Explore "A Nightmare of the Doldrums" by W. Clark Russell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The _Justitia_ was a smart little barque of 395 tons. I had viewed her with something of admiration as she lay in mid-stream in the Hooghly-somewhere off the Coolie Bazaar, I think it was. There was steam then coming to Calcutta, though not as steam now is; very little of it was in any sense palatial, and some of the very best of it was to be as promptly distanced under given conditions of weather by certain of the clippers, clouded with studding-sails and flying-kites to the starry buttons of their skysail mastheads, as the six-knot ocean tramp of to-day is to be outrun by the four-masted leviathan thrashing through it to windward with her yards fore and aft.
I-representing in those days a large Birmingham firm of dealers in the fal-lal industries-had wished to make my way from Calcutta to Capetown. I saw the _Justitia_ and took a fancy to her; I admired the long, low, piratic run of her hull as she lay with straining hawsepipes on the rushing stream of the Hooghly; upon which, as you watched, there might go by in the space of an hour some half-score at least of dead natives made ghastly canoes of by huge birds, erect upon the corpses, burying their beaks as they sailed along.