Star Forts Are Military History, and the Base of Some Strange Conspiracy Theories

On an unseasonably cold day in late March, I took a nearly empty ferry to Governor’s Island in New York Harbor. The sun was shining, but a brutal, frigid wind meant it was hardly a day for a picnic, a popular reason to visit the island in the summer. I disembarked onto a nearly deserted island, one that would have been utterly quiet if not for the near-constant sound of private helicopters taking off from and landing on the lower tip of Manhattan. I was there to see the star-shaped Fort Jay, a coastal defense built between 1794 and 1806, one of a series of fortifications that once protected the city and its harbor, and recently recast as a historic monument and spot for summer recreation. It’s notable for its striking structure—a kind of five-pointed star, a shape that has led to its inclusion in a strange conspiracy theory about the nature of the past and humanity itself.

The evolution of European-style fortresses from square with rounded turrets at the corners to pointed bastions like the ones on Fort Jay was a result of simple geometry and technological progress. While the traditional structures could easily be defended by archers, those same turrets created blind spots for cannons, which could not be maneuvered as easily or fired directly downward from the top of a battlement. The pointed bastions solved this problem by eliminating blind spots: Cannons could be placed at the wide end of a bastion, and pointed down along the long line of the adjacent walls to defend against armies attacking from any direction.

Leave a Comment