"Lateen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was of the "square rig" of her time—when apparently no use was made of the "fore-and-aft" sails which have so wholly banished the former from all vessels of her size—goes without saying. She was too large for the lateen rig, so prevalent in the Mediterranean, except upon her mizzenmast, where it was no ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... queer little boats!" exclaimed Mabel, as they stood at the rail while the ship was weighing anchor and looked at the native sampans with their bright colors and lateen sails as they darted to and fro ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... flutter all the great sisterhood of shallops, sloops, pinks, schooners, snows, the almost obsolete batteau and periagua, the gundelow with its picturesque lateen sail, and all the winged host that are now merely names in ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... and tried to get a view of shipping through the mango branches. Masts and sails—lateen spars particularly—always get me by the throat and make me happy for a while. But all I could see was a low wall beyond the little compound, and over the top of it headgear of nearly all the kinds there are. (Zanzibar is a wonderful market for second-hand clothes. There ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and eats ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... still crowded with vessels from many distant havens, and the flags of most of the maritime states of Europe were seen, at intervals, within the barrier of the Lido. The moon was now sufficiently high to cast its soft light on the whole of the glittering basin, and a forest composed of lateen yards, of the slender masts of polaccas, and of the more massive and heavy hamper of regularly rigged ships, was to be seen ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... when we arrived, and the rays of the sun took some time to make a clear path out to sea. Out of the bank of white came gliding the heavy power boats of the Sicilian and Corsican fishermen, while from off shore were the ghostly lateen rigged boats of those who had been fishing up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, their yards aslant to catch the faint morning breeze. As they slipped through the leaden water to their mooring at the wharf we could see the decks and holds ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... on to the halyards, and the strange, outlandish sail, lateen in rig and dyed a warm brown, rose in the air. We were sailing on the wind, and when Yellow Handkerchief flattened down the sheet the junk forged ahead and the tow-line went slack. Fast as the Reindeer could ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... inhabitants are naked and poor. They eat rice, have many cocoa palms, and use salt. They fish with hooks made from tortoise-shell, being destitute of articles made from iron. They place a counterweight in one end of their canoes, and rig on them lateen-like sails made of palm-mats. It is quite important to explore this island thoroughly, or any of the others, in order to discover and ascertain accurately the navigation that has been made up to that point, and their distance from Maluco and the Filipinas Islands ... Those islands are somewhat less ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence. On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... descendants (so to say) of the ancient triremes. There was a row of long oars on either side, but sail power had so far developed that there were also one, two, even three tall masts, each crossed by a long yard that carried a triangular lateen sail. The base of the triangle lay along the yard, and the apex was the lower corner of the triangular sail, which could be hauled over to either side of the ship, one end of the yard being hauled down on ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... provided by Nature with all that could be desired for crop-raising, only rain is lacking to bring the fields to fruition, and from the earliest times a great system of irrigation has existed in Egypt. It is curious to see in many directions the white lateen sails of boats which appear to be sailing over the fields. In reality they are sailing on the canals which intersect the country in all directions, and by means of thousands of water-wheels and pumps supply the land with water. Though the Nile overflows its banks, its inundation ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... Mediterranean, encompassed by bands of a darker blue on the far horizon. Close to the villa, the crisped waves glitter like fiery scales; in the distance, the sea is glassy and still, as if lulled to sleep in its blue veil. White lateen sails flash in the sun, and once a day a steamer from Marseilles for Genoa passes hence, dragging in her wake woolly coils of smoke that hang over the sea like a dark cloud, until it gradually dissolves and disappears. The restfulness of the place is indescribable. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... until at last they "went to sleep." The breeze was, after all, merely the gentlest of zephyrs, only just sufficient to give a ship steerage-way; but, very fortunately for us, the boats were provided, by a whim of poor Austin's, with a suit each of enormous lateen sails made of light duck, with yards of such a length that they had to be jointed in the middle to enable them to be stowed in the boats; they were just the thing for light airs, and under their persuasive influence we were soon gliding smoothly through the scarcely ruffled water quite ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... a hatchway through the platform into the hulls by which the water was baled out. The canoes also carried, as a movable fire-hearth, a square, shallow trough of wood, filled with stones. They were rigged with one mast, which could be easily lowered, and had a lateen sail of matting, stretched on a long, slightly-bent yard, which could be quickly shifted round when beating to windward. These vessels were capable of making long voyages, and the Tonga islanders were in the habit of going to Fejee, where they built canoes for the natives, and had probably extended ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... would float us more comfortably; and there we watched for the morning. When that came, the sea had smoothed itself, and the wind died away considerably,—as it does in the Mediterranean at short notice. We looked every way for the white lateen-sails of the coasting and fishing craft, but in vain. It grew hotter and hotter as the sun got higher, and hope and strength began to give out. I lay down on the raft and slept,—how long I don't know, for my first consciousness was my friend's cry of "A ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... had begun to show—strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was beginning to grow intense, for no longer was Nissr making a gale that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... piece of canvas, setting from the truck, or summit of the topmast, to the yardarm of the main topsail-yard. Up above it, on a bending light pole, fluttered the great colours, a George's cross of scarlet on a ground of white. Abaft the main-mast were the mizzen, carrying one sail, on a lateen yard, one arm of which nearly touched the deck; and the bonaventure mizzen (which we now call the jigger) rigged in exactly the same way. Right aft, was a banner pole for the display of colours. These masts were stepped, stayed, and supported ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... loneliness. Beyond, the open channel between him and Verba Buena Island was racing with white-maned seas and sparkling in the shifting sunbeams. The scudding clouds above him drove down the steel-blue sky. The lateen sails of the Italian fishing boats were like shreds of cloud, too, blown over the blue and distant bay. His ears sang, his eyes blinked, his pulses throbbed, with the untiring, fierce activity ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a Genovese felucca, "La Bella Genovese,—a craft of thirty tons, beautiful mould, lateen-rigged, carrying two of that sail and a jib, and ten men for her crew." Aboard this small vessel the author and his family spent six days of pure pleasure, yet "somewhat bitten by fleas." They touched at Elba and other islands, and skirted the coasts of Tuscany, the Roman States, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... changing lights and shadows the storied and sentimentalized towers of the Castle of Chillon. Solemn groups and ranks of Swiss and Savoyard Alps hemmed the lake in as far as the eye could reach, and the lateen-sailed craft lent it their picturesqueness, while the steamboats constantly making its circuit and stopping at all the little towns on the shores imparted a pleasant modern interest to the whole effect, which the trains of the railroad running ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... yellow surface of the solfatara. Hence the puffs of vapour seen from below against the sparkling blue sky, and disappearing like huge birds upon the wings of the wind: hence, too, the tradition of the mast and the lateen sail. A dig with the Guanche magada or lanza, the island alpen-stock, either outside or inside the crater, will turn up, under the moist white clay, lovely trimetric crystals of sulphur, with the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton |
