This is what novelist Amitav Ghosh's imagined vessel, the Ibis would have looked like, waiting with many other opium ships off Canton to unload their cargoes of India-produced opium onto the fast crabs that would take it to shore.
That is, until 1839, when Commissioner Lin Xexu, under orders from the government in Beijing, got serious about ridding China of the powerful and destructive drug that was turning the Pearl River into the River of Smoke.
I'm uncertain why Ghosh chose the name for his ship, which is first a slaver, then an opium ship. The word ibis is the name of a sub-family of large wading birds.
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