Castle Island

This guide to Castle Island in Boston opens in 1905, when a repair crew patching salt-air damage broke into a sealed casemate and found a skeleton chained to the stone, still dressed in an early nineteenth-century army uniform. It traces the granite fort's eighteen-year construction under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer starting in 1833, and the story soldiers already told new recruits long before that discovery: a Christmas Day 1817 duel between two lieutenants, and what furious comrades were said to have done to the survivor. A young private who heard that story in the 1820s was hiding his real identity under the name Edgar Perry.