The Man Without a Country

down the officer of the gun himself, andalmost every man of the gun's crew. Now you may say what you chooseabout courage, but that is not a nice thing to see. But, as the men whowere not killed picked themselves up, and as they and the surgeon'speople were carrying off the bodies, there appeared Nolan, in hisshirt-sleeves, with the rammer in his hand, and, just as if he had beenthe officer, told them off with authority,--who should go to thecock-pit with the wounded men, who should stay with him,--perfectlycheery, and with that way which makes men feel sure all is right and isgoing to be right. And he finished loading the gun with his own hands,aimed it, and bade the men fire. And there he stayed, captain of thatgun, keeping those fellows in spirits, till the enemy struck,--sittingon the carriage while the gun was cooling, though he was exposed all thetime,--showing them easier ways to handle heavy shot,--making the rawhands laugh at their own blunders,--and when the gun cooled again,getting it loaded and fired twice as often as any other gun on the ship.The captain walked forward by way of encouraging the men, and Nolantouched his hat and said,--

  "I am showing them how we do this in the artillery, sir."

  And this is the part of the story where all the legends agree; thecommodore said,--

  "I see you do, and I thank you, sir; and I shall never forget this day,sir, and you never shall, sir."

  And after the whole thing was over, and he had the Englishman's sword,in the midst of the state and ceremony of the quarter-deck, he said,--

  "Where is Mr. Nolan? Ask Mr. Nolan to come here."

  And when Nolan came, he said,--

  "Mr. Nolan, we are all very grateful to you to-day; you are one of usto-day; you will be named in the despatches."

  And then the old man took off his own sword of ceremony, and gave it toNolan, and made him put it on. The man told me this who saw it. Nolancried like a baby, and well he might. He had not worn a sword since thatinfernal day at Fort Adams. But always afterwards on occasions ofceremony, he wore that quaint old French sword of the commodore's.

  The captain did mention him in the despatches. It was always said heasked that he might be pardoned. He wrote a special letter to theSecretary of War. But nothing ever came of it. As I said, that was aboutthe time when they began to ignore the whole transaction at Washington,and when Nolan's imprisonment began to carry itself on because there wasnobody to stop it without any new orders from home.

  I have heard it said that he was with Porter when he took possession ofthe Nukahiwa Islands. Not this Porter, you know, but old Porter, hisfather, Essex Porter,--that is, the old Essex Porter, not this Essex.[Note 9] As an artillery officer, who had seen service in the West,Nolan knew more about fortifications, embrasures, ravelins, stockades,and all that, than any of them did; and he worked with a right good-willin fixing that battery all right. I have always thought it was a pityPorter did not leave him in command there with Gamble. That would havesettled all the question about his punishment. We should have kept theislands, and at this moment we should have one station in the PacificOcean. Our French friends, too, when they wanted this littlewatering-place, would have found it was preoccupied. But Madison and theVirginians, of course, flung all that away.

  All that was near fifty years ago. If Nolan was thirty then, he musthave been near eighty when he died. He looked sixty when he was forty.But he never seemed to me to change a hair afterwards. As I imagine hislife, from what I have seen and heard of it, he must have been in everysea, and yet almost never on land. He must have known, in a formal way,more officers in our service than any man living knows. He told me once,with a grave smile, that no man in the world lived so methodical a lifeas he. "You know the boys say I am the Iron Mask, and you know how busyhe was." He said it did not do for any one to try to read all the time,more than to do anything else all the time; and that he used to readjust five hours a day. "Then," he said, "I keep up my notebooks, writingin them at such and such hours from what I have been reading; and Iinclude in these my scrap-books." These were very curious indeed. He hadsix or eight, of different subjects. There was one of History, one ofNatural Science, one which he called "Odds and Ends." But they were notmerely books of extracts from newspapers. They had bits of plants andribbons, shells tied on, and carved scraps of bone and wood, which hehad taught the men to cut for him, and they were beautifullyillustrated. He drew admirably. He had some of the funniest drawingsthere, and some of the most pathetic, that I have ever seen in my life.I wonder who will have Nolan's scrapbooks.

  Well, he said his reading and his notes were his profession, and thatthey took five hours and two hours respectively of each day. "Then,"said he, "every man should have a diversion as well as a profession. MyNatural History is my diversion." That took two hours a day more. Themen used to bring him birds and fish, but on a long cruise he had tosatisfy himself with centipedes and cockroaches and such small game. Hewas the only naturalist I ever met who knew anything about the habits ofthe house-fly and the mosquito. All those people can tell you whetherthey are _Lepidoptera_ or _Steptopotera_; but as for telling how you canget rid of them, or how they get away from you when you strike them,--why Linnaeus knew as little of that as John Foy the idiot did. Thesenine hours made Nolan's regular daily "occupation." The rest of the timehe talked or walked. Till he grew very old, he went aloft a great deal.He always kept up his exercise; and I never heard that he was ill. Ifany other man was ill, he was the kindest nurse in the world; and heknew more than half the surgeons do. Then if anybody was sick or died,or if the captain wanted him to, on any other occasion, he was alwaysready to read prayers. I have said that he read beautifully.

  My own acquaintance with Philip Nolan began six or eight years after theEnglish war, on my first voyage after I was appointed a midshipman. Itwas in the first days after our Slave-Trade treaty, while the ReigningHouse, which was still the House of Virginia, had still a sort ofsentimentalism about the suppression of the horrors of the MiddlePassage, and something was sometimes done that way. We were in the SouthAtlantic on that business. From the time I joined, I believe I thoughtNolan was a sort of lay chaplain,--a chaplain with a blue coat. I neverasked about him. Everything in the ship was strange to me. I knew it wasgreen to ask questions, and I suppose I thought there was a"Plain-Buttons" on every ship. We had him to dine in our mess once aweek, and the caution was given that on that day nothing was to be saidabout home. But if they had told us not to say anything about the planetMars or the Book of Deuteronomy, I should not have asked why; there werea great many things which seemed to me to have as little reason. I firstcame to understand anything about "the man without a country" one daywhen we overhauled a dirty little schooner which had slaves on board. Anofficer was sent to take charge of her, and, after a few minutes, hesent back his boat to ask that some one might be sent him who couldspeak Portuguese. We were all looking over the rail when the messagecame, and we all wished we could interpret, when the captain asked whospoke Portuguese. But none of the officers did; and just as the captainwas sending forward to ask if any of the people could, Nolan stepped outand said he should be glad to interpret, if the captain wished, as heunderstood the language. The captain thanked him, fitted out anotherboat with him, and in this boat it was my luck to go.

  When we got there, it was such a scene as you seldom see, and never wantto. Nastiness beyond account, and chaos run loose in the midst of thenastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes; but by way ofmaking what there were understand that they were free, Vaughan had hadtheir handcuffs and ankle-cuffs knocked off, and, for convenience' sake,was putting them upon the rascals of the schooner's crew. The negroeswere, most of them, out of the hold, and swarming all round the dirtydeck, with a central throng surrounding Vaughan and addressing him inevery dialect, and patois of a dialect, from the Zulu click up to theParisian of Beledeljereed. [Note 10]

  As we came on deck, Vaughan looked down from a hogshead, on which he hadmounted in desperation, and said:--

  "For God's love, is there anybody who can make these wretches understandsomething? The me
n gave them rum, and that did not quiet them. I knockedthat big fellow down twice, and that did not soothe him. And then Italked Choctaw to all of them together; and I'll be hanged if theyunderstood that as well as they understood the English."

  Nolan said he could speak Portuguese, and one or two fine-lookingKroomen were dragged out, who, as it had been found already, had workedfor the Portuguese on the coast at Fernando Po.

  "Tell them they are free," said Vaughan; "and tell them that theserascals are to be hanged as soon as we can get rope enough."

  Nolan "put that into Spanish,"--that is, he explained it in suchPortuguese as the Kroomen could understand, and they in turn to such ofthe negroes as could understand them. Then there was such a yell ofdelight, clinching of fists, leaping and dancing, kissing of