Word: fetid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...understand you." After the near shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour was badly in need of a drydock, and Cook put in at Jakarta (then Batavia). The two-month stay salvaged the ship but wrecked the crew. Seven men died of malaria and dysentery in the fetid port, another two dozen on shipboard as the Endeavour limped her solitary way around South Africa, back to the Thames and into the history books...
Below decks, the situation was hideous. Buttoned up for battle, the LSMR became as breathless as a steam room. Temperatures often hit 140°, posing a serious hazard of debilitation among the crew and a downright perilous situation in the magazines. Sailors slept face to foot in cramped, fetid racks of three, and life was a reasonable approximation of a Roman galley. But all that has changed. Last week, on the fir-fringed shore of Puget Sound, the Navy proudly unveiled the IFS- I (Inshore Fire Support Ship), a ship that combines all the striking power of its ancestor...
Downtown Djakarta sprawls rank and sullen in the fetid subequatorial heat. Wilhelmina Park, once the pride of the city's stolid Dutch proconsuls, now lies half given back to the jungle, its cracked statuary staring vacantly above a graveyard of wrecked jeeps, trucks and armored vehicles. Swill and offal clog the canal that cuts through the main shopping center, and along its banks people gather in family clusters to bathe, brush their teeth, defecate or wash clothes. Hideously deformed beggars swarm the approaches to even the humblest...
...Mason on the Hollywood press corps: "Four out of five of the [reporters] I have met are illiterate boors with unretentive memories . . . The most voluble celebrities cannot satisfy [their] daily demands . . . And the columnists, spurning inventions which must be shared with competitors, secure exclusivity by raking their own occupationally fetid imaginations...
...Live at Peace. Once when the freighter tied up at a wharf at one port, young Christopher managed to steal a look out of the fetid hold. The ship was in a British harbor, but no Britons were permitted aboard to see the human cargo she was carrying. In the face of the Communist guards, the Greek prisoners kept quiet. Soon afterward the freighter tied up at a Polish port, and the human cattle were transferred from its hold to sealed railway boxcars. Dragged, pushed and prodded from town to town over many months, the Moschou family were finally settled...