Seventy miles west of Key West, at the far end of the Florida Keys, there is a six-sided brick fort that was never finished and never fired a shot in anger. It is the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas, and it is the reason every rum we make is named after a cannon.
The dry ones
Ponce de León came through in 1513 and named the islands Las Tortugas for the sea turtles his crew took there. Later charts added the warning that mattered more to a sailor: Dry. Seven small islands, no fresh water, and a reef that has been taking ships for five hundred years.
The Dry Tortugas sit at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, which is exactly why the United States built a fort on them. Whoever held that water controlled the shipping lane between the Gulf and the Atlantic — the same channel the Spanish treasure fleets had used for two centuries.
The fort that was never finished
Construction began on Garden Key in 1846 and ran for thirty years. Something like sixteen million bricks went into it, shipped down the coast and landed on an island with no soil, no timber and no water.
It was designed for hundreds of guns across three tiers. It never carried anything close to that number. By the time the walls were high enough to matter, rifled artillery had arrived and made masonry forts obsolete — a rifled gun could cut through brick in a way that smoothbores never could. The fort was superseded before it was completed.
It served instead as a prison. Union deserters during the Civil War, and afterwards Dr Samuel Mudd, convicted in the conspiracy that killed Lincoln, who worked through a yellow fever outbreak there and was pardoned in 1869. The army left in 1874. It became a national monument in 1935 and a national park in 1992, and you can still only reach it by boat or seaplane.
The guns
What is left of the armament is still there, sitting on the terreplein looking out at water that has not changed.
Rodman smoothbores and Parrott rifles, iron, enormous, pointed at an enemy that never came. A fifteen-inch Rodman weighs something over twenty tons. Men lived beside these things, drilled with them, and in this particular fort never once fired them at anything.
That is what I could not stop thinking about. A gun is a piece of engineering with a whole world of labour and intention behind it, and most of the ones that survive never decided anything. The ones that did — the culverins, the falconets, the drakes, the bombards — are mostly gone, melted down or lost with the ships that carried them.
Why a rum company came out of it
I went to the Dry Tortugas on a trip with my father in mind and came back with the shape of a brand.
It was suddenly obvious: name the blends for cannon types, and name the small batch releases for the ships of the line — the galleons that won and the ones lost at sea. A bombard was the earliest gun of them all, heavy and crude and the ancestor of everything that followed. That is where our name comes from.
My father served in the United States Navy. He taught me that history is worth knowing, and that the details are the part worth knowing. Keeping a working sailor's history on a shelf, where someone might pick up a bottle and read the name and wonder what a culverin was, seemed a better tribute than anything I could have written on a label.
If you go
Dry Tortugas National Park is reachable by ferry or seaplane from Key West. There is no water, no shop and very little shade. The snorkelling over the moat wall is among the best in Florida, the fort is open to walk, and the guns are right there where the army left them.
Take more water than you think you need. That is the whole reason for the name.
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