The Man Without a Country and Other Tales | Page 9

He wrote a special letter to the
Secretary of War. But nothing ever came of it. As I said, that was about
the time when they began to ignore the whole transaction at
Washington, and when Nolan's imprisonment began to carry itself on
because there was nobody to stop it without any new orders from
home.
I have heard it said that he was with Porter when he took possession of
the Nukahiwa Islands. Not this Porter, you know, but old Porter, his
father, Essex Porter,--that is, the old Essex Porter, not this Essex. 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-will in fixing that

battery all right. I have always thought it was a pity Porter did not leave
him in command there with Gamble. That would have settled all the
question about his punishment. We should have kept the islands, and at
this moment we should have one station in the Pacific Ocean. Our
French friends, too, when they wanted this little watering-place, would
have found it was preoccupied. But Madison and the Virginians, of
course, flung all that away.
All that was near fifty year ago. If Nolan was thirty then, he must have
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 his
life, from what I have seen and heard of it, he must have been in every
sea, 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 life as he. "You know the boys say I am the Iron Mask,
and you know how busy he 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; but
that he read just five hours a day. "Then," he said, "I keep up my
note-books, writing in them at such and such hours from what I have
been reading; and I include in these my scrap-books." These were very
curious indeed. He had six or eight, of different subjects. There was one
of History, one of Natural Science, one which he called "Odds and
Ends." But they were not merely books of extracts from newspapers.
They had bits of plants and ribbons, shells tied on, and carved scraps of
bone and wood, which he had taught the men to cut for him, and they
were beautifully illustrated. He drew admirably. He had some of the
funniest drawings there, and some of the most pathetic, that I have ever
seen in my life. I wonder who will have Nolan's scrap-books.
Well, he said his reading and his notes were his profession, and that
they took five hours and two hours respectively of each day. "Then,"
said he, "every man should have a diversion as well as a profession. My
Natural History is my diversion." That took two hours a day more. The
men used to bring him birds and fish, but on a long cruise he had to
satisfy himself with centipedes and cockroaches and such small game.
He was the only naturalist I ever met who knew anything about the
habits of the house-fly and the mosquito. All those people can tell you
whether they are Lepidoptera or _Steptopotera_; but as for telling how

you can get rid of them, or how they get away from you when you
strike them,--why Linnæus knew as little of that as John Foy the idiot
did. These nine hours made Nolan's regular daily "occupation." The
rest of the time he 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. If any other man was ill, he was the kindest nurse in the world;
and he knew 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
always ready to read prayers. I have said that he read beautifully.
My own acquaintance with Philip Nolan began six or eight years after
the War, on my first voyage after I was appointed a midshipman. It was
in the first days after our Slave-Trade treaty, while the Reigning House,
which was still the House of Virginia, had still a sort of sentimentalism
about the suppression of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and
something was sometimes