, more than 1400 men were jammed into the ten acres. The Army regarded it as a Devil’s Island.
The war had ended when on July 24, 1865, Fort Jefferson’s most famous prisoner came ashore in irons, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. This slight young Maryland physician had treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg when Lincoln’s assassin fled from Washington. He had met Booth casually once, knew nothing of his crime, but in the cry for vengeance, Mudd had been sentenced to life imprisonment, had been lucky to escape hanging.
The legend is that the moat surrounding the walls was infested with sharks; that the garrison enticed sharks into the moat by feeding them, as a deterrent to escape. The motion picture, The Prisoner of Shark Island, perpetuated the legend. In truth, there were no sharks in the moat because it was too shallow and the waters too polluted. But there were plenty of sharks and the more-feared barracuda in the waters outside. The nearest food, water or shelter was at Key West, and escape was impossible in theory. But prisoners always will escape from any prison, and numbers of them did from here. Half of them may have died in the attempt, but they risked death willingly. Mudd wrote his wife that he had rejected several chances to get away because flight, he felt, would be a confession of guilt.
Drama in Chains
But when the Negro troops of the 82nd Infantry became his wardens, his Maryland soul rebelled. One September day he slipped out of the fort and into the hold of a transport, hiding, with the aid of a young sailor named Kelly, under loose planks, where soldiers found him within ten minutes.
Both the doctor and Kelly were put in irons. Kelly broke his chains and the window bars and slipped noiselessly down into the moat on the very chains that had shackled him, stole a small boat and vanished into the gulf.
Mudd stayed on in chains, and whenever a ship put in he was locked in a dungeon. He lost his job as steward in the hospital and was put to cleaning old bricks. “‘I worked hard all day,”’ he recorded dryly, “‘and came near finishing one brick.”
Four prisoners came to share his cell. Three were his fellow “conspirators,” Arnold, O’Laughlin and Spangler. The fourth was Col. George St. Leger Grenfel, an Englishman who had fought for the South and had been caught plotting to burn Chicago and to free the prisoners in an Illinois army prison. Grenfel was in his early sixties, tall and straight in spite of wounds and dropsy. Ordered to work with a ball on his leg, he refused. Soldiers tied a fifty-pound weight to the old man’s feet and ducked him in the harbor. Still he refused to work in chains. Then, one morning the guns pointing over the channel were found to be spiked and Grenfel missing. They did not catch him.
By 1867 the prisoners had dwindled to fewer than fifty. Four companies of the 5th Artillery and a small Engineer force brought the population up to about 300. The food was bad, only the fish fresh. The hospital was full of dysentery, but yellow fever, the scourge of the tropics, had not yet visited the Tortugas. It broke out in late August that year. The post surgeon, Major Joseph Smith, blamed it upon the stinking “‘miasma” rising from the stagnant, sewage-contaminated waters of the moat. Mudd was one of the prisoners detailed to board up the gun ports over the moat.
Doctor Smith died of yellow fever on September eighth, his little boy, Henry, a few days later, and the plague was on. The panic-stricken garrison quickly released Doctor Mudd. Old Doctor Whitehurst hurried from Key West to take charge, and side by side he and Mudd battled the yellow jack. Five of six officers died. The worst night was September sixteenth, when half of M company was stricken between eleven P.M. and one A.M. Within forty-eight hours every man of M company was down.
Mudd himself had a touch of the fever. Before it was stamped out in November there had been 270 cases, with thirty-eight deaths. Mudd was a hero to the garrison, which petitioned Washington for his …
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[ice-cream and electric companies commercial]
… release. Commandant Valentine Stone, about to return North with his motherless two-year-old boy, carried the petition to the President. But the fever overtook Stone at Key West and Mudd went back to his cell. The pardon that was granted in March, 1869, he owed to no one at Fort Jefferson, but to his wife, who had stormed the Capitol and the White House incessantly. Samuel Mudd returned to his Charles County home prematurely aged, to die there 20 years later.
There are many of his descendants living, including three children. A son, Edward J. Mudd, of Washington, is a retired policeman whose one-time job was, ironically, to guard Presidents at the Washington union station. One daughter, a nun, Sister M. Rosamunda, is stationed at Ogden, Utah. A second daughter, Mrs. Mary Elinore Gardner, lives in Baltimore. A doctor grandson, Lt. Col. Richard D. Mudd, formerly of the Ford Hospital, Detroit, is stationed at Scott Field, Illinois. The Mudds of his line have fought in every American war.
Colonel Mudd has discovered some-thing still unknown to reference books: a not too distant relative of his grand-father was Lincoln’s favorite aunt. Mary Mudd was a granddaughter of Thomas Mudd, great-grandfather of the Prisoner of Shark Island, and Mary Mudd married Mordecai Lincoln, the President’s uncle. Lincoln’s first woman teacher was a Miss Buckman, whose mother was a sister of Mary Mudd Lincoln.
Remember the Maine
Half a dozen years after 1867 the scourge walked again in the echoing galleries of Fort Jefferson. The commandant, who was doomed to die, ordered all the well except a few volunteer nurses to take refuge on Loggerhead Key, where they lived in tents. The death rate was heavy. Then, in the fall of 1873, came a destructive hurricane, and the Army abandoned the post. “There is not the slightest possibility of this fortification being completed within the next fifty years,” wrote the departing commandant. “I would finish it up,’’ said General Sherman.
For another quarter of a century Fort Jefferson went to rack and ruin. An ordnance sergeant puttered through the long days, saw the stacks of cannon balls sink deeper into the parade ground, the 140 guns gather rust, but kept his 800 barrels of powder dry. His only company was a handful of Army Engineer laborers, who repaired the storm damage and mounted big 15-inch smooth-bore cannon on the top deck.
By 1886 it was unsafe to roll a barrel of Mammoth powder over the rotten wharf, and before the year was out a hurricane snatched the wharf away, along with most of the galvanized-iron roofs on the barracks. The platforms beneath the 15-inch guns had rotted.
One morning a Mallory Line steamer churned up and put ashore a smallpox patient from Key West and a steward to nurse him. Sergeant Wilkens protested bitterly: ‘‘ There has been no orders received by me from the War or Engineering Departments that this fort has been turned over to the Quarantine Hospital, beside there is the family of the light-house keeper residing inside the fort.”
The Mallory Line skipper ignored the sergeant. A labor gang was packing away Engineer property, bossed by George Phillips, one of the first three Americans to land on Garden Key forty years before. His laborers decamped to Key West at once. It turned out that the Treasury Department had been negotiating for the Tortugas as a quarantine station. The transfer had not yet been formalized and the Key West Public Health Service doctor had jumped the gun. For the next few years Fort Jefferson was a quarantine station, properly equipped, and the only one within many hundred miles where a cholera-infested ship could be handled. It was only another interlude. The War Department wanted it back, General Schofield arguing, “It is too valuable a military station to be surrendered for any other purpose.”
On January 25, 1898, the White Squadron lay in Tortugas waters. At midnight, Admiral Sicard sent a gig from his flagship for Captain Sigsbee, of the Maine. Before long, the Maine washed her hook and vanished into the night. Fort Jefferson was the last American harbor to see her. Sicard had brashly dismissed his Key West pilot, and when the rest of the White Squadron moved out, the Texas struck a reef almost at once and had to be sent back to Brooklyn to dry dock; the lowa went aground and stayed there for fourteen hours while the New York and the Detroit tugged at her. For a few days the squadron, less the Maine and the Texas, steamed off Key West at target practice. Then the torpedo boat Ericsson raced up with the word that the Maine had blown up in Havana harbor.
Before 1898 was out, twenty-three ships of the Navy knew the shelter of Tortugas waters. The Navy began to dredge the channel deeper and to build a coaling station capable of fueling the largest battleship at the piers. At Key West the larger ships could not come within six miles of the naval station. Fort Jefferson now was to be a great naval base. The Army transferred ownership to the Navy, which built a plant distilling 60,000 gallons of water a day to replace two 7000-gallon condensers of Civil War times. Confident that steel and concrete would defy any hurricane, the coaling-station construction went on. A cable boat laid a submarine line to Key West and wireless masts rose over the walls, the operators occasionally reporting reception from such astonishingly distant points as New York and Colén.
The War Department had removed all of its munitions and most of the cannon. Vandals had stolen the brass bolts and rings from the stone cistern covers, many of the silvered mirrorlike doorknobs from the officers’ barracks, even entire doors and windows. All quarters were littered with tons of fallen plaster, soggy with the rains that had beaten through the leaking roofs. Salvagers pulled out the embrasure irons, the gun tracks, the lead, but some of the cannon on the top deck were too ponderous for either the Army or junk men to bother with.
Yo Ho, and a Bottle of Rum
Sixty minutes after the steel and concrete coaling piers were formally accepted by the Navy from the contractors in 1904, a hurricane twisted one of the two coal transporters almost beyond recognition. It was repaired, but next the dredging contractor threw up his contract, 40,000 cubic yards short of fulfillment. And in 1907 the Navy gave up in disgust. The huge 200,000-gallon water tank was moved laboriously to Key West, the water-distilling plant to our then new base at Guantanamo, Cuba.
The wireless station was dismantled and only one custodian and the light-house keeper and his family remained. Soon they, too, were gone. Fort Jefferson was wholly deserted. Rejected by the Army, the Navy and the Treasury, it passed to the Department of Agriculture as a bird preserve. There was a flurry in 1917-18 when the radio station reopened. Two companies of Marines held the fort and a few Navy seaplanes landed in the harbor. Then they were gone and only the birds remained until the bootleggers discovered the Tortugas about 1920.
Deserted Fort Jefferson was a providential base for the rum runners, lying directly on the route between Havana and Tampa. Havana boats dropped their loads there, to be picked up by Florida boats, storing the liquor there if the transfer boat was not on hand. The rum-running trade often doubled in alien smuggling, for which this way station in the gulf was equally useful. Cuban fishermen used the place as a convenience, as they always had when the Army or Navy was not on guard.
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The harbor was closed officially to navigation, but Jefferson’s visitors were not much concerned with rules. The ruin of the fort was completed in the 20’s. All that man could do to destroy it, he did, short of dynamiting the walls themselves, and Nature was not far behind. All was crumbling under sun, rain and wind. The parade ground was a jungle of weeds and brush. The salvage operators who had bought junk rights assumed they had bought the fort itself. The beautiful soldiers’ barracks was dynamited for the wrought iron it contained. The late Captain Rice, of the Key West Army post, became so exasperated with the senseless destruction worked by vandals that he set fire to the officers’ barracks in 1927, swearing that he would leave nothing for the thieves to steal. Nothing remained in the way of metal but such lead and bronze as was so deeply imbedded in masonry that it was not worth prying out.
Fort Jefferson’s rebirth dates from 1934, when a rest camp was opened there for World War veterans employed in Florida-keys camps—the same veterans trapped at Matacumbe Key in Florida’s latest great hurricane. Transportation and communications were so difficult that the rest camp was short-lived, another in Jefferson’s long string of failures, but Washington had been reminded of the fort’s existence and in 1935 the President created it a national monument.
Asking for candidates for the job as junior park naturalist in charge at the Tortugas, the Park Service warned: “Some of the qualifications that are being sought in the candidate are as follows: The man selected to go to Fort Jefferson must be resourceful and adventurous; he must be willing to live under primitive conditions and be capable of taking care of himself. He may, for example, have to chlorinate his own drinking water at times and serve as his own doctor; he must be willing to live in an isolated region; he should have some mechanical experience in dealing with refrigerators, light plants, radio receiving and sending sets; experience in living in the tropics would be extremely helpful; the man should have some very definite hobbies, or he will grow stale.” Washington didn’t overstate matters, and note that it never imagined a woman’s presence.
Arizona Castaways Jim and Margaret Felton finished a three-and-a-half-year term at Fort Jefferson on January twenty-fifth, being succeeded by the Budlongs. The Feltons had seen the sea in California, no more. Both had been reared in Arizona and each of his three Park Service posts, the Petrified Forest, the Tumacacori monument and the White Sands monument, was a desert one. Felton got the job, and Margaret went along.
The Park Service was wrong about the naturalist’s need of a hobby. Jim Felton was gone from the Tortugas before he ever found the time for one. A beginning had been made on the rehabilitation when they reached their new post in the summer of 1938. The President had stopped in on one of his cruises the winter before and had demanded action, so relief labor already was on the job.
No building was habitable and the Feltons camped out in the second-floor casemate of the fort itself. How huge a task it was for a limited number of unskilled hands, most of them unemployed Key West April 18,1942 cigar makers, is suggested by the fact that it was two years before the Feltons had a home, the rebuilt commandant’s house. Mrs. Felton wrote her mother in Arizona that the dining room was a quarter of a mile from her living room, no gross exaggeration. All meals were in the WPA mess and all food and sup- plies came out from Key West in an ancient rum-running boat that had been confiscated by the Coast Guard and donated to the Park Service. It broke down incessantly, and always at the wrong moments, and it stayed in port if the weather did not smile.
Sea-Food Farm No clerical and little technical help was supplied the first year, and all correspondence, record keeping and pay-roll accounting for a seventy-five-man PWA and WPA project fell upon Felton. One by one the obstacles were whipped, and by the fall of 1941 the Feltons could look forward to some-thing like a normal life again. A Key West entrepreneur had started a flying-boat service to the island, charging a very reasonable fee, but it had failed for lack of patronage. Still, yachts and motor cruisers were frequent visitors in winter, private or chartered planes not uncommon, and the visitors often were celebrities. Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh were among them in the winter of 1940-41, characteristically not identifying themselves until they were certain they had been recognized.
Then came the war. Whether or not the Park Service keeps the monument open, visitors will be rare now even at the height of the Florida season. A great many yachts and motor cruisers have been turned over to the Navy, and pleasure cruising is not invited by German submarines. The description Jim Felton wrote last summer is inadequate now. He wrote then: ‘“Imagine a farm located seven hours by car, and over a road sometimes impassable for two weeks at a time, from the nearest town, with no neighbors in between, and growing only shellfish, spiny lobsters, terns, turtle and many kinds of edible fish.”
One thing he forgot—the view. No farm-house ever looked out upon a seven-acre subtropical parade ground dotted with historic buildings in various stages of demolition and reconstruction, with here and there a wooden cross marking the grave of a yellow-jack victim or a drowned Cuban fisher-man, and the whole enclosed by such a brick wall as man has seldom built. In the moon-light the parade ground is an awesome sight. That fifty-foot wall shuts out all view of the sea, but from its top or its galleries you look down upon waters of every hue of blue and green, depending upon the depth. To the westward half-a-mile, towers the light on Loggerhead Key; which long ago took over the warning task of the light-house built into Jefferson’s walls.
Man has come and gone from the Tortugas, the birds have remained. Over the sally port float a squadron of frigate or man-of-war birds, seen no-where else in the United States. By the hour they hang as if suspended from strings, seemingly superior to all laws of aerodynamics.
On two keys a long stone’s throw from the fort is the farthest-north rookery of the sooty and the noddy tern, and the only one in the United States. When Audubon was there in 1832 the birds numbered in the hundreds of thousands. By 1900 there were fewer than 10,000. Fishermen collecting the …
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… palatable eggs by wholesale all but destroyed the colony. In the early spring a skirmishing party appears from the south, apparently reconnoitering for nesting sites. None alights, and, as they vanish the day they come, it is supposed that they must come from a land base within ten hours’ flying time, though both the noddy and the sooty are able to rest on the sea.
Between the first and the tenth of May the advance guard of some twenty thousand birds reclaims the two keys, eighty thousand more following within a few days. Each pair of birds battles for a two-foot area of sand, and a visitor must step with care to avoid their eggs. No nest is built by the sooty. One egg is laid in a small hollow scooped in the sand, and male and female bird alternate on the nest, except in the hottest weather, when they shade the eggs with their wings.
Twenty-one days of incubation and the keys are alive with chicks, looking much like young chickens, except for their webbed feet. Within two or three hours of hatching they are able to run and hide in the grass. The parent birds feed them by regurgitation for seven weeks.
The noddy is outnumbered 100 to 1 by the spectacular black-and-white sooty. The noddy builds a nest of sticks, roots, grass and bits of paper and cloth in the sand, lining it with seaweed. The noddy has less fear of men, swooping about the heads of intruders and pecking viciously, though ineffectually.
Early in September, both species turn back south. Before the end of the month, the last of them has vanished. Their winter range may extend to the coast of Chile, but just where they do go and the course they fly, no one yet knows surely.
Jim and Margaret Felton now have returned to civilization, his new post Kings Mountain Military Park, near York, South Carolina, where snow covered the battlefield in February. Mrs. Felton had not been in Carolina a month before she had made up her mind where she would spend her 1942 vacation— Fort Jefferson. Jim has had enough, for the time being, but Margaret has found a girl in York who is eager to accompany her. Only the Nazis or the Japs or the United States Navy can keep them away. Columns of moon-lit rhetoric couldn’t testify as convincingly to Fort Jefferson’s charm.
Walton D. Stowell II 