THOSE WHO HAD SURVIVED AND THOSE WHO HAD BEEN RESCUED CLIMBED up onto the frigate. Nolan was put onto a litter and made fast with strips of linen around his legs and a turn of line around his chest. The flag he stitched together was put into his hands, and the stretcher was lifted from Yunis to the spar deck of Enterprise. The men on both ships were silent, and the sky was bone white and still from horizon to horizon.
Curran was the last man to come off Yunis, jumping from the main shrouds to the mizzen chains of Enterprise. Nolan was lowered to the deck, and Darby knelt beside the stretcher. He put his fingers to Nolan’s throat, felt the cool, damp skin, and lifted up the flag to see the dime-sized hole bored into his friend’s heart. Darby lowered the eyelids down with his thumb and forefinger, took out his lancet, and cut away the linen and the shot line that bound Nolan to the litter. When he called for bearers his voice sounded like it was coming across a hundred miles.
At first, no one stirred. No one wanted to hear. Curran stood by Pelles, unable to move and incapable of speech, hardly able to believe. Darby asked again, stood, and Lieutenant Amick and four of the Torches came forward. Curran watched as they took up the litter, and a shadow rose behind them. Fante brushed the men away. The big man went to Darby’s side, leaned over, and scooped Nolan’s body up into his arms, bundling him up as though he were a sleeping child. Fante looked up at Curran and Pelles, and tears streaked his black, powder-scorched face. The crew parted before him as he carried Nolan toward the companionway with slow, measured steps.
Until this instant Curran had felt almost no pain; now it seemed to consume him. His skull ached as though it had been punched through with a handspike. He staggered toward the rail and gripped it with both his hands. To starboard, in the place where Yunis had been, there was only a debris-strewn slick. Shot through a dozen times between wind and water, she had sunk alongside, going down by the bow with only a whisper. Far to the south, near the line of the horizon, a thin trickle of smoke wound up from Arzeou, a distant blank marked by a curious smudge. Curran looked across the deck; in Fante’s arms there was another empty place, a thing that had once been a man, a friend, a shipmate; now it was a burned and broken thing, dripping dead blood from dirty rags.
Curran saw faces turning toward him. Pelles, Padeen, Nordhoff, and Hall. His head swirled, and he saw others who were not there: Hackman, Kanoa, and Finch and Guild, a dozen other fallen shipmates. In his mind’s eye, Curran saw Nolan on the pier at Cádiz; he saw one of Nolan’s papers picked up by the wind and blowing off the quay, the wind lifting it, turning it end over end and out into the bay. Grief; desolation; an agony of want and sorrow, all these things welled up in the place behind his heart. Curran felt his joints crumbling; he felt his pulse pound and his mind flying to atoms—as he fell, Pelles caught him up with his good arm and lowered him to the deck.
CURRAN’S EYES OPENED. SLOWLY HE MADE OUT A LIGHT, A WHALE OIL LANTERN turned low, spilling thin light across the foot of his bedstead and the curving space of his stateroom. He turned his head painfully. His boots, sword belt, and pistol were on the deck. He only vaguely remembered the ministrations of Doctor Darby and speaking to Pelles, telling him of the sandstorm and the passage through the al-Humazah channel, of the burning galleys and the harbor lit by flare and cannon, and of Nolan twisting in the air.
For a while, Curran lay staring at the beams of the overhead. He had been washed and his wounds dressed, but still the smell of gunpowder clung to him. His hand reached and fumbled across his desk; there was blood under his fingernails. He found his watch and opened it. Curran could see blue moonlight through the scuttle in the bulkhead; he had slept for the better part of fifteen hours. It was nearly midnight when he walked into the empty wardroom. He drank a cup of ginger beer. Old Chick came in silently and put down a sandwich of cheddar, ham, and mustard. Curran ate it slowly.
Two bells in the middle watch; Curran walked through the ship, down ladders to the gun deck, then aft and down again to the berth deck. Through the swinging hammocks he could see the lighted place where Nolan was laid out on a hatch cover, a sailor and a Marine standing armed over the body. Curran stood at the end of the deck, unable or unwilling to come any closer. A dozen hands passed by him, the men of his division and the crews of Yunis and Torch touching their hats in salute, and his older shipmates patting him with rough, open hands. No one spoke a word, though some were streaked with tears, and it seemed that the entire ship was mute and still.
Curran watched as the guard over the body changed, Marine for Marine, sailor for sailor, then went down into the orlop to Nolan’s cabin. He stood in front of the door for a long moment, then took a lantern off the bulkhead and opened the door.
His light revealed the small, tidy place: Nolan’s bunk, a sea chest, some books and papers. Curran hung the lamp in the ringbolt over the desk. He looked at the bookshelf and Nolan’s modest library: Epictetus, Seneca, Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, and three untitled leather volumes. Curran took them down and put them on the desk.
The first was a chapbook devoted to insects, beautifully illustrated in Nolan’s own hand. The exotic mantises of the tropical Pacific, moths and butterflies from three continents, and even the humblest of shipboard roaches were faithfully and exactly rendered in watercolors and ink. The second was a book of pencil sketches. Spanning the pages were line drawings of various ships, frigates, gun sloops, and schooners neatly drafted from bobstay to counter: Constitution, Holyoke, Hornet, Vixen, Warren, Brister. There were watercolors of sailors around their mess tables, a cartoon of a midshipman exiled aloft, and a fine likeness of Curran, laughing. There was a haunting ink sketch of a man standing alone at a ship’s rail, his back turned, a tremendous thundercloud looming on an ink-washed horizon. The figure was tall and wore a neatly ribboned queue. Perhaps it was Captain Pelles; perhaps it was someone else.
Curran opened the third book, its pages stuck through with needles and cards wound with multicolored thread. Stuck in the book’s leaves were patterns traced on tissue paper: arrowheads and clouds and olive branches.
Curran sat and listened to the sound of the water against the hull. A seabag swayed on its dowel and the lamp rolled in its handle. Nolan’s bloody clothing had been bundled into a white sheet and placed onto the foot of the berth by Doctor Darby. Nolan’s flag was folded into a triangle and placed atop it. After a long time Curran leaned across and pulled it open. He had only glimpsed it during the battle, and now, looking closely at it, he was astounded by its intricacy.
Nolan’s blood was spattered over the fly; in places the flag was burned through by powder and shot. No part of the whole was larger than a hand’s breadth. Nolan had sewn it together from hundreds of small pieces of fabric, like a quilt. The stripes were pieced together from bits of red ribbon and bunting. Other parts were cut from bits of cloth or bandanas in shades from crimson to copper red, united into rectangular strips with careful, even stiches. Some parts were linen, white as snow, fabric cut from the simple shirts Nolan wore in hot weather. Other parts were a sun-bleached shade of tan sewn onto butternut-colored cotton.
The blue of the flag’s canton was composed of a hundred patches and as many shades of that color; sapphire bits of silk, navy blue bits of pea jackets, rectangles of denim, strips from Nolan’s old coat sleeves dyed with India ink in shades of azure, cornflower, and deepest indigo. On very close examination parts of the blue rectangle not blue at all, but ebony-black as Fante’s brow. Over the canton Nolan had sewn stars for all the states, those that he knew. Twenty-three stars were ordered in a wavering set of rows: five, and six, and six again twice. Some were applied as embroidered patches, layered with stiches, some were cut and sewn with five- and even six-sided stars, each star cut from a unique piece of fabric, a constellation in shades of white duck, rough homespun, and yellow flax almost the color of sunflowers.
Up close, the miscellany of patches made the flag seem almost abstract, the smallest parts quite distinct; but taken together, the whole became not only unified but interdependent, its rectangular and lopsided pieces melding into harmony and order, as sublime and beautiful as an ideal.
Curran looked at Nolan’s seabag, still hanging from a dowel on the door. He took it down and opened it. It contained shirts and a pair of duck trousers, some darned socks, and what looked like a pillowcase made of two pieces of satin. He pulled it out and noticed that dozens of threaded needles were stuck into its corners. Curran turned the case inside out and found it to be embroidered from end to end: a map of the United States, drawn from memory.
Needlepoint piled up, stitch upon stitch; the original Thirteen were there, and Delaware; Louisiana, of course, and Kentucky and Ohio: all the states extant on the day of his conviction. In the years of his sentence Nolan had somehow divined most of the ten states that were added to the Union.
In the south Nolan had stitched in the boundaries of Alabama and Mississippi quite exactly, and above them Tennessee. The peninsula of Florida was there, but not demarked as a state, Nolan probably mistaking that the lack of a war with Spain had resulted in continued Spanish possession of that place. In the northwest where he had served, Nolan had correctly sewn in Illinois and Indiana but seemed not to know about the Minnesota and Missouri Territories. The Arkansas Territory was unknown to him, though he had stitched in the Sabine and Red Rivers with a fair degree of accuracy. Curran was surprised that Nolan had embroidered most of Texas, bordered in the south by the Rio Grande, and unbounded to the west. He had sewn a star at a place Curran did not know: Arroyo Nogal. Rivers and mountains, plains and lakes were all in their places. It was a beautiful, ornate, and detailed piece of work.
“It must have taken years.”
Curran stood and turned to find Captain Pelles standing in the doorway. He placed the silk map back on top of the flag.
“I often saw him staring up at the ensign,” Pelles said. They stood in silence for a moment. “In my memory he never missed a reveille in any of the ships he was on. On Holyoke and Constitution he was always there, at dawn, in fair weather or foul.” Pelles traced his fingers around the stars.
“I don’t know why I didn’t notice,” Curran said softly. “But he was on deck at the end of the middle watch, the day we sailed for Arzeou. He saw the sunrise.” Curran touched the map. “He must have counted the stars. When another was added, he was sure another state had come into the Union.”
Pelles sat down at Nolan’s desk and adjusted the lantern on its ringbolt. Among the other books, the captain’s eyes fell on the copy of Epictetus. He opened the cover to the dedication he had written years earlier.
“I remember when he first came aboard Vixen,” Pelles said. “I met him in the West Indies, before the second British war. I was third under Captain Scholley. I’d just made lieutenant, not more than a year. It was 1809, I reckon, early in his sentence. Wasp rendezvoused with us off St. Barth’s. Her patrol was over and all hands knew there would be a run up the Gulf Stream, then Christmas and snow in Boston.
“The morning Wasp was to part company, Nolan was put into a boat and sent aboard us. He looked very blank when he was told he was being exchanged into the outbound ship. There would be no going home for him, not even to a prison. Until then, I’m sure he thought he was going home. I remember he had stitched together a boat cloak out of a wool blanket—that one there, on the hook—he made it when he thought he would be returned to Boston. Instead he was turned over to us. I was the officer of the deck; I am ashamed to say that I signed for him as though he were a bag of nails.
“When he came aboard in that old coat of his I thought he must be some sort of lay chaplain. I was so green I thought every ship must have one. It was only when Captain Scholley called us together to explain Nolan’s sentence that I had any idea he was a prisoner. In the first six months he was on Vixen almost no one talked to him. No one dared.”
Pelles looked older, grayer, and sadder than Curran had ever seen him.
“I met him again when he came aboard Holyoke off the Marquesas; by then he was an old salt—he’d sailed with Porter to Tahiti. I know for a fact that Porter thought to leave him there to command the garrison with Gamble . . . exile in paradise.” The captain paused for a long moment. “But Porter did not put him ashore.” Pelles’ green eyes fixed on Curran. “The commodore didn’t want to exceed his orders. So Nolan was sent on. No ship wanted to carry him. And no officer wanted to be complicit in Washington’s vengeance—but we went along. We all did.”
Pelles looked down at his hands. “Truxton and Gamble complained to the Navy Department. I did too. But none of us had the guts to alter his orders. Nolan was braver than any of us.” Pelles looked around at the cabin, scarcely eight feet by seven. Everything Nolan had owned would not even fill half a seabag.
“Did he ever speak to you of family, sir?” Curran asked.
“He did not.”
Curran said softly, “I am embarrassed to say that I never asked.”
After a pause the captain said, “Now he is punished and we are guilty.” Pelles opened Nolan’s Bible. There was a slip of paper marking Isaiah 2:4. He turned over the bookmark and unfolded it. Nolan’s firm hand had written:
Bury me in the sea; it has been my home and I love it. But will not someone set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams in Newport, that my disgrace not be more than I ought to bear.
Say on it: In memory of Philip Nolan, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. He loved his country as no other man had loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.
Pelles handed the paper to Curran. “I will leave it to you to gather his personal effects.”
“Yes, sir.” Pelles had never seemed small to Curran, but now, in the shadow of the lantern, he seemed shrunken, grave, and wounded.
“I have lost a shipmate and it pains me,” Pelles said.
“You were his friend, sir.”
“I cannot call myself one. A friend would have done more.”
FOR THE REST OF THE EVENING NOLAN’S BODY LAY ON THE GUN DECK, GUARDED in turns until each division, each squad of Marines, and each mess had paid him the honor. He was washed and his hair combed, and his head was placed on the pillowcase he had made. He was covered in plain sailcloth until his uniform was made ready. His best blue coat was brushed up, and the old brass buttons were taken off. The plain ones were replaced with officer’s buttons bearing the eagle and anchor: they were sewn onto his waistcoat. For the cuffs of his coatee, the sailors of each division gave blue-dyed, anchor-carved buttons from their peacoats, thirteen of them, one from each department and division of the ship.
A shroud was stitched from the ticking of Nolan’s own mattress, and a black hat ribbon embroidered with the words U.S. FRIGATE ENTERPRISE. Three marble cannonballs from Ar R’ad were placed at Nolan’s feet and the ticking was pulled gently up over him. As the canvas was being sewn, Curran stepped forward and removed his own sword. He placed the pommel in Nolan’s hands and the scabbard by his side. Men wept openly as Padeen sewed shut the canvas.
Philip Clinton Nolan was buried at sea at 36° 44' North and 0° 58' East. The Mediterranean was at her most beautiful to receive him; the sky was pure and infinite and the sea blue-dark and calm. As his remains were put over the side and the volley was fired, Curran walked to the quarterdeck.
The bo’sun’s pipes shrilled a long, plaintive wail. The crew held its salute, every officer, sailor, and midshipman. As Curran went up the ladder to the quarterdeck Fante readied a halyard. At the taffrail, the Marines were called to attention and presented arms with a firm clash, their gloved hands slapping the stocks of their rifles, their bayonets moving as one machine, up from port arms in a gleaming blur, then perpendicular and white in the sun.
Together, Curran and Fante hoisted Nolan’s battered flag into the mizzen. Rippling in the wind, the powder-stained ribbons and patches were a perfect emblem of his shipmates’ esteem, grief, and proud resolve.
The United States frigate Enterprise flew Philip Nolan’s flag until the day she was stricken from the list.
FOR MANY YEARS IT WAS RUMORED IN THE FLEET THAT NOLAN WAS NOT KILLED at Arzeou. It was put about that he was allowed to go ashore at Cádiz and that he came home to the United States. Others said that he went to New York and saw Aaron Burr, and that on that day Burr died of shame and grief. Some think that the ghost of Nolan still rides over the sea, that he became a Flying Dutchman, a phantom, moving from ship to ship. But in the end, Philip Nolan proved to be a mortal man—merely flesh and blood.
Arthur Pelles wrote a special letter to the Secretary of the Navy demanding that Nolan be pardoned. The letter was returned, and Pelles went to Fort Adams, at Newport, and had a marker placed in the graveyard there. When the garrison commander removed it, Pelles challenged the man to a duel. The interview was declined; the officer preferred charges (assault and insubordination), and Pelles was briefly arrested. Exonerated at court-martial, Pelles was ordered to duty in a dingy garret in the Capitol. There he found his friends few on the ground and his prospects greatly diminished. Told he would never again command a ship, Pelles resigned his commission and took a wagon south and west as far as he could conveniently travel. He settled on the Bay of Biloxi in Mississippi, where he lived as a semirecluse for the rest of his life.
Curran, himself later a captain and then a commodore, also wrote to secure a pardon and to restore to Philip Nolan the privileges of a citizen. The authorities in Washington ignored the whole business. You may be sure that the people of that city will always serve their own interests first, and there are few among them, then or now, who might do anything to set right a cleverly hidden wrong. Curran, too, eventually resigned his commission. After serving as captain of a China ship in the merchant service, Curran retired to the town of Staunton, in his native Virginia. He married, had two daughters, and never laid eyes on the sea again.
No stone or marker exists to honor Philip Nolan, and no records mark his part in the actions at Arzeou or the cutting out of USS Torch. The country that Nolan loved did everything in its power to erase him from history.
They will tell you still in Washington that there was no Philip Nolan—that he never lived, and that this story never happened. Believe what you will. But as long as there is a United States Navy it will have a ship named Enterprise. And as long as there is a ship that bears the name, it will carry Philip Nolan’s flag.
