“Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again.”
Nolan laughed; but nobody else laughed--the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Then Colonel Morgan added, “Mr. Marshall, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat and deliver him to the naval commander there. Request him to order that no one shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship.”
Colonel Morgan himself went to Washington and President Jefferson approved the sentence, so a plan was formed to keep Nolan constantly at sea, far from his own country. The ships of our navy took few long cruises then, but one ship was directed to carry the prisoner as far away as it was going, then transfer him to another vessel before it sailed for home. He was to be confined only so far as necessary to prevent his escape and to make it certain that he never saw or heard of his country again.
As soon as a vessel on which Nolan sailed was homeward bound, Nolan was transferred to an outward-bound vessel for another cruise. At first he made light of it--but in time he learned something he had not thought of, perhaps--that there was no going home for him, even to a prison.
There were some twenty such transfers which took him all over the world, but which kept him all his life at least some hundred miles from the country he had hoped he might never hear of again.
[Illustration: HE FLUNG THE BOOK INTO THE SEA]
Nolan wore his uniform, but with plain buttons. He always had a sentry before his door, but the men were as good to him as his sentence permitted. No mess wanted to have him with them too steadily because they could never talk about home matters when he was present--more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. They took turns inviting him to dinner, and the captain always asked him on Mondays. He could have any books or papers not printed in America. Newspapers having any mention of America had to be gone over and the allusions cut out. He used to join the men as they were reading on deck and take his turn in reading aloud.
Once when they were cruising around the Cape of Good Hope, somebody got hold of Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” which was then new and famous. Nolan was reading to the others when he came to this passage: