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More "Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impact alert Jack Benson felt his heart leap into his mouth. It was as though the "Hastings" had struck, lightly, on a reef. Almost by instinct Jack threw the wheel over to port. Something was rasping, forcefully, under the hull of the submarine. As the helm went to port that something underneath, whatever it was, ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... a great amount of water, when disturbed, so as to become too large to be swallowed by some of its foes, illustrating another adaptive modification for self-defense. The wonderful colors and color patterns of the tropical fish of the reef, or of the open water forms like the mouse-fish of the Sargossa Sea, often render them more or less completely hidden from the foraging enemy. A flounder looks like a fish which was originally symmetrical, but which had come to lie flat on its side ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... bark and hope our chart, With childish glee on our voy'ge we start, The boat glides merrily o'er the wave. But ah! there's many a storm to brave, And many a dang'rous reef to clear, And rushing rapid o'er which ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... storm has kept the people away from the appointment. But the next night they make it up, and the preacher tries to make it up, too. When Mr. Thompson brought me down, six years ago, we came straight through by fording, belly-deep to the horses, across the reef, three miles long, that forms the nexus between the Nueces Bay and the Corpus Christi Bay. On either side was deep water or miring sand. Once, since that, he has had to tote his passengers out on his back. The reef has been washed out in spots. Lo! this time we go ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various
... jutting block, whitened by the sea-birds which here brought up their young in peace, for even the reckless boys had looked upon it as too hazardous to descend. The sea far below was just creaming among the rocks which peered above the water, and ran out in a reef causing a dangerous race; but though Joe searched the whole cliff face below him for nearly a minute he could see nothing, and at last he shouted with all his might and had a lesson in the feebleness of the human voice in that ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... give his boats? one, he said, who never was on the water in his life till I took him out for a sail a week come Tuesday. A fine use they'd be to him but to drown himself. A puff of wind, and not knowing how to take in a reef, the boat would be over in a jiffy and the nets lost. Now who would be the better for the loss of my nets? answer me that. And I'd like to be told when my boats and nets were at the bottom of the lake to whom would ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... was none the less. It was one of those hard facts, which he of all men, needed to know at the threshold of his experience with the world. Such a revelation proves disastrous to the many who go down to do business in that world. Ordinary and weak and neutral moral constitutions are wrecked on this reef set in the human sea. Like a true mariner he had written it boldly on his chart. There at such and such a point in the voyage for the golden fleece, were the rocks and the soul-devouring dragons of the way. Therefore, oh! my soul, beware. What, indeed, would this argonaut of the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... mentioned, his hero performs rather a feat in shearing three and a half pounds of washed wool in twenty-three and one-half minutes, A Mexican would have to take a reef in his big hat if he could not do better than that. His tin check is worth four and a half cents to him, and a fair hand ought to have at least fifty in his pocket at sunset, in return for as many seven-pound unwashed fleeces,—always provided he has not sacrificed them to monte during ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation and quiet are ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... fore-mast a large white flag, and we cried, "It is then to Frenchmen we will owe our deliverance." We instantly recognised the brig to be the Argus; it was then about two gun-shots from us. We were terribly impatient to see her reef her sails, which at last she did, and fresh cries of joy arose from our raft. The Argus came and lay-to on our starboard, about half a pistol-shot from us. The crew, ranged upon the deck and on the shrouds, announced to us, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... the flat congewoi-covered ledges of reef on the southern side of the bar lie bare and exposed to the sun. Here and there in the crystal pools among the rocks, fish have been left by the tide, and as you step over the congewoi, whose teats spurt out jets of water to the pressure of your foot, large silvery ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... craggy vertical walls of coral in very deep water. When there is a little wind, it is dangerous to come near these rocks; but luckily it was quite smooth, so we moored to their edge, while the men crawled over the reef to the land, to make; a fire and cook our dinner-the boat having no accommodation for more than heating water for my morning and evening coffee. We then rowed along the edge of the reef to the end of the island, and were glad to get a nice westerly breeze, which carried us over the strait to ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such things, and have few substitutes for ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... inverted troughs indicating lodgment by solutions from below, as, for instance, in the saddle-reef gold ores of Nova Scotia and Australia, and in certain copper ores of the Jerome camp of Arizona (p. 204.) This occurrence does not indicate whether the solutions were hot or cold, magmatic or meteoric, but in connection with other evidences has sometimes been regarded as significant ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... the desert, it generally takes the form of a lovely running stream of water, which you're crazy to reach and suck up. But the shipwrecked tar always sees a vessel coming to his relief, which keeps on rushing through the water, right up over reef and everything and disappears over the island leaving him broken-hearted at the deception caused by conditions in ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... to imagine the moment when her despairing mother, with death near, and with prayers and tears, had cast her adrift, hoping that the one little life most dear to that mother might be saved. The fatal reef where those parents had gone down also held for her a weird fascination, and at times the voice of the ocean seemed like the despairing cries of mortals. One picture, and it was her best, was a view of the wreck, as near as Uncle ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... rating of Able Seamen on the ship's books: these two letters are often used as an epithet for the person so rated. He must be equal to all the duties required of a seaman in a ship—not only as regards the saying to "hand, reef, and steer," but also to strop a block, splice, knot, turn in rigging, raise a mouse on the main-stay, and be an example to the ordinary seamen ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the belated one his place, and after a while of squattering about and sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... thoughtless frenzy in matters where unbiased judgment is most of all necessary. It is a rock upon which we have split before; it has taken us many years to recover from the shock, and now we are in danger of altogether losing our political life upon the same reef. Unless we mend our course we inevitably shall. Men forego every consideration of public honor and private conscience for the sake of electing a party candidate. The man at the helm of the party ship has declared that he will sail due north, or south, or east, or west, whatever happens, and his crew ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... High, precipitous, perpendicular, level, and dotted with farm-houses, this singular bit of land stretches several miles out southward to sea, bordered with a rocky beach, and tapered off into the wide ocean with Duxbury Reef—a dangerous rocky reef, curving down to the southward and almost always white with foam, save when the sea is calm, and then the great lazy green waves eddy noiselessly over the half-hidden rocks, or slip like oil over the ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... how long a time it might take a thought to develop. Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacant ground a palace or ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... white with snow when the ship came to Ungava. She had run on a reef in leaving Cartwright, her first port of call on the Labrador coast; her keel was ripped out from stem to stern, and for a month she had lain in dry dock for repairs at St. John's, Newfoundland. It was October 22nd when I said good-bye to my kind friends at the post and in ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... trust Neb than Rupert on such a duty. The latter had no taste for ships; felt no interest in them; and I have often wondered why he took a fancy to go to sea at all. With Neb it was very different. He was already an expert seaman; could hand, reef and steer, knot and splice, and was as useful as nine men in ten on board a vessel. It is true, he did not know when it became necessary to take in the last reef—had no notion of stowing a cargo so as to favour the vessel, or help her sailing; but he ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... something or ither wi' their han's. Mony's the time my stockin' 's been maist as guid's a cloaset to me, though I cudna jist gang intil't. But what maitters 't! A prayer i' the hert 's sure to fin' the ro'd oot. The hert's the last place 'at can haud ane in. A prayin' hert has nae reef (roof) till't." ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... borne on the back of a placid horse, is carried on a slow canter around the ring. He evidently impersonates a member of the horse marines, for he executes elaborate imitations of pulling ropes, reefing and furling sails. Probably the horse marines reef topsails on horseback. In the absence of opposing testimony we accept his theory, and are greatly pleased to find that the equestrian sailor finally escapes being wrecked on the lower row of benches, and so meeting a watery grave among ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... trims her to the gale I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: 'Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bitter cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson light hung motionless, against which leafless ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... had completed her last voyage. She was now a battered wreck on a barrier reef. She hung thus for one heart-breaking second. Then another wave, riding triumphantly through its fellows, caught the great steamer in its tremendous grasp, carried her onward for half her length and smashed her down on the rocks. Her back was ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... "Shall I reef, or furl?" demanded Wilder, standing with the trumpet at his lips, ready to issue the ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you crowded in like that? Hyrcan tiger; take any ship but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS the first you know! stop he starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . NOW then, you're all right; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... weather looking somewhat wild in the west with the red light of the sun among the clouds there, and the dark heave of the swell running into a sickly crimson under the sun and then glowing out dusky again, I got them to treble-reef the mainsail and hoist it, and then thanking them, advised them to be off. Then, putting Cromwell to the tiller, I went forward with the others and set the topsail and forestaysail (the spritsail lying furled), which would be show enough of canvas till I saw what the weather was to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... of that," replied Jack, "and I have a plan that will offset it. You see that projecting reef there?" and Jack pointed to the north. The others signified that they did. "Well," Jack continued, "back of that is as cosy a little harbor as you would care to see. I noticed it as we came by. We'll take the Essex there, and she will be hidden ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... he went rolling to leeward, for the wind began all at once to blow hard. He heard the call of the captain, and the loud trampling of the men over his head, as they hauled at the main sheet to get the boom on board that they might take in a reef in the mainsail. Diamond felt about until he had found what seemed the most comfortable place, and there he snuggled ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... had been twisted off by the whirling eddies, and were now rapidly scattering, each striving to clear the reef. Only the four vessels bound together—Estein's, Thorkel's, Liot's, Osmund's—swept in an unresisting cluster ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... signal letters. The red ensign was already fluttering from a staff at the stern, and the house flag of David Verity & Co. was at the fore, but these emblems did not satisfy Coke's fighting mettle. The Andromeda would probably crack like an eggshell the instant she touched the reef towards which she was hurrying; he determined that she would go down with colors flying if he were not put out of action by a bullet before he could reach ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... that the gift was thine. Whereat the hero, while the shooting spasm Had fastened on the lungs, seized him by the foot Where the ankle turns i' the socket, and, with a thought, Hurl'd on a surf-vex'd reef that showed i' the sea: And rained the grey pulp from the hair, the brain Being scattered with the blood. Then the great throng Saddened their festival with piteous wail For one in death and one in agony. And none had courage to approach ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... I don't know what to make of it. No wind at all; the glass steady as a rock; and a heavy swell rolling up from westward. Take hold of my glass and bring it to bear on the Monk"—this was the lighthouse guarding the westernmost reef of the Off Islands. "Every now and then a ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... was coming inboard regularly, and Bess knew she should be carrying less sail; but it would mean a lot of time to reef the mainsail, and if she was to get on there was small time for reefing, 'specially as the wind was hauling to the east. A beat home now, as Captain Leary warned her, 'twould be. Surely she would never be home by daylight now. And colder now it was. Ay, it was. She drew the tarpaulin over her ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... to take in a certain sail and reef another—directions which, even if they could have heard them, would have been as Greek to the occupants of the boat; but the wind carried her voice away, and she stood helpless, watching Herbert's ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... around!" was the ominous cry a moment afterward, and all was confusion. The words were scarcely uttered, when, and before the helm was up, the ill-fated ship struck, and, after a few tremendous shocks against the sunken reef, she parted about midship. Ropes and stays were cut away—all rushed forward, as if instinctively, and had barely reached the forecastle, when the stern and quarter-deck broke asunder with a violent crash, and sunk to rise no more. Two of the seamen ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... age, the twilight of the Gods of old morality—evil is got rid of.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} For a long while Wagner's ship sailed happily along this course. There can be no doubt that along it Wagner sought his highest goal.—What happened? A misfortune. The ship dashed on to a reef; Wagner had run aground. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner had stuck fast on a contrary view of the world. What had he set to music? Optimism? Wagner was ashamed. It was moreover an optimism for which ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... glad Captain Blastblow has come to his senses, and is standing out from the shore," I added. "About five miles to the eastward of the line of Keys, which form part of a circle, from Cape Florida to Pickle Reef, more than forty miles, is a series of reefs and rocks. There is a passage between the reefs and the Keys, through which vessels of light draught may pass. But I believe in having plenty of sea room when the weather ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... social call, eh? Well, that's good. I don't get much company these days. Sit down, have a reef." ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... signal to form the line as most convenient. The fleet then formed in the following order:—Goliath, Zealous, Vanguard, Minotaur, Theseus, Bellerophon, Defence, Orion, Audacious, Majestic, and Leander. The Culloden was then astern the Swiftsure, and the Alexander to leeward, tacking to clear the reef. The Admiral hove to, to pick up a boat, and also the four next ships astern of the Vanguard, which gave the Orion an opportunity, by standing on and passing them, to get up with the Zealous at about ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... talk him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... ever yet had grace Ne'er to abuse his power and place? No magic of her voice or smile Suddenly raised a fairy isle, But fondness for her underwent An unregarded increment, Like that which lifts, through centuries, The coral-reef within the seas, Till, lo! the land where was the wave. Alas! 'tis everywhere ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... thunder of the surf. The waters of the pool leapt as if a giant hand had churned them. The foam from beyond the reef overspread them like snow. The whole world became full of the ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... band of silver stretched away to the horizon, marking the meridian of the moon. This was broken by the line of coral reef, over which the surf curled and sparkled with a phosphoric brightness. The reef itself, running all round, seemed to gird the islet in a circle of fire. Here only were the waves in motion, as if pressed by some subaqueous and invisible power; for beyond, scarcely a breath stirred ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... unguided raft was seen in the "Slant Crossing" by the crew of an up-bound steamboat, and they wondered at the absence of all signs of life aboard it. Every now and then the drifting mass of timber touched on some sand-bar or reef, but the current always swung it round, so that it slid off and resumed its erratic voyage. At length, after floating swiftly and truly down a long straight chute, the Venture was seized by an eddy at its foot, revolved slowly several times, and ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... upon the coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... to a very strong gale, attended with rain, so as to bring us under double-reefed top-sails. In lowering down the main top-sail to reef it, the wind tore it quite out of the foot rope, and it was split in several other parts. This sail had only been brought to the yard the day before, after having had a repair. The next morning we got another top-sail to the yard. This gale proved ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... assisted by a few able sea-men, form the crew of the ship. They stand watch, make, reef, and take in sail; do all the dirty work, tarring down, painting, scraping, and slushing. They stand watch and watch, keep at night a look-out on the cat-heads, gangways, quarters, and halliards, where they are required to "sing out" their stations every half ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the cellar is so very dark, God wants to station a candle there, and has placed you there because you can accomplish a work for Him, and for others, of priceless importance. Where is the light needed so much as on a dark landing or a sunken reef? Go on shining, and you will find some day that God will make that cellar a pedestal out of which your light shall stream over the world; for it was out of his prison cell that John illuminated the age in which his lot was cast, quite as much as from his rock-pulpit beside the Jordan. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... owner of the piece, was going to make a lot of money out of it. Now, even this material balm was denied him. He had sold out, and he was feeling like the man who parts for a song with shares in an apparently goldless gold mine, only to read in the papers next morning that a new reef has been located. Into each life some rain must fall. Quite a shower was falling ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... resumed the ex-mate, "as soon as I found myself alone in the hut. I came to the conclusion that I should be carried off by force, if I remained till next day; and so I got into the launch, carried her out of the lagoon, taking care to give the ship a berth, went through the reef, and kept turning to windward, until day-break. By that time, the island was quite out of sight, though I saw the upper sails of the ship, as soon as you got her under way. I kept the top-gallant-sails in sight, until I made the island, again; and as you went off, I ran in, and took possession of ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 'We're lost, every soul and the good money! we've struck a reef, Adam, and 'tis the end and O the good money!' Hereupon I climbed 'bove deck, the vessel on her beam ends and in desperate plight and nought to be seen i' the dark save the white spume as the seas broke over us. None the less I set the crew to cutting away her masts and heaving ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... These uninhabited islands came under Australian authority in 1931; formal administration began two years later. Ashmore Reef supports a rich and diverse avian and marine habitat; in 1983, it became a National Nature Reserve. Cartier Island, a former bombing range, is now a ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Many flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the river fish even of the tropics rarely if ever have gay or conspicuous markings. A very curious case of this kind of adaptation occurs in the sea-horses (Hippocampus) of Australia, some of which bear long foliaceous appendages resembling ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... stand one by another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The biggest I ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... in the case of Osborne v. Aaron's Reef, Limited, Mr. Justice CHITTY, in the interests of the public, was justly severe on both plaintiff and defendants, declining "to give any costs in this action to such a Company." Everyone is familiar with the nautical expression ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... of the floods and thunder, To her pale dry healing blue— To the lift of the great Cape combers, And the smell of the baked Karroo. To the growl of the sluicing stamp-head— To the reef and the water-gold, To the last and the largest Empire, To the ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... from death, as we thought—little knowing the fell purpose for which he had been stationed to hold out the flaring torch as a welcoming beacon to be seen afar by any vessel in distress. I glanced at the dangerous ring of coral reef round the island on which the ship had once struck, and then looked at the repulsive islander, who sat gazing at us with a savage leer. Although somewhat resembling a Papuan, as Hassan had said, we were soon destined ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... And what for? Why, just to find out what was the matter with his trial balance, that's all. When one of Labe's trial balances starts out for snug harbor and ends up on a reef with six foot of water in her hold, naturally Labe wants to get her afloat and pumped dry as quick as possible. He ain't used to it, for one thing, ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... climbing as they got a chance,—these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it blew a stiff breeze. Some time before the admiral spoke the vessels outside, he was compelled to take in all his light canvass; and when he filled, again, after giving his orders to the frigate and sloop, the topgallant sheets were let fly, a single reef was taken in the top-sails, and the lighter sails were set over them. This change in the weather, more especially as the night threatened to be clouded, if not absolutely dark, would necessarily bring about a corresponding change in the plan of sailing, reducing the intervals ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps of cocoa-nut-trees and dwarf palms, with bare gaunt stems and tufted tops, stood out here and there along the rocky slopes, while lesser vegetation of cactus and mangrove bushes were scattered thickly over the island, cropping ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... ashore, and the captain had gone over to the cable office. The boys, after dinner, had wandered around through the crowds, avidly watching everything, from the Portuguese women selling fruit, to the phosphorescent surf rolling in across the reef ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... of bachelors"—who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his watch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has ever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but he is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the large black stone, just as one shatters ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the Spratly Islands are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam; parts of them are claimed by Malaysia and the Philippines; in 1984, Brunei established an exclusive fishing zone, which encompasses Louisa Reef in the southern Spratly Islands, but has not publicly claimed ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... screamed Captain Riggs at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... face came a set expression of determination that, even though the countenances wearing it were youthful, boded no good to the treacherous enemies of freedom whose trail they were that very moment following. Then they flashed past Robbin's Reef light and snuggled into their ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... Cocos-Keeling Islands, in the Indian Ocean, cannot be passed over. He was eager to visit a coral-reef, and this atoll, stocked and planted only by the flotsam and jetsam of the seas, the winds, and migrating birds, offers to the naturalist a most delightful study; for here, progressing almost under his eyes, are the phenomena which have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... about the same rate as that at which they had started, but the wind came off the high land, and sometimes in such strong puffs that they had to loosen the sheet. The fisherman had shown them how to shorten sail by tying down the reef points and shifting the tack and, in the afternoon, the squalls came so heavily that they thought it best to lower the sail and reef it. Towards nightfall the wind had risen so much that they made for the land, and when darkness came on threw out the little grapnel the boat carried, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... keep quiet, and the ladies and children to dress and sit at the doors of their state-rooms, there to await the advice and action of the officers of the ship, who were perfectly cool and self-possessed. Meantime the ship was working over a reef-for a time I feared she would break in two; but, as the water gradually rose inside to a level with the sea outside, the ship swung broadside to the swell, and all her keel seemed to rest on the rock or sand. At no time did the sea ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... spent standing off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... a hardy sailor who had been on the lakes in the roughest weather, "no boat would live now to reach the reef. Better wait till your ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... is Upper Buchanan, whose river, the St. John's, owns a bar infamous as that of Lagos for surf and sharks. The southernmost, Lower Buchanan, is defended by a long and broken wall of black reef, but the village is far from smooth water. All these 'towns' occupy holes in a curtain of the densest and tallest greenery. They are composed of groups and scatters of whitewashed houses, half of them looking like chapels and the other like toys. Each has its adjunct of brown huts, the native ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Trunnell had the reef tackles rigged from the main yard, and the life-boat was slung clear of the lee rail. Then, watching a chance, she was let go with Hans and Johnson in her to keep her clear and dropped back to the mizzen channels, where the volunteers were ready to ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... series of sketches of island life in the South Seas, not inferior to those contained in 'By Reef and Palm.'"—Speaker. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the eminent geologist and authority on volcanology, declares there is danger that all the West Indian reef islands will collapse and sink into the sea from the effects of the volcanic disturbances now in progress. More than that, he says, the Nicaraguan canal route is in danger because it is in ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... cold morning, the moon had gone down, and Venus was just rising in the east; on every side was the blue rolling water. They had left Nantucket miles behind. Sampson, who was on duty, seeing the boy looking out, as if he had come to the conclusion that the island had been submerged, shook out a reef in the line which he was making fast, that he might catch the boy's ear, and pointing to a dim light far down in the distant horizon, he remarked, "Look well, it's old Sankoty; I'm thinking you'll have seen different days when you make ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... and down on the waves like a feather, and thrust her bows under so far, that John had to waste some of his enthusiasm upon the baling kettle. Paul had not hoisted the jib, for the mainsail was all the old craft could stagger under, and her youthful skipper expected soon to be obliged to reef. The Flyaway was at the eastward of the island, driving over and through the waves like a phantom. The spray was dashing over her bows, and her jib was wet several feet above the boltrope. She was working to windward till she could clear the island, when she would have the wind free ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... I had waited in vain; but I now resolved to wait no longer. I had made a bold determination on that very morning; which was, that I should take the dinghy and visit the reef myself. This, then, was the grand excursion on which I was bound, when I removed the little boat from her fastenings, and shot out upon the bosom of the bright ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... to keep up the right pressure of steam and drifted in upon a reef. I said once before that ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... chucks himself right into it, and puts his last ounce of strength on a rope. That is the fellow who will make a good officer, and who, if needs be, can set an example to the men when they have to go aloft to reef a sail in a stiff gale. So, as I understand, Mr. Prendergast, he is going to leave the sea for a bit. It seems a ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... minute or so returned, clambering back through the skylight holding two blue lights in his hand. He struck the end of one and illuminated the whole place with the ghastly glare. The Vanity, but a few minutes before a trim, smart ship, lay there on the reef a total wreck. The bright light showed her broken bulwarks with the seas making clean sweeps through them, the decks one mass of wreckage in hopeless confusion, cordage and rigging, splintered yards, and shattered deck-house—all alike had suffered a sea change. The foremast and the ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... ship away, for Montauk, sir," exclaimed the mate—"keep her away for Montauk, and let that chap follow us if he dare! There's a reef or two, inside, that I'll engage to lead him on, should he choose to try the game, and that will cure him of his taste for chasing ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... which they apply to all sorts of obstacles consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... long narrow Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the sky grew paler by degrees and the stars faded out. We were opposite the buoy now, dark amongst the dark waves, and we turned at right angles and made for the shore. The tide was high and we glided over the inner reef easily. Soon we could see the eaves of the cottage dimly, a cock crowed sleepily, the white pole pointed out some rough steps ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... throttled me as I dragged it after me through the water; whilst the loose folds of my shirt, being washed out to seawards by the tide, kept getting entangled with my arm. I grew weak and faint but still swam my best, and at last I providentially reached a reef of rocks which projected from the opposite shore, and to which I clung until I had somewhat regained ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... in his breast. Weariness fell from him, and he leaped overside, not feeling the chill of the shallows. With a grunt, he heaved the boat up on the narrow strand and knotted the painter to a fang-like jut of reef. ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... with the pressure of the wind on it. But Frank Racer had considerable skill in handling boats, and with his brother at the helm, to ease off when he gave the word, he managed to cast off the throat and peak lines, lower the gaff and sail, and then take a double reef in ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... sailed twelve hours before we fell in with a gale, which lasted several days, and we kept under close-reef-topsails and storm-staysails. The gale lasting a week, raised a mountainous swell, but it was very long and regular. On the seventh day the wind abated, but the swell continued, and at evening there was very little wind, when a circumstance occurred which had nearly cost me my life, ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... lady's hand it will snugly lie, 'Tis as thin as a red rose-leaf, Yet it holds the seagull's sorrowing cry, And the roar of the tide-lashed reef. ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... aleak; the sailor works at the pumps till, faint and weary, is heard from below, six feet of water in the hold; the boats are got ready, but, before they are into them, the vessel is dashed against a reef of rocks; some, in despair, throw themselves into the sea; others get on the rocks without any clothes or provisions, and linger a few days, perhaps weeks or months, living on shell fish, or perhaps taken up by some ship; others get on pieces of the wreck, and perhaps be cast on some foreign ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... of the pirates stuck his head out of the cabin door, jabbered some unintelligible words and pointed to the sails. The boy nodded, for he understood they wanted to attend to the rigging. So the crew trooped forth, rather fearfully, and began to reef the sails and put the ship into ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... after sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... rapidly too, towards the shore. With an anxious, piercing gaze, I looked round to the southward to see if I could discover any signs of the smack, half dreading to find her driven in among the rocks, yet still praying and hoping that she might be riding safely at anchor behind some sheltering reef, or within some little harbour on the coast. Not a sign of her could I discover. I looked seaward. Two or three sails were seen, rising and falling in the offing, but too far off to allow me to hope that she could be one of them. On drove the mast; its course was altered, and it was evidently ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... Commandant Desbarres, and Isidore ate, drank, as if he had never eaten or drunk before. He helped himself repeatedly to all the dishes, becoming aware for the first time of the pleasure of having one's belly full of good things which tickle the palate in the first place. He had let out a reef in his belt and, without speaking, and although he was a little uneasy at a wine stain on his white waistcoat, he ceased eating in order to take up his glass and hold it to his mouth as long as possible, to enjoy the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... ME about Henry," he protested. "I've known Henry twenty-five years. If Henry got his deserts," he exclaimed hotly, "he wouldn't be a consul on this coral reef; he'd be a minister in Europe. Look at me! We're the same age. We started together. When Lincoln sent him to Morocco as consul, he signed my commission as a midshipman. Now I'm an admiral. Henry has twice my brains and he's been a consul-general, ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... the sight of the fire upon the island. It served, however, to show people's tempers and spirits; and we were able to give a tolerable guess how our men would behave, in case there really were any enemies upon the island. The flaws came heavy off the shore, and we were forced to reef our topsails when we opened the middle bay, where we expected to have found our enemy; but saw all clear, & no ships, nor in the other bay next the north-east end. These two bays are all that ships ride in, which recruit on this island; but the middle bay is by much ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... if I had an axe. An axe or a paddle. Harry, I'm not getting back down in one piece. Somehow, I know it. Don't you let them do it to anyone else unless there are manual controls from the ejection onwards. Don't do it. This isn't just nosing into the Slot, over the reef between the town and the island and letting go then, and beginning to sweat. This is much more, Harry. This is bloody frightening. Are the three minutes up yet? My stomach is crawling at the thought of you pushing that ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... of the braver spirits. "It may hold. We don't want to drown on the reef. Let's get ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... the past! But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones—curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the makers ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... as a boy, I shipped before the mast—the wrong mast—and how the old tub bumped a reef and went down with all hands—and feet—except mine. You remember me telling how I grabbed aholt of a large wooden box and floated on to a dry spot. It knocked the wind out of my stummick considerable, but I hung on kind of unconscious till the tide went out. When I come to, I looked round to ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... to the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against the submerged rocks and swept on, all but one. Frona, in a canoe ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... And what wilt thou reply? Draw tight the rein Lest that fiery soul of thine Whirl thee out of the listed plain, Past the olives, and o'er the line. Dire and grievous the charge he brings. See thou answer him, noble heart, Not with passionate bickerings. Shape thy course with a sailor's art, Reef the canvas, shorten the sails, Shift them edgewise to shun the gales. When the breezes are soft and low, Then, well under control, you'll go Quick and quicker to strike the foe. O first of all the Hellenic bards high ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... he, "I must be goin' in. There is a story in the evenin' paper that I am readin'. Men are divin' in the seas for a treasure, and pirates are watchin' them from behind a reef. And there ain't a woman on land or water or in the air. Good-evenin'." And he trundled his pushcart down the alley and back to the musty court where ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... sailed to New York, and in his pocket was a letter which was not to be read till Bermuda was out of sight. When the coral reef was passed, when the fairy blue of the island waters had changed to the dark swell of the Atlantic, he slipped the bolt in the door of his cabin and took out ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... to the circumstance that the rocks all around it lay so near the surface of the sea as to prevent the possibility of agitating the element very seriously, and to the fact that she was near the lee side of the reef. Had the breakers been of the magnitude of those which are seen where the deep rolling billows of the ocean first meet the weather side of shoals or rocks, a craft of that size, and so loaded, could not possibly have passed the first line of white water without filling. As it was, however, the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... gave chase in all haste and coming up with her before long, threw grapnels on board and made fast to her. Then they made all sail for their own island and were but a little distant from it, when the wind veered and rent their sails and cast them on to a reef on our coast. Thereupon we sallied forth on them, and looking on them as booty driven to us by fate, slew the men and made prize of the ships, in which we found the treasures and rarities in question and forty damsels, amongst whom was ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... anxious to deify him: and thence he started again to find his way across the Pacific to the Cape of Good Hope. After much intricate and dangerous navigation among the Spice Islands-in the course of which Drake made a treaty with the Sultan of Ternate, and the Pelican was all but lost on a reef-she rounded the Cape in January, sailing into Plymouth Sound on September 26th, 1580, a little less than three years from the day when she began her voyage. Drake was the first commander who conducted a circumnavigation from start to finish. His precursors ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... south, round Pongara Point, keeping close into the land. About forty feet from shore there is a good free channel for vessels with a light draught which if you do not take, you have to make a big sweep seaward to avoid a reef. Between four and five miles below Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which is fitted with a lighthouse, a lively and conspicuous structure by day as well as night. It is perched on a knoll, close to the extremity of the long arm of low, sandy ground, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... 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 lose. With a look of incredulity and contempt, he said with an oath that he would rather see a wind than hear of it! But while he was speaking I watched his eye, and followed it ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... of Vera Cruz and were passing Anton Lizardo, the place to which we were bound. But a reef was between us and the anchorage where the fleet was quietly lying. The Captain of the schooner said he could cross the reef. Taking his place in the rigging from where he could better observe the breakers and the currents, the schooner tacked here and there, rapidly and repeatedly, ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith
... and slack each reef an' tack, Gae her sail, boys, while it may sit; She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore, An' she'll roar through a heavier yet. When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep, In the tempest's angry moan, We dash through the drift, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank. As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to be within half a degree of the truth. We found Point Venus, the northern extremity of the island, and the eastern point of the bay, to lie in the longitude of 149 deg.13', this being the mean result of a great number of observations made upon the spot. The island is surrounded by a reef of coral rock, which forms several excellent bays and harbours, some of which have been particularly described, where there is room and depth of water far any number of the largest ships. Port Royal bay, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of Norman's Woe. ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not. One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... round; then to retreat from us. Across our way appears a long band of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color from the extended spur of verdure in which the western end of the island terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on her beam-ends,—the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... other towards the central peak of Mount Maitland, 1700 feet high. On the right bow, low sharp cliff-points of volcanic ash; and on the right again, a circular lake a quarter of a mile across and 40 feet in depth, with a coral reef, almost awash, stretching from it to the ash-cliff on the south side of the harbour mouth. A glance shows that this is none other than an old crater, like that inside English Harbour in Antigua, probably that which has hurled out the boulders and the ash; and one whose temper ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... couch which Abdul had made for him under the shadow of a mighty rock. The desert was no longer a shoreless sea of golden sand; they were reaching the reef of hills ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... rend the battling ship. All the night is mad and murderous: who shall front the night? Not the prow that labours, helpless as a storm-blown leaf, Where the rocks and waters, darkling depth and beetling height, Rage with wave on shattering wave and thundering reef on reef. Death is fallen upon the prisoners there of darkness, bound Like as thralls with links of iron fast in bonds of doom; How shall any way to break the bands of death be found, Any hand avail to pluck them from that raging tomb? All the night is great with child of death: ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while she herself should ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil Michael Renow Jean Reo Barton Repent Jean Requal Jesse Rester Louis Rewof Thomas Reynelds ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... but that reef-girt shore seemed to forbid the approach of a vessel. Nevertheless he set up long poles with flags on them at different points of the island, so that a passing ship might see them for miles out ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... of sketches of island life in the South Seas, not inferior to those contained in 'By Reef and Palm.'"—Speaker. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, 'when I had money of my own, I always gave it.' It was only on ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... zone: 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: none Climate: equatorial; scant rainfall, constant wind, burning sun Terrain: low-lying, nearly level, sandy, coral island surrounded by a narrow fringing reef; depressed central area Natural resources: guano (deposits worked until late 1800s) Land use: arable land: 0% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 5% other: 95% Irrigated land: 0 km2 Environment: almost totally covered with grasses, prostrate vines, and low-growing ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in the morning we were near a point of the coast off which a large reef extended about a mile in length, we ran in between the land and this reef, which we estimated to be in 23 deg. Lat., and thus sailed along the coast, along which there was another reef, inside which the water seemed to be very smooth and still; we did our best to get inside this ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... regard to the cattle, was happily removed. Mr. Hume with his usual perseverance, walked out when the camp was formed; and, at a little distance from it, ascended a ridge of pure sand, crowned with cypresses. From this, he descended to the westward, and, at length, struck upon the river, where a reef of rocks creased its channel, and formed a dry passage from one side to the other; but the bend, which the river must have taken, appeared to him so singular, that he doubted whether it was the same ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... struck upon an unknown reef, a gale of wind in the meantime blowing, and the sea running high. Every effort was made to save the ship by the officers and crew; the poor coolies, battened down beneath the decks, being allowed no chance to aid in saving the ship or themselves. Although the yards ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Captain Riggs at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned, waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... aside, and busied himself with taking another reef in his suspenders. "The Rev'und Gawge wanted me to go," he said, in a low tone. "Besides, how can I know what all's in the books he done left me ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... almost gone, and the dust covered most of what was left: still there was a wonderful spirit and grace, and a wild, weird beauty which attracted us exceedingly; but the captain could only tell us that it had belonged to the wreck of a Danish brig which had been driven on the reef where the lighthouse stands now, and his father had found this on the long sands a day or two afterward. "That was a dreadful storm," said the captain. "I've heard the old folks tell about it; it was when I was only a year or two old. There were three merchantmen wrecked ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... bird trims her to the gale I trim myself to the storm of time; I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime; "Lowly faithful banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... It ain't enough to know how to reef a gasket, you got to make the mate know you know it. That's reputation. The good word, said at the right time, that's the word that makes us; and evil be to him that evil thinks, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... West India Islands, within the reefs of which there are large swamps. All the reefs I have myself seen could be associated only with nearly pure calcareous rocks. I have received a description of a reef lying some way off the coast near Belize (terra firma), where a thick bed of mud seems to have invaded and covered a coral reef, leaving but very few islets yet free from it. But I can give you no precise information without my notes (even if then) ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of ports and storms, mates and ships and logged days. "Remember Oahu like it was when we first made it," he queried, "and the Kanaka girls swimming out to the ship with hybiscus flowers in their hair? Yes, and the anchorage at Tahiti with the swells pounding on the coral reef and Papeete under the mountain? It was nice there in the afternoon, lying off the beach with the white cottages among the palms and orange trees and the band playing in the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... before the admiral spoke the vessels outside, he was compelled to take in all his light canvass; and when he filled, again, after giving his orders to the frigate and sloop, the topgallant sheets were let fly, a single reef was taken in the top-sails, and the lighter sails were set over them. This change in the weather, more especially as the night threatened to be clouded, if not absolutely dark, would necessarily bring about a corresponding change in ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people on different parts of the coast, walking, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... masters. I'll soon find tasks for you. You!" he exclaimed, seizing Dick, "go and help the cook in the galley, you two will pick oakum," he added, turning to Lancelot and me; "and when the hands are sent aloft to reef sails, as you seem active fellows, you'll go to ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 15 United States—American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), Virgin ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the face of the compass again to assure myself of the direction. I found even this small change an advantage in more ways than one, as the boat moved steadier, and I was able to spread a larger amount of canvas. Lashing the tiller, I crept forward and shook out an additional reef, hauling the ropes taut. By this time the wind had steadied into a brisk breeze, and the rain had ceased. Crawling back across the thwarts, I took the jumping tiller again into my hands, and held her nose to it, seeking every advantage. I had ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Islands were easily visible. The principal one lay upon the water in the distance, a long, dull-colored body; scalloped with slight hills and valleys. We could not go straight at it, but had to travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is fenced with an invisible coral reef. At last we sighted buoys, bobbing here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them, "raised the reef," and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further shoaled into pale green, with a surface ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the "Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—quarter less twain—then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming—nine ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South America of the intermittent elevation of the land, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... One for saddle, and the other to carry a pack. You see, I've struck color in a curious place, and it promises good. But it's away off, near twenty miles in the foot-hills. It's an outcrop I've been tracing for quite a while, and if my calculations are right, the reef comes right along down here through Barnriff. You see, I've been working on those ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... and hope our chart, With childish glee on our voy'ge we start, The boat glides merrily o'er the wave. But ah! there's many a storm to brave, And many a dang'rous reef to clear, And rushing rapid o'er ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... mended as well as the foresail, and was set anew. The sheets went, however, about two in the morning, and the sail flew from the reef-band like a bit of muslin torn by a shop-boy. The brig now had nothing set but a close-reefed main-topsail, and this I expected, every minute, would follow the other canvass. It rained, blew tremendously, and the sea was ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... carry on; reef none, boy, none; Hang her out on a stretching sail: Gunnel in, gunnel in! for the race we'll win, While the land-lubbers so pale— (Carry on!) While the land-lubbers so pale Are fumbling at their points, my son, For ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... like a thunder-clap-like the roar of breakers on a reef, burst from the spectators; a shout of triumph so mighty that the statues quivered, the brazen altars rang, the hangings swayed, the sacred vessels clattered and the lamps trembled and swung; the echo rolled round the aisles like a whirlpool at the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who clung to him, he made no attempt to strike out. He knew that the waves would bear him quickly enough on to the rocks, and he reserved himself for the struggle with them. A great roller came surging over the outlying reef. It carried him in like a feather and hurled him up against the face of the cliff. As he struggled upon its crest, he mechanically put out his hands and seized a projecting portion of the rock. The shock of the contact ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shred, sir," said Philip; "the scissors shall only be used to cut the threads, with which the ladies take in a reef here and ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep. Nothing is to be seen out of Sandag Bay, but one small segment of the horizon and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the whole Bahama group, and the name San Salvador somehow became shifted in time to another island. Thus was the original landfall long lost sight of, and no two writers could agree on the subject. Recently, however, the most careful students have decided upon the reef now called Watling's Island, to-day an English ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... are grannies. They would jam so that you'd never untie 'em, besides being ugly. There's wrong ways even in doing up a string. See here." He rapidly twisted the ends together into a reef-knot. "There's strength and beauty together," he said. "Look how neat it is, the ends tidy along the standing part, all so neat as pie. Besides, it'd never jam. Watch how I do it, and then try it ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... judges were probably Roman knights after the model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... again after sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the run he passed several ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of seeing a fine crystal ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... to some of us, a beautiful dream for years. And were we disappointed? Oh, no! No picture of our imagination had ever been so bright, so beautiful as that spread out before us, as our gallant ship sailed majestically through the coral reef into the beautiful harbor of Honolulu. It was like entering a new world; everything was bright with tropical splendor. The mountains, in whose hearts had slumbered volcanic fires, which, from time to time, had burst forth, lighting up the great ocean with Tartarean brilliancy, and scattering red-hot ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... but rapt eawt wi awt uts reef, un us Berry foke'll elp yo as ard as we kon. Wayn helps Robdin, un wayn elp yo, if yoan ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... for the icebergs of frozen Labrador, Floating spectral in the moonshine along the low, black shore. Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below; And the white squall smites in summer, and the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... was gold; now it was land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and "twenty pieces of silver"; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the picnic was a good way off, being the point of the promontory that shut in the mouth of the river, a great crag, with a long reef of rocks running out into the sea, playfully called the Kitten's Tail, though the antiquarians always deposed that the head had nothing to do with cats or kits, but with the disposition to erect ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... great animation, in his native tongue, about the pleasures of "faahee," or surf-bathing, and the exquisite fun of dodging the "manos," or sharks, among the rollers. Presently he struck out into the lagoon, and before we could guess his intention, he swam over to the reef, and, picking his way across it, plunged fearlessly among the breakers on the outside. He stayed, however, but a short time, and came back saying, that the "manos" were altogether too thick out there, and that a huge blue one, had come near seizing him in the surf, before he ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... likely to be so with the wind rising out of the northeast; and ere long the Petrel's topmast was sent down, and a double reef put in her mainsail. Until midnight it blew hard with a fast rising sea, and a mist as thick as a hedge. After this, it was ugly weather all the way home, and as they passed Ailsa Craig the wind changed to full north, and fetched the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... House at a dinner to meet a little tin soldier cousin in white epaulettes, who was over from Germany ... and (the German Ambassador) Count Munster told me that the French had hoisted their flag on a reef, as he said, within cannon-shot of Jersey, as to the British or neutral nature of which there had long been a dispute between the two Governments.' [Footnote: The Memoir has a note upon this episode of the Ecrehous Books, which led ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... The Spectator, don't know what you miss. The thrilling stories I have listened to! Once I heard a circumstantial story of a wreck in the South Seas told by the plucky little wife of the captain, who had stayed by her husband's side—"Papa" she called him—while the ship slowly sank on a coral reef, and then drifted about in an open boat for days ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... draw nearer and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the uptilted edge of the boat. The little ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... oars, lads, and rig the mast, reef down the sail to the last point; we must show a little to keep her dead before the wind; we shall have a tremendous sea when we are once fairly away from the shelter of the island. This gale will soon knock up the sea, and with the cross swell from the Atlantic it will be as ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... expired and I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked among ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... I express no opinion on the controverted points. I doubt if there are ten living men who, having a practical knowledge of what a coral-reef is, have endeavoured to master the very difficult biological and geological problems involved in their study. I happen to have spent the best part of three years among coral-reefs and to have made that attempt; and, when Mr. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... upon one or more of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... boat there was great store of silver and gold, and some victuals. On the same evening the fleet came to anchor off Melinda, which is eighteen leagues from Mombaza, and is in lat. 3 deg. S. This place has no good harbour, being only an almost open roadstead, having a kind of natural pier or reef of rocks on which the sea beats with much violence, owing to which the ships have to ride at a considerable distance from the shore. The city stands in a broad open plain, along the shore, surrounded with many palms, and other sorts of trees, which are green the whole ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... the expedition was not a very auspicious one, for on leaving the harbor of St. John (or "havre de Menuagoesche," as Villebon calls it) at 2 o'clock on the afternoon of the 2nd of August, d'Iberville ran the Envieux upon a reef; however, the damage was not serious as the ship floated when the tide rose. At Penobscot Baron St. Castin joined the expedition with 130 Indians. The French priests Simon and Thury, as the event proved, were no mere figure heads; they actively ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... the West Indies, he met with an old Spaniard who remembered the wreck of the Spanish ship, and gave him directions how to find the very spot. It was on a reef of rocks, a few leagues from ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... diamond mines; where these two unite below there was formerly a fort. The Landa river is extremely serpentine, deep to the very bushes on both sides, and quite clear of danger up to the town, except near Siminis creek, about ten miles below the fort; here a reef of rocks runs across the stream, and as the fair way over them is somewhat intricate, the channel ought to be buoyed before attempted to be passed. The Barracouta, drawing thirteen feet, just scraped them at ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... see that her eyes rested upon the edge of the wilderness. It seemed to him that she must be thinking of that; and he noted with pain, as often before, the contrast between her and her surroundings. From every direction the forest appeared to be rushing in upon that perilous little reef of a clearing—that unsheltered island of human life, newly displaying itself amid the ancient, blood-flecked, horror-haunted sea of woods. And shipwrecked on this island, tossed to it by one of the long tidal waves of history, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... is low, and the flat congewoi-covered ledges of reef on the southern side of the bar lie bare and exposed to the sun. Here and there in the crystal pools among the rocks, fish have been left by the tide, and as you step over the congewoi, whose teats spurt out jets of water to the pressure of ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... she were headin' west-nor'west, which were a good course, till eight bells in the arternoon watch, when the sea gittin' up so tremendiously we had to furl the reefed mainsail and mizzen topsail and close reef the fore ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... at the low comedy Shoes with the swollen Promontories and the Trousers with the double Reef and the folding Cuffs and the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... twenty-two gneiss reefs extending about six hundred and fifty feet, in front of the entrance to Plymouth Sound. Smeaton's lighthouse, modelled after the trunk of a sturdy oak in Windsor Park, became the model for all subsequent lighthouses. It is as firm to-day as when originally built, but the reef on which it rests has been undermined and shattered by the joint action of the waves and the leverage of the tall stone column, against which the seas strike with prodigious force, causing it to vibrate like ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... rock-bound reef of Unbelief There sat the wild Negation; Then they sank once more and were washed ashore At the Point ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought—gigantic, breaking seas—went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... powers of the microscope. It multiplies by means of buds like those of a tree, the individuals all combining to form a composite stony mass, which is called a polypidom. A number of such polypidoms growing close together form a coral reef. See woodcuts. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... were a portion of the crew of a whaler, which had struck on a reef of rocks about seventy miles off, and that they had been obliged to leave her immediately, as she fell on her broadside a few minutes afterwards; that they had left in two boats, but did not know what had become of the other ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... lee-beam lies the land, boys, See all clear to reef each course; Let the fore-sheet go, don't mind, boys, Though the weather ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... chain of reefs extending S from White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... he should have returned in time; only just in time it was; from the angry look of the outer world the island would now, for many a day be besieged by seas impassable to such small craft as alone could reach the reef. Had he tarried but to the next tide (and how sorely he had been tempted to remain an hour more in the gatekeeper's lodge within sight and hearing of buxom Moggie, Margery's grand-daughter), had he missed the tide, for days, maybe for weeks, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... coast, La Salle had sailed four hundred miles beyond the mouth of the river he sought. Unaware of his mistake, he determined to land and build a temporary fort; but the frigate Aimable, laden with stores, was wrecked upon a reef; Beaujeu, the recreant commander of the Joly, deserted his leader and made sail for France, and presently La Salle was left with only the little frigate Belle. Soon afterwards this vessel also sank beneath the stormy waters of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... whistled to himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs her off the ground." A tiny spit of flame, pale against ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... fearful of entering upon an unknown coast in the dark, we stood off all night, which was well for us, as we found ourselves at day-break next morning, 7th May, within a ship's length of a great reef of rocks, which extended from one island to the other, and thinking to have gone between the islands, we had nearly run upon this dangerous ledge. Having a small breeze from shore we were fortunately able to stand off, and went to the westermost island, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... and the Thursday following he had asked the Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly given and accepted, it was with ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... is thinking of dangers to shun,— Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,— she was laden with all the stores of the colony,—he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than those near our ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... acknowledge the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and breakers are foaming on the reef, she mounts the billows and survives the storm. That we are not suffering the pains of hell, that we have hopes of heaven and ever shall be there, we owe not to our good works, but to God's good will; to that only. Till ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... I cried to Oliver, throwing off my jacket; "we must swim for it!" and seizing him by the arm, I helped him to wade across the reef, and then plunging into the sea, we swam off towards the boat. Her crew perceived our danger, and with sturdy strokes pulled towards us. A glance I cast behind showed me that one of the canoes of the savages had ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, and what-not, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... back to him. There was no one in sight; the island was out of the lines of communication, and a point just north of them shut off the open water. But she saw that the reef to which Windham clung trended in to the shore a little way ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Their names were changed, the Eclaire being rechristened the Sylph, the Actif becoming the Hawke. Lieutenant Farrance was promoted to the rank of captain, and given the command of the latter vessel, and some of the survivors of a ship that had a fortnight before been lost on a dangerous reef were told off to her. He was, according to rule, permitted to take a boat's crew and a midshipman with him from his old ship, and he selected Will Gilmore, and, among the men, Dimchurch and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... future exploration will develop Midian as it has done India. The quartzose outcrop called the "Wynaad reef" (Madras Presidency) produced only a few poor penny-weights per ton, two and seven being the extremes, while much of it was practically unproductive. Presently, in February, 1878, the district was visited by Sir Andrew Clarke, of Australian experience, member of the Viceregal ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... outwardly calm, but with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... seamen. The soldiers carried their swords, and Black Simon bore a brown biscuit-bag over his shoulder. Under his direction the rowers skirted the dangerous surf which beat against the cliffs until they came to a spot where an outlying reef formed a breakwater. Within was a belt of calm water and a shallow cover with a sloping beach. Here the boat was dragged up and the seamen were ordered to wait, while Simon and Aylward started ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no more pressure; the freshening wind had worked the schooner into ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... breadth; has a mean depth of 375 fathoms (greatest 1200); receives no rivers, and owing to the great evaporation its water is very saline; long coral reefs skirt its shores, and of many islands Jebel Zugur, in the Farisan Archipelago, and Dahlak are the largest; the dangerous Daedalus Reef is marked by a lighthouse; as a seaway between Europe and the East its importance was greatly diminished by the discovery of the Cape route, but since the opening of the Suez Canal it has much more than regained its old position; owes its name probably ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her surprise she heard his voice, deep and sonorous as the bell-buoy that was moored by the Spear Point Reef. ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... this day we left the entrance of the harbor and bore away for Kennebeck river. In the latter part of the night, there came on a thick fog and our fleet was separated. At break of day we found ourselves in a most dangerous situation, very near a reef of rocks. The rocks indeed appeared on all sides of us, so that we feared we should have been dashed to pieces on some of them. We were brought into this deplorable situation by means of liquor being dealt out too freely to our pilots.—Their ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... wrapt in murky smoke, both rushed out together, breathing forth flaming fire. And sore afraid were the heroes at the sight. But Jason, setting wide his feet, withstood their onset, as in the sea a rocky reef withstands the waves tossed by the countless blasts. Then in front of him he held his shield; and both the bulls with loud bellowing attacked him with their mighty horns; nor did they stir him a jot by their onset. And as when through the holes of ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... the sects of the philosophers have stranded on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains to avow that God having acted for the best has not ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... survey? It is extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... pearl of Desay; of mad feasts and dances in the barbaric night, and quick dangers and sudden deaths; of the queen's love-making to Desay, of Desay's love-making to the queen's daughter, and of Desay, every joint crushed, still alive, staked out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by the sharks; of the coming of the plague; of the beating of tom-toms and the exorcising of the devil-devil doctors; of the flight over the man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... precipice, from which it was only separated by a parapet built on the ledge of the rock, so low that the eye might easily measure the depth of the crag, and gaze on the conflicting waters which foamed, struggled, and chafed over the reef below. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... all on the raging canal!" said Terrill to his captain, as the team started. "If it comes on to blow, we can take a reef ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... have reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol—a portrait of ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... biographies. This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... We know that North America had a very different shape during the Cretaceous or even the Middle Tertiary period from what it has now, and that the Gulf of Mexico extended up the valley of the Mississippi as far as the Ohio, by the presence of a great coral reef in the Ohio River near Cincinnati. We know also that Florida and the Southeastern Atlantic States are a very recent addition to the continent, while the pampas of the Argentine Republic have, in a geological sense, but just been upheaved from the sea, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... admit that his men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail with a gentle ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... islands have not since subsided. I have no doubt that I should have considered them as formed during subsidence. But I should have been much troubled in my mind by the sea not being so deep as it usually is round atolls, and by the reef on one side sloping so gradually beneath the sea; for this latter fact, as far as my memory serves me, is a very unusual and almost unparalleled case. I always foresaw that a bank at the proper depth beneath the surface would give rise ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... answered. "If these light airs hold they may overhaul us, because they can spread so much more cloth. But if the westerly freshens—and it nearly always does in the afternoon—I can outsail the Gull. I can drive this old tub full sail in a blow that will make the Gull tie in her last reef." ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... know why, save that life was intolerable at home after the smash-up, and Winnie Morris heard I was getting wild, and turned a cold shoulder on me, I fancied. As to this craft, that reels and tumbles about like a reef of drunkards, she is bound for Australia; so I suppose, in due time, you and I will be landed on the shores of the golden Ophir, if we don't get turned into Davy Jones' ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... gentle sister spirit, when you smile My soul is like a lonely coral isle, An islet shadowed by a single palm, Ringed round with reef ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... gone, and most of the people had left the wharf by this time. Bobtail, who was on the lookout for the signal, saw it immediately, and headed the yacht for the pier. As Ben Chinks had remarked, it blew hard, and the wind came in heavy flaws. The Skylark had a single reef in her mainsail, and the jib was furled, but even with this short canvas she ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... successor, Vietnam. China has occupied the Paracel Islands since 1974, when its troops seized a South Vietnamese garrison occupying the western islands. China built a military installation on Mischief Reef in 1999. The islands are claimed by ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Winwood Reade in 1872. The inhabitants of Western Africa have worked their gold fields for centuries to very little purpose. Their want of pumps, of quartz-crushing machinery, and of scientific appliances, has limited their labors to scratching the top soil and nibbling at the reef-walls. A large proportion of the country is virtually virgin ground; and a rich harvest has been left for Occidental science, energy, and enterprise. It is fast becoming evident that Africa will one day equal half a dozen Californias. The annual product of gold ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... serious one. The Endeavour, raised by a wave over the ridge of a reef, had fallen again into a hollow in the rock, and by the moonlight, portions of the false keel and the sheathing ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Terns or Sea Swallows that you have seen about the reef nest there also; and this island, as well as the mainland near by, is a favorite stopping-place for all the shore and water birds in their journeys,—from Sandpipers to great flocks ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... coal and reprovision. As he was not allowed to land at Samoa, he went on to Pago-Pago, in complete ignorance that war had been declared, and, not being able to get supplies there, left for Suva. At the latter port the harbor lights being extinguished, he ran his vessel on to the reef in the night time. Rockets were sent up, but no assistance could be given from the shore. Fortunately, however, he got off as the tide made; but ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly decorated, and the whole party ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... have also been encountered, or a reef of rocks just emerging above the surface, where previously there was always supposed to have been deep water. On some few occasions, the gradual building up of an island by submarine volcanoes has been observed, as that of Sabrina in 1181, off St. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... may read that binds the sheaf Or builds the house, or digs the grave, And those wild eyes that watch the wave In roarings round the coral reef. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... divergence from the actual rock surface was expected, and realized in a few places, yet on the whole the agreement was very good. The borings revealed two depressions or channels where the rock surface passed below the grade of the projected tunnels, these depressions being separated by a rock reef which extends down stream from Blackwell's Island. In 32d and 33d Streets in Manhattan, borings were made from the river to the station site at intervals of about 100 ft., wash-borings and core-borings alternating. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Alfred Noble
... mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall, and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... grannies. They would jam so that you'd never untie 'em, besides being ugly. There's wrong ways even in doing up a string. See here." He rapidly twisted the ends together into a reef-knot. "There's strength and beauty together," he said. "Look how neat it is, the ends tidy along the standing part, all so neat as pie. Besides, it'd never jam. Watch how I do it, and then try ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef. You are to believe that its first cousins are the soft, slimy sea-anemones which you see expanding their living flowers in every rock-pool - bags of sea-water, without a trace of bone or stone. You must believe it; for in science, as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... it served only as a landmark to the fishermen, for they had found by experience that by keeping the laird's chimney and the white tower of Cloomber in a line they could steer their way through the ugly reef which raises its jagged back, like that of some sleeping monster, above the troubled ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... jealously watched and repressed the natural gaiety which was a part of her. Those who have been in serious wrecks are never quite the same afterward; and she had seen her fairest dream beaten and crumpled upon the reef ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... made him promise to do better. Some awful free-minded folks have crept into the church, an' the fact is, we need their money,' Deacon Joe went on. 'What the minister ought to do is stick to the old doctrines that are safe an' sound. 'St'id o' that he's tryin' to sail 'twixt rock an' reef.' ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... sometimes occur in inverted troughs indicating lodgment by solutions from below, as, for instance, in the saddle-reef gold ores of Nova Scotia and Australia, and in certain copper ores of the Jerome camp of Arizona (p. 204.) This occurrence does not indicate whether the solutions were hot or cold, magmatic or meteoric, but in connection with other evidences has sometimes been regarded as significant ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... the Viorne, for the darkness seemed to be growing denser. The young people groped their way along the slope of the Garrigues, till they came to a rock on which they sat down. Around them lay an abyss of darkness. They were stranded, as it were, on some reef above a dense void. And athwart that void, when the dull tramp of the little army had died away, they only heard two bells, the one clear toned and ringing doubtless at their feet, in some village across ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... entering upon an unknown coast in the dark, we stood off all night, which was well for us, as we found ourselves at day-break next morning, 7th May, within a ship's length of a great reef of rocks, which extended from one island to the other, and thinking to have gone between the islands, we had nearly run upon this dangerous ledge. Having a small breeze from shore we were fortunately able to stand off, and went to the westermost ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... removed by the Athenians. But the most awkward part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... sight of the delectable Gardens. But having tried to cast anchor, which was a stone at the end of a piece of the kite-string, he found no bottom, and was fain to hold off, seeking for moorage, and, feeling his way, he buffeted against a sunken reef that cast him overboard by the greatness of the shock, and he was near to being drowned, but clambered back into the vessel. There now arose a mighty storm, accompanied by roaring of waters, such as he had never heard the like, and he was tossed this way and that, and his hands so numbed ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number of men, women and children, standing round Mr. Inglis at the entrance ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... year of groping for he knew not what, with money gone, and not much progress made, Rembrandt took a reef in his pride and settled down to paint portraits, and to do a little ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... various places upon one or more of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same in that which accompanies the narrative; but in the log ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... from this perilous position, that Drake had caused the sacrament to be administered to us as if we had been on the point of death, and now that we were mercifully set free we sang a Te Deum and went forward very cautiously, hardly daring to set sails lest we should chance upon some reef still more dangerous. ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... till now, been held in abeyance by Merelli, who had foreseen difficulty. And, now that it was reached, it proved a reef indeed. For, of the four singers, only the basso had any conception of time. Thus when Merelli, in despair, came apologetically to Ivan to suggest an alteration of the rhythm—which made the whole beauty of the song—Ivan rose from his place swearing, savagely, that not one other note in the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... speculating on the strange change which had come over her father her eyes had wandered aimlessly along the harbor's entrance; the low reef that protected it from the sea, and the point of land to the south, that projected far out into the strait like a gigantic index finger pointing toward the mainland, the foliage covered heights of which were just visible ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... flat fish, as, for example, the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the river fish even of the tropics rarely if ever have gay or conspicuous markings. A very curious case of this kind of adaptation occurs ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... of South America; "No other work of mine," he says, "was begun in so deductive a spirit as this; for the whole theory was thought out on the West Coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had, therefore, only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs." (I. p. 70.) In 1835, when starting from Lima for the Galapagos, he recommends his friend, W. D. Fox, to take up geology:—"There is so much larger a field for thought ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... side. He was outwardly calm, but with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of the sea like a volcanic peak, and was evidently encircled with a barrier reef, as we could trace a line of snowy surf breaking on its outer verge, and parting the sapphire blue of the deep water without from the emerald green shoals within. The coast, sweeping in beautiful bays, dotted with overgrown islets, and fended by rocky promontories, was rimmed ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... should have split itself up into so many centres of thought and action, each one of which is wholly, or at any rate nearly, unconscious of its connection with the other members, instead of having grown up into a huge polyp, or as it were coral reef or compound animal over the whole world, which should be conscious but of its own one single existence; how it is that the daily waste of this creature should be carried on by the conscious death of its individual members, instead of by the unconscious waste of tissue which goes on in the ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... they preserve the rain; neither has it any lake, but several salt ponds, which furnish the sole production of the island. Turk's Island cannot be approached on the east or northeast side, in consequence of the reef that surrounds it. It has no harbor, but has an open road on the west side, which vessels at anchor there have to leave and put to sea whenever the wind comes from any other quarter than that of the usual trade breeze of N.E. which blows over the island; for the shore is so ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... showed a water sky, but from it we must have been at least forty miles. Between us and the shore, a land-floe, of some thirty miles in width, followed the sinuosities of the coast-line. Bergs here and there strewed its surface; but the major part of them formed what is called a "reef," in the neighbourhood of Devil's Thumb, denoting either a bank or shoal ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... accident. Humboldt, Maury, and Guyot, Arago, Agassiz, and Pierce, by observation, philosophy, and mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they trace a ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... at half speed through the narrow channel in the coral reef which makes the natural breakwater of the harbor. This channel is carefully buoyed on either side, and at night safety-lamps are placed upon each of these little floating beacons, so that a steamship can find her way in even after nightfall. Though ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... sighed Shortie. "Peggy, will you excuse me, but I have surely got to let out a reef if anything more is coming," and Shortie let out a hole or two in the leather belt which encircled the region into which ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Australia, between Australia and Indonesia Map references: Oceania, Southeast Asia Area: total area: 5 km2 land area: 5 km2 comparative area: about 8.5 times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) and Cartier Island Land boundaries: 0 km Coastline: 74.1 km Maritime claims: contiguous zone: 12 nm continental shelf: 200 m (depth) or to depth of exploration exclusive fishing zone: 200 nm territorial ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... he was only a poor orphan, and had a family to support, and if he never came out alive it would be a great hardship upon those dependent upon him for support, and he asked her as a special favor that she take her hand and take a reef in one side of the mouth so it would be smaller. She consented, and puckered in a handful of what would have been cheek, had it not been mouth. He looked at her again and found that the mouth had become a very one-sided affair, ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... discoveries up to the present demonstrate, this Colony cannot be considered rich in auriferous deposits. Until the contrary has been proved, I venture to submit the theory that every gold-bearing reef in these Islands, accessible to man, has been disintegrated by volcanic action ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Mediterranean, and gave him a great Insight into the practical Part of Navigation. He grew fond of this Life, and was resolved to be a compleat Sailor, which made him always one of the first on a Yard Arm, either to Hand or Reef, and very inquisitive in the different Methods of working a Ship: His Discourse was turn'd on no other Subject, and he would often get the Boatswain and Carpenter to teach him in their Cabbins the constituent Parts of a Ship's Hull, and how to rigg her, which he generously paid 'em for; and tho' ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... Howland Island Hungary Iceland India Indian Ocean Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Jan Mayen Japan Jarvis Island Jersey Johnston Atoll Jordan Juan de Nova Island Kazakstan Kenya Kingman Reef Kiribati Korea, North Korea, South Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia, Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Man, Isle of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... slaves, sloops, lands, and 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 bridge, and to ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the paralysis of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of seeing ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,— Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... eight rocks, near the surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... 'em - tight or loose; From spar to deck, from deck to keel, From barnacle to shroud, There weren't one pair of reach-me-downs To all that jabbering crowd. But wasn't it a gladsome sight, When roared the deep sea gales, To see them reef her fore and aft A-swinging by their tails! Oh, wasn't it a gladsome sight, When glassy calm did come, To see them squatting tailor-wise Around a keg of rum! Oh, wasn't it a gladsome sight, When in ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... was the survey of the so-called "inner passage" between the Barrier Reef and the east coast of Australia; the New Guinea work was a hors d'oeuvre, and dealt with only a small part of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... them to the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... hundreds of workaday tasks: of currencies kept in effective relation, of development loans meshed together, of standardized weapons, and concerted diplomatic positions. The Atlantic Community grows, not like a volcanic mountain, by one mighty explosion, but like a coral reef, from the accumulating ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... it meant, and down came the call, 'Don't wait to save your things, only wraps, ladies! Up on deck! Life- belts if you can!' I remember Bernard standing at the top of the ladder, helping us up, and somehow, I understand from him, that we were on a reef, and might either remain there, and sink, or be washed off. The fog was clearing, and there was a dim light up high, somewhere, one of the lighthouses, I believe. I don't quite know how it all went; ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... aboard, ye see, with a word or two t' le'ward of what ye might call a speakin' acquaintance with the skipper. I 'lowed he'd strike the Rattler; but he cleared the Rattler, by good luck, an' fetched up at dawn on the Devil's Teeth, a mean, low reef o' them parts, where the poor Will-o'-the-Wisp broke her back an' went on in splinters with the sea an' wind. 'Twas over soon, Dannie; 'twas all over soon, by kindness o' Providence: the ol' craft went t' pieces an' was swep' on t' le'ward by ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for Dick's journey to the coast to meet her when the time came. So great was the excitement that a newcomer thought some great reef had been struck, and followed several of us about for days trying to discover its location and get his ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Shaw, forward at his station, gasp in sheer alarm. When heading toward the inshore shoals the brig was never put round till the quick, loud cries of the leadsmen announced that there were no more than three feet of water under her keel; and when standing toward the steep inner edge of the long reef, where the lead was of no use, the helm would be put down only when the cutwater touched the faint line of the bordering foam. Lingard's love for his brig was a man's love, and was so great that it could ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... voting power was vigorous—have accomplished a veto. But projects in which Mrs. Rattleton was concerned never went slowly; and in the present case the necessity for getting back in time for the races really compelled haste. And so it came to pass that not until the Fleetwings was off the Brenton's Reef light-ship, with her nose pointed well up into the north-east, was there framed in Mr. Port's slow-moving mind a suitable line of argument upon which to base a peremptory refusal to go upon the expedition—and by that time he was so excruciatingly ill ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... from the litter and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie, dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold. Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds of thousands of pounds capital ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the bulls, and they from some unseen lair beneath the earth, where was their strong steading, wrapt in murky smoke, both rushed out together, breathing forth flaming fire. And sore afraid were the heroes at the sight. But Jason, setting wide his feet, withstood their onset, as in the sea a rocky reef withstands the waves tossed by the countless blasts. Then in front of him he held his shield; and both the bulls with loud bellowing attacked him with their mighty horns; nor did they stir him a jot ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... approved in silence. He had ceased to hold any conversation with the coarse seaman; but neither Glenarvan nor he left the poop. Two hours after a stiff breeze came on. Will Halley took in the lower reef of his topsails. The maneuver would have been a difficult job for five men if the MACQUARIE had not carried a double yard, on the American plan. In fact, they had only to lower the upper yard to bring the sail to its ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... rechristened the Sylph, the Actif becoming the Hawke. Lieutenant Farrance was promoted to the rank of captain, and given the command of the latter vessel, and some of the survivors of a ship that had a fortnight before been lost on a dangerous reef were told off to her. He was, according to rule, permitted to take a boat's crew and a midshipman with him from his old ship, and he selected Will Gilmore, and, among the ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... away the jib or reef the upper hatchways?" Ingram called out to Sheila when they had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... turned his face aside, and busied himself with taking another reef in his suspenders. "The Rev'und Gawge wanted me to go," he said, in a low tone. "Besides, how can I know what all's in the books he done left me 'thout I ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... tried to imagine the moment when her despairing mother, with death near, and with prayers and tears, had cast her adrift, hoping that the one little life most dear to that mother might be saved. The fatal reef where those parents had gone down also held for her a weird fascination, and at times the voice of the ocean seemed like the despairing cries of mortals. One picture, and it was her best, was a view of the wreck, as near as Uncle Terry could describe it, with human forms clinging ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... over, on some convenient fairy carpet such as I used to read of in Eastern tales when I was a boy. For us, we had to make our way in haste back to the ship, which lay in the offing, and could not come near on account of the reef barrier. We got on board safely, passing the reefs where once an American ship was wrecked and her crew killed and eaten by the people of ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... itself in another way if it would work," supplemented Dickie, much to Gregory's surprise. "Lots of times a boat breaks down and drifts on to a reef. If she could get word to some one close by they could take her in tow or even pull her off before she was ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... first, gave him the position of Bowers's Island and began to discuss coral reefs and volcanic action. They were now well in among the islands. Two they passed at a distance, and went so close to a third—a mere reef with a few palms upon it—that Mr. Chalk, after a lengthy inspection through his binoculars, was able ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... two small islands in the neighbourhood of Oneeheow. The former is a single high hummock, joined by a reef of coral rocks to the northern extremity of Oneeheow. The latter lies to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... beautiful spirit that rides upon its bosom, the gallant ship.' Though it is to The Pilot, pre-eminently, and The Waterwitch, in nearly an equal degree, that these remarks apply, there is many a passage in Cooper's later novels—for example, The Two Admirals, Homeward Bound, Mark's Reef, Ashore and Afloat, and The Sea-Lions—in which we recognise the same 'cunning' right hand which pencilled the Ariel, and its crew, the moody, mysterious pilot, and stalwart Long ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... tossed up and down on the waves like a feather, and thrust her bows under so far, that John had to waste some of his enthusiasm upon the baling kettle. Paul had not hoisted the jib, for the mainsail was all the old craft could stagger under, and her youthful skipper expected soon to be obliged to reef. The Flyaway was at the eastward of the island, driving over and through the waves like a phantom. The spray was dashing over her bows, and her jib was wet several feet above the boltrope. She was working to windward till she ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... uniforms; another that a cross of St. Louis had been found. But the element of probability in the various stories evaporated on investigation. Flinders, sailing north from Port Jackson in the INVESTIGATOR in 1802, kept a sharp lookout on the Barrier Reef, the possibility of finding some trace being "always present to my mind." But no definite ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... of reefs extending S from White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps furnish ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... the residence of the Administrator, Government House, as it is called, to be built on the site of Lo Bengula's kraal. But the spot was not a convenient one for the creation of a European town, for it was a good way from any stream, and there was believed to be a valuable gold-reef immediately under it. Accordingly, a new site was chosen, on somewhat lower ground, about two miles to the south-west. Here new Bulawayo stands, having risen with a rapidity rivalling that of a mining-camp in Western America. The site has no natural beauty, for the landscape is dull, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... and when the moon came up she seemed to be glowering from her shroud. Joe was anxious to take in something, but the skipper said, "Don't think there'll be much of it. We can reef her when it comes away. I want to be home." All the night it seemed as though something evil were in the air, and even the men below were depressed. Sometimes it happens that if you work long in a lonely house, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... yonder mast a flag streams out As bold as a royal pennant; I can watch the good ship lunge about From this tower of which I am tenant; But oh, might I be in the battling ship, Might I seize the rudder and steer her, How gay o'er the foaming reef we'd slip Like the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... bursting into foam and gyrating in dizzy whirlpools, its surface broken by explosions of spray or pitted by devouring vortices resembling the oily mouths of marine monsters. Below this, in turn, is the White Horse, worst of all. Here the flood somersaults over a tremendous reef, flinging on high a gleaming curtain of spray. These rapids are well named, for the tossing waves resemble nothing more than runaway white horses with streaming ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... consisted of ten men, the coxswain, the midshipmen, and Harry. The surf was no longer breaking on the bar outside. There was a bright sea, with white-crested waves and, before starting, the captain ordered a reef to be put ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... centre of Padre Island the coast of Texas deepens at the rate of about a fathom to the mile, until at twenty fathoms there is a coral reef, and on the easterly side of this reef the water deepens, as by the side of a perpendicular wall, to a very great depth. This reef marks the boundary of the Gulf stream, and also the boundary of the terrible tornado. ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... was little Pedro the cabin boy—and went to sleep. The rest of the crew also were asleep. And the boy who, I suppose, felt quite big to think that he was really steering the Admiral's flagship, was a little too smart; for, before he knew it, he had driven the Santa Maria plump upon a hidden reef. And there she was wrecked. They worked hard to get her off but it was no use. She keeled over on her side, her seams opened, the water leaked in, the waves broke over her, the masts fell out and the Santa Maria had made her ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... shrilling over our heads at some great fin rising out of the sea beyond. On our trip to and from Bongao, one of the Tawi Tawi Islands, on a wrecking expedition to save the launch Maud, stranded there on a coral reef, all the Signal Corps officers were at liberty, too, which made life on the ship even more agreeable, the delightful experience being again repeated on our return trip to Manila ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... us towards the Florida coast. Being arrived on the coast nearly opposite to Havana, the privateer went in shore to reconnoitre, and our ship lay off and on. Next morning she returned with two small vessels, a schooner and sloop. We then all four steered over the reef towards the small islands, and on Tuesday afternoon were brought to anchor in a little harbour formed by the Florida isles and the Martyr's Reef, as snug a hole as buccaniers would wish. They had seen no papers, but those of the ship and the Manifest, but the latter was enough, and ...
— Piracy off the Florida Coast and Elsewhere • Samuel A. Green
... discoveries led me to consider their bearing on Imperial and Australian interests. There lay the vast island of New Guinea, dominating the shores of Northern Australia, separated at one point by only twenty miles of coral reef from British possessions, commanding the Torres Straits route, commanding the increasing pearl- shell fisheries, and also the beche-de-mer fishery. It was also improved by the richness and beauty, and the number of their fine vegetable products—fine timber, the cocoanut, the sago ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to scrape over them at ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... good ship Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian Sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... hesitation he brought the sloop about and headed her for the light-ship on Brenton's reef, and they sailed in silence. Awhile she watched the sapphire waters break to dazzling whiteness under the westerning sun. Then, in an ecstasy she did not seek to question, she closed her eyes to feel more keenly the swift motion of their flight. Why not? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... be seen only under the higher powers of the microscope. It multiplies by means of buds like those of a tree, the individuals all combining to form a composite stony mass, which is called a polypidom. A number of such polypidoms growing close together form a coral reef. See woodcuts. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... however, shows that it was the Antilles and neighbouring islands. He named this island Hispaniola. Having decided to land, Columbus put in towards shore, when the largest of his ships struck a concealed rock and was wrecked. Fortunately the reef stood high in the water, which saved the crew from drowning; the other two boats quickly approached, and all the sailors ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... into orange. Here waves of fire beat over golden shores and red clouds extended as an army in regular column upon column. At the zenith, billows of scarlet leaped in feathery foam against a purple continent and the flaming tide extended from reef to reef among a thousand aerial bays and estuaries of alternating gloom and glow until shrouded and dimmed in an orange tawny haze of infinite distance. In the immediate foreground of this majestic display, like a handful of rose-leaves fallen out of heaven, small clouds floated directly downward, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... connect the idea of selfishness with this view of the aspirations of humanity. Proctor and Airy absolutely know that they will be forgotten so far out in on-coming time, but still they drudge away, in the belief that man can only acquire knowledge of God's works as the coral reef attains continental proportions—that is, by the infinitesimal contributions of countless unselfish individualities. They are desirous that man should some day know the truth. Is there any ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... keep to leeward of her; the land of Bovenbergen on her lee bow about three points, the Holmes right a head of her. The wind had at four P.M. shifted to the N.N.W.; the land on her lee beam, nine leagues, was that part of Jutland a few miles to the southward of Bovenbergen. At eight o'clock the Horn Reef, bearing S.S.W. distance forty miles; at this time a tremendous heavy sea was setting on the shore in the direction of E.S.E. At six lost sight of the Bellete; the last sight we had of the Defence she was standing with her head in shore, E.N.E. under storm mizen-stay-sail and try-sail. ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... commander of a cruiser. I make bold to say that the man who can carry these objects out with success has deserved better of the country than the officer of a battleship, tacking from Ushant to the Black Rocks and back again until she builds up a reef with her beef-bones." ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fairest maiden that eyes ever beheld. Unlike was she to maidens dwelling in those islands, for her hair was black as the waters of the long winter night, and her eyes were as the twin midnight rocks that look up from the white waves of the moonlit sea in yonder reef; withal was she most beautiful to look upon, and her voice was as music that stealeth ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Sir!" hollered our capting. "Reef your arft hoss, splice your main jib-boom, and hail your chamber-maid! What's up in ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Oliver Reade Jeremiah Reardon Lewis Recour John Red James Redfield Edward Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil Michael Renow Jean ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... White-fronted Heron, Blue Crane of the colonists. Herodias Jugularis, Blue Reef Heron, Blue Crane, colonists of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... plain sight of it it requires the greatest familiarity with the principal points to be able to steer by them. During the night of Friday, August 2, we, by some mysterious operation, got in between Nottingham and Salisbury Islands, when we thought we were beyond the Digges. We found a bad reef, just on a level with the water's edge, about eight miles north-west of the north-west point of Nottingham Island, which is not down upon the charts, and is situated just where a vessel running along at night, ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... thy predecessors and mine have given, shall remain firm; and whosoever breaketh it, then give I him God's curse, and that of all saints, and of all hooded heads, and mine, unless he come to repentance. And I give expressly to St. Peter my mass-hackle, and my stole, and my reef, to serve Christ." "I Oswald, Archbishop of York, confirm all these words through the holy rood on which Christ was crucified." () "I Bishop Athelwold bless all that maintain this, and I excommunicate all that break it, unless they come to repentance."—Here was Bishop Ellstan, Bishop ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... spoke the cog rasped along the edge of the reef, and a long white curling sheet of wood was planed off from her side from waist to poop by a jutting horn of the rock. At the same instant she lay suddenly over, the sail drew full, and she plunged seawards amid the shoutings of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... extends to a length of about fourteen hundred feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four hundred and twenty-seven. At a little more than half-flood in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs it is buried sixteen feet. As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they apply to all sorts of obstacles consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef areas," or regions in which coral reefs are found. There is a very notable ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley
... left behind to help us to make sail. But the weather looking somewhat wild in the west with the red light of the sun among the clouds there, and the dark heave of the swell running into a sickly crimson under the sun and then glowing out dusky again, I got them to treble-reef the mainsail and hoist it, and then thanking them, advised them to be off. Then, putting Cromwell to the tiller, I went forward with the others and set the topsail and forestaysail (the spritsail lying furled), which would be show enough of canvas till I saw what the weather was to be like. ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... fleet coming down the lake would have to beat up against the wind to reach him; so close to land that any fleet trying to flank him would come within range of the forts; and left only one apparent gap that a foe might try to use, a gap in front of which was a dangerous sunken reef. This was indeed a baited trap. Finally he put out cables, kedges, anchors, and springs, so that with the capstan he could turn his vessels and bring either side to ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... crimson maple-boughs, I know by heart each burning leaf, Yet would that like a barren reef Stripped to the breeze ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... in the Gold Reef City There are mothers and children too! And they cry 'Hurry up for pity!' So what can a brave ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... south of Vera Cruz and were passing Anton Lizardo, the place to which we were bound. But a reef was between us and the anchorage where the fleet was quietly lying. The Captain of the schooner said he could cross the reef. Taking his place in the rigging from where he could better observe the breakers and the currents, the schooner tacked here and there, rapidly and repeatedly, under ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith
... to the turn of the land the reefs began to be sown here and there on our very path; and Mr. Riach sometimes cried down to us to change the course. Sometimes, indeed, none too soon; for one reef was so close on the brig's weather board that when a sea burst upon it the lighter sprays fell upon her deck and wetted ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a fishing canoe, paddled some distance from shore, and dropped the native anchor, a stone secured to a rope. They were awakened in the morning by the motion of their boat. Zeke was wading in the shallow water, and towing them from a reef towards which they had drifted. "The water-sprites had rolled our stone out of its noose, and we had floated away." This was a narrow escape, but nevertheless they stuck to their floating bedstead as the only possible sleeping place. A day's successful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... own, crinkles and cracks; the skirting, having absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... I believe that not a stone or a handful of mud gravitates into its place without the will of God; that it was ordained, ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold should be washed down from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man might find it at a certain moment and crisis of his life—if I be superstitious enough (as thank God I am) to hold that Creed, shall I not believe that though this great war had no general upon earth, it may ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... coming inboard regularly, and Bess knew she should be carrying less sail; but it would mean a lot of time to reef the mainsail, and if she was to get on there was small time for reefing, 'specially as the wind was hauling to the east. A beat home now, as Captain Leary warned her, 'twould be. Surely she would never be home by daylight ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... is Dutch for ridge or reef. Toward the middle of the eighties the first mine was discovered on what is the present site of Johannesburg. The original excavation was on the historic place known as Witwatersrand, which means White Water Reef. Kimberley history repeated ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the icebergs of frozen Labrador, Floating spectral in the moonshine along the low, black shore. Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below; And the white squall smites in summer, and the autumn ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... gait of the fellows only spurred Judd to shake forth another reef, so that without knowing it he ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... his men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... the good ship Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which has often ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... own mast to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sat for a while smoking in silence. Now and then in the lagoon was the splash of some big fish, and a little way out towards the opening in the reef was the light of ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... wind was driving the black smoke of the steamers, far out at sea, in long funereal wreaths, athwart the foaming wake, and the silver-sailed schooners began to reef, in anticipation of the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... energies could preserve the vessel from being dashed back upon the coast we had just left, he gave us neither help nor heed, till in the final moment when we had given up all for lost, he seized the helm and shot us into shelter and safety behind the reef whereon we expected to go to pieces, through a channel which, in the calm that followed the storm, we found it difficult to retrace to the deep water, towing ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... the ice-reef, and went spinning along so briskly over the low hummocks that the driver had to run to keep ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... "Arctic" and "Pacific," they could not defy the powers of pure accident. In the same gale the "Empire City" was dismantled, having all of her upper works swept off, while the "Illinois" was injured by being on the Colorado Reef. They have both been undergoing most costly repairs for several weeks. While writing this, the "Philadelphia" is also in the shop. She recently broke her shaft and her cross-tail, and had to put into Charleston. All of these repairs cost an ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... want to run on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes down here, and volcano ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... Washed up the sky from Night's profoundest cell; One after one the stars begin to shine In drifted beds, like pearls through shallow brine; And lo! through clouds that part before the chase Of silent winds—a belt of milky white, The Galaxy, a crested surge of light, A reef of worlds along the sea of Space: I hear my sweet musicians far withdrawn, Below my wreathed lattice, on the lawn, With harp, and lute, and lyre, And passionate voices full of tears and fire; And envious nightingales with rich disdain Filling the pauses of the languid strain; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... left their stranded boat; Main Beach Cove, a little to the north-east; and Deadman's Cove, farther away. Of these, only Main Beach was available between one hour on either side of low water. The fact that the boat was making for it, and had already successfully skirted the submerged reef lying off it, proved that its occupant ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... to Razee Reef," he told her, eager to make her a partner in all his little concerns. "The Bee boats fetch the whistler there so as to lay off their next leg. I didn't know that Mr. Marston was interested in the ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Fort, all at the same time. Don't be mad, Jim dear, and do not be frighted fer me. I'm going over thar to make it all right—to free HIM of stealing—to have YOU left out of it all—and take it all on myself. Don't you be a bit feared for me. I ain't skeert of the wind or of going. I'll close reef everything, clear the creek, stretch across to Injen Island, hugg the Point, and bear up fer Logport. Dear Jim—don't get mad—but I couldn't bear this fooling of you nor HIM—and that man being took for stealing ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of Java. Spite of all his care, he was once on the edge of destruction. One evening as night was closing in a grating sound was heard under the Pelican's keel. In another moment she was hard and fast on a reef. The breeze was light and the water smooth, or the world would have heard no more of Francis Drake. She lay immovable till daybreak. At dawn the position was seen not to be entirely desperate. Drake himself showed all the qualities of ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... was wrecked not a cable's length from the shore, firmly fixed upon a reef of rocks upon which she had been thrown; the water was smooth, and there was no difficulty in their communication. The savages, content with plundering whatever was washed on shore, had to the time of their quitting the rocks left them uninjured. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... as far as Loch Ryan, when it slowly died away and became flat calm. One of my friends and myself were walking the deck together, when he excitedly observed, "What is that on our starboard beam; is it a reef?" I assured him there were no shoals in the vicinity of the yacht; and I took up the field-glasses, and saw quite plainly that it was a bottle-nosed whale. It soon began to move and send masses of water into the air. The calm continued, and some anxiety was felt lest the leviathan should playfully ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... exactly 36 days. Had Columbus held a direct course west from Gomera, in latitude 27 deg. 47' N. he would have fallen in with one of the desert sandy islands on the coast of Florida, near a place now called Hummock, or might have been wrecked on the Montanilla reef, at the north end of the Bahama banks: his deflection therefore, to the S.W. on the 7th October, was fortunate for the success ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... sailors call it the fata morgana. When you're on the desert, it generally takes the form of a lovely running stream of water, which you're crazy to reach and suck up. But the shipwrecked tar always sees a vessel coming to his relief, which keeps on rushing through the water, right up over reef and everything and disappears over the island leaving him broken-hearted at the deception caused ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... rock, about a mile to the left of the town of D——, which was surrounded by numerous small ones. This place was called the wrecker's reef, and was covered at high water, but when the tide was low, Isabel and the others often went there to get shells. They had to be careful to watch the rise of the tide, as, long before the rock was covered the retreat was cut off by the water surrounding ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... had fed his hopes to defeat. And yet, while Mr. Croker may not be charged as the reason of his own removal, some consideration of causes that incited it should have a merit and an interest. It is one vessel crashing on a reef that points a danger, and makes for the safety of every ship that follows, and the story of a wrecked and drowned dictatorship cannot fail to instruct ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... to my stormy shriek! Toilers upon the sea, the Whistling-buoy would speak! List to my sobbing shout! list, for my word is brief: Death is beneath me here! death on the sunken reef Where the jagged ledge is hid and the slimy seaweeds grow, And the long kelp streamers wave in the dark green depths below, Where, under the shell-clad hulk, the gaunt shark makes his lair,— Toilers upon the sea, ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and municipal town of Wellington county, Western Australia, 112 m. by rail S. by W. of Perth. Pop. (1901) 2455. The harbour, known as Koombanah Bay, is protected by a breakwater built on a coral reef. Coal is worked on the Collie river, 30 m. distant, and is shipped from this port, together with tin, timber, sandal-wood and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... last resort, to save Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, his father might even submit to Bonbright's wife; his mother did not bow so low before that god; her particular deity was a social deity. If Bonbright's argosy did not wreck against the reef of his father, it never could weather the hidden rock ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... the land, while the shoals, where the natives declare there are "more fish than water," teem with every sort of man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from each interstice of the coral-reef. The latter, often of immense size, are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting nothing else: they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and thread it on a string slung round the neck. The horror of the lobster for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... encouragement and sympathy therefrom. One morning sometime between the fifteenth and twentieth day, I was scanning the horizon with my customary eagerness, when suddenly, on looking ahead, I found the sea white with the foam of crashing breakers; I knew I must be in the vicinity of a sunken reef. I tried to get the ship round, but it was too late. I couldn't make the slightest impression upon her, and she forged stolidly forward to ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... to but he—"I alone am alone! The whole world is in love with me, and I'm utterly alone." Alone as a wreck upon a desert ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some ship-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock? must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness he had ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs to look up the precious souls among ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Monday morning we beheld with consternation that the tide did not reach our boat, and by dint of hard labor we constructed a railroad from a neighboring fence, and moved the Mayeta on rollers upon it over the mud and the projecting reef of rocks some five hundred feet to the water, then embarking, rowed close along the shore to avoid the current. A deep fog settled down upon us, and we were driven to camp again on the left bank, where a cataract tumbled over the rocks fifty or more feet. Tuesday was ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... man; and just then the bow of the boat swung around, was forced heavily down stream by the current, and slam it went against a reef! ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... regions and events that compose its subject. The answer is obvious enough, and ought to satisfy every mind, however "inquiring." The fact is, that the authors of the different works to which there is any allusion, most probably never heard there were any such places as the Reef, Rancocus Island, Vulcan's Peak, the Crater, and the other islands of which so much is said in our pages. In other words, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... intended planting on and about the children's graves—and two young women. We started early in the morning, for I intended staying at the north end till late in the afternoon, whilst the two girls went crayfishing on the reef. ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... and where the trail crossed there was a mighty sycamore that almost dammed its course. With its gnarled and swollen roots half dug from their crevices by the tumultuous violence of cloudbursts, it clung like an octopus to a shattered reef of rocks and sucked up its nourishment from the water. In the pool formed by its roots the minnows leapt and darted, solemn bull-frogs stared forth from dark holes, and in a natural seat against the huge tree trunk Big Boy sat cooling his feet. He looked younger now, with the blood ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... inshes of mbroidery. The stock-ins was a littel too big, so I had to fill em up with hankercheefs. The waste jest but-tened up on me, at the waste line, but it tuk half a dozen piller cases, and a cuppel of sheets, to stuff the upper part of the front. I had to put a reef in crinny line, cos it showd, and it tuk ma's pach-wurk quilt to mak my bussel big ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... has been mastered. My husband's directions for the arrangement of a hunting-tie are as follows:—"The centre of the stock is placed on the front of the neck, the ends are passed in opposite directions round the back of the neck, brought in front, tied in a reef knot, crossed in front of this knot, and finally secured, as a rule, by means of a pin or brooch of the safety or horse-shoe or fox pattern. A gold safety pin is often used. A brooch pin is naturally safer than an ordinary pin. Nowadays, hunting ties ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... the Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... had been on board the Thetis a few hours, and were in the act of eating a lobster for the first time in our lives, when the captain and the sailors began to swear violently at the pilot, whom I could see at the helm, rigid with fear, striving to avoid a reef—barely visible above the water—towards which our ship was being driven. Great was our terror at this violent tumult, for we naturally thought ourselves in the most extreme danger. The vessel did actually receive a severe shock, which, to my vivid imagination, seemed like the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Jack Benson felt his heart leap into his mouth. It was as though the "Hastings" had struck, lightly, on a reef. Almost by instinct Jack threw the wheel over to port. Something was rasping, forcefully, under the hull of the submarine. As the helm went to port that something underneath, whatever it ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips proceeded thither and ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days,— Take thou ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... well as the clinging lad, went sweeping over the side of the vessel, and carried safely above the reef, started in toward the beach on a ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... golden age, the twilight of the Gods of old morality—evil is got rid of.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} For a long while Wagner's ship sailed happily along this course. There can be no doubt that along it Wagner sought his highest goal.—What happened? A misfortune. The ship dashed on to a reef; Wagner had run aground. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner had stuck fast on a contrary view of the world. What had he set to music? Optimism? Wagner was ashamed. It was moreover an optimism for which Schopenhauer ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... consists of large blocks of a volcanic conglomerate, some of which measure nineteen feet by six or eight, and ten feet in thickness; whilst a little farther north another wall extends E.N.E. to a natural reef of rocks." (Hamilton, Researches in Asia ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... we received a signal for divisions of battle fleets to steer independently for the Horn Reef swept channel. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... smoothly; everything connected with water must be like itself, forcible, but clear. That is why sea-slang is so poetical; there is a word for everything and every act, and a thing and an act for every word. Seamen must speak quick and bold, but also with utmost precision. They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect,— therefore—(Steamboat bell rings.) But I must ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... things," brought us steaming glasses of toddy, so strong that I think she had watered the whisky with more whisky, for the tears started to my eyes as I drank my first drink. But I felt fine and warm inside for all that. Captain McGilp, as tough a looking seaman as ever shook out a reef, hoisted himself beside Dan. He had not mind ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... log of a cutter which sailed from the Clyde to the Amazon in search of a gold reef. It relates how they discovered the buccaneer's treasure in the Spanish Main, fought the Indians, turned aside the river Jamary by blasting, and so laid bare ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... these bold frontiersmen aroused Brock's admiration. His own example had again acted as an inspiration. Shortly after leaving Port Talbot, his batteau, pounding in the sea, ran upon a reef that extended far from shore, and despite oars and pike-poles, remained fast. In the height of the confusion "Master Isaac" sprang overboard, and a moment later voyageur and raw recruit, waist deep in water, following the example of the hero of Castle ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... the jib or reef the upper hatchways?" Ingram called out to Sheila when they had fairly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... met their gaze brought consternation to every heart. The schooner lay head to the wind. The mainsail had been set with a double reef, to help keep the vessel in that position. The seas seemed alarmingly higher than when they ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... each projecting cape, And perilous reef, along the ocean's verge, Starts into life a dim gigantic shape, Holding its lantern o'er ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... our way appears a long band of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color from the extended spur of verdure in which the western end of the island terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on her beam-ends,—the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; all ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... vessels had been twisted off by the whirling eddies, and were now rapidly scattering, each striving to clear the reef. Only the four vessels bound together—Estein's, Thorkel's, Liot's, Osmund's—swept in an unresisting cluster ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... Ne'er to abuse his power and place? No magic of her voice or smile Suddenly raised a fairy isle, But fondness for her underwent An unregarded increment, Like that which lifts, through centuries, The coral-reef within the seas, Till, lo! the land where was the wave. Alas! 'tis ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... Reef," he told her, eager to make her a partner in all his little concerns. "The Bee boats fetch the whistler there so as to lay off their next leg. I didn't know that Mr. Marston was interested ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... he could see nothing but ledge and jutting block, whitened by the sea-birds which here brought up their young in peace, for even the reckless boys had looked upon it as too hazardous to descend. The sea far below was just creaming among the rocks which peered above the water, and ran out in a reef causing a dangerous race; but though Joe searched the whole cliff face below him for nearly a minute he could see nothing, and at last he shouted with all his might and had a lesson in the feebleness of the human voice in ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... having absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last of much more revolutionary affairs, of a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... frigate, after a tempestuous cruise, came to anchor at Marseilles. An equinoctial gale came on, and after two days of desperate exertion, and throwing many of the guns overboard, the frigate was driven from her anchors, stranded on a reef of rocks, and the crew in such peril that they were saved only by the most extraordinary exertions, and the assistance of the people on shore. The port officer, M. de Peltier, exhibited great kindness and activity, and the ship was rapidly repaired, but with such an exact ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... third day I received orders to draw nearer and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the uptilted edge of the boat. The little island ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... symptoms of its being inhabited—that there was no anchorage that he could discover, as the shore rose perpendicularly, like a wall, from the ocean. We therefore ran to leeward, and discovered that a reef of coral rocks extended nearly two miles from that side of the island. The boats were again lowered, and after surveying, the mate reported that there was a passage, with plenty of water, for the ship, through the very centre of the reef, which would bring her into a small bay, where she might ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... classes, that the bell-buoy, fixed to one of the outer Manacles, is utterly inadequate to warn vessels of their nearness to danger. And when the sounds of that bell came in the landward breeze to where I stood looking across the reef, they seemed, not a message of warning to those who cross the deep, but as the death-knell of the hundreds of men, women, and children who have breathed their last in the ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... swamp through which the Sabine finds an outlet to the Gulf, the shore lies low and barren. The fort or sand battery was placed at the turn about one half mile below the hamlet called Sabine City, opposite the upper end of the oyster reef that for nearly a mile divides the channel into two parts, each narrow and neither straight. The Sachem, followed by the Arizona, took the eastern or Louisiana channel, and was hardly under fire before a shot struck her steampipe and completely disabled her. The Clifton moved ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... You have to reef your sails considerable when you are a-sailin' round in a small bedroom between two beds of sickness (asthma and inflammatory rheumatiz). You have to haul 'em in, and take down the flyin' pennen of Hope and Asperation, and mount up the lamp of Duty and Meekness for a figger-head, ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... things that thy predecessors and mine have given, shall remain firm; and whosoever breaketh it, then give I him God's curse, and that of all saints, and of all hooded heads, and mine, unless he come to repentance. And I give expressly to St. Peter my mass-hackle, and my stole, and my reef, to serve Christ." "I Oswald, Archbishop of York, confirm all these words through the holy rood on which Christ was crucified." () "I Bishop Athelwold bless all that maintain this, and I excommunicate all that break it, unless ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... duties of the commander of a cruiser. I make bold to say that the man who can carry these objects out with success has deserved better of the country than the officer of a battleship, tacking from Ushant to the Black Rocks and back again until she builds up a reef with her beef-bones." ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw what sort of a boat he had; she cleared the waves like a sea-bird, without so much as a drop coming in, and he therefore judged that he did not need to take in a reef, which in an ordinary ten-oared boat he would be obliged to ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... hour the Speedy was again off, running out of the south channel, past the grim walls of old Fort Taylor, and a few miles farther on passing Sand Key light, which rises from a bit of coral reef barely lifted above the wash of a tranquil sea. At that time this was the most southerly point of United States territory. In the deep water just beyond Sand Key lay a great battle-ship, tugging sullenly at her pondrous anchors, ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... From far afield came the unceasing murmur of the market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily, and called to one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow length came lines of patient little donkeys with jangling ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... colonizing expedition of eleven vessels left Holland for the Dutch East Indies. Among these ships was the Batavia, commanded by Francis Pelsart. A terrible storm destroyed ten of the fleet, and on June 4, 1629, the Batavia was driven ashore on the reef still known as Houtman's Abrolhos, which had been discovered and named by a Dutch East Indiaman some years earlier—probably by the commander of the Leeuwin, who discovered and named after his ship the cape at the southwest point of the continent. The Batavia, which carried a number of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... have cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such things, and have few substitutes for them, are not far ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... and Elmtree beacons in range, giving Dry Romer a wide berth to starboard, until Chapel Hill and Conover beacons come into range on his port side. The vessel is then held on a course between Coney Island and Fort Tompkins lights until Robbins Reef light shows ahead. ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the bight's mouth, they found, as they had expected, coral rocks, and too many of them; so that they had to run along the edge of the reef a long way before they could find a passage for the boats. While they were so doing, and those of them who were new to the Indies were admiring through the clear element those living flower-beds, and subaqueous gardens of Nereus and Amphitrite, there ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the river. They waved their handkerchiefs to Wort, who waved his in return. Then they stood and followed with their eyes the vessel in its flight. She passed Forbes' Island, passed the light-house, passed Rocky Reef, passed—out ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... out of Sydney, on Christmas Eve, they fetched up to the entrance of the lagoon, and plied all that night outside, keeping their position by the lights of fishers on the reef, and the outlines of the palms against the cloudy sky. With the break of day the schooner was hove-to, and the signal for a pilot shown. But it was plain her lights must have been observed in the darkness by the native fishermen, and word carried to the settlement, for a boat was already under ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... making an accurate map of the whole Bahama group, and the name San Salvador somehow became shifted in time to another island. Thus was the original landfall long lost sight of, and no two writers could agree on the subject. Recently, however, the most careful students have decided upon the reef now called Watling's Island, to-day an English ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... and shaped my course for the old rock. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; we ran slap before it, but soon found it necessary to take in the top-gallant sails. This we at last accomplished, one at a time. We then thought a reef or two in the topsails would be acceptable; but that was impossible. We tried a Spanish reef, that is, let the yards come down on the cap: and she flew before the gale, which had now increased to a very serious degree. Our cargo of wine and tobacco ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... km land area: 5 sq km comparative area: about eight times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) and ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... we are; The real, the never-setting Star; And the Flower, of which we love Faint and fading shadows here; Never a tear, but only Grief; Dance, but not the limbs that move; Songs in Song shall disappear; Instead of lovers, Love shall be; For hearts, Immutability; And there, on the Ideal Reef, Thunders the ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... of Palma; where a court-martial was held on the officers and crew of the late Raven brig, which passed a slight censure on the captain for not having approached the shore with greater caution. In the evening, the fleet beat out of Palma, and steered between Vache and the reef off Antioch. On the 12th, in the Gulph of Lyons, they were joined by the Active, Seahorse, and Juno; who had, the day before, seen the French fleet perfectly ready for sea. The Renown also joined that evening; on board of which, invalids, &c. were next day sent. It was a calm, all day; ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... of a life at sea are not as great as fiction writers sometimes indicate, according to this old sea dog. He says that in all his voyages, he has been in only one serious wreck. That was on a reef of coral keys off ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... as we were cruising about for two days in sight of it. Its height, and the boldness and strength with which it is built, are truly wonderful; but still more wonderful is its position upon a dangerous reef, situated ten miles from the coast; at a distance, it seems to be founded in the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Sir Archibald, "that Mrs. William had rather have you come safe than unexpected. Be modest, Skipper Bill, and reef the Venture when ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... the eight rocks, near the surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at the mouth of the Tagus. It is known by its brownish-yellow colour, and by its tentacula, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... the wharf and beckoned so frantically that the big man swarmed up the rigging to the dock as though he were going aloft to reef a topsail in a ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... knowing that a reef of uncharted genitives stretched ahead of him, on which in spite of M'Turk's sailing-directions he ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... north; the axis lying north by east to south by west. At either end are the island-groups already referred to, and their connexion with the mainland may be traced by the sunken rocks indicated by the breaking seas on the line of reef. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... take in a reef or two, then, that's all," said Herrick. "Bear a hand, my boy, and we'll ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... morning we had above a hundred fathoms; we then stood-to the S.S.E.; this course made almost a right angle with that which we had followed in the night: it bore directly in-shore, the approach to which, in this place, is rendered terrible by a very long reef, called Arguin, which according to instructions we had on board extends above thirty leagues in breadth.[12] According to the instructions given by the Minister of the Marine, this danger is avoided by running only twenty-two leagues in the open sea; it is true they recommend not to approach ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against the ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... more attempted to cross the reef by the narrow channel, and happily succeeding, found myself in the open sea, and speeding homeward, joyfully saw our flag flying, and heard the welcome salute ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... clear of the harbour; but we found that there was a devil of a sea running, and more wind than we bargained for; the brig came out of the harbour with a flowing sheet, and we lowered down the foresail to reef it—father and brother busy about that, while I stood at the helm, when the agent said to me, 'When do you mean to make a voyage?' 'Sooner than father thinks for,' said I, 'for I want to see the world.' It was sooner than I thought for ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... it,—Smutty Nose, Star Island, and White Island,—on which is the lighthouse,—much of Laighton's island (the proper name of which is Hog, though latterly called Appledore), and Duck Island, which looks like a mere reef of rocks, and about a mile farther into the ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could stand one by another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The biggest I ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... made an imperative sign to hush the child's merry tongue; and peering forth in intense anxiety, the others perceived a lateen sail passing perilously near, but happily keeping aloof from the sharp reef of rocks around their shelter. Arthur had forgotten the child's prayers and his own, but Ulysse connected them with dressing, and the alarm of the passing ship had recalled them to the young man's mind, though he ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... victuals. On the same evening the fleet came to anchor off Melinda, which is eighteen leagues from Mombaza, and is in lat. 3 deg. S. This place has no good harbour, being only an almost open roadstead, having a kind of natural pier or reef of rocks on which the sea beats with much violence, owing to which the ships have to ride at a considerable distance from the shore. The city stands in a broad open plain, along the shore, surrounded with many palms, and other sorts of trees, which are green the whole year. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... ensued we occasionally caught the alternate murmur of the skipper's and Bainbridge's voices: but they were speaking in ordinary conversational tones, and the multitudinous sounds of the ship—the faint rustle of canvas aloft, the patter of reef-points, the creaking of the yards and timbers, the wash of water alongside, and the subdued hum of many voices on deck—prevented us from catching a word of what was being said. However, we gathered that Captain Roberts had been protesting against turning ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... We ran to the falls. La Motte and I, with some others, leaped into the whale-boat just as the ship sank beneath our feet. We shouted out to the rest of our shipmates that we would try to pick them up, but we could see no one. Though I said the sea was calmer than on the other side of the reef, still we had no little difficulty in keeping the boat from swamping. We could not tell either in which direction to pull. All we could do, therefore, was to keep the boat's head to the sea, and wait till ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... church-town—a single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church—stands high and a mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef, a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... was a good way off, being the point of the promontory that shut in the mouth of the river, a great crag, with a long reef of rocks running out into the sea, playfully called the Kitten's Tail, though the antiquarians always deposed that the head had nothing to do with cats or kits, but with the disposition to erect chapels to St. Christopher on the points of land where they might first greet the mariners' eyes. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yards wide and 200 yards long, the middle is deep, but the sides are coral reefs and shoal: the deep part seems about 100 yards wide. Outside in the Bay of Mikindany there is no anchorage except on the edge of the reef where the Penguin got seven fathoms, but further in it was only two fathoms. The inner bay is called Pemba, not Pimlea, as erroneously printed in the charts of Owen. It is deep and quite sheltered; another ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen by the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... work you deem sublime Is like the grain of pink-hued lime Which once was a coral insect's shell, But now is a microscopic cell, Entombed with countless billions more In a lonely reef on ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride through deserted country—suppose ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... resigned and Christian; expressing full purpose to work with God in whatever calling he should labor, and cheerful hopes of the future. Then came a long, long silence, and then tidings that the Eastern Star had been wrecked on a reef in the Indian ocean! The mother had given back her treasure into the same beloved hands whence she first received him. "I gave him to God, and God took him," she said. "I shall have him again in God's time." This was how she settled the whole matter ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... two human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... to make out the coast of France, not very far away from them. By the side of the reef lay their little vessel, half in, half out of the water, with a large hole in her side. There was nothing that they could do but wait until some one should see them from the shore, and come off with a boat ...
— Stories from English History • Hilda T. Skae
... it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine—I think at times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... terrace below, increasing in force as the pyramid enlarges downward. It is the pyramidal bulk of human nature with its finest brain, true to anatomic principles, at the top. That radiance at the summit is the delight and the aspiration of all below. As it rises as slowly as growth of a coral reef it increases the courage of those below in proportion as they ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... Rock. It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four hundred and twenty-seven. At a little more than half-flood in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs it is buried sixteen feet. As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and black, And the frail few years I may yet expect Hoary and hopeless, but less hard to bear, For I have been too long and deeply wrecked On the lone rock of desolate Despair, To lift my eyes more to the passing sail 140 Which shuns that reef so horrible and bare; Nor raise my voice—for who would heed my wail? I am not of this people, nor this age, And yet my harpings will unfold a tale Which shall preserve these times when not a page Of their perturbed ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... up right! and in a day or two we'll have all aboard, and 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 ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... fleet then formed in the following order:—Goliath, Zealous, Vanguard, Minotaur, Theseus, Bellerophon, Defence, Orion, Audacious, Majestic, and Leander. The Culloden was then astern the Swiftsure, and the Alexander to leeward, tacking to clear the reef. The Admiral hove to, to pick up a boat, and also the four next ships astern of the Vanguard, which gave the Orion an opportunity, by standing on and passing them, to get up with the Zealous ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... have been so dreary to her but for her appreciation of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and her admiration of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he had less the look of a ship driving on to reef—some of his images of the country. He called for claret and water, sighing as he munched bread in vast portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered bread was to abstain from luxury. He praised passingly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fact, the Chub was made into a cullender, and completely disabled, before he struck her colours. The same fate attended the Confiance, the Linnet, and the Finch, the latter of which grounded on a reef of rocks about the middle of the engagement. The gun-boats appear absolutely to have run away. Thus was the British fleet captured by an inferior fleet of the Americans. Commodore Downie was killed by a ball from the American gun-boats ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... be made in various places upon one or more of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same in that which accompanies the narrative; ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... note who never could play the ace of Quebec. The Laurier Cabinet knew how to play politics by imagination. Borden had nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the Liberals pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves to a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took a reef out of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing the British Preference and sent a contingent to the South African War in the name of Empire. Laurier was master in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces he created, in immigration, in great railways, in a deeper St. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... be observed that in payable saddle formations a slide intersects the reef above the saddle coming from the west, and turning east with a wall of the east leg, where the leg of reef is observed to go down deeper, and to carry a greater amount of gold than in ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... on a dangerous reef which is never above water, though some small round black rocks are seen at low tide awash. They look like the kettles in which cooks get up a boiled dinner; and for this reason the Arabs call the reef Abu Kizan, which means the ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... a portion of the crew of a whaler, which had struck on a reef of rocks about seventy miles off, and that they had been obliged to leave her immediately, as she fell on her broadside a few minutes afterwards; that they had left in two boats, but did not know what ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... once a swift bullet was sent shrilling over our heads at some great fin rising out of the sea beyond. On our trip to and from Bongao, one of the Tawi Tawi Islands, on a wrecking expedition to save the launch Maud, stranded there on a coral reef, all the Signal Corps officers were at liberty, too, which made life on the ship even more agreeable, the delightful experience being again repeated on our return trip to Manila from ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... for the same spot. From New York to Panama, from Panama to Lima, were our first steps. Here we joined the United States steamship Hartford, Admiral Farragut's flagship, and the next day set sail for our destined port,—if a coral reef surrounded by a raging surf can be called a port. About the same time a party of French observers under Monsieur Janssen, of the Paris Academy of Sciences, left Panama in ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... of the piles were removed by the Athenians. But the most awkward part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, as might be expected between two hostile armies confronting each ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... crossed the platform to consult the map with its ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little beyond the large plume. It was as though the tide had struck a reef out yonder. ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... answering none. What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fish has made its appearance on the reef, a number of superstitious ceremonies have to be performed before the people may go and spear them in the water. On the eve of the fishing-day the medicine-man of the tribe causes a quantity of leaves ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... icebergs of frozen Labrador, Floating spectral in the moonshine along the low, black shore. Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below; And the white squall smites in summer, and the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... in all were wrecked at this spot. One split on the reef. Another was caught in the backwater. Others sank in the whirlpool below the rapids. Others went under at the first leap into the cataract. Two of the canoes had foolishly been lashed abreast. They sidled, shipped a billow, and sank. All the ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... several plates had each three towns which would fit the case before me, one as well as the other. Fortunately we chose the middle one of the three, because it had a little lighthouse. That on the left we found afterwards was Bognor, which has a reef of dangerous rocks ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... the last time, but all getting a grip on it somehow, and staying there in company with other people's babies whom they didn't know, and celebrities whom they knew to death, until, one by one, they either stranded upon a motherly dowager by the Fireplace Shoals, or were rescued from the Soda Reef by some gallant wrecker of a strong-minded young lady, with a view to taking salvage out of them in ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... day, and the rising wind sang in the rigging of the ships. The weather horizon, dark and brilliant, in ominous alternations showed a sky of piled-up cloud interspersed with inky patches where squalls were bursting. To leeward, the broad lagoon, stretching for a dozen miles to the tree-topped rim of reef, smoked with the haze of an impending gale. Ashore, the palms bent like grass in the succeeding gusts, and the ocean beaches reverberated with a furious surf. The great atoll of Makin, no higher than a man, no wider than a couple of furlongs, but in circumference a sinuous giant of ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... Ulietea, where, within the coral reef, the ship anchored in a good harbour. Two canoes at once came off, each bringing a woman and a pig—the one as a mark of confidence, the other as a present. The ladies each received a spike-nail and some beads, greatly to their delight. On ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... outside Deer Island, nothing lay between me and Nahant. The well-known beach and the sandy headland called "Grover" stood out at the edge of Lynn Bay, and the rise and fall of the white surf, too distant to be heard, marked the long reef stretching seaward. After dining, and allowing the boat to drift while rearranging my provisions, I took my place, and, getting the proper bearings astern, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... reefs that stud the ocean. Following the shoreline of Queensland, at a distance of from ten to one hundred and fifty miles, and stretching for twelve hundred and fifty miles, is the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one of the wonders of the world. The shelving floor of the ocean rises nearly to the surface along this line, and vast colonies of coral building creatures have formed their reefs up to the water's edge along the ridge. The turbulent ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... No land was in sight—only a few trawler sails and a squat, ugly tramp steamer flinging a pennant of black smoke to westwards. As the day wore on the wind rose steadily, and in the afternoon the watch turned out to reef sails. Matheson was an excellent sailor, and this tussle with the elements exhilarated him. Olive, too, was quite at home on board a yacht, and the two marched the decks together in keen enjoyment of the bite of the wind and the whip of the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Regiment by the 'Lady Prevost,' she cannot take the provisions." Trivial details these may seem; but in war, as in other matters, trivialities sometimes decide great issues, as the touching of a button may blow up a reef. The battle of Lake Erie, as before said, was precipitated ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... account of the matter, the land of Chilao appears to be the island of Ramiseram, between which and the island of Manaar extends a reef of rocks called Adams Bridge. The deep channel is between Ramiseram and the point of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Half-a-score of steamboatmen cursin' her like hell, Flounderin' in the flooded waist, scramblin' for a hold, Hangin' on by teeth and toes, dippin' when she rolled; Ginger Dan the donkeyman, Joe the 'doctor's' mate, Lumpers off the water-front, greasers from the Plate, That's the sort o' crowd we had to reef and steer and haul, Bringin' home the Rio Grande—ship and freight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop. Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacant ground a ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the bizarre, the slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in "Wardour-street ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... verandah of a missionary's dwelling, the dame, his wife, and a pretty, blonde young girl, with ringlets, were sitting there, enjoying the sea-breeze, then coming in, all cool and refreshing, from the spray of the reef. As I approached, the old lady peered hard at me; and her very cap seemed to convey a prim rebuke. The blue, English eyes, by her side, were also bent on me. But, oh Heavens! what a glance to receive from such ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... were changed, the Eclaire being rechristened the Sylph, the Actif becoming the Hawke. Lieutenant Farrance was promoted to the rank of captain, and given the command of the latter vessel, and some of the survivors of a ship that had a fortnight before been lost on a dangerous reef were told off to her. He was, according to rule, permitted to take a boat's crew and a midshipman with him from his old ship, and he selected Will Gilmore, and, among the men, Dimchurch and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... furled the jibs, then took a reef in the mainsail. Consulting the skies again, he decided to leave one of the jibs up, so set it once more and took another reef in the mainsail, ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... the garboard strakes, my lads, And reef the starboard screw— For it sticks like tar, that sandy bar, To the Nancy P. ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... need to seek the sea. For Fortune changeth as the moon To caravel and picaroon. Then Eastward Ho! or Westward Ho! Whichever wind may meetest blow. Our quarry sails on either sea, Fat prey for such bold lads as we. And every sun-dried buccaneer Must hand and reef and watch and steer. And bear great wrath of sea and sky Before the plate-ships wallow by. Now, as our tall bows take the foam, Let no man turn his heart to home, Save to desire treasure more, And larger ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... his house to the world, and lived in his home. But here he found another reef. The poor soldier had one of those eccentric souls which need perpetual motion. Diard was one of the men who are instinctively compelled to start again the moment they arrive, and whose vital object seems to be to come and go incessantly, like the wheels mentioned in Holy Writ. Perhaps he felt the ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... well-found ship. But naught save dire necessity would make a seaman try to beach his ship here at any time, least of all when half a gale was piling the seas one over the other across the shallows. Only, we could see that no jagged reef waited ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... of Able Seamen on the ship's books: these two letters are often used as an epithet for the person so rated. He must be equal to all the duties required of a seaman in a ship—not only as regards the saying to "hand, reef, and steer," but also to strop a block, splice, knot, turn in rigging, raise a mouse on the main-stay, and be an example to the ordinary ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... expect that future exploration will develop Midian as it has done India. The quartzose outcrop called the "Wynaad reef" (Madras Presidency) produced only a few poor penny-weights per ton, two and seven being the extremes, while much of it was practically unproductive. Presently, in February, 1878, the district was visited by Sir Andrew Clarke, of Australian experience, member ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... upon a reef, he would hardly have noticed such a minor shipwreck. Mrs. Forrester? why, then—When the doctor, after ponderous pleasantries, had waddled away aft, Rudolph turned upon her a ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... "Keep to the right; to the right—not too far out. She daren't come where we are, for she'd be ripped to pieces on the reef, and ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones—curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian Sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook 300 That, lingering along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus, while still upon his arm He lean'd; not rising, from supreme contempt. "Or shall we listen to the over-wise, Or to the over-foolish, Giant-Gods? 310 Not thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till all That rebel Jove's whole armoury were spent, Not world on world upon these ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... your sires made earth this new creation Where, from San Salvadore and Plymouth Reef To Westward Mission Trails, ascends belief In God and, therefore, in the Soul's Salvation Through Freedom, in white, spiral spray which grief Sees, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... tell ME about Henry," he protested. "I've known Henry twenty-five years. If Henry got his deserts," he exclaimed hotly, "he wouldn't be a consul on this coral reef; he'd be a minister in Europe. Look at me! We're the same age. We started together. When Lincoln sent him to Morocco as consul, he signed my commission as a midshipman. Now I'm an admiral. Henry has twice my brains and he's been a consul-general, ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... to the sea wall, and there looked out over a foaming waste of waters. In one place where a sunken reef of coral came close to the surface the waves beat and tore at it as though to wrench it up, and cast it ashore. There the sea boiled ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... left the entrance of the harbor and bore away for Kennebeck river. In the latter part of the night, there came on a thick fog and our fleet was separated. At break of day we found ourselves in a most dangerous situation, very near a reef of rocks. The rocks indeed appeared on all sides of us, so that we feared we should have been dashed to pieces on some of them. We were brought into this deplorable situation by means of liquor being dealt out too freely to ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... what had been, to some of us, a beautiful dream for years. And were we disappointed? Oh, no! No picture of our imagination had ever been so bright, so beautiful as that spread out before us, as our gallant ship sailed majestically through the coral reef into the beautiful harbor of Honolulu. It was like entering a new world; everything was bright with tropical splendor. The mountains, in whose hearts had slumbered volcanic fires, which, from time to time, ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... rage, turned them up into the black sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought—gigantic, breaking seas—went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), Palmyra Atoll, Puerto ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of rigging the gaff to the spar. Figure 7 shows the method of crotching the main boom and Fig. 8 a reef point knot, which may come in handy in ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the boat from driving on the dangerous reef, was just as much as the oarsmen could accomplish. Weakened as they were, by long suffering and starvation, they had a tough struggle to hold the pinnace as it were in statu quo—all the tougher from the disproportion between such a heavy craft and the light oar-stroke ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... his own mast to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... cat can sail into the very eye of the wind, while before the wind she is a flier, and yet she is not the best sail boat for a beginner. Let me tell you why: First, the sail is heavy and so it is hard to hoist and reef. Second, in going before the wind there is constant danger of jibing with serious results. Third, the catboat has a very bad habit of rolling when sailing before the wind, and each time the boat rolls from side to side she is liable to dip the end of her heavy boom in the water and "trip herself ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... along the reef! The angry tempests blow; The cloud-waves beat the cloudland cliff Like gusts of drifting snow. O ship of the moon, beware, beware, There's many a danger ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of Good Hope. After much intricate and dangerous navigation among the Spice Islands-in the course of which Drake made a treaty with the Sultan of Ternate, and the Pelican was all but lost on a reef-she rounded the Cape in January, sailing into Plymouth Sound on September 26th, 1580, a little less than three years from the day when she began her voyage. Drake was the first commander who conducted a circumnavigation from start to finish. His precursors had died on the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the Reef, Bowline, Clove-hitch and Sheep-shank knots according to instructions given in Handbook, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... foresheet, and were soon clear of the harbour; but we found that there was a devil of a sea running, and more wind than we bargained for; the brig came out of the harbour with a flowing sheet, and we lowered down the foresail to reef it—father and brother busy about that, while I stood at the helm, when the agent said to me, 'When do you mean to make a voyage?' 'Sooner than father thinks for,' said I, 'for I want to see the world.' It was sooner than I thought for ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... way about two hours after sunrise, with a strong breeze from the northward. About half an hour after quitting the land, passed a dangerous rapid, occasioned by a. reef of rocks reaching nearly across the river. In passing this rapid the wind slackened for half a minute, and the current carried the boat astern to within six or seven feet of the rocks; at this critical instant the wind happily freshened, and forced the boat ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall. When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... and afar lie lonely, But lonelier are these than the heart of grief, These loose-linked rivets of rock, whence only Strange life scarce gleams from the sheer main reef, With a blind wan face in the wild wan morning, With a live lit flame on its brows by night, That the lost may lose not its word's mute warning And the blind by its ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Worship's Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a fellow as ever went between stem and stern of a ship, and can hand, reef, steer, and clap two ends of a rope together, as well as e'er a He that ever crossed Salt-water; but I was taken by one George Bradley (the name of the Judge) a notorious Pirate, and a sad rogue as ever was hanged, and he forced me, an't ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... vigorous—have accomplished a veto. But projects in which Mrs. Rattleton was concerned never went slowly; and in the present case the necessity for getting back in time for the races really compelled haste. And so it came to pass that not until the Fleetwings was off the Brenton's Reef light-ship, with her nose pointed well up into the north-east, was there framed in Mr. Port's slow-moving mind a suitable line of argument upon which to base a peremptory refusal to go upon the expedition—and ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... presented a project (the first in order of date), which consisted in constructing upon the Eclat reef a semi-lunate dike, and a breakwater at Cape Heve. Moreover, upon the emergent parts of the Eclat reef and heights of the roadstead he proposed to erect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... and more thoroughly by reefing topsails when it has to be done, than by doing it at a routine hour, without the accompaniments of the wind, the wet, and the lurching, which give the operation a tone and a tonic—the real thing, in short. Doubtless we may wait too long, like Micawber, even for a reef-topsail gale to turn up, though the ocean can usually be trusted to be nasty often enough; but, on the other hand, one over sedulously bent on making opportunity is apt to be too preoccupied to ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... duobligi. Redoubt (fortification) reduto. Redoubtable timinda. Redress (amend) rebonigi, ripari. Reduce (to powder) pisti. Reduce (dissolve) solvi. Reduce malpliigi. Redundance suficxego. Redundant suficxega. Reed kano. Reef (rocks) rifo. Reel (stagger) sxanceligxi. Re-enter reeniri. Re-establish reigi. Refection mangxeto. Refectory mangxejo. Refer to turni sin. Referring to rilate al. Refine rafini. Refined (manners) bonmaniera, gxentila. Refiner rafinisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... many people today who expect to get things without workin' for them. But this troop is not run on sich lines. Some day ye'll come bang up aginst another troop, and how'll ye feel if ye git licked. Why, when I asked some of you boys to tie a clove-hitch ye handed me out a reef-knot, which is nothin' more than a 'granny' knot, which any one could tie. I want yez to do more than other people kin, or what's the use of havin' a troop? So git away home now, fer we'll have no more fun until yez git ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... this time was beating on me, and I was drenched to the skin. I must have slept for four hours or so, when I was awakened by a rough thump on the side from the stumbling foot of the captain of the top, the word having been passed to shake a reef out of the topsails, the wind having rather suddenly gone down. It was done; and now broad awake, I determined not to be caught napping again, so I descended, and swung myself in on deck out of the main rigging, just as Mr Treenail was mustering ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... channel such as it was, set directly for the obstruction, and it might be possible to drop down on it from above—if one provided some means for getting back again. Stonor marked the position of every rock, every reef above, and little by little made ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... four of the following knots: Reef, sheet-bend, clove-hitch, bow line, middleman's, fisherman's, sheepshank," ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... wrecks of successive floods lodging in the narrows; these were easily overcome: the course of the river to-day for nearly six miles was a fine and even stream, from forty to fifty yards wide, and from eight to sixteen feet deep, over a bottom of rock and sandy gravel; when a reef of rocks at once interrupted our progress in the laden boats, the water breaking with such violence over them, that I was afraid they would be greatly endangered even when light. The horses had stopped at a cataract about three quarters of a mile lower down, and it appeared that the rocky ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... extremity of the sea-beach at Penzance there is a reef of sunken rocks which shows its black crest above water at low tide. It was discovered that this reef contained tin, and the people of the town attacked it with hammers and chisels, when each receding tide left it exposed, as long as the seasons would permit, until the depth became unmanageable. ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of opposition to break the fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of national ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... some time before, she fired on the natives. The circumstances respecting this affair, as communicated to me, if correct, do not reflect much credit on the commander of the vessel. They are as follow: During a gale the Astrolabe drove on the reef, but was afterwards got off by the exertion of the natives; some of the men deserting from the ship, the chiefs were accused of enticing them away, and on the men not being given up the ship fired on the village; the natives barricaded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... those shortened sails, and that Union Jack, the terror of his tribe, rising to a British cheer; he lowered his mainsail, and crawled up on the weather quarter. Arrived within a cable's length, he double-reef'ed his foresail to reduce his rate of sailing nearly to that of the ship; and the next moment a tongue of flame, and then a gush of smoke, issued from his lee bow, and the ball flew screaming like a seagull over the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... us some modern sea terms, as sloop, schooner, yacht and also a number of others as boom, bush, boor, brandy, duck, reef, skate, wagon. The Dutch of Manhattan island gave us boss, the name for employer or overseer, also cold slaa (cut cabbage and vinegar), and a ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... of the surf. The waters of the pool leapt as if a giant hand had churned them. The foam from beyond the reef overspread them like snow. The whole world became full of the sound of ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... eased off, and the foresail shivering, her wake would be as straight as her mast; only, he was a rare fellow for carrying on, was old Captain Goss! We would be staggering under a whole main-sail, when the other smacks had three reefs in theirs; and it was odds but we had one line of reef-points triced up, when our neighbours would be going at it under storm-trysail and storm-jib. He worked the Lively Nan hard, he did, did Captain Goss. Sweet, and wholesome, and easy as she was—for she would rise to any sea, like as comfortable as a duck—Old Goss all but drove her under. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... its bosom, the gallant ship.' Though it is to The Pilot, pre-eminently, and The Waterwitch, in nearly an equal degree, that these remarks apply, there is many a passage in Cooper's later novels—for example, The Two Admirals, Homeward Bound, Mark's Reef, Ashore and Afloat, and The Sea-Lions—in which we recognise the same 'cunning' right hand which pencilled the Ariel, and its crew, the moody, mysterious pilot, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... All sail was set. Not a puff of wind rendered that display available. The reef-points pattered as the yacht rolled gracefully from side to side on the gentle heave of the ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... Morgan, "and take in the to'gallant s'l's. Close reef the tops'l's and double reef the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... for Mrs. Morrison was an excellent housekeeper, and could make a dollar go a great ways without appearing to be niggardly; but unexpected misfortune overtook them, and the company in which most of the carpenter's savings had been invested struck a reef, so that not only did the little income cease from this source but there was danger that the principal ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... or more, representing successive pauses or stages in the elevation of the island above the sea, and constituting most striking scenic features. About one-half the Cuban coast is bordered by keys, which are largely old reef rock, the creations of the same coral-builders that may now be seen through the transparent waters still at work on the modern shallows, decking the rocks and sands with their graceful and many colored tufts of ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... you better, and knew your husband at all, I might steer you a little farther out of Honeymoon Bay into calm waters, and tell you how to reef your sails, and how to tack at certain junctures of the voyage, and with the wind in ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... rock of refuge, we landed at the Twenty-five Mile, where lately a rich reef had been found. We pegged out a claim on which we worked, camped under the shade of a "Kurrajong" tree, close above a large granite rock on which we depended for our water; and here we spent several months busy on our reef, during which time Lord Douglas ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... attack of neuritis, which continued for three solid months, the best doctors in Sydney and Melbourne failing to give relief. Our ship first called at Fanning Island, a cable station (delivering four months' mail), a mere coral atoll with its central lagoon, fringe of cocoanut trees and reef. The heavy swell breaking on the reef, and the wonderful blue of the water, the peaceful lagoon, the bright, clear sky, and the cocoanut trees, formed a picture never to be forgotten. A picture typical of all the many thousands of such Pacific ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... the waist; then, lifting him clear of the deck, and aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him bodily into the dory. The man, falling, struck his head against one of the thwarts, a glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... sad and disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not understand if he were told. He has reason, therefore, to say we are dull. And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as all that is alive but inexplicable must be. No more conscious purpose shows in our existence than is seen in ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... the higher powers of the microscope. It multiplies by means of buds like those of a tree, the individuals all combining to form a composite stony mass, which is called a polypidom. A number of such polypidoms growing close together form a coral reef. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... to the inexpressible surprise and joy of the islanders, a large vessel was seen to pass through the narrow opening in the coral reef, and cast anchor in the lagoon. The excitement on Ratinga was great, for vessels rarely had occasion to visit the island, although some of them, probably South Sea whalers, were seen to pass it on the horizon two or three times ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... scent, and birds without song'; a contrariness which puts the alluvial gold on the top of mountain ranges and leaves the valleys barren; which mocked the experience of the world, and showed the waterworn gravel deposit to be the biggest, richest, deepest, and most reliable gold reef ever known; which placed diamonds in such conditions that the greatest living authority, who had undertaken a huge journey to report on the occurrence, could only say, in the face of a successful wash-up, ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Street. There is a crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top. There is another crash and more screams at the other side of the street, and before the driver has diagnosed the case, he has hit the Exchange Street crossing, which sticks out like the Reef of Norman's Woe. When he has landed on the other side of this crossing, he slows down and goes meekly out of town at ten miles an hour, while we saunter forth and pick up small objects of value such as wrenches, luncheon baskets, ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride through deserted country—suppose it should be raining and the ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Admiralty Records 1. 1471—Capt. Billop, 26 Oct. 1712.] Bruce, encountering dirty weather on the Irish coast, when in command of the Hawke, out of thirty-two pressed men "could not get above seven to go upon a yard to reef his courses," but was obliged to order his warrant officers and master aloft on that duty. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1477—Capt. Bruce, 6 Oct. 1741.] Belitha, of the Scipio, had but one ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... expedition was not a very auspicious one, for on leaving the harbor of St. John (or "havre de Menuagoesche," as Villebon calls it) at 2 o'clock on the afternoon of the 2nd of August, d'Iberville ran the Envieux upon a reef; however, the damage was not serious as the ship floated when the tide rose. At Penobscot Baron St. Castin joined the expedition with 130 Indians. The French priests Simon and Thury, as the event proved, were no mere figure ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... my stormy shriek! Toilers upon the sea, the Whistling-buoy would speak! List to my sobbing shout! list, for my word is brief: Death is beneath me here! death on the sunken reef Where the jagged ledge is hid and the slimy seaweeds grow, And the long kelp streamers wave in the dark green depths below, Where, under the shell-clad hulk, the gaunt shark makes his lair,— Toilers upon the sea, here is the ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... here mention that the natives of De Peyster's Island (Nukufetau) caught all the fish they wanted in the smooth and spacious waters of the lagoon, and were not fond of venturing outside the barrier reef, except during the bonito season, or when the sea was very calm at night, to catch flying-fish. Then, too, the currents outside the reef were swift and dangerous, and the canoes had either to be carried a long distance over the coral or paddled a couple of miles across the lagoon ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... with wood. Off the N E part lay two small rocky islands, between which and the island to the N E, 4 leagues apart, I directed my course; but a lee current very unexpectedly set us very near to the shore, and I could only get clear of it by rowing, passing close to the reef that surrounded the rocky isles. We now observed two large sailing canoes coming swiftly after us along shore, and, being apprehensive of their intentions, we rowed with some anxiety, being sensible of our weak ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... 5 sq km land area: 5 sq km comparative area: about eight times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... volume of water, always endeavoring to break away the rocky bonds which have harnessed it, rushes roaring as a huge, tongue-shaped, tumbling mass between its confines of rock and reef. Breaking into swift back-wash and swirls in the bay below, it lashes back in a white fury at its obstacles. Fortunately for the junk traffic, it improves rapidly with the advent of the early spring freshets, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... had a good long inspection of the large barque, which lay heeled over on the outlying reef of one of the many islands, and could distinctly see the fine curl of smoke rising up from the ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... maybe, from the fogbanks of Newfoundland, and blasts that have cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such things, and have few substitutes ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips proceeded thither and searched narrowly, but without avail. The sea ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... glare for shade, Tartarean heat for coolness, cannon thunder and shouting for quietness, grey enemies for nursing women, and for home a battlefield in a hostile land. Heavy ordnance wagons, far from the guns they were meant to feed, traces cut and horses gone, rested reef-like for the tides to break against. Travelling forges kept them company, and wagons bearing officers' luggage. Beneath several the mules were pinned; dreadful sight could any there have looked or pitied! Looming ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... there, and was not sorry. The place was too eerie to stay in long. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake when we met again on the inner reef, "I've knowed they amateurs run straight off home when they've a-found theirselves under Hospital. A terr'ble place! Yu knows now. Did 'ee ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... extremity of the island, and the eastern point of the bay, to lie in the longitude of 149 deg.13', this being the mean result of a great number of observations made upon the spot. The island is surrounded by a reef of coral rock, which forms several excellent bays and harbours, some of which have been particularly described, where there is room and depth of water far any number of the largest ships. Port Royal bay, called by the natives Matavai which is not inferior to any in Otaheite, may easily be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... wrecked not a cable's length from the shore, firmly fixed upon a reef of rocks upon which she had been thrown; the water was smooth, and there was no difficulty in their communication. The savages, content with plundering whatever was washed on shore, had to the time of their quitting the rocks left them uninjured. They ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... was spent standing off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... dust covered most of what was left: still there was a wonderful spirit and grace, and a wild, weird beauty which attracted us exceedingly; but the captain could only tell us that it had belonged to the wreck of a Danish brig which had been driven on the reef where the lighthouse stands now, and his father had found this on the long sands a day or two afterward. "That was a dreadful storm," said the captain. "I've heard the old folks tell about it; it was when I was only a year or two old. There were three ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... live by Heaven's free gale, that plays aloud In the stretch'd canvass and the piping shroud; The rush of winds, the flapping sails above, And rattling planks within, are sounds we love; Calms are our dread; when tempests plough the deep, We take a reef, and to the rocking sleep." "Ha!" quoth the Miller, moved at speech so rash, "Art thou like me? then where thy notes and cash? Away to Wapping, and a wife command, With all thy wealth, a guinea in thine hand; There with thy messmates quaff the muddy cheer, And leave ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... really ought to get some of this canvas off her," says he. "Ferdie, could you help tie in a reef?" ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Marlborough House at a dinner to meet a little tin soldier cousin in white epaulettes, who was over from Germany ... and (the German Ambassador) Count Munster told me that the French had hoisted their flag on a reef, as he said, within cannon-shot of Jersey, as to the British or neutral nature of which there had long been a dispute between the two Governments.' [Footnote: The Memoir has a note upon this episode of the Ecrehous Books, which led to the publication of Parliamentary ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... unhappy courage of the looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar, to hand, reef and steer, and to run a steam launch. In all of these, and in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly. He was well onto forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three when he killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enough. I think we both know the position of every reef to within a hundred yards, so we will shape our course for Guernsey. If we happen to hit it off, we can hold on to St. Helier, but if when we think we ought to be within sight of Guernsey we see nothing of it, we must lie to again, till the storm has blown ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... turkey-cock; her face, from heat, anger, and the quantity she had drank, being as red as her gown. Indeed, she looked for all the world as if she had been put into a furnace and blown red hot. Jorrocks having got rid of his "worser half," as he calls her, let out a reef or two of his acre of white waistcoat, and each man made himself comfortable according to his acceptation of the term. "Gentlemen," says Jorrocks, "I'll trouble you to charge your glasses, 'eel-taps off—a bumper toast—no skylights, if you please. Crane, pass the ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... the entrance the wave dropped the ship, and with a mighty crash that threw Barbara Harding to her feet the vessel struck full amidships upon a sunken reef. Like a thing of glass she broke in two with the terrific impact, and in another instant the waters about her were filled ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of distress!" cried the woman. "Oh! the ship, the ship! The wind is dead upon the shore, and the long reef, out by the Battery Point, has seen many a vessel ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked among the islands in ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... elevated tongue of table-land, called by the inhabitants thereabouts the Mesa. High, precipitous, perpendicular, level, and dotted with farm-houses, this singular bit of land stretches several miles out southward to sea, bordered with a rocky beach, and tapered off into the wide ocean with Duxbury Reef—a dangerous rocky reef, curving down to the southward and almost always white with foam, save when the sea is calm, and then the great lazy green waves eddy noiselessly over the half-hidden rocks, or slip like oil over the dreadful dangers ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of day was failing them, and they began to give themselves up as lost, the keen eye of Roger espied an opening through the foam-covered reef; and though it was narrow, and evidently dangerous, he and Seaton resolved to make a desperate effort to pass through it, and gain the smooth still waters that they knew must lie between the ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... preserve the rain; neither has it any lake, but several salt ponds, which furnish the sole production of the island. Turk's Island cannot be approached on the east or northeast side, in consequence of the reef that surrounds it. It has no harbor, but has an open road on the west side, which vessels at anchor there have to leave and put to sea whenever the wind comes from any other quarter than that of the usual trade ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... he examined the coast with great attention. Stretched out below them was the sandy shore, bounded on the right of the river's mouth by lines of breakers. The rocks which were visible appeared like amphibious monsters reposing in the surf. Beyond the reef, the sea sparkled beneath the sun's rays. To the south a sharp point closed the horizon, and it could not be seen if the land was prolonged in that direction, or if it ran southeast and southwest, which would ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... regarding its capabilities." In the map of his route, published by Arrowsmith, Port Grey is laid down as a spacious, well-sheltered harbour, with a convenient point of land extending a couple of miles out to sea from its northern extremity, and having a useful reef of rocks projecting, most happily, to the same distance, affording altogether a secure shelter for ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... North Pacific Ocean; Johnston Island and Sand Island are natural islands, which have been expanded by coral dredging; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; the egg-shaped reef is 34 km in circumference; closed to the public; a former US nuclear weapons test site; site of now-closed Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS); most facilities dismantled and cleanup complete in 2004; some ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... I was coming up into a reg'lar twister, and thought it would be safer to reef a mite and make for ca'm waters. My head begun to whirl, and I cal'lated I'd best weigh anchor ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... never thought of this much till one day there came on board, A chap who ventur'd to join as seaman by the Lord! His hair hung down like reef points, and his phiz was very queer, For his mouth was like a shark's, and turn'd down from ear ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... last voyage. She was now a battered wreck on a barrier reef. She hung thus for one heart-breaking second. Then another wave, riding triumphantly through its fellows, caught the great steamer in its tremendous grasp, carried her onward for half her length and smashed her down on the rocks. Her back was broken. She parted in two halves. Both sections ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... as Loch Ryan, when it slowly died away and became flat calm. One of my friends and myself were walking the deck together, when he excitedly observed, "What is that on our starboard beam; is it a reef?" I assured him there were no shoals in the vicinity of the yacht; and I took up the field-glasses, and saw quite plainly that it was a bottle-nosed whale. It soon began to move and send masses of water into the air. The calm continued, and some anxiety ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... that came creeping down upon us from the north-east. The night seemed preternaturally still, the silence which enveloped us being so profound that the noises of the ship—the occasional heavy flap of her canvas, accompanied by a rain- like pattering of reef-points; the creak of the jaws of the mainboom or of the gaff overhead on the mast; the jerk of the mainsheet tautening out suddenly to the heave of the schooner; the kicking of the rudder, and the gurgling ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... Island, was caught by the rising tide and drowned, Hammond Rock springing up immediately after to mark the spot. His wives, who were watching him at the time, resolved to drown themselves, and were changed into some dry rocks upon an adjacent reef named after ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... never crashing iceberg Nor honest shot of foe, Nor hidden reef has sent me The way that I must go. My wound that stains the waters, My blood that is like flame, Bear witness to a loathly deed, A ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... ahead of me. On the third day I received orders to draw nearer and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the uptilted edge ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... record of hopes unfulfilled, and high adventure unachieved, would have been disinterred from the dark storehouse of the past! That the vessel came in her present position by accident, could hardly be supposed. More probably, having struck on the Barrier Reef, or on some of the hidden coral shelves with which this sea abounds, she had been taken into this secluded creek for repairs. Cook, the great circumnavigator, careened his ship at a spot not far distant from this; but we were unanimously of opinion that this vessel ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... clear through some of the larger seas, and you didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no more pressure; the freshening wind had worked the ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... carry another inch of canvas," expostulated English as the mate shook out a reef in the mainsail, but Coppin and Clarke were now in command, since only they professed to know the coast, and the warning was unheeded, especially as the wind had for a moment lulled or rather drawn back for a more formidable spring, swooping down ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... answered as the helmsman answers, when he knows he has a mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is one of the mutineers himself. "Put him aout y'rself, 'f ye a'n't afeard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... considered Tripoli Vecchia, which is a very ancient port, and the site of a once famous city, more secure than that of Tripoli itself, though certainly much smaller. Whilst we were here no bark visited it. Good-sized ships occasionally anchor in it. Like Tripoli, it is defended with a sunken reef of rocks, some peaks of which rise several feet out of the water. Along this line is a strong surf always chafing and roaring. There are two mouths of entrance; the deepest water within is about twelve or fourteen feet. There is another but much ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... are idle. A very old craft, she may have foundered; or laid her bones upon some treacherous reef; but as with many a far rover, her fate ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... a mad horse, till I felt like being jerked off the spar; then, indeed, I thought of a feather-bed at home, and hung on with tooth and nail; with no chance for snoring. But a few repetitions, soon made me used to it; and before long, I tied my reef-point as quickly and expertly as the best of them; never making what they call a "granny- knot," and slipt down on deck by the bare stays, instead of the shrouds. It is surprising, how soon a boy overcomes his timidity about going aloft. For my own part, my nerves became as steady ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... a nasty night, and we must go in somewhere, although night is the best time for their fishing. Only one jack-lobster out of all the pots this time. It was now blowing hard and beginning to rain, so, with one reef in, we started again. It was a ripping breeze; I knew of old how quickly the wind can rise along that coast. The last time I was in Baltimore—picturesque old place, with its ruined abbey and the memory of the sacking of it by Moorish pirates, and the carrying-off of the women ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... companions of the carriage that had come to grief by sticking fast in the mud of the cross-roads, for, after the men and beasts belonging to it had striven uselessly for three long hours to move it from the reef on which it had foundered, the gentleman sitting alone inside it had hit upon the peculiar idea of being carried to the csarda on man-back instead of on horseback. He mounted, therefore, on to the ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... reefs and keys in connection with their survey? It is extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time you were ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... boy—and went to sleep. The rest of the crew also were asleep. And the boy who, I suppose, felt quite big to think that he was really steering the Admiral's flagship, was a little too smart; for, before he knew it, he had driven the Santa Maria plump upon a hidden reef. And there she was wrecked. They worked hard to get her off but it was no use. She keeled over on her side, her seams opened, the water leaked in, the waves broke over her, the masts fell out and the Santa Maria had ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... margins it threw off in its metamorphoses. That came of his having placed the matter in such competent hands. The lawyer had, for instance, got him finally out of "Porepunkahs" in the nick of time—the reef had not proved as open to the day as was expected—and pulled him off, in the process, another three hundred odd. Compared with Ocock's own takings, of course, his was a modest spoil; the lawyer had made a fortune, and was now one of the wealthiest ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... he had brought home from various voyages. Stuffed, dried, repolished, or otherwise preserved, according to their kind; birds, fishes, reptiles, arms, articles of dress, shells, seaweeds, grasses, or memorials of coral reef; each was displayed in its especial place, and each could have been displayed in no better place. Paint and varnish seemed to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to obliterate stray finger-marks ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... long beat back. As they got away from the land, the wind increased very much, and came in strong sharp cold gusts which made it necessary first to take in the gaff-topsails, and then one reef and then another in the mainsails. As the wind increased the sea got up, and the little vessels, more suited to fine weather than foul, had hard work to look up to the rising gale. Still there was no help for it. The tide helped them along, but by its meeting the wind much more sea was knocked up ...
— Adrift in a Boat • W.H.G. Kingston
... It consists of large blocks of a volcanic conglomerate, some of which measure nineteen feet by six or eight, and ten feet in thickness; whilst a little farther north another wall extends E.N.E. to a natural reef of rocks." (Hamilton, Researches in Asia Minor, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... and get the mizzen topsail and the fore and main sail in, sir, and reef the fore and main topsails; the spars are buckling fearfully. She can't stand ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... total obscurity, but its path was almost exclusively a "water-track." It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano. Seldom has a more striking proof been given of the vividness of human curiosity as to the condition of the worlds outside our ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... says: "Now, keep the heart up right! and in a day or two we'll have all aboard, and 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 ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... not only never executed so delicate a piece of workmanship, but he had never seen its equal. Every curve of the exquisite-hued waves was studied from the swell that sometimes swept grandly in from the lake on the long reef of rocks a few miles above St. Ignace. The form of the goddess was modelled from his remembrance of the Greek antique. It was a gem worthy of an emperor. What should he ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Had Columbus held a direct course west from Gomera, in latitude 27 deg. 47' N. he would have fallen in with one of the desert sandy islands on the coast of Florida, near a place now called Hummock, or might have been wrecked on the Montanilla reef, at the north end of the Bahama banks: his deflection therefore, to the S.W. on the 7th October, was fortunate for the success of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... emptied a bottle of each into a pitcher and swallowed the whole as easily as an ordinary man would take down a dose of peppermint. The empty bottles were thrown overboard, and the captain said that if this man were a frequent passenger there would be danger of a reef of bottles in the ocean all the way from New York to Aspinwall. I never saw his equal for swallowing malt liquors. To quote from ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and it did not seem like a laugh, but as if he were calling his son bad names. "You can manage a boat all of you, can't you, and row and reef and steer? Get out. Books is in your way, and writin', and ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... emotions like these Must be freely indulged By a party who sees A Society bulged On a reef the existence of which its ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bowshot across at the mouth. And when we sighted this river, which was sixty miles beyond C. Verde, we cast anchor at sunset in ten or twelve paces of water, four or five miles from the shore, but when it was day, as the look-out saw there was a reef of rocks on which the sea broke itself, we sailed on and came to the mouth of another river as large as the Senegal, with trees growing down to the water's edge and promising a most fertile country." Cadamosto determined to land a scout here, and caused ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... passes on and after adventures and tempests in many seas at last reaches the far Pacific. There the torch-bearers pass from island to island and the light flames like a beacon fire across many a blue lagoon and coral reef. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... be found at which it was possible to land the stores and provisions. So completely do the rocks surround the island, that it was not easy to find a place even to land a man. At length, however, they succeeded, having discovered at the south-west end, a small opening in a reef that runs across a bay. Here the people, provisions and stores were all put on shore in perfect safety. The Commandant wrote in high spirits at the promising appearance of his new territory; and subsequent accounts have proved, that the opinion he then formed was not erroneous. He ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... the greatest naval battle of history was about to be fought, is an arm of the North Sea between Norway and Denmark. The scene of the battle was laid off Jutland and Horn Reef, on ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... know un so well as I knows you, bein' on'y a hand aboard, ye see, with a word or two t' le'ward of what ye might call a speakin' acquaintance with the skipper. I 'lowed he'd strike the Rattler; but he cleared the Rattler, by good luck, an' fetched up at dawn on the Devil's Teeth, a mean, low reef o' them parts, where the poor Will-o'-the-Wisp broke her back an' went on in splinters with the sea an' wind. 'Twas over soon, Dannie; 'twas all over soon, by kindness o' Providence: the ol' craft went t' pieces an' was swep' on t' le'ward by the ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... when shut alone and safe inside These four white walls,—hearing no sound except Our own heart-beatings, silences have crept Stealthily round us,—as the incoming tide Quiet and unperceived creeps ever on Till mound and pebble, rock and reef are gone. ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... desolate; I know the winds have stripp'd the gardens green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, but we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths beguile; There ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... look'd wild, without a trace of man, And girt by formidable waves; but they Were mad for land, and thus their course they ran, Though right ahead the roaring breakers lay: A reef between them also now began To show its boiling surf and bounding spray, But finding no place for their landing better, They ran the boat for shore,—and ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... called Nick, after they had been moving along in procession for some time, the Tramp leading the way—for George realized that he must curb his speed propensity while navigating these deceptive shallow waters, unless he wanted to take chances of wrecking his beloved craft on an unseen oyster reef, or a sandbar that lay just ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... additional troops. As these forces would be raised chiefly in New England, they could be employed first to protect Springfield. Any open avowal of this plan was avoided, however, lest the insurgents should take alarm and immediately attack the arsenal. But these plans were wrecked on the reef of financial bankruptcy. Congress could only supplicate the States for money and borrow what it might on its expectations. Recruiting went on so slowly that the rebellion was practically over when two companies of artillery, numbering seventy-three ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... sweetness in double rhymes, And a double at Whist and a double Times In profit are certainly double— By doubling, the Hare contrives to escape; And all seamen delight in a doubled Cape, And a double-reef'd topsail in trouble. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the water and the sky grew paler by degrees and the stars faded out. We were opposite the buoy now, dark amongst the dark waves, and we turned at right angles and made for the shore. The tide was high and we glided over the inner reef easily. Soon we could see the eaves of the cottage dimly, a cock crowed sleepily, the white pole pointed out some rough steps ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... sea. It is one of the most powerful lights in the world, sending its rays far out over the sea and land as it revolves. When the sea mists arise it has a powerful foghorn which can be heard for many miles. Close by is the reef at Rockenend, on which many a gallant ship ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... stand on deck against the force of the wind. He could only cling to his place and see the vessel driven ashore, without being able to lift a hand to save her. Suddenly he was conscious of a grating, grinding sensation beneath his feet, and knew that the vessel had struck a coral reef. She swung round broadside to the wind; the boats on the weather side were wrenched from their davits and hurled away in splinters; and in the midst of such fury and turmoil there was no possibility of launching the remaining two boats and escaping ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on the walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struck on the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in his proud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Who recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned, sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... during the night never being so correct as during the day, she had recovered her distance, and was about four miles from us. The gale, if anything, had increased, and Captain Maclean determined, notwithstanding, to shake a reef out ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... their han's. Mony's the time my stockin' 's been maist as guid's a cloaset to me, though I cudna jist gang intil't. But what maitters 't! A prayer i' the hert 's sure to fin' the ro'd oot. The hert's the last place 'at can haud ane in. A prayin' hert has nae reef (roof) till't." ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Edwards, was despatched to apprehend the mutineers, and bring them back to England for trial and punishment. The Pandora reached Tahiti March 23, 1791, set sail, with fourteen prisoners, May 8, and was wrecked on the "Great Barrier Reef" north-east of Queensland, August 29, 1791. Four of the prisoners, including George Stewart, who had been manacled, and were confined in "Pandora's box," perished in the wreck, and the remaining ten were brought back to England, and tried by court-martial. (See The Eventful ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... harmless spinsters as my enemies, and their proposals for excursions, and luncheons, and dinners caused me much misgiving, not only because they separated me from Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you know, and that is why I tried to persuade Doris ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... until its somewhat intricate manipulation has been mastered. My husband's directions for the arrangement of a hunting-tie are as follows:—"The centre of the stock is placed on the front of the neck, the ends are passed in opposite directions round the back of the neck, brought in front, tied in a reef knot, crossed in front of this knot, and finally secured, as a rule, by means of a pin or brooch of the safety or horse-shoe or fox pattern. A gold safety pin is often used. A brooch pin is naturally safer than an ordinary pin. Nowadays, hunting ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... missionaries was good and their families were large. No death occurred among them until 1837, when Mrs. R. Davis was called to her rest. Dangers abounded on every hand, yet accidents were rare. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis were lost at sea; Marsden was wrecked on the Brampton reef, but escaped unhurt with all his party. Henry Williams passed through a terrible experience when returning from Tauranga in 1832. For two days his little vessel had been enveloped in driving rain and had been blown quite out of her course, when the missionary, who had been praying through ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... No. 2. Boat excursions. Remarks on the Percy Isles; with nautical observations. Coral reefs: courses amongst them during eleven days search for a passage through, to sea. Description of a reef. Anchorage at an eastern Cumberland Isle. The Lady Nelson sent back to Port Jackson. Continuation of coral reefs; and courses amongst them during three other days. Cape Gloucester. An opening discovered, and the reefs quitted. General ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... silver rupees, where Captain Robinson and his mate are settling the trade accounts of the trip, blessing the Burmese clerk for having half a rupee too much; funny work for men brought up to "handle reef ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... them and the shore widened, the surf became stronger and higher, until by the time they reached the reef the canoe was dancing like ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... Antilles and neighbouring islands. He named this island Hispaniola. Having decided to land, Columbus put in towards shore, when the largest of his ships struck a concealed rock and was wrecked. Fortunately the reef stood high in the water, which saved the crew from drowning; the other two boats quickly approached, and all the sailors ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
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