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More "Mainsail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... afore the wind 'twas worse than ever. The way Phil see-sawed that piece of pie back and forth over the river was a sin and shame. He could have slacked off his mainsail and headed dead for the buoy, but no, he jiggled around like an old woman crossing the road ahead of ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with a sort of scared hurry when the master threw the wheel hard over and trod on the spokes with all his weight. As soon as the bellying mainsail began to flap, the three men let it go on the run. They kept up the jumbo sail, as the main jib is called; they reefed the foresail down ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... as possible, in some well sheltered bay. Here soundings wouid be taken, and the vicinity thoroughly inspected. When the bay gave promise of shells and coral, a camp was made on the silver-like beach under the shade of the towering cocoanut trees. The mainsail was detached and carried ashore to serve as an awning. The large sheet-iron boilers were also landed. While two of the crew gathered wood and decayed vegetation for fuel, the others were busy erecting a crude fire- place with rocks, over ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... want a pilot," by burning a blue light on the bridge, and bears down on the pilot schooner. The moon reveals enormous figures, with a heavy dot beneath, on the mainsail of the schooner. Over the rail goes the yawl, followed by the oarsman and pilot, whose turn it is to go ashore. The pilot carries a lantern, which in the egg-shaped yawl dances on the white wave crests up and down like a fire-fly. The yawl is soon under the steamer's lee, and a line ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... this we saw a few of the other vessels hoisting their sails; and then Captain Truck, Oliver, and I pulled and hauled until we got our mainsail set. The men then washed down the decks, though really there was no dirt to wash away, and we tried, as we had promised, to ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... though, and means to fight us," cried another. "See, he is hauling up the foot of his mainsail, but he wants to keep ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... be vinegar-pots to be found in her larder, but they were kept behind closed doors and sampled only when she was alone. As she sat looking out to sea, Max's brain still at work on the problem of her unusual mood, a schooner shifted her mainsail in the light breeze and set ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... day, we managed, despite a new hole in the old boiler, to steam out of hospitable Sinfir at 6:30 a.m. on the auspicious Wednesday, February 13. The appearance of the Mukhbir must have been originale enough: her canvas had been fished out of the hold, but in the place of a mainsail she had hoisted a topsail. We passed as close as possible to the islet-line of Secondary formation, beginning with Shu'shu', the wedge bluff-faced to south: the Palinurus anchored here in a small bight on the north-east side, between two reefs, and narrowly escaped being wrecked by a northerly ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... fetched in close under the point, and gone about on the port tack—the next would clear—when the first shot struck her, cutting a hole through her jib, and I expected the wind to rip the sail up immediately; yet it stood. The breeze being dead on-shore, the little boat heeled towards us, her mainsail hiding the steerswoman. ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... three varieties of fore-and-aft rig, the cutter—the racing rig par excellence—is of an appearance the most imposing, from the fact that practically all her canvas is in one piece. The enormous mainsail of a cutter, as she draws slowly past a point of land or the end of a jetty under your admiring gaze, invests her with an air of lofty and silent majesty. At anchor a schooner looks better; she has an aspect of greater efficiency and a better balance to the eye, with her two masts distributed ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... dark when her headsails ran down, she turned short on her heel, and her anchor bit into the sandy bottom on the edge of the outer reef; for it was too dangerous then to attempt entering the little bay full of shoals. After the last solemn flutter of the mainsail the murmuring voices of the Moorsom party lingered, very ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... mean the grace?" said honest Mrs. Blower, for the first time admitted into this worshipful society, and busily employed in arranging an Indian handkerchief, that might have made a mainsail for one of her husband's smuggling luggers, which she spread carefully on her knee, to prevent damage to a flowered black silk gown from the repast of tea and cake, to which she proposed to do due honour—"Does her leddyship mean the grace? I see the minister is just coming in.—Her leddyship ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... lived, and occasionally there were guilty approaches and rencontres, she in her boat, I in mine, both being slight clinker-built Montreux pleasure-boats, which I had spent some days in overhauling and varnishing, mine with jib, fore-and-aft mainsail, and spanker, hers rather smaller, one-masted, with an easy-running lug-sail. It was no uncommon thing for me to sail quite to Geneva, and come back from a seven-days' cruise with my soul filled and consoled with the lake and all its many moods of bright and darksome, serene and pensive, dolorous ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... lugger touched our weather side, at the same time lowering down her foresail and mainsail with no little noise and confusion; in a second or two there were thirty of their men on our decks, flourishing their cutlasses, and looking round with their pistols ready cocked in their left hands ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... them; but it has been often observed by those employed on the water that when it ceased blowing half a gale the sky at once became overcast, with damp weather or rain. This may all seem common enough to most people; but to those accustomed to gauge the wind by the number of reefs wanted in a mainsail or foresail it was not so; and the number of consecutive days when two or more reefs have been kept tied down during the last few summers has been remarkable—alternating at times with equally persistent spells of calm and fog such as we are now passing through. Again, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... in the lagoon, using only our engine to escape the coral traps. Past the ever-present danger, with the wind now half a gale and the rain falling again in sheets—the intermittent deluge of the season—the Morning Star, under reefed foresail, mainsail and staysail, pointed her delicate nose toward the Dangerous Islands and hit hard the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... through it—without a sound, you understand—something a shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow, it looked to me. It passed from the weather side to the lee and ducked behind the sweep of the mainsail like that—" McCord snapped his thumb and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... is most obvious in the smallest vessels, as cutters: and of those kept for pleasure, and therefore built for the purpose of sailing as fast as possible, without reference to freight or load, there are many the hull of which might be entirely wrapt up in the mainsail. It is of course very rarely, if ever, that a vessel carries at one time all the sail she is capable of; the different sails being usually employed according to the circumstances of direction of wind and course. The sails of a ship, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... impatience. It wanted but half an hour of 'knocking off time'—and that half-hour would be time enough, for his watch to finish the scraping of the deck-house—but the wind waits on no man, and already the weather clew of the mainsail was lifting lazily to a shift. It was hard to give up the prospect of having the house all finished and ship-shape before the Mate came on deck (and then trimming yards and sail after the work was done); but here was the wind working light into the eastward, and the sails nearly aback, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... succeeded in stopping the leak, this was not accomplished until the mainsail had been carried away by the heavy sea, and other injuries sustained. It was a terrible time for all, and the crew, exhausted and overworked on insufficient food, were only held to their tasks by the captain and mates standing over ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... ordered. It was Eric who obeyed and held on to the sheet Hrolfur himself untied the mainsail, whilst at the same time keeping hold of the sheet. I imagined Hrolfur must be thinking it safer to have the sails loose as it was likely to be ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... a mile from the shore a small brigantine, stripped to a lower topsail, storm-jib, and balance-reefed mainsail, was trying to claw off shore. She had small chance, unless the gale shifted or moderated, for she evidently could not carry enough sail to make any way against the huge sea, and to heave to would be sure destruction ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... Mark, forgetting the officer in the elation of the boy. "Joe Dance will not let the Yankees overhaul him now. Look, he's getting the blacks to help haul up the mainsail. Then that prize is all right," he added, ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... masts over the side and herself out of water. We were then carrying the double reefed topsails, reefed courses, inner jib, fore and main topmast staysail, but the gale had so increased I gave orders to close-reef the topsails and furl the mainsail. I thought it better to run no further risk of dismasting her, as there was always a chance so long as they were kept standing. All hands were up reefing the main topsail and I had the wheel. I saw the black shadow of the mountains in the darkness towering ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... jibs collapse And belly and tug at the groaning cleats, The spanker slats, and the mainsail flaps, And thunders ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... by reaching the arm still further into the hollow behind our seat, it will grasp the storm mizen, a strongly made triangular sail, to be used only in untoward hours, and for which we must prepare by lowering the lug mizen, and shifting the halyard, tack, and sheet. Then the Rob Roy, with her mainsail and jib reefed, will be under snug canvas, as ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... already up, and the yacht drifting with the falling tide. A moment more and she spread a low treble reefed mainsail behind, a little jib before, and the western breeze filled and swelled and made them alive, and with wind and tide she went swiftly down the smooth stream. Florimel clapped her hands with delight. The ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... from the Carib word "boucan," a kind of gridiron on which, like the natives, they cooked their meat, hence, bou-canier. The word filibuster comes from the Spanish "fee-lee-bote," English "fly-boat," a small, swift sailing-vessel with a large mainsail, which enabled the buccaneers to pursue merchantmen in the open sea and escape among the shoals and shallows of the archipelago when pursued in ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... appearance in a critical situation;" for the CAPTAIN was at this time actually fired upon by three first-rates—by the SAN NICOLAS, and by a seventy-four, within about pistol-shot of that vessel. The BLENHEIM was ahead, the CULLODEN crippled and astern. Collingwood ranged up, and hauling up his mainsail just astern, passed within ten feet of the SAN NICOLAS, giving her a most tremendous fire, then passed on for the SANTISSIMA TRINIDAD. The SAN NICOLAS luffing up, the SAN JOSEPH fell on board her, and Nelson resumed his station abreast of them, and close alongside. ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... to the Cove below. How they scamper along, eager to walk the deck of that trim little craft, the Falcon, anchored in the stream, and sitting like a bird on the bosom of the famed river. Wait a minute and you will see the mainsail flutter in the breeze. Now our rollicking young friends have marched past ruins of "chapel, convent, hospital," &c., on the beach; you surely did not expect them to look glum and melancholy. Of course they knew all about "Monsieur ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... make sail. Out wi' you, you blasted lubber, and lay aloft. Up wi' you, and loose that mainsail, and, when you've got it loose, furl it. I'll show you how I earned that money. Up wi' you, 'fore I give ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... tide high, Captain Pomery found plenty of Water in the winding channel, every curve of which he knew to a hair, and steered for at its due moment, winking cheerfully at Billy and me, who stood ready to correct his pilotage. He had taken in his mainsail, and carried steerage way with mizzen and jib only; and thus, for close upon a mile, we rode up on the tide, scaring the herons and curlews before us, until drawing within sight of a grass-grown quay he let run down his remaining canvas and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a jolly thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the chance of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly pulling round, he sees the wind getting into the mainsail, and he feels that she feels the helm. He has her on a slant of the wind, and he makes out between the harbour piers. I am supposing, for the sake of good luck, that it is not blowing bang down the harbour mouth, nor, for the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Cobham gave chase, easily captured her in the Bay of Biscay, and discovered there were forty Inquisition prisoners aboard. After rescuing the prisoners, the captain and crew of the Spanish vessel were then sewn up in their own mainsail and tossed into the sea, no doubt with such sententious expressions of godliness as was thought befitting to sacred occasions of that period. This ceremony having been performed, the vessel was scuttled, so that she might nevermore be used in trading with British sailors or any one else ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... correct) that the Association for building the Pilgrim Monument at Plymouth should issue a pamphlet giving a picture of the "Landing of the Pilgrims, December 21, 1620," in which women are pictured, and in which the shallop is shown with a large fore-and-aft mainsail, while on the same page is another picture entitled, "The Shallop of the MAY-FLOWER," having a large yard and square-sail, and a "Cuddy" (which last the MAY-FLOWER'S shallop we know did not have). The printed description of the picture, however, says: "The cut is ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... it'll be the very thing to catch it too. We can keep it spread out a bit wi' a hollow place in the middle, an' if it do rain, there then,— my boy, we'll ha' a pool big enough to swim ye in. Hurrah! it's sure to rain. See yonder. It be comin' nearer every minute. Let's be ready for it. Down wi' the mainsail. Let go the sheets,—an' instead o' spreadin' our canvas to the wind, as the song says, we'll stretch it out to the rain. Come, Will'm, ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... out of the storm. The gale drove us in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to. The mainmast went with ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... enthusiastically, misunderstanding the look. "Wait till our mainsail's bent, an' she walks home with all her salt wet. There's some work first, though." He pointed down into the darkness of the open main-hatch between the ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... fresh gale in the evening at S.W. by W., which, being fair for the Portugal fleet, and the weather pleasant and agreeable, we heard the signal given to unmoor, and running in under the island of Si—-, we hauled our mainsail and foresail up in the brails, lowered the topsails upon the cap, and clewed them up, that we might lie as snug as we could, expecting their coming out, and the next morning saw the whole fleet come out accordingly, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... interested: "An' did they say he was as big as a cabin an' a ruff on him like the mainsail ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... orders the boys set sail, hoisting both the jib topsails and club topsails; in fact, cracking on every stitch. Hans grew weary again before the mainsail ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... fair a breeze as one would wish to see, we were some of us astonished to see the captain giving orders to reef topsails. The royals were stowed, so were the top-gallant-sails, topsails close reefed, mainsail reefed, and just at 10.45 p.m., as I was going to bed, I heard the captain give the order to take a reef in the foresail and furl the mainsail; but before I was in bed a quarter of an hour afterwards, a blast of wind came ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... to have her stores taken aboard to go to sea. And that was attended to next morning, and she was out for her trial trip the same afternoon. Everybody said she looked as handsome as a photograph going out, though all the old sharks, when they saw her mainsail hoisted for the first time, said she'd certainly have need of her quarter and draught to stand up ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... jib. b. Jib. c. Foresail. d. Foretopsail. e. Foretopgallantsail. f. Foreroyal. g. Mainsail. h. Maintopsail. i. Maintopgallantsail. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... circumvented propensities. What humble, happy masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge- pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain—when, nevertheless, he ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... boom above his head, and the vast expanse of the mainsail, a tremendous canvas, even though reefed. He saw the straining, board-like staysails. He heard the harsh scream of the wind aloft, the vibrant thrumming of tautened stays, the banging of a block, the crash of boarding seas. Grim sounds, and an outlook to daunt a young man whose maritime experience ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... me, if it hadn't a been for a great big nigger wench he had, called Rose. My! what a slashin' large woman, that was; half horse, half alligator, with a cross of the mammoth in her. She wore a man's hat and jacket, and her petticoat had stuff enough in it to make the mainsail of a boat. Her foot was as long and as flat as a snow shoe, and her hands looked as shapeless and as hard as two large sponges froze solid. Her neck was as thick as a bull's, and her scalp was large and woolly enough for a door-mat. She was ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... jetty. A livelier, stiffer, and drier little vessel of her size never was built. She jumped over the waves, as if the sea was a great play-ground, and the game for the morning, Leap-Frog. Though the wind was so high that we were obliged to lower our foresail, and to double-reef the mainsail, the only water we got on board was the spray that was blown over us from the tops of the waves. In the state of the weather, getting down Channel was out of the question. We were obliged to be contented, on this first day of our voyage, with running across to the Welsh coast, and there ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... let raise the mast and hoist the mainsail, and the wind filled the sail, and they made taut the ropes all round. But anon strange matters appeared to them: first there flowed through all the swift black ship a sweet and fragrant wine, and ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... now upon an income of $2000 a year, derived from boiling down fish into phosphates for the midland markets. He preserves, however, the habit and appearance of old days: that is to say, his chin is folded away under his lip like a reef in a mainsail; his cheek-bones hide his ears, so tusky and prominent are the former, and tipped with a varnish of red, like corns on old folks' feet; he has a nose which is so long and bony that it seems to have been constructed in sections, like a tubular bridge, and to communicate ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... again to that cockle-shell craft with its stone ballast and big brown mainsail, the boy was sent ashore and the two companions set out by themselves. By this time the sun had gone down, and a strange green twilight was shining over the sea. As they got farther out the dusky shores seemed to have a pale mist hanging around them, but there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... in wary sort, Haul down the mainsail, and attempt to wear; And would put back in panic to the port, Whence, in ill hour, they loosed with little care. — "Not so," exclaims the wind, and stops them short, "So poor a penance will not pay the dare." And when they fain ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... boat came and hailed the chief's vessel; he immediately hoisted his mainsail, and the fleet weighed apparently in great confusion. They worked to windward all night and part of the next day, and anchored about one o'clock in a bay under the island of Lantow, where the head admiral of Ladrones was lying at anchor, with about two hundred vessels and ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... was she now, from the reef points on the great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... another tack or two would carry her round the point, and there were reefs amid which she might possibly make her escape, when a shot, flying higher than the rest, struck the head of her main-mast. Over the side went the topmast and topsail, down came the mainsail, and the vessel's head paying off, in five minutes she was hard and fast on a reef. The frigate had, meantime, been shortening sail, and scarcely had the schooner struck, when she dropped her anchor in a position completely to command the ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... time when the poor devil who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot night in fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just sinking into sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head and the rush of the shell, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as it speeds on its arched ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... likewise adopted, in part, by Captain Price, of the Volcano; and in order to give to his ship a still greater resemblance than it already had to a merchantman, he displayed an old faded scarlet ensign, and drew up his fore and mainsail in what ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... much to go there," said I, and the captain, without comment, changed his course a little more to the eastward and let the reef out of his mainsail. ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... continues. "After sunrise the strength of the wind increased, and the sea became still more terrible. The Admiral all this time kept his mainsail lowered, so that the vessel might rise from among the waves which washed over it, and which threatened to sink it. The Admiral followed, at first, the direction of east-northeast, and afterwards due northeast. He sailed about six hours in this direction, and thus made seven leagues and a half. ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... lay at the wharf, a pretty little craft of six or eight tons, with a mainsail and jib. It was a delightful afternoon; a gentle westerly wind swept over a placid sea, and the sky was as clear as the mirror that reflected its exquisite blue. Greenleaf and Miss Sandford took their seats amidships, leaving the stern for the boatman. The ropes ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... which their visitors brought them quantities of delicious watermelons. "Next day, August 3," says the journal, "the Indians, with their six chiefs, were all assembled under an awning formed with the mainsail, in presence of all our party, paraded for the occasion. A speech was then made, announcing to them the change in the government, our promises of protection, and advice as to their future conduct. All the six chiefs replied to our speech, each in his turn, according to rank. They expressed ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... could beat her. She was a clinker-built boat, about seventeen feet long, and her breadth of beam—that is, the distance across her from one side to the other—was great compared with her length. She was rigged like Frank's boat, having one mast and carrying a mainsail and jib; but as her sails were considerably larger than those of the Speedwell, and as she was a much lighter boat, the boys all expected that she would reach the island, which the young skippers always regarded as "home" in their races, long before ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... door of the galley, where the cross, sleepy cook was coaxing his stove to burn, a path of light lay across the deck, showing a slice of steel bulwark with ropes coiled on the pins, and above it the arched foot of the mainsail. In the darkness forward, where the port watch of the Villingen was beginning the sea day by washing down decks, the brooms swished briskly and the head-pump clacked like a great, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... of the smugglers was to escape, and this they hoped to do if they could bring down the cutter's mainsail. The king's officer knew that he should have the smugglers safe enough if he could but make them strike; this, however, knowing that they all fought with ropes round their necks, they ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... the corners of the islands and in very narrow channels, the inward drawing of the tide marked long, curved lines and illusive circles on the oily sea. The Spindrift was poised motionless on the surface of the water, borne slowly, almost imperceptibly, forward by the sweep of the tide. Her mainsail, boomed out, hung in loose folds. The sheet, freed from all strain, was borne down by its own weight, until the slack of it dipped in the water. Terns and gulls, at lazy rest, floated close to the yacht's side. Long rows of dark cormorants, perched on rocky points, strained their necks ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... it ready to hoist as a square sail; the rest of the spars we lashed fore and aft on either side, while we cut up the mainsail and raised the gunwale a foot or more all round to help keep out the water. We also, as far as we could, covered in the after-part of the little craft. While we were thus engaged the boys were pumping and baling. This task was scarcely accomplished before the wind had blown us helplessly ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... strain which had counteracted the pressure of her mainsail, the schooner flew up into the wind. The Indiaman held on her course for another length, and then her helm was put up, and she swept down across the bows of the privateer. Then the men leaped to their feet, the soldiers lined the bulwarks, and as she passed along a ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... quickly to my feet, to see what was the matter. Pont Grave was still ill, which prevented him from rising as quickly as he wished. I was scarcely on deck, when the barque was thrown upon the coast; and the wind, which was north, drove us upon a point. We unfurled the mainsail, turned it to the wind, and hauled it up as high as we could, that it might drive us up as far as possible on the rocks, for fear that the reflux of the sea, which fortunately was falling, would draw us in, when it would have been impossible to save ourselves. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... minutes we saw a distinct flash. The wind, which had been southeast, had now left us, and it was dead calm. We sprang aloft immediately and furled the royals and top-gallant-sails, and took in the flying jib, hauled up the mainsail and trysail, squared the after yards, and awaited the attack. A huge mist capped with black clouds came driving towards us, extending over that portion of the horizon, and covering the stars, which shone brightly in the other part of the heavens. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... You could rock in the hair-cloth chair by the water door, and join in conversation with more active persons mending seines upon the wharf; or you could dangle your heels from the work-bench, and listen to stories and debates inside, and look on Captain Philo sewing upon a mainsail. ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... possessed a teak-built four-oared gig which, being heavy and strong, I rigged with a jib and mainsail, besides adding six inches to her keel, when she proved to be a handy and seaworthy little craft. An iron framework could be erected over the stern-sheets and covered with a canvas hood, thus forming quite a roomy ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... through the surf," said Goring. The two men sprang in and pushed off, pulling me in after them. With mainsail and jib we ran out from the land and passed safely over the bar. Then my two companions without a word of farewell sprang overboard, and I saw their heads like black dots on the white foam as they made their way back to the shore, while I scudded away into the blackness of the night. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my soul!' said he, wiping his brow with a huge coloured handkerchief as big as a mainsail, 'one night in such a furnace as that would have ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... mainsail, by the squall so lately rent, In streaming pendants flying, is unbent; With brails refixed, another soon prepared, Ascending spreads along beneath the yard; To each yard-arm the head-rope they extend, And soon their ear-rings and their robans bend. That task ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... having then only six mariners and six merchants in health. The 16th we had a great storm at W.S.W. by W. which came on about 6 P.M. and our men being very weak and unable to hand our sails, we that night lost our mainsail, foresail, and spritsail, and were obliged to lie hulling till the 18th, when we got up an old foresail; and finding ourselves now in the Channel, we bore up for the coast of England. In less than two hours the old foresail was blown from the yard by a spurt of wind, and we were again ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... ceased. The ship was coming round slowly; I held my breath in the renewed stillness of expectation; one wouldn't have thought that there was a single living soul on her decks. A sudden brisk shout, "Mainsail haul!" broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the men running away with the main-brace we two, down in my cabin, came together in our usual position ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... jib, while others set the foretop-mast staysail in its place. But the wind was full of mischief; it seemed to be playing with the ship's company; it furnished one piece of work after another with dizzying rapidity. Hardly was the jib secured before the great mainsail ripped open from top to bottom, and in the same puff the close-reefed foretopsail split in two with a bang, from earing to earing. Now came the orders fast and loud: "Down yards! Haul out reef tackle! Lay out and furl! ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... years ago that I stood on the deck of an incoming steamer, straining my eyes across a heaving sea, the horizon lost in the dull haze of countless froth-caps; we had slowed for a pilot, so the word came down the deck. Suddenly, against the murky sky-line, with mainsail double-reefed and jib close-hauled, loomed a light craft plunging bows under at every lurch. Then a chip the size of your hand broke away from the frail vessel, and a big wave lying around for such prey, sprang upon ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... now become beautifully fine, I thought I might attempt to get out some spare sails. I obtained what I wanted from the fo'c'sle, and after a good deal of work managed to "bend" a mainsail and staysail. Being without compass or chart, however, I knew not where I was, nor could I decide what course to take in order to reach land. I had a vague idea that the seas in those regions were studded with innumerable ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... bright summer morning! Sheila sat in the stern of the small boat, her hand on the filler. Lufrath lay at her feet, his nose between the long and shaggy paws. Duncan, grave and watchful as to the wind and the points of the coast, sat amidships, with the sheets of the mainsail held fast, and superintended the seamanship of his young mistress with a respectful but most evident pride. And as Ingram had gone off with Mackenzie to walk over to the White Water before going down to Borvabost, Frank Lavender was Sheila's sole companion out in this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Stukely while he took a bucket and proceeded to bale. But the wind showed a disposition to freshen, careening the boat so steeply that, despite Stukely's utmost care, the water began to slop in over the lee gunwale, as well as over the bows; and at length they decided to take a reef in the mainsail, for Dick had no fancy for spending the rest of the cruise in an ineffectual endeavour to free the boat of water that came in faster than he could throw it out. This was done, and the boat resumed her headlong rush to the southward, until by the time that the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... entered the Straits of Gibraltar I verily thought she'd have sunk, For the wind began so for to alter, She yaw'd just as tho' she was drunk. The squall tore the mainsail to shivers, Helm a-weather, the hoarse boatswain cries; Brace the foresail athwart, see she quivers, As through the rough tempest she flies. But sailors were born for all weathers, Great guns let it blow, high or ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... Fresh Gales and Cloudy the most part of these 24 hours. P.M. got up the spare Mainsail to dry, it being Wet by the Water getting into the Sail room, occasioned by the Ship being very Leakey in her upper works. At 5 a.m. loosed 2 Reefs out of each Topsail, and saw the Land, which we judged to be Cape Finister and Cape Ortugal. ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... quarter-deck by Rev. Mr. Rising, of Virginia City, old friend of mine. Spread a flag on the booby-hatch, which made a very good pulpit, and then ranged the chairs on either side against the bulwarks; last Sunday we had the shadow of the mainsail, but today we were on the opposite tack, close hauled, and had the sun. I am leader of the choir on this ship, and a sorry lead it is. I hope they will have a better opinion of our music in Heaven than I have down here. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... letter's lineaments Though swollen to mainsail measure,—magically, I gather from your words; and on its face Are three vast seals, red—signifying blood Must I suppose? It moves on Dresden town, And dwarfs the city as it passes ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... prayer, and then felt so satisfied that our request was granted that I could not continue asking, and very soon went up again on deck. The first officer, a godless man, was in charge. I went over and asked him to let down the clews or corners of the mainsail, which had been drawn up in order to lessen the useless flapping of the sail against the rigging. He answered, "What would be the good of that?" I told him we had been asking a wind from GOD, that it was coming immediately, and we were so near the reef by this time that there was not a minute to ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... went, showing her magnificent sailing qualities, for in a few minutes the boat was far behind, when there was a put from the cutter's side, but not to send a ball across their bows, for before the report reached the boys' ears a peculiar sound came overhead, and there was a hole through the mainsail. ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... hauling at the halliards of the after-mainsail and went to his assistance, while Coristine, doffing his coat, lent a hand to The Crew, when, by their combined efforts, the sails were all hoisted and the schooner floated away from the pier. The lawyer walked over the deck with ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... western horizon, had been stealthily creeping zenith-ward, and at the same time spreading out north and south, with a look in it that seemed to portend more wind; so, as a measure of precaution, I went to work, upon the conclusion of our meal, and shortened sail by taking down a couple of reefs in the mainsail, and a single reef in the little stay foresail which the boat carried. And, this done, I rearranged the royal in the stern-sheets as a bed for my companion, urging her to turn in at once and get as much ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... their ships are made of bamboo, like matting. They do not use a yard on the mast, but raise the mainsail on the mast fastened to a pole as an infantry flag is placed on a pike; and the sheets hang down from the other side with which the sail is turned to this or that side, according to the direction of the wind. The sail is half the width of the ship, and the mast is large and high. ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... the other busied himself in attempting to unlock a large and much-dented cash-box. From on deck came falsetto cries and the creak and rattle of blocks as the black crew swung up mainsail and driver. Grief watched a large cockroach crawling over the greasy paintwork. Griffiths, with an oath of irritation, carried the cash-box to the companion-steps for better light. Here, on his feet, ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)—she ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... simile and metaphor; both use a language of great flexibility;[11] for which reason we find that after the poet himself, the poor man speaks most poetically. Witness the beautiful description: "All to once the nor'easter springed out from the land, an' afore us could down-haul the mainsail, the sea wer feather-white an' skatting in over the bows." New words are eagerly seized; hence the malapropisms and solecisms so frequently made fun of, without appreciation of their cause. Obsolete has come hereto from the Navy, through sons who are bluejackets. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... know exactly what to do with it. Dan perched himself on the weather gunwale, his weight there serving as ballast to keep the craft from capsizing. Yet, even so, everything had to be done with the utmost skill, for, with the mainsail up, the least fluke in handling the boat would ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... which is the stick to which the upper end of the sail is fastened, is a broomstick. The boom, the stick at the bottom of the sail, was made of a rake handle with a broomstick spliced to make it long enough. Mother let me have a sheet, which I put down on the floor and cut into the shape of a mainsail. The wind was the cheapest power to be found, thus it was utilized; the three wheels were ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... before the officer of the deck, 2d Lieut. Jas. L. Parker, remarked to me that he thought it looked a little squally to windward. I immediately passed over to the weather side, and as it looked a little darker than it had done, I ordered him to haul up the mainsail, and brail up the spanker, and directed the helm to be put up. These orders were promptly obeyed. Lieut. Parker took the mainsail off her, and had got the spanker about half brailed up, when the squall struck us. It did not appear to be very riotous, nor was ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... and safety is on the other side of it; land and destruction on this—the attempt, the hope, the failure; then the stout-hearted, skillful captain would try one rare maneuver to save the ship, cargo, and crew. He would club-haul her, "and if that fails, my lads, there is nothing but up mainsail, up helm, run her slap ashore, and lay her bones on the softest bit of ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... another burly young fellow in a blue guernsey, a fisherman, part owner of a little bit of a smack with a brown mainsail. The two stalwart young fishermen ran along the quay, and one of them dropped down into a boat that was chained to an angle in the quay-side, where there was a flight of slimy stone steps leading down to the water. The other young man ran off to get some of the boat's ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... that it could be lowered when the wind was too strong. The dimensions of the sail as we made it are given in the drawing (Fig. 15). The top of the sail was lashed to a spar, which was connected by a short stick to another spar tied to the mainsail about eighteen inches lower down. The sail was strengthened with an extra strip of cloth along the lower spar, and the tie strings were applied in the usual way. The connecting stick, or topmast we may call it, was hinged to the lower ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... Aunt Martha knows the truth. You just run up and tell Mrs. Stoddard all about it, Amanda," he answered; and, having sent his boat into deep water, the captain drew in his oars and began hoisting the big mainsail. ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... captives in a slave trader, exposed to the sun's rays by day, and the river damp by night, without protection.'[2] Still more used the Durham boat for the river journey. This famous craft was a large, flat-bottomed barge, with round bow and square stern. With centre-board down and mainsail and topsail set on its fixed mast, it made fair progress in the wider stretches. But on the up trip it was for the most part poled or 'set' along. Each of the crew took his stand at the bow end of one of the narrow gangways which ran along ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... sped by the line o' the British craft; The skipper called to his Lascar crew, and put her about and laughed:— "It's mainsail haul, my bully boys all—we'll out to the seas again— Ere they set us to paint their pirate saint, or ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... can be there to-night, slick as a whistle. Remember the Barracouta, that old power-sloop we've taken so many trips in? I've had her overhauled this spring and a new seven-and-a-half-horse engine put in her; her jibs and mainsail are in first-class shape. You'll find her at my mooring near the steamboat wharf. My Bucksport dory has just been pulled up on the ledges and painted. You'll need another boat besides, so I've arranged with Sammy Stinson to let you have his pea-pod. She'll ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... construction, and by the occasional aid of George was bringing the hull to a completed state. While this was being done, George was at work with the loom, slowly weaving out the fabric for the sails. As the mast had been stepped back over six feet from the prow, it was concluded to make a mainsail and a jib, a small triangular sail which is attached to the forwardly projecting jib-boom. The two sails would afford greater speed than a single sail, and that was one consideration. The other was, that with two sails the mast would not need to be so long, and the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... following, as near as can be recollected, were the articles landed from the ship; (and the intention was, when all should have been got on shore, to haul the ship on shore, or as near it as possible and burn her.) One mainsail, one foresail, one mizen-topsail, one spanker, one driver, one maintop gallantsail, two lower studdingsails, two royals, two topmast-studdingsails, two top-gallant-studdingsails, one mizen-staysail, ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... gust of wind at that moment bellied his fold of the sail, and he forgot the dawning suspicion in an immediate tussle to reduce the disordered canvas. A few minutes more of desperate work and the mainsail was securely reefed; but these were supremely momentous intervals, during which the fate of the First ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... And instead of a breeze he has sent a gale. Last night I saw St. Elmo's stars, With their glimmering lanterns, all at play On the tops of the masts and the tips of the spars, And I knew we should have foul weather to-day. Cheerily, my hearties! yo heave ho! Brail up the mainsail, and let her go As the winds will ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... found a channel through which we could make but slow progress. The wind increased and blew terrifically all night, forcing the vessels to beat back and forth in the mouth of the straits, and we had a similar experience on the night of the 22d, running the gauntlet under reefed mainsail and jib through loose ice and in imminent danger of shipwreck. Next day the ice appeared somewhat open, and Captain Barry concluded to venture into the pack. When we got into clear water we worked up to the bulkhead of ice and passed Resolution Island. We were almost as glad ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... you will see. When the wind is behind, each stiff quill at the end of the wing stands out by itself and is caught and driven by the blast; but as the bird turns round to face the gale, they all close up and form a continuous mainsail, close-hauled. And all the while the expanded tail is in play, dipping first at one side and then at the other, and turning the trim craft with easy grace "as the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... once to unfurl the jib. With a little canvas on her I believed the sloop could be wore 'round and headed into the wind before the waves sprang up. Perhaps it would have been wiser to have given her a hand's breath of the mainsail. However, before the bit of canvas bellied out and I had dashed back to the helm, the first wave broke over the ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... hands concealed as usual, stood by the capstern. "I fear, sir, we cannot carry the mainsail ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... heavy westerly swell, the Fram, light as she now was, surpassed herself in rolling, and that is indeed saying a great deal. This rolling brought us a little damage to the rigging, the gaff of the mainsail breaking; however, that affair did not stop us long. The broken spar was quickly replaced by a ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... mile of the two ships—the NASSAU and the DAGGET—the newcomer backs her foreyard and hauls up her mainsail. A cheer rises from the ships. She wants to "gam," I.E. to gossip. With eager hands four boats are lowered from the two ships, and the captains and second mates of each are ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... the moon beginning to paint the clouds with leprous hues, and the great ring grew wider and wider, he looked at the mainsail, and wished the trouble over. At midnight there came a sigh; then a rattle of blocks, and then a big, silent wave came pouring along. Something was astir somewhere, and before long the Esperanza's crew knew what was the matter. The last ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... avalanche of books descended upon me from the shelf overhead. Yet I slept pretty soundly. Once I was awakened by a tremendous noise outside—something like a gun going off. I afterwards found it had been occasioned by the mainsail being blown away to sea, right out of the bolt-ropes, the fastenings of which were immediately ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... keep it spread out a bit wi' a hollow place in the middle, an' if it do rain, there then,— my boy, we'll ha' a pool big enough to swim ye in. Hurrah! it's sure to rain. See yonder. It be comin' nearer every minute. Let's be ready for it. Down wi' the mainsail. Let go the sheets,—an' instead o' spreadin' our canvas to the wind, as the song says, we'll stretch it out to the rain. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... foresail and come to our anchor under jib and half-lowered mainsail. I sprang forward to take in the jib and carry it, with the foresail, to the locker abaft the ladies' cabin, when Captain Branscome sang out to me to be in no such hurry, but to fold and stow both sails neatly without detaching them—the ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... when about thirty leagues west of North Cape, and about the same latitude as the Bay of Islands, no land in sight, the wind rose so that they had to bring to, under the mainsail, but moderated a little the next day so that they could run in towards the land. Again it freshened up and blew a perfect hurricane, accompanied by heavy rain, and a "prodidgeous high sea," which caused the ship to go greatly to ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men. That's how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had hit us—and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers. Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... "For God's sake heave hard on that rope if you want to save yourselves!" saluted him as he gained the deck. Roaring wind, a deluge of rain, and pitch darkness held revel on the sea; but above the din was heard the dreaded sound of breakers close under their lee. The jib was split, the mainsail half-lowered, and the vessel running gunwale under. By vigorous and well-directed action, in which John Bowden proved himself to be one of those men who are towers of strength in emergencies, the head of the Buss was brought round, and the immediate danger ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... tore through the sails or rigging, but not a spar was touched nor an important rope cut. We could see some of her crew aloft reeving and stopping braces and ready to repair any damage done, working as coolly under fire as old man-of-war's men. But while we were looking, down came the gaff of her mainsail, and the gaff-topsail fell all adrift; a lucky shot had cut her peak halyards. Our crew cheered with a will. "Well done, Hobson; try it again!" called the captain to the boatswain's mate, who was ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... racing yawl, A spare-rigged schooner sloop, Athwart the bows the taffrails all In grummets gay appeared to fall, To deck the mainsail poop. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... his squadron followed his example. Sir Richard Grenville, however, remaining to receive the sick men, was the last to weigh. The admiral and the rest of the fleet with difficulty recovered the wind, but Sir Richard, not being able to do this, was advised by his master to set his mainsail and coast about, trusting to the sailing of his ship. As the Spanish squadron was already on his weather-gage, Sir Richard utterly refused to fly from the enemy, declaring that he would rather die than dishonour ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... bank, just above the belt of silt and sand that divided it from the river. The two men turned for a moment, and watched her from the yacht's deck. She waited till the big mainsail went up, and the yacht's head swung round and pointed up stream. Then she began to run fast along the shore, close ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... starboard bulwarks were gone, and what added to my astonishment and filled me with fears and doubts was, that in spite of the pace at which she was approaching us and the dead calmness of the air, she had no other sails than her foresail and mainsail, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the Spanish ship in the Bay of Biscay, after all resistance was over and the heat of the battle had cooled, he ordered his crew to bind the captain and all of the crew and every Spaniard aboard—whether in arms or not—to sew them up in the mainsail and to fling them overboard. There were some twenty dead bodies in the sail when a few days later it was washed up on ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... forehead those creases," I cry to my friend on the yacht, "I admit that the mainsail's in pieces And most of the sheets in a knot; But remember that if We go ponk on that cliff It's The Blare will be paying your nieces ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... "monarch of all he surveyed," casting his eye up now and then at the trim of his canvass, but more frequently keeping it on me. Dick began to open his budget of chat, and I found him as full of fun as his mainsail was full ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... captured the ship, and took out with the hooks [?] all that they deemed necessary of the wine and brandy, and all the silver and other things that had value, and tortured two Spaniards in order to learn whether there was more silver, and cut down the sails and rigging, except the mainsail, and turned the ship adrift with the men, excepting five or six whom they took with them, and among others ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... on a mainsail, the yard being seventy-one feet long, and reefyard sixty-six feet long, eleven inches diameter at center ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... the gaff of the mainsail broke short off. We replaced it with the gooseneck from the gaff of the storm trysail, and the second gooseneck broke short off inside fifteen minutes of use, and, mind you, it had been taken from the gaff of the storm trysail, upon which we would have depended in time of storm. At the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... jolly round corporation and smug rosy face which he used to present, he has of late become as shrivelled and shrunk as a frost-bitten apple. His scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, which bellied out so bravely in those prosperous days when he sailed before the wind, now hangs loosely about him like a mainsail in a calm. His leather breeches are all in folds and wrinkles, and apparently have much ado to hold up the boots that yawn on both sides of his once ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... side of the forecastle, and the mainsail, which was still drawing, concealed from me a certain portion of the after-deck. Not a soul was to be seen. The planks, which had not been swabbed since the mutiny, bore the print of many feet, and an empty bottle, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a passenger, and ten men. At 11 A.M. we "sheeted home," and stood out of the harbor with a fair breeze, and all canvass spread: but, within an hour, the wind freshened to a gale, and compelled us to take in everything but a close reefed mainsail. The sea being rough, and the weather squally, our boat took in more water than was either agreeable or safe, until we somewhat improved matters by constructing a temporary forecastle of tarpaulins. Finding it impossible, however, to contend against wind and current, we bore ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... they finally succeeded in stopping the leak, this was not accomplished until the mainsail had been carried away by the heavy sea, and other injuries sustained. It was a terrible time for all, and the crew, exhausted and overworked on insufficient food, were only held to their tasks by the captain and mates standing over ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... separated. I put the Reindeer about on the other tack, ran up under the lee of a junk, shivered the mainsail into the wind and lost headway, and forged past the stern of the junk so slowly and so near that one of the patrolmen stepped lightly aboard. Then I kept off, filled the mainsail, and bore away for ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... flying jib: take the bonnet off the jib, and put a reef in her," came the strong swift sentences. "Brail up the foresail, and double reef the mainsail." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... her headsails ran down, she turned short on her heel, and her anchor bit into the sandy bottom on the edge of the outer reef; for it was too dangerous then to attempt entering the little bay full of shoals. After the last solemn flutter of the mainsail the murmuring voices of the Moorsom party lingered, very frail, in the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... our topmast, but let all stand, because she scudded before the sea very well, and we knew that the topmast being aloft, the ship was the wholesomer, and made better way through the sea, seeing we had sea-room. When the storm was over, we set foresail and mainsail, and brought the ship to. Then we set the mizzen, maintopsail, and the foretopsail. Our course was east- northeast, the wind was at southwest. We got the starboard tacks aboard, we cast off our weather braces and lifts; we set in the lee braces, and hauled forward ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... a danger to the ship. The jibs I speedily doused and brought tumbling to the deck; but the mainsail was a harder matter. Of course, when the schooner canted over, the boom had swung out-board, and the cap of it and a foot or two of sail hung even under water. I thought this made it still more dangerous; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He stepped aft to take the wheel himself. The mainsail was going up smartly. The old boatswain and the Portygees swung upon the lines with vehemence. There was not more than a capful of wind; but once let the canvas fill, and ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... Jib. c. Foresail. d. Foretopsail. e. Foretopgallantsail. f. Foreroyal. g. Mainsail. h. Maintopsail. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... George kept after the big warship like a sword-fish chasing a whale. She drew so close that some burning wads from the Spanish guns set fire to her mainsail. Continually hoping that the Prince Frederick would come up, the gallant Walker hammered away at the Glorioso with furious precision, and drove her so near the rocks off Cape Vincent that the castle guns began to play upon the two grappling warriors of the sea. The British sea-captain ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... dear friend, buy a boat of from four to six tons burthen, properly rigged and ballasted; also buy a red shirt, a small low-crowned straw hat, some tar to smear over your hands, and learn the first stanza of 'The sea! the sea!' to make every thing seem more nautical and ship-shape. Hoist jib and mainsail, and venture out. After you have drifted a mile or two, it will fall a dead calm, and the boat (Gazelle? Wave? Gull?) will float two or three hours, the sun flashing back from the glassy surface of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... strange object in the clouds, coming from the north." She called the attention of Mrs. L. Lowell to it, and they were both somewhat alarmed. However, they continued to watch the object steadily for some time. It drew nearer. It was of triangular shape, and seemed to be about the size of a pilot-boat mainsail, with chains attached to the bottom of it. While crossing the land it had appeared to descend, but, as it went out to sea, it ascended, and continued to ascend, until it was lost to ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... a few words and many dramatic gestures, he made known how the trader, roused from a two-day stupor by the pitching of the vessel and the banging of the boom sticks, had staggered up out of the cabin, and been struck by the heavily swinging boom of the mainsail. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... for Anne to go to Boston, and to tell Anne that her Aunt Martha knows the truth. You just run up and tell Mrs. Stoddard all about it, Amanda," he answered; and, having sent his boat into deep water, the captain drew in his oars and began hoisting the big mainsail. ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... island lies some seventeen miles from the coast We started on our homeward sail with a fresh westerly wind. Shortly after midday it backed round to the north and grew lighter. At five o'clock we were stealing along very gently through calm water with our mainsail boom out against the shroud. The jib and foresail were drooping in limp folds. An hour later the mainsheet was hanging in the water and the boat drifted with the tide. Peter, crouching in the fore part of the cockpit, hissed through his clenched teeth, which is the way in which ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... took our mainsail, which was hard frozen, and carried it ashore to cover our house, first thawing it by a great fire; by night they had covered it, and had almost hedged it about, and our six builders desired they might travel up into the country to see ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... starboard bow, the officer then gave orders for our cable to be slipped, which was immediately put into execution. John Gardener, a seaman, wishing to go aloft, and not taking proper hold, was blown from the rigging, and never seen again. We set the fore-sail, which immediately split; the mainsail, met with the same fate; the gaskets of the topsails gave way, and the sails split. At half past eight we found we had sprung a leak, owing to the ship's labouring so much; in the course of ten minutes we sounded, and found three feet water in the hold. The pumps were choaked; by 9 A. M. they ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... time we crossed into frequent thunders. One evening just at dark we made out a heavy black squall. Not knowing exactly what weight lay behind it, I called up all hands. We ducked the staysail and foresail, lowered the peak of the mainsail, and waited to feel of it—a rough and ready seamanship often used in these little California windjammers. I was pretty busy, but I heard distinctly ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of mile of the two ships—the NASSAU and the DAGGET—the newcomer backs her foreyard and hauls up her mainsail. A cheer rises from the ships. She wants to "gam," I.E. to gossip. With eager hands four boats are lowered from the two ships, and the captains and second mates of each are soon racing ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... time of it with Colonel Euan Smith and the Manchester Regiment, his only regret being that he had not killed a tiger. We waved adieux to the skipper, pointed the yacht's head to the southward, made sail, and, as soon as it was cool enough, lowered the funnel and set the mainsail. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... generwine crew, aint I? All right, my hearties, I'll set ye to work fast enough." And then followed a string of orders in true nautical style, and the Rover boys flew in one direction and another to execute them. Up went the mainsail and the jib, and the top-sail followed, and soon the Old Glory was standing off into Santa Barbara Channel, with Mrs. Stanhope in the carriage waving them an adieu, and the girls and the boys ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... one was sighted, bound from Antwerp to Cadiz. Cobham gave chase, easily captured her in the Bay of Biscay, and discovered there were forty Inquisition prisoners aboard. After rescuing the prisoners, the captain and crew of the Spanish vessel were then sewn up in their own mainsail and tossed into the sea, no doubt with such sententious expressions of godliness as was thought befitting to sacred occasions of that period. This ceremony having been performed, the vessel was scuttled, so that she might nevermore be used in trading with British sailors or ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... no sooner reached the vessel than the latter began to drift, carrying the boat along with her. Instantly those on board endeavoured to hoist the mainsail of the Smeaton, with the view of working her up to the buoy from which she had parted; but it blew so hard, that by the time she was got round to make a tack towards the rock, she had drifted at least ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... obliged to stand a long way to the westward, and went to the northward of Juan Fernandez above a degree, before we had a wind that we could make any southing with. On the 25th, in the latitude of 46 degrees, we met with a violent hard gale at west, which obliged us to lie-to under a reefed mainsail for some days, and before we got round the cape, we had many very hard gales, with a prodigious sea and constant thick snow; and after being so long in so delightful a climate as Chili, the cold was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a strapping ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... like very much to go there," said I, and the captain, without comment, changed his course a little more to the eastward and let the reef out of his mainsail. ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... lying outside so much as the merry blue bay between me and those rocks and sand-hills. If I moved my head a little to the right, I saw, over the top of the low wall already mentioned, and apparently quite close to it the slender yellow masts of a schooner, her mainsail hanging loose from the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must, I thought, be on the very harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with Wynnie, I had turned from the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs overhanging the open sea on our own side ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... Laird, who had sought Mannering for some time, and now joined him, "there they go—there go the free-traders—there go Captain Dirk Hatteraick, and the Yungfrauw Hagenslaapen, half Manks, half Dutchman, half devil! run out the bowsprit, up mainsail, top and top-gallant sails, royals, and sky-scrapers, and away,—follow who can! That fellow, Mr. Mannering, is the terror of all the excise and custom-house cruisers; they can make nothing of him; he drubs them, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Goshhawk, if the iron thrown had struck her at or near the water-line. None of it did so, but the next exclamation of Senor Zuroaga was one of utter dismay, for the foremast of the bark had been cut off at the cap and there was a vast rent in her mainsail. Down tumbled a mass of spars and rigging, forward, and the ship could no longer ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... century and the waters of San Francisco Bay would permit. Spider had already agreed to sail with me as my crew of one, and, also, as cook while I did the deck work. We would outfit our grub and water in the morning, hoist the big mainsail (which was a bigger piece of canvas than any I had ever sailed under), and beat our way out the estuary on the first of the seabreeze and the last of the ebb. Then we would slack sheets, and on the first of the flood run down ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... crew promptly obeyed the several orders, and the mainsail was hauled up in much less time than it ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... going either way, up which the waggons had been a couple of hours ago scrambling over the shingle against time, to land one more load yet while the ebb allowed it. They could hear the yeo-yeo! of the sail-hoisters at work on the big mainsail abaft, and wondered how on earth she was going to be got clear with so little sea-way and the wind dead in shore. But they were reassured by the ancient mariner with the striped shirt, whose mission in life seemed to be to stand about and enlighten land-minds about sea-facts. The master of ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... variable. At 12h. 30m. P.M. up mainsail and in royals; at 2h. made the signal for the squadron to prepare for battle, and, anchoring, bent the sheet cable through the larboard gun-room port to the sheet anchor; at 4h. set steering-sails,—fresh ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men. That's how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had hit us—and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers. Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... very anxious night indeed for me; by far the most anxious that I had thus far spent since the destruction of the Saturn, for the wind steadily increased, compelling me to haul down a first and then a second reef in the mainsail, while—the wind and sea being now square abeam—I was continually exposed to the danger of being swamped by a sea breaking aboard. By constant watchfulness, however, I contrived to escape this danger, and my ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... of the blade to allow the blood of the victim to run off. Many a caravan leader has spent the greater part of his life in travelling to and fro between Tabriz and Trebizond. On every journey he has seen Ararat to the north of the road, like a perpetually anchored vessel with its mainsail up; and he knows that the mountain is a gigantic frontier beacon which marks the spot where Russia, Turkey, and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... will have to tell me where to steer the sloop to," said Larry, after the mainsail had been run up. "I don't know where that ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... the helm, so that his ship ran into the wind and her sails lay "a-back" as the mariners say. This gave us time to come up under the stern of his vessel, and firing continually into the vessel we killed as many as came to the helm, and cut in two his mainsail and brace. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... darting through the air or lighting on the hives, their thighs covered with the yellow forage. A solitary robin sings near. I sit in my shirt sleeves and gaze from an open bay-window on the indolent scene—the thin haze, the Fishkill hills in the distance—off on the river, a sloop with slanting mainsail, and two or three little shad-boats. Over on the railroad opposite, long freight trains, sometimes weighted by cylinder-tanks of petroleum, thirty, forty, fifty cars in a string, panting and rumbling along in full view, but the sound ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Pilgrim Monument at Plymouth should issue a pamphlet giving a picture of the "Landing of the Pilgrims, December 21, 1620," in which women are pictured, and in which the shallop is shown with a large fore-and-aft mainsail, while on the same page is another picture entitled, "The Shallop of the MAY-FLOWER," having a large yard and square-sail, and a "Cuddy" (which last the MAY-FLOWER'S shallop we know did not have). The printed description of the picture, however, says: "The cut is copied from a picture by Van der ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not worse terms ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... us now! Awake! [Shouting in Dimsdell's ear. My friend, awake! Dost thou not hear the storm? Oh! how it shrieks and whistles through the shrouds! The awful guns of heaven boom in our ears— Nay, that was the mainsail gone by the board, Flapping with cannon roar. You do not follow me. O, come, I say! This is no sermon. You cannot be asleep, Yet feign you are to cheat me of my story. Wake up, my friend. You carry the ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... out. You could rock in the hair-cloth chair by the water door, and join in conversation with more active persons mending seines upon the wharf; or you could dangle your heels from the work-bench, and listen to stories and debates inside, and look on Captain Philo sewing upon a mainsail. ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... out perfectly round, like a big, pale balloon, this did, and for a second something was bounding through it—without a sound, you understand—something a shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow, it looked to me. It passed from the weather side to the lee and ducked behind the sweep of the mainsail like that—" McCord snapped his thumb and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... inevitable end. It was long, however, and to us it seemed like ages, ere the schooner suddenly appeared for one brief instant, relieved against a tower of glimmering foam. I still see her reefed mainsail flapping loose, as the boom fell heavily across the deck; I still see the black outline of the hull, and still think I can distinguish the figure of a man stretched upon the tiller. Yet the whole sight we had of her passed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its laborious fishing, the red-backed sea-eagle is sometimes deprived of its spoil by a bird much inferior in size and weight and which has not the slightest pretensions to the art. An eagle had captured a "mainsail" fish (banded dory) which loomed black against its snowy breast as in strenuous spirals it sought to gain sufficient height whence to soar over the spur of the hill to its eyrie. The fish, though not weighty, was awkward to carry, and the presence of the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... fog lay along the sea, in-shore of us, which all believed to be the sweat of the land, and thought no more of; though none wished to enter it, for that is a coast where foul airs rise, and through which the gulls and land-birds refuse to fly. Well, here we lay, the mainsail in the brails, the top-sails beating the mast-heads, like a maiden fanning herself when she sees her lover, and nothing full but the upper duck, with the sun fairly below the water in the western board. I was then young, and quick of eye, as of foot, and therefore ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and means to fight us," cried another. "See, he is hauling up the foot of his mainsail; but he wants to ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the stern of the small boat, her hand on the filler. Lufrath lay at her feet, his nose between the long and shaggy paws. Duncan, grave and watchful as to the wind and the points of the coast, sat amidships, with the sheets of the mainsail held fast, and superintended the seamanship of his young mistress with a respectful but most evident pride. And as Ingram had gone off with Mackenzie to walk over to the White Water before going down to Borvabost, Frank Lavender was Sheila's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... tremendous lurch; and sometimes an avalanche of books descended upon me from the shelf overhead. Yet I slept pretty soundly. Once I was awakened by a tremendous noise outside—something like a gun going off. I afterwards found it had been occasioned by the mainsail being blown away to sea, right out of the bolt-ropes, the fastenings of which were immediately outside my ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... and the lad steered their boats towards the shore side by side, the former hauling in his mainsail somewhat to lessen the speed of his boat. They parted to the northward of the promontory described, Dermot steering for the little cove in which stood the solitary hut already spoken of, while his uncle continued along the shore a little ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... mariners, in wary sort, Haul down the mainsail, and attempt to wear; And would put back in panic to the port, Whence, in ill hour, they loosed with little care. — "Not so," exclaims the wind, and stops them short, "So poor a penance will not pay the dare." And when they fain would veer, with fiercer roar Pelts back their reeling ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... remonstrances, unheard because of the nonadjustment of the trumpet, she reached under the seat and brought out the pile of Blazeton weeklies. With her feet upon the pile to keep it from blowing away, she proceeded to unfold one of the papers. It crackled and snapped in the wind like a loose mainsail. ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... channels, the inward drawing of the tide marked long, curved lines and illusive circles on the oily sea. The Spindrift was poised motionless on the surface of the water, borne slowly, almost imperceptibly, forward by the sweep of the tide. Her mainsail, boomed out, hung in loose folds. The sheet, freed from all strain, was borne down by its own weight, until the slack of it dipped in the water. Terns and gulls, at lazy rest, floated close to the yacht's side. Long rows of dark cormorants, perched on rocky points, ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... unconcern, as the "monarch of all he surveyed," casting his eye up now and then at the trim of his canvass, but more frequently keeping it on me. Dick began to open his budget of chat, and I found him as full of fun as his mainsail was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... gale caught the foresail and tore it to shreds; the mainsail was also destroyed, then the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the lake of truth,— Mayest thou sail upon it with a fair wind; May thy mainsail not fly loose. May there not be lamentation in thy cabin; May not misfortune come after thee. May not thy mainstays be snapped; Mayest thou not run aground. May not the wave seize thee; Mayest thou not taste the impurities of the river; Mayest thou not see the face of fear. May the fish come to ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... just right," said Jack, as the mainsail was hoisted. This was true, and the run to the village took but a few minutes. While the boys went off to send their message to the Fords, Isaac Fasick hunted up the constable and related ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... lagoon, using only our engine to escape the coral traps. Past the ever-present danger, with the wind now half a gale and the rain falling again in sheets—the intermittent deluge of the season—the Morning Star, under reefed foresail, mainsail and staysail, pointed her delicate nose toward the Dangerous Islands and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... encreas'd, and dark Clouds intercepted the Day; so that we had little more Light, than what the terrifying flashes of Lightning afforded us. Our Captain, who was an able Seaman, at the first Signal of an approaching Storm, handed his Top-sails, took a Reef in his Foresail, and the Men were furling the Mainsail, when the Lightning shiver'd the Mast, which was cut away with the utmost Expedition. We lay some time under a Mizzen-balast, but were at last forc'd to put before the Wind, and, for Four Days, we scudded with the Goose-wings of our Foresail, in which Time we had not the least Glimpse of Sun ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... land, now bent in the wildest agony, its leafy top resembling an umbrella turned inside out. I saw the Whim, greenish white in a greenish foam, heeled over till her masts were all but on the waves and her mainsail, half torn from its boom, snapping in the wind. In this fashion she was being driven at breakneck speed across the Gulf. I thought—I tried to think—that I had seen a small boat being dragged behind. Surely ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... "Whin I was a yachtsman, all a man needed to race was a flat-bottomed boat, an umbrella, an' a long dhrink. In thim days 'twas 'Up with th' mainsail an' out with th' jib, an' Cap'n Jawn first to th' Lake View pumpin' station f'r th' see-gars.' Now 'tis 'Ho, f'r a yacht race. Lave us go an' see our lawyers.' 'Tis 'Haul away on th' writ iv ne exeat,' an' 'Let go th' peak capias.' 'Tis 'Pipe all hands to th' Supreme ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... was further intensified by the cold, grey fog. The wind was light, but a steady up-Channel draught. The lugger was creeping in under mainsail and jib, her other sails ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... gale in the highest degree violent, they clung so fast to the masts and rigging, that it was scarcely possible to get them either up or down; yet by the dexterous activity of our people, we got the mainsail up, clewed up the main top-sail, and got the ship's head round without receiving much damage. The violence of the wind continued several hours, but before morning it veered again to the N.W. and continued in that quarter till the afternoon of the 29th, when it died away, and we had a dead calm for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the tiller and the mainsail sheets into his care, and, with another glance ahead, pulled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... third reef was taken in the mainsail, and Johnson filled the cabin with a storm-sail of No. 1 duck, and sat cross-legged on the streaming floor, vigorously putting it to rights with a couple of the hands. By dinner I had fled the deck, and sat in the bench corner, giddy, dumb, and stupefied with terror. The frightened leaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... channel through which we could make but slow progress. The wind increased and blew terrifically all night, forcing the vessels to beat back and forth in the mouth of the straits, and we had a similar experience on the night of the 22d, running the gauntlet under reefed mainsail and jib through loose ice and in imminent danger of shipwreck. Next day the ice appeared somewhat open, and Captain Barry concluded to venture into the pack. When we got into clear water we worked up to the bulkhead of ice and passed Resolution Island. We were ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... reply, and the other busied himself in attempting to unlock a large and much-dented cash-box. From on deck came falsetto cries and the creak and rattle of blocks as the black crew swung up mainsail and driver. Grief watched a large cockroach crawling over the greasy paintwork. Griffiths, with an oath of irritation, carried the cash-box to the companion-steps for better light. Here, on his feet, and bending over the box, his back ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... others along the hammock railings on the lee-gangway. The whole ship's company and officers were assembled, some on the booms, others in the boats; while the main-rigging was crowded half way up to the cat-harpings. Over-head, the mainsail, illuminated as high as the yard by the lamps, was bulging forwards under the gale, which was rising every minute, and straining so violently at the main-sheet, that there was some doubt whether it might not be necessary to interrupt the funeral in order to take sail off the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... face only saved from oily smoothness by half-hearted flutterings of a westerly breeze. Those faint airs blowing up along the Vancouver Island shore made tentative efforts to fill and belly out strongly the mainsail and jib of a small half-decked sloop working out from the weather side of Sangster Island and laying her snub nose straight for the mouth of the Fraser River, some sixty sea-miles east ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 138) is similar to a cutter rig, but has a small sail set up on another mast abaft the mainsail. The sheet is led aft to a spar that projects beyond the counter. The mast upon which the smaller sail is set is known as the mizzenmast. In this rig it will be seen that the main boom must be made considerably shorter than was the case in the cutter rig. This is done so that it will not ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... about the decks and came suddenly on a man whom I had last seen at the tiller of a small boat in Clew Bay. I was beating windward across the steep waves of a tideway. His boat was running free with her mainsail boomed out; and he waved a hand to me as he passed. Once again we met at sea; but we were much less cheerful. He was returning to France after leave, to spend the remainder of a second winter in ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... the Nancy Jane now," called the boy from the dooryard, pointing to a sloop on the other side of the wide estuary, bowling in with topsail and jib furled, and her rusty mainsail bellying under pressure of a ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... spaces and rich woods on the lower slopes; a little white town was opening up in one place, and scattered farms dotted the prospect. The other shore, which I could just see, framed between the gunwale and the mainsail, as I sat leaning against the hatchway, and sadly missing a deck-chair, was lower and lonelier, though prosperous and pleasing to the eye. Spacious pastures led up by slow degrees to ordered clusters of wood, which hinted at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... boats, except one, had been swept from the davits, and the wheel houses had been stove in. As there was no further necessity to strain the hull and engines, the little craft was brought near the wind under low steam, and close-reefed mainsail; riding the long rolling seas like a sea-gull. To windward the sky-soon became clear, but we took care not to get far away from the dense fog to leeward of us. We did not see a cruiser, while we lay for many hours anxiously waiting for night. ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... fitted him magnificently at the shoulders. He and the suit began to leave each other from that point down. At the waist it looked like a deflated balloon. The top of the trousers fitted him about as snugly as a round manhole in the street. The legs flapped like the mainsail of a catboat that's coming about. They ended some time before his own legs did and there was quite a little stretch of yarn sock visible before the big tan shoes began. Ole had two acres of feet and he polished his shoes himself, with great ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... forming a kind of bridges or causeways, on one of which we crossed without difficulty. The men had hoisted one sail upon the cart at first setting off; but the wind being now, as they expressed it, "on the larboard quarter," a second blanket was rigged as a mainsail, to their great amusement as ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... steep, narrow steps leading from the bank to the Cove below. How they scamper along, eager to walk the deck of that trim little craft, the Falcon, anchored in the stream, and sitting like a bird on the bosom of the famed river. Wait a minute and you will see the mainsail flutter in the breeze. Now our rollicking young friends have marched past ruins of "chapel, convent, hospital," &c., on the beach; you surely did not expect them to look glum and melancholy. Of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... discern the remains of my precious system lying high and dry among the rocks of that winter's experience. Yet I tried all ways to make it go. I was like a boy with a new boat, who increases or lessens his ballast, now tries her with mainsail, foresail, topsail, jib, flying jib, and jibber jib, and now with bare poles,—anything to make her float. Each night I took my poor system home for repairs, and each morning, full of hope, tried to launch it anew in my school-room. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... half-a-mile of the rocks. Then, while I waited to see the end of her, she suddenly wore round, and after staggering a moment while the sea broke over her, hauled up to the wind, and careening over, with her mainsail sweeping the water, started gaily on ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... Pomery found plenty of Water in the winding channel, every curve of which he knew to a hair, and steered for at its due moment, winking cheerfully at Billy and me, who stood ready to correct his pilotage. He had taken in his mainsail, and carried steerage way with mizzen and jib only; and thus, for close upon a mile, we rode up on the tide, scaring the herons and curlews before us, until drawing within sight of a grass-grown quay he let run down his remaining canvas and laid ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... his heart stood still as she seemed on the point of descending the companion. But she had another purpose in mind. Throwing aside the gaskets, she stripped the sail covers off the mainsail and began, with practiced hands, to reef down to the third reef. Then she went forward and did the same to the forestaysail. A minute later, hardly knowing why or how, except that he was helping Madge, Gregory, like a man in a dream, was pulling with ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... off to a big, half-decked boat beautifully built and fitted in Toronto. Stirling, who admitted that he knew nothing about such matters, sat down aft and lighted a cigar, while Weston proceeded to get the tall gall mainsail and big single headsail up. He was conscious that his companion was watching him closely, and when he let go the moorings and seated himself at the tiller the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the lee of Comfort Island!" sputtered Andy through the spray, as he and Jamie sprang for the mainsail ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... but their eyes met and Philippa looked hurriedly away. There was a moment's queer, strained silence. Before them loomed up the outline of Mainsail Haul. ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drifting down the river. A quiet, smoky October day; the distant hills all softened in the haze; the near shores green with the fresh-springing aftermath. Reuben lounged upon the sunny side of the mainsail, thinking, with respectful pity, of the poor fagged fellows in roundabouts who were seated at that hour before the red desks in Parson Brummem's school-room. At length he was enjoying a taste of that outside life of which he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... at a motion of the chief's hand, the peak of our mainsail was dropped, and the boat swung up into the wind, laying "hove to," almost stationary. The centre-board was lowered to stop her drifting to leeward, although I cannot say it made much difference that ever I saw. NOW what's the matter, I thought, when ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... situation, and directed the other five seamen to respect and obey the man he had selected as captain. Then he directed French to cast off the stops from the foresail and mainsail, and have the jib and flying-jib ready to set at ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... grassy lanes, one after one, 60 Lift light the nodding foxglove's purple bell. Thence, to the distant sea, and where the flag Hangs idly down, without a wavy curl, Thou hoverest o'er the topmast, or dost raise The full and flowing mainsail: Steadily, The helmsman cries, as now thy breath is heard Among the stirring cordage o'er his head; So, steadily, he cries, as right he steers, Speeds our proud ship along the world of waves. Sylph, may thy favouring breath more gently ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... disappointed at the result of the conference, for I was interested in the chase. I ordered the jib and mainsail to be taken in, and the helm to be put down. The fog had lifted to the northward and westward of us, so that I could see St. Augustine light and the pilot-boat. We took up one of the pilots, and in less than half an hour we were anchored under the lee of the town, where the water was as smooth ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... Norman's Woe as we went by; and the reef where the schooner Hesperus struck I passed close aboard. The "bones" of a wreck tossed up lay bleaching on the shore abreast. The wind still freshening, I settled the throat of the mainsail to ease the sloop's helm, for I could hardly hold her before it with the whole mainsail set. A schooner ahead of me lowered all sail and ran into port under bare poles, the wind being fair. As the Spray brushed by the stranger, I saw that some of his sails were ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... could not be done by simple rowing, we ventured to hoist a small sail, which we had scarcely done when the foremast of the boat I commanded suddenly broke in two places, and I found myself obliged, in order to keep up with the shallop, to raise the mainsail, which, however, I had to lower again immediately, or my boat would have ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... so arranged that it could be lowered when the wind was too strong. The dimensions of the sail as we made it are given in the drawing (Fig. 15). The top of the sail was lashed to a spar, which was connected by a short stick to another spar tied to the mainsail about eighteen inches lower down. The sail was strengthened with an extra strip of cloth along the lower spar, and the tie strings were applied in the usual way. The connecting stick, or topmast we may call it, was hinged to the lower spar by means of a ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... hardly keep her delight within the bounds of so called propriety. It was all she could do to restrain herself from dancing on the little deck half swept by the tiller. The boat of a schooner which lay at the quay towed them out of the harbour. Then the creature spread her wings like a bird —mainsail and gaff topsail, staysail and jib—leaped away to leeward, and seemed actually to bound over the waves. Malcolm sat at the tiller, and Blue Peter watched ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... hours, the wind had gradually increased until it blew a gale: the foresail was taken in, the mainsail close-reefed, and the saucy boat flew along before it like a gull, the following seas just kissing the edge of her taffrail, as ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... frequently broke over their decks. On Wednesday morning, the wind slackened a little, and they were able to shew a small bit of canvas; but towards night the storm again arose, and the waves ran so high that the ships were hardly able to live. The admiral endeavoured to carry a close-reefed mainsail, to bear his ship over the surges; but was at length forced to lay to, and to suffer his ship to drive astern before the wind. On Thursday the 14th February, the storm increased so that every one expected to perish, and it was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... lee side of the forecastle, and the mainsail, which was still drawing, concealed from me a certain portion of the after-deck. Not a soul was to be seen. The planks, which had not been swabbed since the mutiny, bore the print of many feet, and an ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cleared, and order reigned on board, though the mainsail could not be set until the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Straits of Gibraltar I verily thought she'd have sunk, For the wind began so for to alter, She yaw'd just as tho' she was drunk. The squall tore the mainsail to shivers, Helm a-weather, the hoarse boatswain cries; Brace the foresail athwart, see she quivers, As through the rough tempest she flies. But sailors were born for all weathers, Great guns let it blow, high or low, Our duty keeps us to our tethers, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... day passed without making ten miles; the boat was kept under the jib, as they dared not hoist the mainsail, and the wind was so variable that much time was lost in humouring ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... t' the s'uth'ard," said the skipper, anxiously, while they put a double reef in the mainsail. "'Twill be a ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... same as before, or east by south. Latitude 42 deg. 68'. Distance reckoned to be 136 miles. The English ship which had remained in company until now, left us. It began to blow so hard in the evening that we had to reef the topsails and take in the mainsail, and proceed with ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... the choppy waves with vigorous strokes and shot her around at the last moment for a perfect landing. The mainsail and jib went up with rapid jerks while the rings rattled their protest. The strenuous physical exercise brought him temporary relief; but, when he had cast off, taken the tiller and after a few moments of idle jockeying back and forth in the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the sloop drew nearer. She was a fair-sized craft, and carried a crew of three. The men seemed to be nice fellows, and not at all of the Captain Langless class. Soon the sloop dropped anchor close in shore and the mainsail came down at the ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... maindeck. The sails, in that light breeze, made but a faint fluttering noise. It ceased. The ship was coming round slowly; I held my breath in the renewed stillness of expectation; one wouldn't have thought that there was a single living soul on her decks. A sudden brisk shout, "Mainsail haul!" broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the men running away with the main-brace we two, down in my cabin, came together in our usual position ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... got a pretty good offing, but the wind still increasing, I took in my main-top-sail, being able to carry no more sail than two courses and the mizen. At two in the morning, August 3rd, it blew very hard, and the sea was much raised, so that I furled all my sails but my mainsail, though the wind blew so hard, we had pretty clear weather till noon, but then the whole sky was blackened with thick clouds, and we had some rain, which would last a quarter of an hour at a time, and then it would blow very fierce while the squalls of rain were ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... scarcely was the order obeyed when the flash of artillery blazed out from among the mangroves on either hand, and a perfect hailstorm of grape and langridge struck us, riddling our bulwarks, and tearing the foot of the mainsail and foresail to shreds, but, luckily, not hitting a soul of us; though how Courtenay and I escaped—it not being etiquette for either of us to seek the shelter of the bulwarks—heaven only knows; but we did. The guns were pointed ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... gone on deck. Billy could hear them throwing down the halyards, casting off gaskets, and heaving the anchor short on the tiny winch. In several minutes one called down that everything was ready, and all went on deck. Hoisting mainsail and jigger was a matter of minutes. Then the cook and cabin-boy broke out anchor, and, while one hove it up, the other hoisted the jib. Hastings, at the wheel, trimmed the sheet. The Roamer paid ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... unvarying persistence as Ranji's. Whether half a gale is blowing on the Hove ground, or there is not enough wind to move the flag at Lord's, the Indian prince's cricket shirt always presents the appearance of the mainsail of a six-tonner on a breezy day in the Solent. Anyone can satisfy himself as to the truth of this assertion by glancing at the first illustration on page 213. The batsman's face is concealed by his arm, and his attitude ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... orchard-plot and grassy mead With pavement of the murmuring way. Cast, with full hands the harvest cast, For the brave men that climb the mast, When to the billow and the blast It swings and stoops, with fearful strain, And bind the fluttering mainsail fast, Till the tossed bark shall sit, again, Safe as ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... on deck to make sail. Out wi' you, you blasted lubber, and lay aloft. Up wi' you, and loose that mainsail, and, when you've got it loose, furl it. I'll show you how I earned that money. Up wi' you, 'fore I ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... had now become beautifully fine, I thought I might attempt to get out some spare sails. I obtained what I wanted from the fo'c'sle, and after a good deal of work managed to "bend" a mainsail and staysail. Being without compass or chart, however, I knew not where I was, nor could I decide what course to take in order to reach land. I had a vague idea that the seas in those regions were studded with innumerable ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... to hasten to his dear relations and country; yet the present haste he feared might hinder the seeing of them at all. Upon a strange earnestness in his own mind and judgement, he gave a positive command to the captain to cause all the sails to be taken down except the mainsail only, and that to be half-furled. Upon the captain's dispute, Whitelocke with quickness told him that if he did not presently see it done he would cause another to do it, whereupon the captain obeyed; and it was a great mercy that the same ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... her masts over the side and herself out of water. We were then carrying the double reefed topsails, reefed courses, inner jib, fore and main topmast staysail, but the gale had so increased I gave orders to close-reef the topsails and furl the mainsail. I thought it better to run no further risk of dismasting her, as there was always a chance so long as they were kept standing. All hands were up reefing the main topsail and I had the wheel. I saw the black shadow of the mountains ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... the arm still further into the hollow behind our seat, it will grasp the storm mizen, a strongly made triangular sail, to be used only in untoward hours, and for which we must prepare by lowering the lug mizen, and shifting the halyard, tack, and sheet. Then the Rob Roy, with her mainsail and jib reefed, will be under snug canvas, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly silence, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... one bell in the first dog-watch; the weather was fine, the water smooth, the breeze light; and the brig, with little more than bare steerage-way upon her, was laying her course, with squared yards, both clews of her mainsail hauled up, and studding-sails set on both sides, her topsails occasionally collapsing and flapping to the masts for lack of wind to keep them "asleep." Miss Trevor was, as usual, on deck, seated in a deck-chair, with a book on her lap and ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... rig had been evolved to meet local conditions. Imagine a cutter with one single long spar in the place of a mast and topmast; this spar is stepped rather farther aft than it would be in an ordinary cutter, and there is one huge mainsail, "leg-of-mutton" shaped, with a boom but no gaff, and a very large jib. Owing to their big head-sails, and to their heavy keels, these Bermudian craft fore-reach like a steamer, and hardly ever miss ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the order to shove clear of the dock the mainsail was hoisted. Then each crew captain kept one eye on the watch for the signals of the instructor, who was aboard a boat designated ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... royal top-gallantsail, topsail and mainsail disappear from the main mast, upon which appears a regular fore and aft suit of canvass, consisting of mainsail, gaff topsail, and gaff top-gallantsail, reducing the vessel to a square rig forward, and a plain fore and aft rig aft. A few minutes more, and the foremast passed ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... and the golden tips of the mountains turning purple and then grey, the first order was given, a couple of staysails ran with jigging motion up to their full length, and a chirruping, creaking sound was heard as the men began to haul upon the yard of the mainsail. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... fisheries, and visits it now upon an income of $2000 a year, derived from boiling down fish into phosphates for the midland markets. He preserves, however, the habit and appearance of old days: that is to say, his chin is folded away under his lip like a reef in a mainsail; his cheek-bones hide his ears, so tusky and prominent are the former, and tipped with a varnish of red, like corns on old folks' feet; he has a nose which is so long and bony that it seems to have been constructed in sections, like a tubular ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the well, and finding the ship had sprung a leak, and now had five feet water in the hold, the people clewed up the main-topsail, hauled up the mainsail, and immediately endeavored to furl both, but could not effect it. On discovering the leak all the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... hand the three topsails and to stow the jib. We are in no hurry; for the plain reason, that Guinea will be to-morrow just where Guinea is to-night. As for keeping the ship steady in these matters of squalls, we have the mainsail on her—'" ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... of gridiron on which, like the natives, they cooked their meat, hence, bou-canier. The word filibuster comes from the Spanish "fee-lee-bote," English "fly-boat," a small, swift sailing-vessel with a large mainsail, which enabled the buccaneers to pursue merchantmen in the open sea and escape among the shoals and shallows of the archipelago when pursued ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... shore the two commanders sat together in the sheets, a strange contrast to one another, while under the feet of the rowers was a litter of huge stones which Sir Nigel had ordered to be carried to the cog. These once aboard, the ship set her broad mainsail, purple in color, and with a golden St. Christopher bearing Christ upon his shoulder in the centre of it. The breeze blew, the sail bellied, over heeled the portly vessel, and away she plunged through the smooth blue rollers, amid the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... languour of the preceding days this was dizzy speed. Two ridges of foam streamed from the ship's bows; the wind sang in a strenuous note which under other circumstances would have expressed to me all the joy of life. Whenever the hauled-up mainsail started trying to slat and bang itself to pieces in its gear, Mr. Burns ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... next would clear—when the first shot struck her, cutting a hole through her jib, and I expected the wind to rip the sail up immediately; yet it stood. The breeze being dead on-shore, the little boat heeled towards us, her mainsail hiding ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that he saw land, he would give a silk doublet, besides the other rewards promised by the Sovereigns, which were 10,000 maravedis to him who should first see it.[109-4] At two hours after midnight the land was sighted at a distance of two leagues. They shortened sail, and lay by under the mainsail without the bonnets. ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... into the shadow of the fishing-boat. There were two rapid pistol-shots, a scream, and then another pistol-shot, followed by silence. The clustering fishermen had disappeared. And then, suddenly, as the first puffs of a land-breeze came out from the Sussex shore, the boom swung out, the mainsail filled, and the little craft crept out with her ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which the three passengers of El Nacional set themselves with famished delight. About sunset, as was its custom, the breeze veered and swept back from the mountains, cool and steady, bringing a taste of the stagnant lagoons and mangrove swamps that guttered the lowlands. The mainsail of the sloop was hoisted and swelled to it, and at that moment they heard shouts and a waxing clamour from the bosky profundities ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... breath to my heart bring healing! Let Death now follow, his booty seeking: The moves are many before the checkmate! Awhile I'll harass thy love of plunder, As on I scud 'neath thy angry eyebrows; Thou only fillest my swelling mainsail, Though Death ride fast on thy howling tempest; Thy billows raging shall bear the faster My little vessel ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... us a little, and Tom hurried us off to get ashore again by daylight, before the weather became worse. It was a very pleasant twenty minutes' sail to the shore, racing along before the wind, with two reefs in the mainsail—quite a different thing from beating out. The tide was high, and the captain therefore steered for the pier, where he hoped to land us. Unfortunately, however, he missed it; and as it was impossible ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... be in the stream waiting for a fair breeze-then the Maggy 'll play her part. Bless yer soul! the little craft and me's coasted down the coast nobody knows how many years; and she knows every nook, creek, reef, and point, just as well as I does. Just give her a double-reefed mainsail, and the lug of a standing jib, and in my soul I believe she'd make the passage without compass, chart, or a hand aboard. By the word of an old sailor, such a craft is the Maggy Bell. And when the Spanish and English and French all got ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... formed of a great steep of ice jutting a long way slantingly into the sea, the width between the point and the main being about a third of a mile. I seized the helm, and shouted to the men to hoist the head of the mainsail that she might round to when I put the helm down. But the fellows were in a panic terror and stood gaping at what they regarded as their doom, calling upon the Virgin and all the saints for help and mercy. Into this bay did we rush on top of a huge sea, Trentanove ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... and their child. About eight A.M., in the midst of the lagoon, their cutter had capsized in jibbing. They got her righted, and though she was still full of water put the child on board. The mainsail had been carried away, but the jib still drew her sluggishly along, and Francois and the woman swam astern and worked the rudder with their hands. The cold was cruel; the fatigue, as time went on, became excessive; and in that preserve of sharks, fear haunted them. Again and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hold her up to the wind at all, we couldn't run out of the storm. The gale drove us in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to. The mainmast ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... not at her moorings, and he concluded that his cousin was away in her on some excursion. When he reached the boundary line of the estate, he discovered the sailboat with her bow on the beach, though her mainsail was still set. A gentle breeze was blowing, with which the Florence could make good headway; but there seemed to be no one on board of her. Corny watched her for some time, waiting for the appearance of ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... worry mother. She's at the window by this time, looking out for the boat. Do you think there is any fun in making her uneasy? Besides, I don't think it is safe to stay here any longer. There comes the Flyaway under jib and mainsail." ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... a boat came and hailed the chief's vessel; he immediately hoisted his mainsail, and the fleet weighed apparently in great confusion. They worked to windward all night and part of the next day, and anchored about one o'clock in a bay under the island of Lantow, where the head admiral ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... in his socks, an' drinks like a fish, if he don't do nothin' wuss. Good-night Capp'n. Baby'll ketch cold if I keep on jawin' here. Mind your weather eye, and port your helm when you reach the landin'. If you'll take the advice of a young salt, you'll clew up your mainsail an' dowse some of your top-hamper—ah! I ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the captain hauling at the halliards of the after-mainsail and went to his assistance, while Coristine, doffing his coat, lent a hand to The Crew, when, by their combined efforts, the sails were all hoisted and the schooner floated away from the pier. The lawyer walked over the deck with a nautical air, picking up all loose ends of rope ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... used to present, he has of late become as shrivelled and shrunk as a frost-bitten apple. His scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, which bellied out so bravely in those prosperous days when he sailed before the wind, now hangs loosely about him like a mainsail in a calm. His leather breeches are all in folds and wrinkles, and apparently have much ado to hold up the boots that yawn on both sides of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... up a fresh gale in the evening at S.W. by W., which, being fair for the Portugal fleet, and the weather pleasant and agreeable, we heard the signal given to unmoor, and running in under the island of Si—-, we hauled our mainsail and foresail up in the brails, lowered the topsails upon the cap, and clewed them up, that we might lie as snug as we could, expecting their coming out, and the next morning saw the whole fleet come out accordingly, but ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... a new hole in the old boiler, to steam out of hospitable Sinfir at 6:30 a.m. on the auspicious Wednesday, February 13. The appearance of the Mukhbir must have been originale enough: her canvas had been fished out of the hold, but in the place of a mainsail she had hoisted a topsail. We passed as close as possible to the islet-line of Secondary formation, beginning with Shu'shu', the wedge bluff-faced to south: the Palinurus anchored here in a small bight ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
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