There is just a chance of our meeting a homeward-bound ship in these latitudes; and as, at all events, we shall probably be at Calcutta in a fortnight—some sanguine people say in ten days—it is time to be beginning the letter I shall want to send you from there. Our voyage has been most prosperous, and though it seems tedious, yet it has given us little to complain of. We have never had more than twenty-four hours of foul wind since we left England, and few ships have such luck in so long a voyage; sometimes we had a day’s calm, when George is fit to hang himself, and sometimes a very fresh breeze, when the ship shivers away at the rate of eleven miles an hour, and that makes me sick and sorry; but we have generally, since we left the Cape, sailed along very smoothly and pleasantly. We are all in excellent health, and I am grown fat, and now that I can read, and draw, and work, and eat in a natural land-like fashion, the days go off very well, very much better than I thought possible at sea.
