noon
Still , things went on pretty smoothly on board while the calm lasted , despite the little roughnesses which the second mate 's way of evincing his authority produced -- and which I could not avoid noticing , for I 'm sure he used to be `` down '' on me whenever he had a chance of calling me to account for going where I had no business to , as I confess I sometimes did , although I used to be encouraged by the men , and Mr Marline would wink at my escapades . We all found it terribly dull , though ; for , even the fish were too lazy to come to the surface to be caught , and so we were deprived therefore of our old pastime of angling for them from the bowsprit in the afternoons and evenings . Day after day , the _ Josephine _ rolled her hull from port to starboard and then back again to port on the tumid sea , which , save throbbing with a dull heavy swell , had now lost all its life and action : -- day after day we looked in vain for a breeze from sunrise to sunset ; day after day our watchful longing was all in vain ; there , day after day , for over a week , we rolled and lay ! Captain Miles used to come up regularly on the poop at noon to take the sun , from a sense of duty ; but it was almost a useless task , as we hardly varied a mile in our position from the commencement of the calm , the vessel remaining close in with the fiftieth parallel of longitude and in latitude thirty-two North . Mr Marline liked to chaff the captain about this , telling him that his sextant wanted polishing up a bit and that the glasses were wrong . However , that all went for nothing with his chief , who well knew where the fault lay , fully understanding that the instrument was not to blame ; but , as regularly as he brought out the sextant he used to laugh at Mr Marline 's stereotyped joke . As related in Coleridge 's `` Ancient Mariner '' : -- `` Day after day , day after day We stuck , nor breath nor motion ; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean ! ''