This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.
Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
© 2016 by Chuck Pfarrer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pfarrer, Chuck, author. | Hale, Edward Everett, 1822–1909. Man without a country.
Title: Philip Nolan: the man without a country / Chuck Pfarrer.
Other titles: Man without a country
Description: Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015043881 (print) | LCCN 2015048278 (ebook) | ISBN 9781591146650 (ebook) | ISBN 9781591146650 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Burr Conspiracy, 1805–1807—Fiction. | Stateless persons—Fiction. | Soldiers—Fiction. | Exiles—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / War & Military. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | War stories. | Adventure fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.F37 P48 2016 (print) | LCC PS3616.F37 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043881
Title page image: Oil on canvas by Michel Felice Corne (1752–1845), courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.
All other images are from the author’s collection.
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First printing
OTHER TITLES BY CHUCK PFARRER
Nonfiction
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL
SEAL Target Geronimo:
Inside the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden
Fiction
Killing Che
Minsky, Pinsky, and Paddy
LAND, SEA, AND STARS
Contents
Author’s Note
A Notorious Person
Grist upon the Wheels
Before a Military Court
Into Custody
Going Aboard
Shipmates
By These Stars
The Affront
The Waif Pole
What Ship?
The Thunder
Hell Afloat
The Letter of Marque
Reckoning
The Lofa River
Mother of Sorrows
Turned Ashore
Independence Day
Captain’s Mast
The Fortress at Arzeou
The Man Without a Country
Acknowledgments
FOR THE HERO OF THIS NOVEL I GIVE CREDIT TO A SUPERIOR MIND AND MORE graciously fluent pen. Philip Nolan was the protagonist of a short story entitled “The Man Without a Country,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863. Its author, Edward Everett Hale, set his story during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and cast as his arch-villain a real-life Revolutionary War hero turned renegade—Aaron Burr. In Hale’s story, Philip Nolan, a young Army officer, becomes embroiled in Burr’s plot to invade the lands of the Louisiana Purchase.
“The Man Without a Country” was a magazine piece, barely seven thousand words. To make the story into a novel it was necessary to expand the plot, add characters, and shamelessly indulge a lesser author’s whim. Though charting a course as close to history as possible, I have retained a novelist’s prerogative, creating a sister ship to USS Constitution and naming her what I pleased. Naval historians will also see that a very real act of valor, the cutting out of USS Philadelphia, has been both dislodged in time and attributed to fictional heroes.
Edward Everett Hale created in Philip Nolan the first antihero in American literature. Though treated harshly by the court that judged him, the peculiar severity of Nolan’s sentence makes him worthy of our sympathy. Two hundred years before “extraordinary rendition,” Philip Nolan was made into a sort of stateless prisoner, a fate and judicial status still chillingly relevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In Hale’s account, Nolan becomes a sort of Flying Dutchman, never touching land, forgotten by his country, a broken man who would die repentant after decades at sea. In Philip Nolan, the reader will discover a different fate for America’s first secret prisoner.
Oh let death deliver me
bring my days to their fatal end
For there’s no affliction worse
than losing one’s own country
—EURIPIDES
HE HAS BEEN ERASED FROM HISTORY. WERE IT NOT FOR A LETTER PUBLISHED in a gentleman’s magazine and a small scrap of newspaper, the world would not know of Philip Nolan at all. Charged with treason, Nolan’s prosecution was irregular, his trial peremptory, and his punishment vindictive. After his court-martial at Richmond in 1807, the records of his birth, his education, his military service, the transcripts pertaining to his indictment and sentence—all were made to disappear. Nolan was then exiled, and it fell to the United States Navy to incarcerate him.
From the first day of Nolan’s confinement until the day of his death, the government