The pleasant Trade, which had wafted us with different degrees of velocity, over a distance of more than a thousand miles, at last gradually failed.  The sails began to flap gently against the masts, so gently, indeed, that we half hoped it was caused, not so much by the diminished force of the breeze, with which we wore very unwilling to part, as by that long and peculiar swell which,

        “In the torrid clime
        Dark heaving,”

is productive of oscillating motion on the ship; but the faint zephyrs, which had coquetted with our languid sails for an hour or two, at length took their leave, first of the courses, then of the topsails, and lastly of the royals and the smaller flying kites aloft.  In vain we looked round and round the horizon for some traces of a return of our old friend the Trade, but could distinguish nothing save one polished, dark-heaving sheet of glass, reflecting the unbroken disc of the sun, and the bright clear sky in the moving mirror beneath.  From the heat, which soon became intense, there was no escape, either on deck or below, aloft in the tops, or still higher on the cross-trees; neither could we find relief down in the hold; for it was all the same, except that in the exposed situations we were scorched or roasted, in the others suffocated.  The useless helm was lashed amidships, the yards were lowered on the cap, and the boats were dropped into the water, to fill up the cracks and rents caused by the fierce heat.  The occasion was taken advantage of to shift some of the sails, and to mend others; most of the running-ropes also were turned end for end.  A listless feeling stole over us all, and we lay about the decks gasping for breath, seeking in vain some alleviation to our thirst by drink! drink! drink!  Alas, the transient indulgence only made the matter worse!

Meanwhile, our convoy of huge China ships, rolling very slowly on the top of the long, smooth, and scarcely perceptible ridges, or sinking as gently between their summits, were scattered in all directions, with their heads in different ways, some looking homeward again, and some, as if by instinct, keeping still for the south.  How it happens I do not know, but on occasions of perfect calm, or such as appear to be perfectly calm, the ships of a fleet generally drift away from one another; so that, at the end of a few hours, the whole circle bounded by the horizon is speckled over with these unmanageable hulks, as they may for the time be considered.  It will occasionally happen, indeed, that two ships draw so near in a calm as to incur some risk of falling on board one another.  I need scarcely mention, that, even in the smoothest water ever found in the open sea, two large ships coming into actual contact must prove a formidable encounter.  As long as they are apart their gentle and rather graceful movements are fit subjects of admiration; and I have often seen people gazing, for an hour at a time, at the ships of a becalmed fleet, slowly twisting round, changing their position, and rolling from side to side, as silently as if they had been in harbour, or accompanied only by the faint, rippling sound tripping along the water-line, as the copper below the bends alternately sunk into the sea, or rose out of it, dripping wet, and shining as bright and clean as a new coin, from the constant friction of the ocean during the previous rapid passage across the Trade-winds.