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Page 5
"It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again
see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your
cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this
intention.
"Respectfully yours,
"W. SOUTHARD, for the Secretary of the Navy."
If I had only preserved the whole of this paper, there would be no break
in the beginning of my sketch of this story. For Captain Shaw, if it
were he, handed it to his successor in the charge, and he to his, and I
suppose the commander of the Levant has it to-day as his authority for
keeping this man in this mild custody.
The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man without
a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked
to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home
or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of
war,--cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. But it
was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us,
except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not
permitted to talk with the men, unless an officer was by. With officers
he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as they and he chose. But he
grew shy, though he had favorites: I was one. Then the captain always
asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the
invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him
at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his
own state-room,--he always had a state-room,--which was where a sentinel
or somebody on the watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate or
drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had
any special jollification, they were permitted to invite
"Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some
officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was
there. I believe the theory that the sight of his punishment did them
good. They called him "Plain-Buttons," because, while he always chose to
wear a regulation army-uniform, he was not permitted to wear the
army-button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the
insignia of the country he had disowned.
I remember, soon after I joined the navy, I was on shore with some of
the older officers from our ship and from the Brandywine, which we had
met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and
the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of the
gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long since
changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the system which
was adopted from the first about his books and other reading. As he was
almost never permitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in
port for months, his time at the best hung heavy; and everybody was
permitted to lend him books, if they were not published in America and
made no allusion to it. These were common enough in the old days, when
people in the other hemisphere talked of the United States as little as
we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign papers that came into
the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go over them first, and
cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that alluded to America.
This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back of what was cut out
might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of one of Napoleon's
battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan would find a great
hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an
advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President's
message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which
afterwards I had enough and more than enough to do with. I remember it,
because poor Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion to
reading was made, told a story of something which happened at the Cape
of Good Hope on Nolan's first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever
knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the
civil thing with the English Admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving
for a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of
English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these,
was quite a windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel," which they had all of them heard of, but which
most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published
long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of anything national
in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from
Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas
ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was
permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on
deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often
now, but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well,
so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the
others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a
line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten
thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto,
stopped a minute and drank something, and then began, without a thought
of what was coming,--
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