![]() While most of them were military members who were serving or were imprisoned at the fort, several others were civilians. Some of those who perished were interred in the cemetery. Major outbreaks of other diseases exacted a heavy toll on those staying at the fort, killing dozens throughout the 1860s and 1870s, according to Fogarty. The quarantine hospital, the remains of which she helped discover, had been used to treat yellow fever patients. She knew that, in addition to being used as a military prison during the American Civil War, the fort also served as a naval coaling outpost, lighthouse station, naval hospital, and safe harbor for military training.Īs the population of the fort swelled with military personnel, prisoners, enslaved people, engineers, support staff, laborers, and their families, the risk of communicable diseases, particularly mosquito-borne yellow fever, increased. She started by reading up on Fort Jefferson’s past. Was he a soldier or a civilian? And how did he die? Fogarty was tasked with finding the answers. The team wanted to know more about John Greer. But her work on the project was just beginning. 1861,” it read.įor Fogarty, finding the grave was a major coup of her still fledgling career in marine archaeology. The next day, they returned to the watery grave with ordinary kitchen sponges, clearing away the rest of the debris on the headstone until they could read the entire engraving. They deciphered what they could, then left. With Marano and another diver closely following behind her, Fogarty swam over to the patch of seaweed and discovered that it covered a gravesite with a headstone bearing an inscription they could only partly make out. “We were preparing to return to our boat, when I noticed a rectangular-shaped patch of seaweed.” “On the day we surveyed the site, we counted 25 pylons in all,” Fogarty recalled. Marano and former Rosenstiel School graduate student Devon Fogarty, who played a key role in the discovery, recounted the monthslong process that went into finding the hospital and cemetery. The national park service only recently announced the discovery to coincide with preservation month, which is celebrated in May. The mysterious dots turned out to be the remnants of pylons that made up the hospital’s foundation-the space between them matching to a tee the measurements of the hospital Marano had located in records. Swimming parallel lines from north to south over the shallow area, and using a GPS tracker to maintain their course, he and two other divers discovered the remains of the quarantine hospital and cemetery he had researched and read about in official records. Then, one day in mid-August 2022, Marano finally got the chance. ![]() Hurricane Irma and a year’s long active-duty deployment as a Coast Guard reservist during the height of the pandemic would delay that plan. So, he promised himself to one day explore the site with a team of divers. “We still needed to get in the water and get eyes on it,” Marano said. Once he returned to the mainland, he did a little sleuthing, learning that the area was a submerged island near the 100-square-mile park where a 19 th-century quarantine hospital and cemetery once may have been located. ![]() ![]() “Usually, that indicates there’s some kind of manmade structure.”Ĭould the peculiar dots have been navigational aids from a bygone era? Marano wasn’t sure. “Very early in my archaeological career, I was taught that you don’t find patterns or rigid shapes in nature,” said Marano, an adjunct professor in the Exploration Sciences Program at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. Maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano had taken the short flight on numerous occasions, traveling to the park’s historic Fort Jefferson to assist in restoration projects.īut one day in the summer of 2016, as the seaplane descended for an aquatic landing, Marano saw something unusual: an L-shaped pattern of dots below the water. The view from the passenger window of the turboprop seaplane always had been the same: miles and miles of clear blue water as the aircraft made the 30-minute flight from Key West to Dry Tortugas National Park. ![]()
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