"Doldrums" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and seas, pertinacious rains, declining stores, till we came almost to regard ourselves as in the case of Vanderdecken. Three days ago our luck seemed to improve, we struck a leading breeze, got creditably through the doldrums, and just as we looked to have the N.E. trades and a straight run, the rains and squalls and calms began again about midnight, and this morning, though there is breeze enough to send us along, we are beaten back by an obnoxious swell out of the north. Here is a page of complaint, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... San Thome and its little sister isle of Principe, lie right on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea, about two hundred miles from the African mainland. A warm, lazy sea, the sea of the doldrums, sapphire or turquoise, or, in deep shaded pools, a radiant green, joyfully foams itself away against these fairy lands of tossing palm, dense vegetation, rushing cascades, and purple, precipitous peaks. A soil of volcanic origin ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... of the craft, however, was what Bluewater Bill termed "a masterful man." Despite the urgent entreaties of his depleted crew to put into some port and refit, he kept on, with favoring breezes, and soon entered what are called the "doldrums" in which fierce hurricanes alternate with periods of dead flat calm in which a ship will float on a rippleless sea "as idle as a painted craft upon a painted ocean." The Eleanor Jones drifted about in one of these flat, hopeless calms till the pitch boiled in her seams and the sails ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... DOLDRUMS. Those parts of the sea where calms are known to prevail. They exist between and on the polar sides of the trade-winds, but vary their position many degrees of latitude in the course of the year, depending upon the sun's declination. Also applied to ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... experience had I seen a craft so boldly driven. Then—on the evening of the fifth day out from Weymouth—the wind rapidly dwindled away to nothing, and left us rolling heavily on the steep swell that followed us. I concluded that we had run into the doldrums, or horse latitudes, and that we should now probably have calms, or light baffling airs until we fell in with the trade-winds; but on going below to turn in at midnight, I observed that a very decided fall of the barometer had taken place. I therefore returned to the deck for a moment and cautioned ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... education," said he, "but let me tell you this, Captain Fourneau, I've sailed these waters since I was a little nipper of ten, and I know the line when I'm on it, and I know the doldrums, and I know how to find my way to the oil rivers. We are south of the line now, and we should be steering due east instead of due south if your port is the port that the owners ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... find it the part of wisdom to send committees of women instead to plead with the Mayor over his five o'clock tea. They could worm a playground or a small park out of him when I should have met with a curt refusal and a virtual invitation to be gone. In his political doldrums the Mayor did not have a kindly eye to reformers; but he was not always able to make them ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... But at this moment it cannot be denied that the ship of the stage is drifting somewhat hither and thither, Every breath of air and every current of public opinion impels it first in one direction and then in another, At one moment we may be said to be in the doldrums of the English society drama, or we are sluggishly rolling along in a heavy ground swell, propelled by a passing cat's paw of revivals of old melodramas. Again we catch a very faint northerly breeze from Ibsen, or a southeaster from Maeterlinck and Hauptmann. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... southward, we reached that narrow belt of the Atlantic, called "the doldrums," which lies between the variable and the trade winds. This tract is from two to three degrees in width, and is usually fallen in with soon after crossing the thirtieth degree of latitude. Here the wind is apt to be light ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... The doldrums brought rain before the southeast wind came to urge us faster on our course and to clear the skies. Now we were in the deep tropics, five or six hundred miles farther south than Honolulu, and plunging toward the imaginary circle which is the magic ring of the men who steer ships in all oceans. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... No, sir. It was only my way, just to make things a bit more cheery, for every one on deck seems to be in the doldrums, all on account of ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... doldrums—how the sails of the listless ship droop, and the hope of escape dies day by day—may understand something of the life Gyp began living now. On a ship, even doldrums come to an end. But a young woman of twenty-three, who has made a mistake in her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stream, still another still was standing; It was that of the Doldrums. The Doldrums and the ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "professors" were engaged in scientific experiments. The extent of their "scientific" knowledge may be judged by the fact that they expected to produce (I give their own words) "a little blue sky" if "they went on long enough." This in the heart of the Doldrums at 450 feet! I have no objection to any amount of blue sky in its proper place (it can be found at the 2,000 level for practically twelve months out of the year), but I submit, with all deference to the educational ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... ey!" quoth Ben, "not new, but news enow; A strange sail in the offing."—"Sail! and how? What! could you make her out? It cannot be; I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea." "Belike," said Ben, "you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling."—"When the Sun declined Where lay she? had she anchored?"—"No, but still 510 She bore down on us, till the wind grew still." "Her flag?"—"I had no glass: but fore and aft, Egad! she ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... we had the doldrums fair enough, and there we lay with our courses clewed up and our t'gallantsails wearing out with the continuous slatting, as the ship rolled lazily on the long, easy equatorial sea. She was heading all around the compass, for there was not enough air to give her steering way; so, ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... think, boy; sure there isn't nothin' in the univarse but she can spaik about, just like a book, an' though she niver was in the doldrums as far as I knows, she's been in the dumps often enough; maybe it's cousins they are. Anyhow she's not here, an' so we must ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... sails began to flap against the masts, and the ripple which had been playing on the water disappeared altogether. With the last breath of wind she was put about, and attempted to stand off shore; but she was very soon left in what is called the "doldrums," ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... we do a little. Where did you get the Sailor's Hornpipe from? We're sorry about not having girls, but we make it answer. And when you get in the doldrums, or becalmed, it stirs up your blood. Oh, they are taking ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... quiescent, and is a precious possession to muse on during the night or in the long evening hours when I'm too tired to sleep and the light is not good enough to read or sew, or mostly when I'm not well and the doldrums come very near. But I should choose this life if I had to begin again; only I should try to live it to ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... tenor of existence goes on, with its tidal ups and downs, too listlessly busy to demand expression. Then the shock of tempest comes, and it's only after we're driven out of them that we realize we've been drifting so long in the doldrums of life. Then it comes home to us that there are the Dark Ages in the history of a woman exactly as there were the Dark Ages in the history of Europe. Life goes on in those Dark Ages, but it doesn't feel the call to articulate itself, ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... degeneracy of her affairs, had recently begun to drink. Owing to the failure of her affair with Lynde—for in spite of her yielding she had never had any real heart interest in it—and to the cavalier attitude with which Cowperwood took her disloyalty, she had reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not. In one ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... for it she would scarcely have done four. And finally it fell calm again, and the schooner lost steerage way altogether. There was again every sign that the calm was likely to be prolonged—in fact, we were in the latitudes of the "Doldrums", or calms that occur just to the north and south of the Trade winds, where, as on the Line, the calms sometimes last for weeks at a stretch. It was therefore an excellent opportunity to test Cunningham's contrivance, and we accordingly proceeded to bolt it up ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the stairs to Bobby's room, and sat down glumly on the floor. Reaction was strong, and they had both fallen into aimless doldrums of spirit. Suddenly Bobby sat up straight ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... some time of the year comes just overhead. Between these belts of trade winds there is a strip or belt under the region where the atmosphere is rising from the earth, in which the winds are irregular and have little energy. This region of the "doldrums" or frequent calms is one of much trouble to sailing ships on their voyages from one hemisphere to another. In passing through it their sails are filled only by the airs of local storms, or winds which make their way into that part of the sea from the neighbouring continents. ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... croaking, you blundering old fool!" snapped Travers, as Mrs. Bawdrey gave a heart-wrung cry and hid her face in her hands. "You and your eternal doldrums! Here, Bawdrey, lend a hand, old chap. We can get him upstairs without the assistance of this human trombone, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... ever-present winds. The Harpoon, shaping her course for Norfolk, in the United States, had made but a poor passage of it. She got into the south-east trades, and all went well till they made St. Paul's Rocks, where they were detained by the doldrums and variable winds. Afterwards she passed into the north-east trades, and then, further north, met a series of westerly gales, that ultimately drove her to the Azores, just as her crew were getting very short of water and provisions. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... failed for once; then the pleasant face and sprightly figure of the lady of his choice seemed to interpose, and to comfort him. "Come, come!" he said, "ain't we gettin' into the doldrums, Crowe? I'll just step in an' close up the warehouse; it must be time to ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of Good Hope; twenty days later, on the rocky island of St. Paul, grandfather had a fight with a monster seal; a sailor took the scurvy, and, dosed with niter and vinegar, was stowed in the longboat, but he died and was buried at sea in the Doldrums. Then, with a cargo of Sumatra pepper, they made Corregidor Island and Manilla Bay where the old Spanish fort stood at the mouth of the Pasig. The barque, the final cargo of hemp and indigo and sugar in the hold, set sail ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... in the forecastle o' the ol' Quick as Wink, in this here black gale from the nor'west," said Tumm, "along o' four disgruntled dummies an' a capital P passenger in the doldrums, I been thinkin' o' Small Sam Small o' Whoopin' Harbor. 'This here world, accordin' as she's run,' says Small Sam Small, 'is no fit place for a decent man t' dwell. The law o' life, as I was teached ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... about July 7, and ran into the Doldrums. On the whole we could not complain of the weather. We never had a gale or big sea until after leaving South Trinidad, and though an old ship with no modern ventilation is bound to be stuffy in the tropics, we lived and slept on deck so long as it was not raining. If it rained at night, as ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket. Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he could now make he needed, for his change of domicile had brought about a corresponding change of habit and expenditure into which he slipped imperceptibly. To live on fifteen dollars a week, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... waited about, becalmed in the doldrums. There was little to interest him in town except a helpless espionage on Irene's loyalty to Drury Boldin. Her troth defied both time and space. She went every day to the post-office to mail a heavy letter and to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... prices during the second half 1999 took pressure off the budget and currency; the bolivar is widely believed to be overvalued by as much as 50%. Despite higher oil prices, the economy remains in the doldrums, possibly due to investor uncertainty over President CHAVEZ's reform agenda. Implementing legislation for the new constitution will not be passed until the second half of 2000, after a new legislature is elected. With the president's ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... trades clear to the Line," he remarked to his father. "After that I'd be liable to bang round for a couple of weeks in the doldrums, but in spite of that—did you say I couldn't do it in ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... in Spain, and again a few minor notes, strung together, perhaps, by Greig, in the Saeter, and you feel the scent of the pines in the valley rising to the snow—a concertina takes me back to warm golden sunsets in the dog watches in the Doldrums!—guess, I am fortunate receiving sweet ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch |
