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In 1823 Lord Byron was in Genoa in Italy writing poetry including something called The Island.

In it, at one point, one character is telling another he’s seen a ship.

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.”

And this is the first citation we have for the doldrums meaning a ship that is unable to make headway.

As The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea explains it

“[the doldrums are a] belt of low pressure that extends 5° to 10° either side of the equator…[they] were notorious in the days of sail, because vessels could become becalmed there for many days and even weeks…Being in the doldrums has now become synonymous with being listless, depressed, and generally stuck in a rut.”

It is information like this that must have been stuck in my brain somewhere and made me think that this name of a region of ocean gave us our word doldrums for being down, for feeling melancholy.

And I guess it did, but I see that in fact it also has an older history, although it is a short one.

That citation of Lord Byron is from 1823 but in 1812 in the newspaper The Examiner there is a citation reading

“A doldrum is, we believe, the cant word for a long sleeper.”

So the Oxford English Dictionary has as its first and obsolete definition

“slang…a dull, drowsy, or sluggish fellow.”

It’s easy to believe that sailors stuck for days or weeks in the hot, humid seas around the equator might use this word to describe the place.

The OED etymology for doldrum is not too helpful, it says perhaps from dold, an early variation on dolt meaning “dull.”

Lord Byron is reported to have said

“who would write who had anything better to do?”

and I guess he found life in Genoa a little dull around the time he set doldrums to paper, because he promptly set out to join the Greek war of independence and brought along a pile of money to pay to support soldiers under his command.

But the Greek military organization was in a bit of a doldrum itself, or maybe a shambles or a mess.

The lousy weather didn’t help and not only did Byron get discouraged he got sick and died.

Maybe dull isn’t so bad after all.