17
Fort La Fayette
On the afternoon of the 25th of September, we left Fortress Monroe, on the steamer George Peabody. There were no other passengers, but the fifteen or twenty soldiers composing the guard. The boat was a Baltimore boat, and we received from her officers and crew the same courteous treatment that had been extended to us on board of the Adelaide. We reached Fort La Fayette, in New York harbor, a little before dark, on the afternoon of the 26th, and were immediately transferred from the boat to the Fort. Fort La Fayette is built upon a shoal, or small island, lying in the Narrows, just between the lower end of Staten Island and Long Island, and two or three hundred yards from the latter. It is something of an octagonal structure, though the four principal sides are so much longer than the others, that the building, on the inside, looks like a square. It is some forty-five or fifty feet high. In two of the longer and two of the shorter sides, which command the channel, are the batteries. There are two tiers of heavy guns on each of these sides, and above these, are lighter barbette guns under a temporary wooden roof. The other two principal sides are occupied, on the first and second stories, by small casemates; all those on the second and some of those on the first story, being then assigned to the officers and soldiers. There are, altogether, ten of these casemates on each story. The whole space enclosed within the walls is about one hundred and twenty feet across. A pavement about twenty-five feet wide runs around this space, leaving a patch of ground some seventy
