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Updated: May 11, 2025
"This is a good boat, and a fast boat too," observed Jack Tier, after he had luffed up several minutes, in order to make sure of his proximity to the reef; "and it might carry us all safe enough to Key West, or certainly back to the Dry Tortugas, was we inclined to try our hands at either." "I cannot quit my aunt," said Rose, quickly, "so we will not even think of any such thing."
"Tortugas!" commented Cecil, pointing to the rocky shores of the islet. "That's where all the pirates came from, wasn't it?" queried Stuart, eager to break the silence of the journey. "Pirates? No. The pirate haunts were more to the north. It was the stronghold of the buccaneers." "I always thought pirates and buccaneers were the same thing," put in the boy. "Far from it.
In fact, far from being the forbidding spot it has been painted, Dry Tortugas seemed to us a veritable garden in the path of the great Gulf Stream. On the afternoon of our arrival the Bull Pup was got under way and headed through a circuitous channel to East Key, off which we came to anchor about dusk.
It was known to them all, that Mulford had been left on a naked rock, some thirty miles from that spot; and it was not easy to understand how he could now be at the Dry Tortugas, planted, as it might be, on purpose to show himself to the brig, against the tower, in the bright moonlight, "like a pictur' hung up for his old shipmates to look at."
At the time when the mate lay down to take his rest, therefore, the schooner was quite five-and-twenty miles to windward of the Dry Tortugas, and some twenty miles to the northward of the Florida Reef, with the wind quite light at east-south-east. Such, then, was the position or situation of the schooner. As respects her condition, it is easily described.
"Come aboard, shipmate, if you are for Hispaniola, the Tortugas, and the Spanish Main," said I, whereupon he scrambled in, losing a boot overboard in his baste, which necessitated much intricate angling with the boat-hook ere it was recovered. "They're Peter's, you know," he explained as he emptied out the water.
Everything around us dripped with moisture, and I could have wrung pints from my coat and breeches. "Oh for the Dry Tortugas!" Ringan sighed. "What I would give for a hot sun and the kindly winds o' the sea! I thought I pined for the hills, Andrew, but I would not give a clean beach and a warm sou'-wester for all the mountains on earth." Then again: "Yon's a fine lass," he would say.
They recounted the incidents of their trip down the Great Lakes, through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River, their pleasant run down the east coast of the United States to the Florida Keys, past the Dry Tortugas and up to Mobile. To all of their conversation Carlos listened intently, eating in silence, but keenly alert to every word that was said.
"After France had taken possession of Tortugas, it came about quite naturally that the French buccaneers found themselves better treated in that port than the English filibusters or the Dutch Sea-Rovers.
We had sailed down during the night from Marquesas across the Rebecca shoals, and when caught by the squall were off Bush Key, one of the most easterly of the group, which enjoys the distinction of possessing Dry Tortugas, why "dry" we know not. Our extraordinary entrance, almost instantaneous, from rough to comparatively smooth water can only be explained by a casual reference to the great reef.
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