Dry Tortugas National Park Trivia
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49 free Dry Tortugas National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Dry Tortugas National Park trivia quiz covers the tiny coral islands 68 miles west of Key West that hold Fort Jefferson, the largest brick structure in the Americas. Questions cover the fort itself (16 million bricks, 243 guns never fired, cisterns that failed), the prisoners including Dr Samuel Mudd, the lighthouses on Garden and Loggerhead keys, and the birds, reefs and shipwrecks of a park that is more than 99 percent water. History runs from Ponce de León's 160 turtles in 1513 through the wreck of HMS Tyger, enslaved labourers building the fort, the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, the Navy coaling station where USS Maine loaded before Havana, the Carnegie marine laboratory, Franklin Roosevelt's 1935 monument, the 1992 park, the Atocha treasure and the Key West flotilla that tried to reopen the park during the 1995 government shutdown. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Everglades and Biscayne quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Dry Tortugas lie in which body of water, about 70 miles west of Key West?
Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico: the islands sit at its gateway beside one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, which is why the Army chose their harbour for a giant fort.
Q 02Apart from boats, what is the only way for visitors to reach Dry Tortugas National Park?
Seaplane
Seaplane: the islands have no runway and no road, so the planes from Key West touch down on the water and moor beside the fort.
Q 03Roughly how many bricks went into the walls of Fort Jefferson?
About 16 million
About 16 million bricks, laid around a core of coral concrete, went into the fort, and their weight has been pressing the walls unevenly down into the sand ever since.
Q 04Which explorer, the first European known to reach the Dry Tortugas, gave the islands their name in 1513?
Juan Ponce de León
Juan Ponce de León called them Las Tortugas, 'the turtles', for the sea turtles his crew found there, only weeks after he had landed in Florida and named that too.
Q 05Why are the Dry Tortugas called 'Dry'?
They have no surface fresh water
They have no surface fresh water: chart-makers added the word to warn passing crews not to count on refilling their casks, and visitors still have to carry in all they drink.
Q 06More than 99 percent of Dry Tortugas National Park consists of what?
Open water
Open water covers all but a fraction of a square mile of the 101-square-mile park, which is why rangers say the best way to see it is to get in and swim.
Q 07Which feature, repeated row upon row in brick, is the hallmark of Fort Jefferson's gun galleries?
Arches
Arches: each gun room is a brick vault strong enough to carry a second tier of cannon above it, and an early Park Service study called the fort a splendid example of arch construction.
Q 08What sometimes links Bush Key to Garden Key, letting visitors walk between the two Dry Tortugas islands?
A shifting sandbar
A shifting sandbar: storms and currents build it up and cut it through again, so in some years Bush Key is a short walk from the fort and in others it takes a kayak.
Q 09What has been forcing the bricks out of Fort Jefferson's outer walls for more than a century?
Rusting iron shutters
Rusting iron shutters: built into the gunports to shield the crews, they swelled as the salt air corroded them and have pushed whole sections of the brick facing off the walls.
Q 10After 30 years' work, how did the Army leave Fort Jefferson?
Unfinished
Unfinished: with the walls sinking under their own weight and military technology moving on, the work was never completed, and the Army pulled its garrison out in 1874.
Q 11In July 1847 seven enslaved workers fled the Fort Jefferson site by boat; how did their escape end?
Caught and sent back
Caught and sent back: the seven were seized in the Keys within days, the two ringleaders were dismissed and the other five returned to the works, where their wages went on being paid to their owners.
Q 12Seen from the air, Fort Jefferson's walls trace which shape?
Hexagon
Hexagon: six brick walls meet at corner bastions that jut out so the defenders could fire along the face of the wall next door.
Q 13How did Fort Jefferson, built to mount hundreds of heavy guns, fare in battle?
No enemy attacked it
Q 21Which US Navy warship called at the Dry Tortugas in 1898 just before its fateful voyage to Havana?
USS Maine
USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour three weeks after she arrived, killing more than 250 of her crew, and 'Remember the Maine' became the cry that carried America into war with Spain.
Q 22From 1904 to 1939 the Carnegie Institution ran what on Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas?
A marine biology laboratory
A marine biology laboratory: scientists came each summer to study the reefs and left before hurricane season, and its work included some of the first underwater colour photographs.
Q 23Which president used the Antiquities Act to make Fort Jefferson a national monument in the depths of the Depression?
No enemy attacked it: the fort worked as a deterrent, and its harbour spent the Civil War sheltering the Union warships that were blockading Southern ports.
Q 14What went wrong with the rainwater cisterns built into the walls of Fort Jefferson?
The stored water turned salty
The stored water turned salty: salts leached out of the sand filters, or seawater seeped in where the settling walls cracked the tanks, and the garrison came to depend on steam condensers that distilled seawater.
Q 15Dr Samuel Mudd was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson for helping which assassin, whose broken leg he had set?
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth rode to Mudd's Maryland farm hours after the shooting; Mudd set the leg, then told investigators he had not recognised his patient, a lie that helped convict him.
Q 16How did Dr Samuel Mudd try to escape from Fort Jefferson in 1865?
Hid aboard a supply ship
Hid aboard a supply ship: two months into his sentence he slipped onto the transport Thomas A. Scott and lay under planks in the hold, was soon found, and was put in irons in a cell known as the dungeon.
Q 17What did Dr Mudd do at Fort Jefferson that helped win his pardon?
Treated patients during a yellow fever epidemic
Treated patients during a yellow fever epidemic: when the post surgeon died in 1867, the prisoner took charge of the hospital, and the garrison's soldiers signed a petition for his release that credited him with saving lives.
Q 18Which president pardoned Dr Samuel Mudd in 1869?
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson pardoned him less than a month before leaving office; Mudd, who had escaped the gallows by a single vote, went home to Maryland, but his conviction was never overturned.
Q 19During the Civil War, Fort Jefferson served mainly as a prison for Union soldiers convicted of what?
Desertion
Desertion: the Union shipped its captured deserters to the remote fort, where the convicts were put to hard labour on the very walls they were locked inside.
Q 20Which Civil War-era advance made Fort Jefferson's thick brick walls obsolete while they were still going up?
Rifled artillery
Rifled artillery: in 1862 Union rifled guns battered a breach in the brick walls of Fort Pulaski in Georgia in about 30 hours, showing that no masonry fort could hold out any longer.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the monument in January 1935, and within months New Deal relief crews were at work shoring up the crumbling fort.
Q 24In 1908 the Dry Tortugas became a federal bird reserve, created to stop the collecting of what?
Eggs
Eggs: the order shut out the collectors who raided the islands' seabird rookery, and the colony it saved now draws tens of thousands of nesting birds every year.
Q 25During the 1995–96 government shutdown, which 'micronation' staged an 'invasion' to reopen Fort Jefferson?
The Conch Republic
The Conch Republic, Key West's half-serious breakaway 'nation', set out with a cheque for a day of the park's running costs and a plan to declare the fort open, because the closure was costing the town's tour operators dearly.
Q 26Who found the 1622 wreck of the treasure galleon Atocha between Key West and the Dry Tortugas in 1985?
Mel Fisher
Mel Fisher had found the first traces of the wreck in the 1970s, and Florida claimed it; he fought the state to the US Supreme Court and won in 1982, three years before his divers reached the main treasure.
Q 27The crew of HMS Tyger, wrecked in the Dry Tortugas in 1742, escaped 700 miles in small boats to which British colony?
Jamaica
Jamaica: the castaways tried and failed to seize a Spanish ship, then crossed enemy waters in small boats to Port Royal; archaeologists confirmed the identity of the wreck in 2024.
Q 28Birdwatching at the Dry Tortugas peaks with migration in which month?
April
April: the islands lie on a main flyway between North and South America, and at the height of the northbound passage thousands of songbirds and other migrants stop there to rest.
Q 29Dry Tortugas National Park holds the only large nesting colony in the continental United States of which seabird?
Sooty tern
Sooty tern: tens of thousands crowd onto Bush Key to nest, so the island is closed to visitors for most of the year and birders watch the colony from the walls of the fort.
Q 30What killed 96 percent of the shallow-water corals surveyed at the Dry Tortugas in January 1977?
A cold wave
A cold wave: the Arctic outbreak that gave the Miami area its only known trace of snow also pushed 14 °C water over the reef, far colder than its shallow corals could survive.