Philip Nolan and the "Levant" 115 



readers observed it, because nobody ob- 

 served it. The story was a fiction, and 

 with the right of an author of fiction I 

 made this statement, which is unequiv- 

 ocally true. 



I speak of this with a certain sensi- 

 tiveness, because I have been accused 

 of being a forger and counterfeiter for 

 using such language. But it is one of 

 the privileges of authors of fiction to 

 make their narrative as plausible or 

 probable as they can, if they give suffi- 

 cient clues to the reader, from which he 

 may know that he is reading fiction. 

 In this case I began by placing the sup- 

 posed action of part of the book on 

 board a ship which had disappeared 

 more than two years before. I knew 

 that she had disappeared, the Navy De- 

 partment knew she had disappeared, 

 all well-informed readers knew that she 

 had disappeared. Even among four 

 thousand newspapers in the country the 

 editors of two knew that she had dis- 

 appeared. With my eyes open I inten- 

 tionally gave this ready clue to any care- 

 ful reader, that from the beginning he 

 might know that the story was a par- 

 able ; and if there are any of such 

 croakers left, as I suppose there may 

 be in the office of one newspaper known 

 to me, I will say to them that from the 

 time of the Pharaohs down parable has 

 been a method of instruction employed 

 by teachers, even of the highest dis- 

 tinction. 



The Navy Department did not know 

 where the Levant disappeared. All 

 they knew was that Captain Hunt, of 

 the Levant, was under orders to proceed 

 as rapidly as possible from Hilo to the 

 American coast, and that he started out 

 to obey these orders, and the ship has 

 never since been heard from by any 

 trace whatever, unless it be in certain 

 wreckage found on the south shore of 

 Hawaii in June, 1861. 



The Navy Department knew this, but 

 I did not know it. I only knew that 

 she had disappeared somewhere in the 

 Pacific Ocean two years before. 



To carry out the specific purpose to 

 which I have alluded I meant to have 

 these latitudes and longitudes indicate 

 a spot high on the Andes, It was more 

 than twenty years afterward that I 

 found that in some accuracy of some 

 proof-reader, possibly by some blunder 

 of mine, the spot indicated is in the 

 Pacific Ocean, where I did know she 

 had disappeared. But alas the manu- 

 script copy is lost and I cannot find who 

 made this change. This is in point of 

 fact not far from the Marquesan Isl- 

 ands, and, oddly enough, in the story 

 Nolan is supposed to have been at those 

 islands with Essex Porter. But I had 

 nothing to do with this. I placed the 

 ship on the Ande s with the specific pur- 

 pose which I have named. 



I should perhaps have never discov- 

 ered my own error but that many years 

 ago my friend, James D. Hague, who 

 knows the bottom of the Pacific better 

 than I do the surface of the United 

 States, called my attention to the in- 

 structions which Captain Hunt had on 

 his last voyage in the Levant. I had 

 never looked for those instructions, hav- 

 ing no occasion to for my purpose. It 

 seems that Mr Hague was in Honolulu 

 at the time when the Levant sailed ; 

 that Hunt was his friend, and that they 

 bade each other good bye on the day of 

 her parting. As the reader knows, she 

 was never again heard of but from the 

 silent record of the spar which has been 

 found on the island of Kaalualu. But 

 Mr Hague has brought together in his 

 interesting paper the evidence which 

 shows that almost certainly Hunt in- 

 tended to sail on a line nearly east from 

 the Hawaiian Islands. In that region 

 on any of the more recent atlases there 

 is a spot of blue water. On Rand and 

 McNally's elegant atlas of the world I 

 find not a speck for thirty degrees of 

 north latitude from the equator, for 

 twenty degrees of latitude south of the 

 equator. On the old Spanish charts, 

 however, and on charts copied from 

 them Mr Hague and the officers of ma- 



