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Windlass   Listen
verb
Windlass  v. t. & v. i.  To raise with, or as with, a windlass; to use a windlass.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Windlass" Quotes from Famous Books



... very slowly, old Bellevue was placed on huge rollers, horses were attached to a windlass, and it almost took a microscope to see the progress made day by day, but at last it reached its present site, safe and sound. It was necessary to pull down and rebuild the wings, as they had no cellars. Of course, the ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... which I should have been inevitably killed. The fate that I escaped fell to the lot of Bennet's dog. The poor fellow jumped over the cluster of bushes without seeing the pit beyond. By looking down we could see that he was still living. Mr. Vanmater promised to erect a windlass over the pit and get him ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... line, and Nelson and Bowen, with life-lines about them, bent the stubborn end of it around the windlass. It was heavy work, even for two men, on the tumbling, slippery deck, and, that done, they turned, anxiously, to see how the man in the stern of the tug was making out. He was there, back to, bending the thick stubborn bight about the towing bitts with ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly

... the windlass heaving up the anchor, at the time, and had just struck up a sailor's chanty, which made a good deal of noise, but nothing seemed to disturb Granfa. He slumbered peacefuly through all the rattle of chains, and shouting of commands, so, somewhat subdued, ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... harbours as may be seen on the Berwickshire coast having been made. When the wind blows hard from the north, the landing on that side is useless, and the boats, having no shelter, are hauled up the steep slope with the help of a steam windlass. Under these circumstances the South Landing is used. It is similar in most respects to the northern one, but, owing to the cliffs being lower, the cove is less picturesque. At low tide a beach of very ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... being hoisted slowly from the lorries on the railway tracks; the swaying burden is turning round and round in the air, knocking against the railing with a groaning noise, and tearing off large splinters of wood. The overseer is swearing at the men at the windlass and comparing his papers with the slips of the customs officer, the one making a blue check on the bill of lading and the other taking note of each article on his long list. Suddenly a small box comes to light, which has been waiting patiently since yesterday under the sheltering tarpaulin. "A box ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... the deep water; but as I thought we should be able to run her ashore, either upon the same shoal or upon the main, in case we could not keep her, I resolved at all risks to heave her off if possible, and accordingly tur'nd as many men to the capstan and windlass as could be spar'd from the pumps, and at 20 minutes past ten hove her afloat and into deep water." (He did not do this without losing his anchors, as he tells ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery

... formed the mouth of the well. Women, boys, and all wished to have a hand in building it, and it remains to this day, a solid wall of masonry, the circle being thirty-four feet deep, eight feet wide at the top, and six at the bottom. I floored it over with wood above all, and fixed the windlass and bucket, and there it stands as one of the greatest material blessings which the Lord has given to Aniwa. It rises and falls with the tide, though a third of a mile distant from the sea; and when, after using it, we tasted the ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... a lamp was burning in the place. Otter seized the handle of the windlass and began to wind. He was naked, and it was a wonderful sight to see the muscles starting out in knots on his huge but dwarfish frame as he strained at the weight of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... face with the towel, she seized a heavy iron tea-kettle, and carried it to the well, which, surrounded by plantain and dock leaves, was near a corner of the house. She had some little difficulty in managing the windlass, and when the old mossy bucket fell with a dash into the water twenty feet below, it made her start and shiver all over as if ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... 25, 1805] 25th of February Monday 1805 we fixed a Windlass and Drew up the two Perogues on the upper bank and attempted the Boat, but the Roap which we bade made of Elk Skins proved too weak & broke Several times night Comeing on obliged us to leave her in a Situation but little advanced- we were ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... propelled horizontally by a lever worked by a horse. The primary gear impels a pinion keyed to the shaft of a windlass, upon which is wound the elevating rope, whenever the clutch, A, is made to operate through the cord and lever, B. This cord runs over a pulley on the under side the wood framework at C, and its further end may be held in the hand of the workman on the hay load, who, when he has properly ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... sounded the death-knell of the shanty. Aboard the steamer there were practically no sails to be manipulated; the donkey-engine and steam winch supplanted the hand-worked windlass and capstan. By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailing ship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on through the eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride and splendour that was once theirs. ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry

... I read, at the bottom of the water, characters of fire traced upon the letter the queen had touched. Then, scarcely knowing what I was about, and urged on by one of those instinctive impulses which drive men to destruction, I lowered the cord from the windlass of the well to within about three feet of the water, leaving the bucket dangling, at the same time taking infinite pains not to disturb that coveted letter, which was beginning to change its white tint for the hue of chrysoprase,—proof enough that it was sinking,—and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... made a couple of pulleys, and rigged a rope through them, and then made a windlass, and put the rope round ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... got it a good deal more than half done, and could hardly wait to get at it next morning. They hurried out right after breakfast, and Mr. 'Possum had Mr. 'Coon and Mr. Crow sawing, and boring, and shaving with Mr. Man's drawing-knife, making the crank, which was a sort of double windlass that stood up in the car over the back axle, built so two people could turn it; and there would be a strong strap that went down through a hole in the bottom of the car and around the axle to make that turn, too, ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine

... lighted by the dripping candles. The walls were faced with bas-reliefs representing scenes in his life done in massive silver. The priest put on a short white lace garment over his black robe, crossed himself, bowed reverently, and began to turn a windlass slowly. The sarcophagus separated in two parts, lengthwise, and the lower part sank down and disclosed a coffin of rock crystal as clear as the atmosphere. Within lay the body, robed in costly habiliments covered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... our heaving line on board. Then, as soon as I wave my hand, go ahead gently until you have brought a strain upon the hawser, when you may increase the speed to about twelve knots—not more, or you will tear the windlass out of the barque. Steer straight out between those two bergs, and remember that moments are ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... their way through their assailants and dashed in at the castle gate. A crowd of their assailants were close upon their heels. Walter glanced round; dashing across the courtyard he ran through some passages into an inner yard, in which, as he knew, was the well. The bucket hung at the windlass. ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty

... &c., all were ready to throw in, and start away at a moment's notice. The man in the "crow's-nest", as they call the cask fixed up at the masthead, was looking anxiously out for whales, and the crew were idling about the deck. Tom Lokins was seated on the windlass smoking his pipe, and I was sitting beside him on an empty cask, sharpening ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne

... scattered, separated by considerable distances, hence easy portability is the key-note in the construction of this irrigating outfit. The bucket is very light, simply a woven basket waterproofed with a paste of bean flour. The windlass turns like a long spool on a single pin and the standard is a tripod with removable legs. Some wells we saw were sixteen or twenty feet deep and in these the water was raised by a cow walking straight away at ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... food which placed the Reeds among the world's marvels they were of a slowness of movement Wallie never had seen equalled. Whenever he looked through the window, it was to see one or the other resting from the exertion of emptying a bucket of dirt or turning the windlass. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... differed from other kinds of comedy—(1) in having no proper plot; (2) in not being presented primarily on the stage; (3) in having but one actor. Eudicos imitated the gestures of boxing; Theodorus the creaking of a windlass; Parmeno did the grunting of a pig to perfection. Any one who raised a laugh by such kinds if imitation was properly said mimum agere. Mimes are thus defined by Diomedes (p. 491, 13 k), sermones cuiuslibet et molus sine reverentia vel factorum et dictorum turpium ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... silkworm oaks, whose tender shoots and new twigs, of every hue, were allowed to bend and to intertwine in such a way as to form two rows of green fence. Beyond this fence and below the white mound, was a well, by the side of which stood a well-sweep, windlass and such like articles; the ground further down being divided into parcels, and apportioned into fields, which, with the fine vegetables and cabbages in flower, presented, at the first glance, the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... which they might have lived. The ferrying was done with what was really a raft of logs, rather than a boat. It was sustained against the current by means of a tackle attached to a block, rove on a large rope that was drawn taut, from bank to bank, and was propelled by a windlass on each bank. When a wagon had been taken aboard this cable ferry, the windlass on the farther side was turned by one of the men, drawing the raft across. After unloading, the raft was drawn back, by operation of the windlass on the opposite ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell

... a hail along to the forecastle to avast heaving on the cable; for some of the watch had remained on deck, when the rest went below to pass up lines, and were now taking spasmodic, aimless jerks at the windlass. The mate drove his brown-skinned men to marvellous feats with coiling lines, determined to be ready with his part when the boat was ready. He had not heard Vandersee's report ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... was a sudden movement and bustle around the barricade of the Rue Castiglione. The members of the Commune appeared with their inevitable red scarfs.[96] Then there was a great hush. At the same instant the windlass creaked; the ropes which hung from the summit of the column tightened; the gaping hole in the masonry below, gradually closed; the statue bent forward in the rays of the setting sun, and then suddenly describing in the air a gigantic sweep, fell among the ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... so. The officer came on deck, the men were turned out, and the windlass was manned; for, although so large a vessel, she had no capstan. The men hove in the cable in silence, and were short stay apeak, when, as we had foreseen, it came on thicker than ever. Bramble pointed it out to the officer, who was perfectly satisfied that nothing could be ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life. At length those peculiar, long-drawn sounds which denote that the crew are heaving at the windlass began, and in a few minutes we were under way. The noise of the water thrown from the bows was heard, the vessel leaned over from the damp night-breeze, and rolled with the heavy groundswell, and we had actually begun our long, long journey. This was literally ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... with which the sail is turned to this or that side, according to the direction of the wind. The sail is half the width of the ship, and the mast is large and high. The sail is raised by means of a windlass, which contrivance is used also for a capstan. The rigging is made of reeds and grass, which grow wild. The mast is stepped about two-thirds of the length of the ship nearer the prow, in order that the ship may pitch forward. The foremast is not ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson

... accompany them had been already deposited in the Projectile. The three travellers approached the mouth of the enormous cannon, seated themselves in the flying car, and once more took leave for the last time of the vast throng standing in silence around them. The windlass creaked, the car started, and the three daring men ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano

... there, goaded me beyond endurance, and I called him a madman and a liar. I was going to leave him when he seized me by the wrist and sought to detain me by force. You yourself saw the bruises. I became mad, and drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood of the windlass. My first husband sank with one horrible cry into the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... approach to these caverns was not through the house, but through the side of a deep well sunk in the court yard, which communicates through a subterranean passage with this well. Those seeking entrance were let down by a windlass into the well in the court yard, and drawn up by a windlass into this cavern. There was no such accommodation at present, but we were told some enterprising tourists had explored the lower caverns. Pleasant kind of times those old days must have been, when houses had ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... in it 6 ft. apart opposite the ends of the shaft, lay across it a 5 ft. log similarly notched, so making a frame like a large Oxford picture frame. Continue this by piling one set above another till the desired height is attained, and on the top construct a rough platform and erect your windlass. If you have an iron handle and axle I need not tell you how to set up a windlass, but where timber is scarce you may put together the winding appliance described in the chapter ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... children to her side, Te Ava Malu stood out upon the sand and watched the whaler loosen her canvas and heave up anchor. Only when the quick click, click of the windlass pauls reached their listening ears, as the anchor came up to the song of the sailors and the ship's head swung round, did the girls begin to weep. But the mother, pressing them to her side, chid them, and ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... air-pump, with its immense platform, its enormous oval wrought-iron receiver, which a rope running on a pulley firmly fixed in the ceiling easily raised and lowered by means of a windlass—all these thousand and one contrivances which I had so laboriously prepared in spite of the railleries of those who envied me, and which I felt desolate at seeing unemployed, were going to find their use! Unexpected circumstances had arisen at last to ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... dwelt near the harbor heard the clank of a windlass as the crew of the Royal James hove the cable short, and the melodious, deep-throated refrain of a farewell chantey floated across the quiet water. With the flood of the tide and a landward breeze, the brig stole out across the bar while the topsails were sheeted home. When daylight ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... bucket against the stones, the rumble of the windlass, and then Dilly came in with a brimming bright tin dipper. She offered it first to the parson, and though she refilled it scrupulously for each pair of lips, it seemed a holy loving-cup. They sat there in the darkening room, and Dilly "stepped round" and began to get supper. Molly nervously joined ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown

... weekday, at least a hundred men would have lost their lives; probably I would have shared their fate. This occurrence put a stop to my work. Expensive tackle including staging, stretched wire ropes, windlass, and iron pulley-travelers now became necessary for getting out one's stuff. As my little capital was quite inadequate to all this, I surrendered ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... as wages and profits are. They are like two buckets in a well: when one rises, the other descends, but neither of the two motions is the cause of the other; both are simultaneous effects of the same cause, the turning of the windlass. ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... you have goaded me; he was as merciless as you have been merciless. We were in the shrubbery at the end of the lime-walk. I was seated upon the broken masonry at the mouth of the well. George Talboys was leaning upon the disused windlass, in which the rusty iron spindle rattled loosely whenever he shifted his position. I rose at last, and turned upon him to defy him, as I had determined to defy him at the worst. I told him that if he denounced me to Sir Michael, I would declare him to be a madman or a liar, and I defied ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... heave up the anchor with a windlass, Mr. Graines," said he to the engineer. "We had better get the hang of it while we have time to do so. Ship the ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... moment, very black, without relief, like figures cut out of sheet tin. The ship was ready for sea. The carpenter had driven in the last wedge of the mainhatch battens, and, throwing down his maul, had wiped his face with great deliberation, just on the stroke of five. The decks had been swept, the windlass oiled and made ready to heave up the anchor; the big tow-rope lay in long bights along one side of the main deck, with one end carried up and hung over the bows, in readiness for the tug that would come paddling and hissing ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... which we write, none of the outside timbers had been set up, and the edifice had only reached that point immediately above the "solid," where the doorway and the "well-hole" began. Here a large crane had been fixed, and two of the men were up there working the windlass, by which the heavy blocks of moor-stone were raised ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne

... deep Through the noisome and smoke-grimed city, Turning the wheels and the spindles, And the great looms that have no pity,— Weight, and pulley, and windlass, And steel that flashes and kindles, And hears no forest-learnt ditty, Not ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... across the river Plies the little mercy-craft, While from ambushed gun and quiver On it falls the fatal shaft. Trembling from the burning village, Still the terror-stricken fly, For the Indians' love of pillage Stays the bloody tragedy. At the windlass-bar bare-headed— Bare his brawny arms and throat— Brave and ready—grim and steady, Mauley ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... was, I was sorely bruised by the fall, and didn't recover myself for full ten minutes after. Then I discovered that I was sitting in a large wooden trough, hooped with iron, and supported by two heavy chains that passed over a windlass, about ten feet above ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... hickory propagation work consists in the employment of the Spanish windlass for fastening graft and stock together. The old time wrapping of twine or of raffia had to be released in order to allow growth at the point of union of scion and stock. When cord is used it cuts deeply into the new growth, and raffia, which is placed on flat, will be burst ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... they are lost!" the man replied. "I was at the windlass when they shouted up to me to go up and fetch them a bottle of rum. They had just struck it rich, and wanted a drink on the ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty

... early cars on stones in which grooves were cut for the guidance of the wheels instead of the steel rail and the flange wheel of the present day. These early cars were drawn by mules, after they had been pulled by a windlass up the cliff from the boat landing at Frankfort. The mules and the rock rails were soon replaced by two locomotives and iron rails. One engine brought the train from Frankfort to a point half way, by noon, and after the passengers had ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank

... Blennerhassett formerly stood. The mansion, never occupied after the ill-starred family left it, was destroyed by fire a few years before the time of the picnic excursion. Near the low foundation walls of blackened stone stood the wooden curb surrounding the mouth of a deep well. The old windlass, below which a leaky bucket still swung, was kept in repair by unknown hands. Upon looking for the man whom Eva had discovered, Mrs. Arlington saw leaning upon the curb, in a posture of meditation, ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... and rose, making his way forward about the narrow deck-space outside the cabin. Halvard was seated on a coil of rope beside the windlass and stood erect as Woolfolk approached. The sailor was smoking a short pipe, and the bowl made a crimson spark in his thick, powerful hand. John Woolfolk fingered the wood surface of the windlass bitts and found it rough ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... the seething deep. Yard-arms came splintering to the deck. There was a roaring of waters over us, under us, round us—then M. de Radisson, Jean, and I went slithering forward like water-rats caught in a whirlpool. My feet struck against windlass chains. Jean saved himself from washing overboard by cannoning into me; but before the dripping bowsprit rose again to mount the swell, M. de Radisson was up, shaking off spray like a water-dog and muttering to himself: "To be snuffed out like a candle—no—no—no, ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... just before the windlass, when I said something which offended Sam Dixon, one of the men. In return he struck me a blow on the head. I must have fallen immediately, and rolled down directly under the windlass. Perhaps fancying that he had killed me, Dixon walked away, without uttering anything to anybody as ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... appeared. They were absolutely motionless. But the heat and the suffocation in this atmosphere became almost insupportable. The men, with bare heads, and jerseys unbuttoned at the neck, were continually going to the cask of fresh water beside the windlass. Nor was there any change when the night came on. If anything, the night was hotter than the evening had been. They waited in silence what might come ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... wind, and does the signallin' to all the fleet. When gals is full-rigged an' tonguey, they're reg'lar press-gangs to twist young fellers round, an' make 'em sail under the right colors. Stick to the ship, Miss Sally; give a heave at the windlass now'n then, an' don't let nary one o' them fellers that comes a buzzin' round you the hull time turn his back on Yankee Doodle; an' you won't never hanker to be a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... stevedores, appeared to him so lazy, so intolerable. Sometimes he felt as if, seeing or guessing his impatience, they were trying to irritate him by moving the bales with the utmost slowness, and walking with unbearable laziness around with the windlass. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... ho!" woke me early one morning. It was the 10th of September. The enemy was coming. Sails were sticking out of the misty dawn a few miles away. In a moment our decks were black and noisy with the hundred and two that manned the vessel. It was every hand to rope and windlass then. Sails went up with a snap all around us, and the creak of blocks sounded far and near. In twelve minutes we were under way, leading the van to battle. The sun came up, lighting the great towers of canvas. Every vessel was now feeling for the wind, some with oars and sweeps to aid them. ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller

... well there,' said the sexton, 'right underneath the belfry; a deep, dark, echoing well. Forty year ago, you had only to let down the bucket till the first knot in the rope was free of the windlass, and you heard it splashing in the cold dull water. By little and little the water fell away, so that in ten year after that, a second knot was made, and you must unwind so much rope, or the bucket swung tight and empty ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... it all. The salt raw scent of the margin; While, with men at the windlass, groaned each reel, and the net, Surging in ponderous lengths, uprose and coiled in its station; Then each man to his ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts

... were strange looking contrivances, fastened over the head and shoulders, air-tight, and provided with oxygen sufficient to last for an hour or more. The men who wore them sat in a big bucket which was let down the shaft with a windlass, and every now and then they pulled on a signal-cord to let those on the surface know they were alive. When the first of them came back, he reported that there were bodies near the foot of the shaft, but ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... of a horizontal shaft, cut into the mountain-side, that had reached a depth of between two and three hundred feet; the ore being drawn up in large leathern buckets, by mule power, attached to a windlass. Such portions as were deemed sufficiently rich were at once conveyed to the smelting furnace, where the pure ore was melted down and extracted from the virgin fossil. If of inferior quality, it was submitted to ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens

... awakened at six o'clock the next morning by the men chorussing at the windlass, and the quick clank of the pawls that showed how thoroughly Jack was putting his heart into his work, and how quickly he was walking the ship up to her anchor. I scrambled out of my bunk, and took ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... heads with any romantic speculations of the kind. The pilot at the helm quietly smoked his pipe, thinking of nothing either past, present, or to come; those of his comrades who were not industriously smoking under the hatches were listening with open mouths to Antony Van Corlear, who, seated on the windlass, was relating to them the marvelous history of those myriads of fireflies, that sparkled like gems and spangles upon the dusky robe of night. These, according to tradition, were originally a race of pestilent sempiternous ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... provides the armor with a disk, c, of heavy rolled iron, which contains two symmetrical apertures. This disk is movable around a horizontal axis, and its lower part and its trunnions are protected by the sloping mass of concrete that covers the head of the casemate. A windlass and chain give the disk the motion that brings one of its apertures opposite the embrasure or that closes the latter. When this portion of the disk has suffered too much from the enemy's fire, a simple maneuver ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... mechanical contrivances save their muscle wherever it is possible. A great plate of iron or a bundle of deck flooring is picked up, by a hand which swings down from aloft, like a visiting-card by a lady: a single man turning a windlass, it sails into the air, gets up as high as it chooses to, and drops delicately just where it is wanted along the length of the structure. Out on the wharf a double "hoister," working by steam, and able to pick up and swing a hundred tons, is used ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... his hands. He was silent, and worked to get ready to descend the old air-shaft, with grim set lips. Yet there seemed to be no sense of bustle, only the work was done quickly and orderly, his orders being issued as much by signs as by speech, and soon a windlass was erected with ropes and swing chair fastened, into which he at once leaped, followed by another man. Tools and explosives were packed in and lamps lit and the order given to ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... drawbridge again with a great creaking of windlass and chain, and Charles with his head up rode across. But his men-at-arms stood their horses squarely on the bridge so that it could not be raised, and Philip ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... It was a huge, high-ceilinged room with a concrete floor. A monster dynamo was over in one corner, coupled to a matter-of-fact four-cylinder crude-oil engine, to which was also coupled by a clutch an inexplicable windlass-drum with several hundred feet of chain wrapped around it. There were ammeters and voltmeters on a control panel, and one of the most delicate of dynamometers on its own stand, and there were work benches and a motor-driven lathe and a very complete equipment ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... asleep for more than two hours, when they were awakened by an uproar on deck, and rousing themselves from sleep, they heard the rattle of the chains and the crank of the windlass. As their night attire was singularly simple, and consisted largely of the dress which they wore by day, being the same, in fact, with the exception of the hat, it was not long before they were up on deck, and making ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille

... and I've seen it fetched out of a doctor's tent as medicine. It paid him better than his salts and rhubarb. That was before the hotels opened, and while all the grog was sold on the sly. They marched in, dressed up as if they'd been in George Street, though everybody knew one of 'em had been at the windlass all day with the wages man, and the other two below, working up to their knees in water; for they'd come on a drift in their claim, and were puddling back. However, that says nothing; we were all in good clothes ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... With the exception of the few modern installations most of the mines are worked by the primitive Mexican system of winding up the ore in raw-hide sacks, hauled by means of cables made from maguey fibre, upon a mule-actuated windlass—the malacate. In some cases the miners carry huge pieces of ore on their backs, from 100 lbs. to 200 lbs. in weight, along the galleries to the shaft. Interior transport and haulage ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... silently as possible, were employed in clearing the running rigging, for every thing was in the utmost confusion. Having found one musket, three bayonets, and some whale lances, they were laid handy, to prevent the ship being boarded. A handsaw well greased was laid upon the windlass to saw off the cable, and the only remaining hatchet on board, was placed by the mizen mast, to cut the stern moorings when the ship should have sufficiently swung off. Taking one man with me, we went upon the fore-top-sail-yard, loosed the sail and turned ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay

... the whole length of one of her hempen cables, of 120 fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings. The cable, for its preservation, was also carefully served or wattled with pieces of canvas round the windlass, and with leather well greased in the hause-hole. In this state things remained during the whole day, every sea which struck the vessel—and the seas followed each other in close succession— causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally to tremble. At each of these strokes of the sea the ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... coaxed, bribed and threatened, the more vividly they depicted its dangers, the more determined he became to explore its darkened depths. The old well became a part of the child's life. He talked of it by day and dreamed of it by night. The big windlass, with its coil of seemingly never-ending chain, winding and unwinding, lowering and raising the old, oaken bucket green with age, full and flowing; the cooling water oozing between the age-warped staves, nurturing ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... down on top of the windlass, and landed almost in each others arms, half dazed. I sat down on deck to consider who I was, and what was the matter, and Evers made a wobbly run aft, the ship still ripping along, for we had been checked in our mad career for a ...
— "Pig-Headed" Sailor Men - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke

... comment and interpretation of the theatre," Shakespeare's work is, for the rank and file of mankind, "a deep well without a wheel or a windlass." It is true that the whole of the spiritual treasures which Shakespeare's dramas hoard will never be disclosed to the mere playgoer, but "a large, a very large, proportion of that indefinite all" may be revealed to him on the stage, and, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... vessel drawing ten feet in six feet of water or less. Alongside he had a hundred or more of empty barrels which he was sinking under the sides by hauling them down with a line under the bottom of the vessel. He did the work partly with his windlass worked by steam, and he had lifted the bow of the Teaser at least three feet out ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... into the boat. To bring the end back to the sloop was a smaller matter still, and I believe I chuckled above my sorrows when I found that in all the haphazard my judgment or my good genius had faithfully stood by me. The cable reached from the anchor in deep water to the sloop's windlass by just enough to secure a turn and no more. The anchor had been dropped at the right distance from the vessel. To heave all taut now and wait for the coming tide was ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... in getting out planks and lining the proposed shaft, which was made much smaller than the hole already dug, which extended over the whole of the two claims. The next day a windlass was put in position, and the work began in earnest. At the depth of twenty feet they came upon gravel, a result which greatly raised their spirits, as its character was precisely similar to that in the bed of the stream, and showed that Frank's conjecture was a correct one, and that the ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... not to be seen. Neither was MacDonald. There seemed to be no one. The day shift were going back in the tunnels below. The windlass handle hung prone as a disused well. It had not flown back broken. The cable had been cut. Then, he heard a groan. It was Calamity lying on her face at the foot of the windlass, weeping and reaving her hair. Stretched on the grass a few paces back from ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... curiosity, but as much by a new idea that had entered my mind, I stepped upon the staging and glided cautiously aboard. I caught a glimpse of the sailors far off in the forward part of this ship—some seated upon the windlass, others squatted upon the deck itself, with their tin plates before them, and their jack-knives in their hands. Not one of them saw me—not one was looking in my direction: their eyes were too busy with the cook and his ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... great Prince but too fond of pleasure—and which I am told is a perfect wonder of licentious elegance. It is painted with the story of Bacchus and Ariadne, and the table works in and out of the room by means of a windlass, so that the company was served without any intervention of domestics. But the place was shut up by Barbara, Aurelius XV's widow, a severe and devout Princess of the House of Bolkum and Regent of the Duchy during her son's glorious minority, and after the death of her ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... straining on the tow-rope a hundred yards ahead. Frequently we passed some fisherman sitting in his little mat hut, with his feet on the windlass that raised his great square net; but never did we see them catch a fish, although on our return the same men were working as assiduously as ever. The country presented the same compact system of farming, the hills in many places ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... stone parapet; and below, in the bed of the ravine, an orange orchard. Beyond rises a precipice; and, at its foot, men and boys were quarrying stone, which workmen raised a couple of hundred feet to the platform above with a windlass. As we came along, a handsome girl on the height had just taken on her head a large block of stone, which I should not care to lift, to carry to a pile in the rear; and she stopped to look at us. We stopped, and looked at her. This attracted ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... four-years-old "baby," had slipped on the curb of the well, overbalanced himself, and fallen in; dropping a toy into the water as he did so. In a moment Mary was on her feet. Seizing the bucket, she called the elder boys to work the windlass, and, with firm, but quiet instructions and a face as white as death, consigned herself to the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... the hollow decks rebound: Upstarting from his couch, on deck he sprung, Thrice with shrill note the boatswain's whistle rung: All hands unmoor! proclaims a boisterous cry; All hands unmoor! the cavern'd rocks reply. Roused from repose, aloft the sailors swarm, And with their levers soon the windlass arm: The order given, up springing with a bound, They fix the bars, and heave the windlass [3] round; 700 At every turn the clanging pauls resound: Up-torn reluctant from its oozy cave, The ponderous anchor rises o'er the wave. High on the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... feet square, with a hole three feet in diameter in one corner, now securely covered. It was used for lowering or hoisting objects through while the globe was at anchor. An aluminum frame or cage, attached to a windlass by a chain of the same material, was used for this purpose. A powerful coil steel spring operated the windlass. In each of the other corners of the room were anchors of aluminum, also attached to windlasses and worked by steel springs. There was a dynamo that afforded abundance of ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... before it, in its course. It passed, but the vessel rose not. Her deck remained buried in a sheet of foam, and she seemed settling down by the head. There was a frightful pause. First, however, the bowsprit and the butts of the windlass began to emerge—next the forecastle—the vessel seemed as if shaking herself from the load; and then the whole deck appeared, as she went tilting over the next wave. 'There are still more mercies in ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... would have pressed together again. The loose roll was therefore slipped over a vertical iron rod fastened into a circular perforated wooden foot. The upper end of this iron rod ended in a ring, in which the hook of a chain or rope could be fastened. With the aid of a windlass the roll was raised or lowered. When placed in the pan with boiling tar, it was left there until thoroughly saturated. It was then taken out, placed upon a table, and the excess of tar allowed to drip off into a vessel underneath. After partially drying, the roll was spread out in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various

... contraption that seemed to be something like a windlass and something like a dumbwaiter. It was at the very end of the veranda around ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... thought I might be more profitably engaged. I took hold of the handle of the windlass, swung off the great oaken bucket, and watched it descend its often-traveled course, bumping against the wet, slippery rocks with which the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various

... threw them into the sea. Maria, too, took her part in these affairs, and once stabbed to the heart, with her own little dirk, the captain of a Liverpool brig, the Lion, and on another occasion, to indulge her whim, a captain and his two mates were tied up to the windlass while Maria shot them with her pistol. Maria always wore naval uniform, both at sea and when in port; in fact, she entered thoroughly into the spirit of ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... as far as the Newfoundland Banks, and harried the New York traders and the whale ships from New England. It was Copley Banks who captured the Liverpool ship, House of Hanover, but it was Sharkey who fastened her master to the windlass and pelted him to death ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... me, my thoughts touched upon other happenings of that boyhood voyage—the long, tedious beat through the straits against light head winds and a continuous head tide; the man-killing log windlass, round which we hove, and lightened, chain of an eight-inch link; the natives, with their welcome fruit in exchange for trinkets; and, lastly, the white-haired old pilot, who came forward to visit me one evening on ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson

... I have pondered: from the sea of doubt Here drives at length the bark of thought ashore; Landward with screw and windlass haled, and firm, Clamped to her props, she lies. The need is stern; With men or gods a mighty strife we strive Perforce, and either hap in grief concludes. For, if a house be sacked, new wealth for old Not hard it is to win—if Zeus the lord Of treasure favour—more ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... gigantic rabbit burrow, with hundreds of tents and huts dotted about among the heaps of rubbish; dark evergreen forests in the distance, and, above all, the great volcanic mountain of Buninyong towering far aloft—these are the "Black Hills of Ballarat;" and that windlass at that shaft's mouth belongs in part to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... dyke in the new shaft at a shallower depth than Dick's Mount of Gold drive, and here Harry expended those turbulent emotions that welled within him, working furiously. Whether handling pick or shovel, toiling at the windlass, or ringing the heavy hammer on the drill, he wrought with a feverish energy that amazed his mates, who ascribed it all to an excusable but rather insane anxiety to test the value of their mine in the mill. For their part they were very well satisfied with the ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... meaning of Rokuro-Kubi can scarcely be indicated by any English rendering. The term rokuro is indifferently used to designate many revolving objects—objects as dissimilar as a pulley, a capstan, a windlass, a turning lathe, and a potter's wheel. Such renderings of Rokuro-Kubi as "Whirling-Neck" and "Rotating-Neck" are unsatisfactory;—for the idea which the term suggests to Japanese fancy is that of a neck ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... round; see the immense quantity of heaps, and the extent of ground they cover, almost as far as the eye can reach up the lead, and imagine the busy scene which the place must have presented in the earlier days of the rush, when each of these shafts was fitted with its windlass, and each mound was covered with toiling men. In one place a couple of engine-sheds still remain, a gaunt erection supporting the water-tanks; the poppet-heads towering above all, still fitted with the wheels that helped to bring the gold to the ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... each muscle changes from one associated tribe to another, and that either backwards or forwards, is well observable in the muscles of the arm in moving the windlass of an air-pump; and the slowness of those muscular movements, that have not been associated by habit, may be experienced by any one, who shall attempt to saw the air quick perpendicularly with one hand, and horizontally with the other at ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... dense groves about painted funnels, and men swarmed over huge wharves like ants over a crust of bread; up and round the final, great sweeping bend of the river, the Alethea made her sober way, ever with greater slowness; until at length, in the rose glow of a flawless evening, her windlass began to clank like a mad thing and her anchor bit the riverbed, near the left bank, between old Forts Isabelle and Tete de Flandre, frowned upon from the right by the grim pile of the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... mournful wail at intervals. Near us, at the anchorage, a big black barque, loaded and in sea-trim, was getting under weigh, and the haunting strain of 'Shenandoah,' most beautiful of sea-chanteys, timed by the musical clank of the windlass pawls, was borne ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... four days previous, had stood erect—a pillar of life—with an arm like a royal-mast and a thigh like a windlass. But the slightest conceivable finger-touch of a bit of crooked trigger had eventuated in stretching him out, more helpless than an hour-old babe, with a blasted thigh, utterly drained of its brawn. And who was it that now stood over him like ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... Sometimes there are only two or three to a block. Sometimes the well is merely a shallow hole, uncemented, to catch the seepage of the upper strata. Sometimes it is a very deep stone-walled cavity. Rarely is there a pump or a windlass or any other fixed ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... deck, the mate stretched me out on the windlass and commenced examining my limb; and then doctoring it after a fashion with something from the medicine-chest, rolled it up in a piece of an old sail, making so big a bundle that, with my feet resting on the windlass, I might have been taken for a sailor with the gout. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... the second personage; and just then there was a dismal creaking sound made by a windlass, a musical yo-yo-ing came from a vessel moored to the wharf, and a big sugar hogshead was wound up to a certain height, the crane which bore it was swung round, and as the wheels creaked the great hogshead began to descend slowly towards a gaping hole in the ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... a well in a yard, with a rope and a windlass, and an old wooden bucket all over trailing green mosses. Off the yard there was a blacksmith's shop, with a disused anvil and disused tools in it, and a cold hearth covered with scattered slack and iron ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... proper extent. It seems to me that this is the description of bow of which your correspondent has furnished a drawing. Another mode, and which appears to have been applied to the ancient bows, was by a sort of two-handed windlass, with ropes and pulleys, called a "moulinet," which was temporarily attached to the butt-end of the Cross-bow; of this a drawing is given in the illustrations of Froissart's Chronicles, particularly in that one descriptive ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various

... to be employed, the long end of the shaft was drawn down by a windlass; the sling was laid forward in a wooden trough provided for it, and charged with the shot. The counterpoise was, of course, now aloft, and was so maintained by a detent provided with a trigger. On pulling this, the counterpoise falls and the shaft flies upwards ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... the re-opening of the mine shaft about the year 1824. In 1829, or 1830, a small protecting structure was erected, a windlass was put up, which was worked by a horse walking round and round, drawing the water from “the well,” as it came now to be termed, and an open brick tank was constructed in which the poor could dip, a veritable modern ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... into these runnels and supplied the basins with drinking water. The mangers have holes bored in the stone through which passed the halters. There are indications that the cattle were hauled up by means of a windlass. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... Compressed air was carried in large tanks, and oxygen could be made as needed. In short, nothing that could add to the comfort or safety of the travelers had been omitted. There was a powerful crane and windlass, which had been installed when Mr. Swift thought his boat might be bought by the Government. This was to be used for raising wrecks or recovering objects from the bottom of the ocean. Ample stores and provisions were to be carried and, once the ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton

... log of wood, with iron bands at the ends of it, and having a great chain winding up around it. The chain came in through a round hole in the ship's side, with a loud 'click, click,' and I learned that they called it a 'cable,' while the machine we were working was called a 'windlass.' The cable was of course fast to the anchor, and it was very evident to me that we were going to put to sea immediately. The idea of it was now as dreadful to me as it had before been agreeable, when I had contemplated it from the stand-point of a quiet farm, a ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes

... His mates at the windlass went staggering back from the belch of violently discharged air: it tore the wind-sail to strips, sent stones and gravel flying, loosened planks and props. Their shouts drawing no response, the younger and nimbler of the two—he was a mere boy, for all his amazing growth of beard—put ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... oaks furnish ample shade for the tidy yard where an old well, whose bucket hanging from a rickety windlass frame, was supplying water for two Negro women, who were leaning over washtubs. As they rubbed the clothes against the washboards, their arms kept time to the chant of Lord I'se Comin' Home. Paul and two Negro men, barefooted and dressed in overalls rolled to their knees, were taking their ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... imagine what the seamen were about; they appeared to be pumping, instead of heaving, at the windlass. I forced my way through the heterogeneous mixture of human beings, animals, and baggage which crowded the decks, and discovered that they were working a patent windlass, by Dobbinson—a very ingenious and superior invention. The seamen, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... the river near Spring Market used to stand portly merchants, in knee breeches and silver shoe-buckles and plum-colored coats with ruffles at the wrist, waiting for their ships to come up the Narrows; the cries of stevedores and the chants of sailors at the windlass used to echo along the shore where all is silence now. For reasons not worth setting forth, the trade with the Indies abruptly closed, having ruined as well as enriched many a Portsmouth adventurer. This explains the empty ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windlass and wound that boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her, and she lay there ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... above, it was slung in chains, and even in a gale of wind remained perfectly steady. The weight of the entire, although amounting to fifteen tons, was so skilfully counterpoised, that the tube could with ease be raised or depressed by two men working a windlass. Its horizontal range was limited by the lofty walls erected for its support to about ten degrees on each side of the meridian; but it moved vertically from near the horizon through the zenith as far as the pole. Its construction was of the Newtonian kind, the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... discharged in an American port at the end of the voyage. A failure in this will bring you prompt punishment; and resentment of this punishment on your part will bring—death. Mr. Jackson," he concluded, turning to his first officer, "overhaul their dunnage, turn them to, and man the windlass." ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... obediently made a few turns on the windlass, and as the bag came up, two terrapin of the then common diamond-back variety rolled on the deck, and ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... come to an end finally, and at last the sun shone, the windlass clanked and we were underway. The long delay seemed to have broken our little schooner's spirits, for after being out three or four hours we had gone but as many miles, and ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley

... to the windlass. The twist given by the German had set the bucket in motion. Paul was rapidly descending in the bucket to the bottom! He seized the handle in his hand and held on to it with all his strength. It vibrated as though it were a live thing. He feared that ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting

... very true, sir," said Joe; "but I can not see how we are to manage it. There's a hole in the wall, to be sure, and a new rope on the windlass of the well: but how we be going to get the rope where 'tis needed is more ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... anchor ready in the stern, for, in the event of the attempt being unsuccessful, it would be necessary to bring the ship back to her present moorings. Two more anchors were next carried outside the passage, which was not more than two hundred feet in length. The chains were attached to the windlass, the sailors worked at the hand-spikes, and at four o'clock in the afternoon the Chancellor ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... the crowd began to light their torches. He looked at his watch, at the tide, and gave the word to man the windlasses. Then with a glance towards the cliff he started the working chant—"Ayee-ho, Ayee-ho!" The two gangs—twenty men to each windlass—took it up with one voice, and to the deep intoned chant the chains tautened, shuddered for a moment, ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... run for it, but the bees flew faster than he could run, and Jack was mad with pain, when he stumbled, half-blinded, over the brickwork of a well. Jack could not stop his pitching into the well, but he seized the iron chain as it struck him across the face. Down went Jack, and round went the windlass, and after a rapid descent of forty feet our hero found himself under water, and no longer troubled with the bees, who, whether they had lost scent of their prey from his rapid descent, or being notoriously clever insects, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... wings. Above the rim of the silver-blue sea—patched with purple stains in the middle distance—webs of steamer smoke lay along the southern sky. Occasionally a sound of voices, the creak of a wooden windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as it was wound slowly up the foreshore, came from the direction of the ferry and of Faircloth's Inn. The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... men had dined, Spike brought one of his purchases to the windlass, and the other to the capstan, though not until each was bowsed taut by hand; a few minutes having brought the strain so far on everything, as to enable a seaman, like Spike, to form some judgment of the likelihood that his preventers and purchases ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... and the Leak gain'd upon the Pumps considerably. This was an alarming and, I may say, terrible circumstance, and threatened immediate destruction to us. However, I resolv'd to risque all, and heave her off in case it was practical, and accordingly turn'd as many hands to the Capstan and Windlass as could be spared from the Pumps; and about 20 Minutes past 10 o'Clock the Ship floated, and we hove her into Deep Water, having at this time 3 feet 9 Inches Water in the hold. This done I sent the Long boat to take ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... pairs of cable-bitts, and when they are both used at once the cable is said to be double-bitted. Since the introduction of chain-cables, bitts are coated with iron, and vary in their shapes. There are several other smaller bitts; as, the topsail-sheet bitts, paul-bitts, carrick-bitts, windlass-bitts, winch-bitts, jear-bitts, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... has been here this morning to ask whether you wish the windlass to be left in the yard, and whether you will want him and his mate any more, and, if so, when? Of course he says (rolling something in the form of a fillet in at one broken tooth all the while, and rolling it out at another) that they could wish fur to have the windlass if it warn't any ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... tone of this conversation had been heard below. Before the boat had touched the side the crew were laboring at the noisy windlass with their shouts of "Yo heave ho! heave and pawl! heave hearty ho!" while the mate was screaming from the knight-heads, "Heave hearty, men—heave hearty. Heave and raise the dead. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... one occasion, when she was becalmed and practically surrounded by a powerful British fleet, by "kedging"—in other words, sending a row-boat out with an anchor, which was dropped as far ahead as the boat could take it, and the ship pulled up to it by means of the windlass. As soon as the British saw him doing this, they tried it too, but Hull managed to get away from them by almost superhuman exertions. He served in the navy for many years after his memorable victory over the Guerriere, but never ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... day of our occupancy, Britton reported to me that he had devised a plan by which we could utilise the tremendous horse-power represented by the muscles of those lazy giants, Rudolph and Max. He suggested that we rig up a huge windlass at the top of the incline, with stout steel cables attached to a small car which could be hauled up the cliff by a hitherto wasted human energy, and as readily lowered. It sounded feasible and I instructed him to have the extraordinary railway built, but to be sure that the safety ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... sound of the hammering hoofs too late. Two gongs boomed in the rock. The windlass creaked. Five seconds too late Jaimihr gathered up his reins, spurred, wheeled, and shouted to the men behind him. The great gate rose, like the jaws of a hungry monster, and the nine—streaking too fast down far too steep a slide to stop themselves—burst ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... of sable: rich enow it was. Ho, what costly bands he wore upon his quiver! A panther's skin was drawn over it for its sweet fragrance' (4) sake. He bare a bow, which any but the hero must needs draw back with a windlass, and he would bend it. His vesture was befurred with otter skin (5) from head to toe. From the bright fur shone out on both sides of the bold master of the hunt many a bar of gold. Balmung (6) he also bare, a good broad sword, that was so sharp that it never failed when 'twas ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... bread and water as they halted in front of her house, which they were compelled to do for hours, waiting the routine of being mustered into the prison. They were not allowed to leave their ranks, and she would turn an old-fashioned windlass herself for hours, raising water from her well; for the prisoners were often twenty-four to forty-eight hours on the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... all parts of the world, anchored in the stream, discharging and loading cargoes. There, just arrived, was an Italian emigrant ship with a thousand people on board, who had come to start life afresh. There was the large British steamer, with her clattering windlass, hoisting on board live bullocks from barges moored alongside. The animals are raised up by means of a strong rope tied around their horns, and as the ship rocks on the swell they dangle in mid-air. When a favorable moment arrives they are quickly dropped on to the deck, completely stupefied ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... which was to determine the fate of our voyagers now drew on; and every one saw, in the countenances of his companions, the picture of his own sensations. Not, however, giving way to despair, the lieutenant ordered the capstan and windlass to be manned with as many hands as could be spared from the pumps, and the ship having floated about twenty minutes after ten o'clock, the grand effort was made, and she was heaved into deep water. It was no small consolation to find, that she did ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... we also brought a great number of bolts and other iron-work, a companion ladder, windlass, pump, bowsprit bits, bell, a torn jib, a quantity of cordage, and whatever else we could lay our hands upon, that might have the most remote chance of being of future ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... put her head out of the companion way, the Captain ordered her back. She said, "Where is Paul?" Her husband answered, "I have called to him time and time again to get below." She called to Paul, who was holding fast to the anchor chain with his legs stuck under the windlass. He did not answer. She started to creep forward. Her husband could not see her. At this moment the sloop took a dreadful plunge. A heavy sea swept over her from stern to bow, completely submerging her. The Captain, who had taken the precaution to lash himself to the deck, in a half-drowned ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith

... screws turned round by a winch purchase on deck. A chain or rope, however, is better for the purpose of raising this frame, than long screws; but the frame should in such case be provided with pall catches like those of a windlass, which, if the rope should break, will prevent the screw ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... we will now look more closely beneath the pie-crust of Northwich. The best way to do so is to get into a big tub which will just hold two people and go down the shaft of a salt mine, lowered by a windlass. First of all you pass through 32 feet of soil and drift, and then about 92 feet of what would commonly be called rock. Then below these 124 feet you come to the first bed of rock salt, which averages about 75 feet in thickness. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... and fifty pounds of bone and muscle against the crank of the windlass. Some men would have fought first as long as they could stand and see. Others would have begged, argued, or threatened. But Jeff had schooled himself to master impulses of rage. He knew when to fight and when to yield. Nor did he give way sullenly or ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... Endeavour Island. By crossing and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them in the air like an inverted "V," I could get a point above the deck to which to make fast my hoisting tackle. To this hoisting tackle I could, if necessary, attach a second hoisting tackle. And then there was the windlass! ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... gleam on alti-rilievi in gold and silver, delicately wrought by skilful hands, and representing the principal events in the life of the saint. Jewels, and precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side. A windlass slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it, in a gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster, the shrivelled mummy of a man: the pontifical robes with which it is adorned, radiant with diamonds, emeralds, rubies: every ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... a big fellow, we'll not," was the answer, "unless we can get him near enough to stun him with a hatchet. Even on board a big ship the men often have to attach the rope to a windlass to draw the big fellows in while they're still full of fight. Even if he were stunned, I don't think that all of us pulling together could lift his dead weight on board ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... degree, or severe torture, consisted in fastening the sufferer, stripped naked, and his hands tied behind his back, by the wrists to one end of a rope passed round a pulley bolted into the vaulted ceiling, the other end being attached to a windlass, by turning which he could be hoisted into the air, and dropped again, either slowly or with a jerk, as ordered by the judge. The suspension generally lasted during the recital of a Pater Noster, an Ave Maria, or a Miserere; if the accused persisted in his denial, ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... water-kegs into the hold. He had had no rest in over twenty hours and his whole body ached as the last barrel bumped through the hatch. All the crew were aboard and a knot of swaying bodies turned the windlass to the rhythm of a muttered chanty. The chain creaked and rattled over the bits till the dripping anchor came out of water and was swung inboard. The mainsail and foresail went up with a bang, as a dozen stalwart pirates ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... and an ominous-looking bundle, leads the way out of the Schachtmeister's office to another portion of the same building. Here are heaps of dark grey "macadamised" stones;—silver and lead ores just raised from the pit; over whose very mouth we are unknowingly standing. A windlass is in the centre of the chasm; and it is by means of this windlass that the metalliferous substance is raised to the surface in square wooden boxes. Here the dressing of the ores commences; boys cluster in all directions, under the wooden shed, and in ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... urging the herd down the slope, but after a while they reached the welcome shadow of the trees, and Edgar broke into a shout when he saw a rude wooden platform with a windlass upon it and a trough ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss

... enlivening toil is quite efficacious among sailors. So willing to make everything as cheerful as possible, Shorty struck up, "Were you ever in Dumbarton?" a marvellously inspiring, but somewhat indecorous windlass chorus. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... do it easier next time," said Humphrey. "I will make a windlass as soon as I can, and we will soon hoist out another, like they turn a bucket of ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... fall into a shallow well, but his shouts for help were fortunately heard by his wife. "Didn't I tell you so?" she asked. "It's lucky I was in hearing or you might have drowned." He took hold of the bucket and she tugged at the windlass; but when he was near the top her grasp slipped and down he went into the water again. This was repeated until he screamed: "Look here, you're doing that on purpose, I know you are." "Well, now, I am," admitted the wife. "Don't you remember telling me it's best ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... against the clear dome of stars. There is a gloom around as one gets nearer and nearer the bays and cliffs of this lonely island; and now one hears the sound of breakers on the rocks. Hamish and his men are on the alert. The topsail has been lowered. The heavy cable of the anchor lies ready by the windlass. And then, as the Umpire glides into smooth water, and her head is brought round to the light breeze, away goes the anchor with a rattle that awakes a thousand echoes; and all the startled birds among the rocks are calling through the night—the sea-pyots ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... with bridles and bits, but the buffaloes refused to work with them. With tight-fitting halters, and the exercise of much-muscle, he was able for a time to make them "gee" and "haw." But not for long. When they outgrew his ability in free-hand drawing, he rigged an upright windlass on each side of his wagon-box, and firmly attached a line to each. When the team was desired to "gee," he deftly wound up the right line on its windlass, and vice versa ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... man wouldn't see it somehow. He wanted to keep the matter quiet. He got that notion into his head, and a steam windlass couldn't drag it out of him. He wanted as little fuss made as possible, for the sake of the ship's name and for the sake of the owners—'for the sake of all concerned,' says he, ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad



Words linked to "Windlass" :   capstan, ship, yard donkey, lifting device



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