"Bight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... running, and a light rig that seems to outrun them—well, when things happen they happen quickly. My weakness was total ignorance. In particular, my fingers lacked training, and I made the mistake of depending on my eyes to handle the reins. This brought me up against a disastrous optical illusion. The bight of the off head-line, being longer and heavier than that of the off wheel-line, hung lower. In a moment requiring quick action, I invariably mistook the two lines. Pulling on what I thought was the wheel-line, in order to straighten the team, I would see the leaders swing abruptly around ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... lost either their canoe or their net, or perhaps both, and these were their only means of subsistence. Having only two boys with me at the time in the boat, I desired the fishermen to cut the fish away, which they refused to do. I then took the bight of the net from them, and with the joint endeavors of themselves and my boat's crew we succeeded in hauling up the net, and to our astonishment, after great exertions, we raised about eight feet of the saw of the fish above the surface of the sea. It was a fortunate circumstance that ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... much used by the Spanish explorers, means a bight or open roadstead, not an enclosed ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... you will see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within a hundred miles of that stretch of water. But I was not born Norwegian. I am a Dane. My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothing mysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came of generations of poor unlettered people—peasants of the sea who sowed their ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... sound on this earth, and mingled with it now was a lashing like water falling from a great height. We grounded, and Xavier, seizing a great tow-rope, leaped into the shallow water and passed the bight around a trunk. I cried out to Nick, but my voice was drowned. He seized me and flung me under the cabin's lee, and then above the fearful note of the storm came cracklings like gunshots of great trees snapping at their trunk. We saw the forest wall burst out—how far away I know ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... matter to get into them, and anyone but a sailor or a professional acrobat would find it safest to be lowered over the side in a basket. The voyage to the jetty at Largs Bay is a brief epitome of the Bay of Biscay, the Australian Bight, and the monsoons of the Indian Ocean. When you reach the jetty, you are hoisted on to it by practised hands as the launch jumps to the right level. Then—splash! and up comes a green sea through the boards and you are wet to the skin. Bathing, it seems, like education, is "free ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... boasted perfection of human intellect, it should have been broached several centuries afterwards, and that the barometric levellings of Bruce should have been necessary to enforce conviction! It is not at all improbable that Hanno, the Carthaginian, as advanced by Macqueen, reached the Bight of Benin, or of Biafra; and certainly the geographical information obtained on these countries by Herodotus and Edrisi was more accurate than the speculations of many modern geographers. Observation had demonstrated to the moderns that no large river ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... restive reins. Selecting a long thong or cord, a Lap took a turn of both ends round his left hand, and then gathered what sailors call the bight in loose folds held in his right. He now singled out a rein, and threw the bight with unerring aim over the antlers of the victim. Sometimes the latter made no resistance, but generally no sooner did it feel the touch of the thong than it broke away from the spot, and was only secured by the most strenuous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family. Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there must have been ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... hours the next day, the Great Barrier opened into a small bight with shelving shores, which seemed to promise an easy landing place. A boat party, including the professor and the boys, was organized and the pull to the shore begun, after the two ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... could by swiftness of aught plank that swims, Be she outstripped, whether paddle plied, Or fared she scudding under canvas-sail. 5 Eke she defieth threat'ning Adrian shore, Dare not denay her, insular Cyclades, And noble Rhodos and ferocious Thrace, Propontis too and blustering Pontic bight. Where she (my Pinnace now) in times before, 10 Was leafy woodling on Cytorean Chine For ever loquent lisping with her leaves. Pontic Amastris! Box-tree-clad Cytorus! Cognisant were ye, and you weet full well (So saith my Pinnace) ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... camped out that night, And he hobbled his horse in a sheltered bight; Next day of old Joe he found not a track, So he had to trudge home with his swag on his back. He searched up and down every gully he knew, But he found not a hair of his poor old screw, And the stockmen all said as they laughed ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... but the wind was in our favour, and we sprang along at a wonderful rate, and I saw that our only chance of escape was in speedily passing the farther bank of the Tagus, where the bight or bay at the extremity of which stands Aldea Gallega commences, for we should not then have to battle with the waves of the stream, which the adverse wind lashed into fury. It was the will of the ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern horizon,—against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever. It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my in-door ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... exception to this security was found during the brief Dutch period in the seventeenth century and again, much more acutely, when the French were the masters of the Low Countries, and when Napoleon took control of the shipbuilding yards not only from Brest to Dunkirk, but from Dunkirk to the Bight of Heligoland. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... the danger it was far too late to turn and hammer out to the open. I was deep in the bottle-neck bight of the sands, jammed on a lee shore, and a strong flood tide sweeping me on. That tide, by the way, gave just the ghost of a chance. I had the hours in my head, and knew it was about two-thirds flood, with two hours more of rising water. That meant the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... timber the hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather. The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance grew indistinct ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cruel, the most execrable, the most inhuman traffic that ever was plied by degraded men—the traffic in slaves. Yet in the old days the trade was far from being held either cruel inhuman—indeed, vessels often set sail for the Bight of Benin to swap rum for slaves, after their owners had invoked the blessing of God upon their enterprise. Nor were its promoters held by the community to be degraded. Indeed, some of the most eminent men in the community engaged in it, and its receipts ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Tom Ham's whilst we were at the fishin' in summer," explained Toby. "Tom Ham lives at Lucky Bight, ten miles to the nuth'ard from here. We'll be ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... compass" is thus performed. The vessel is moored in the bight at Greenhithe, and by means of warps to certain Government buoys she is placed with her head towards the various points of the compass. The bearing by the compass on board (influenced by the attraction of the iron she carries) ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... minutes together, with both arms buried in the treacherous snow, which was slipping under me, and the end of the lariat a foot or two away. Then with a snake-like wriggle I grasped it, and there was a cry of relief from the watchers. I got a bight around Ormond's shoulders, and after some difficulty fastened it. One cannot use ordinary knots on hide. Ready hands gathered in the slack, and my rival was drawn up swiftly, while they guided him diagonally ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Alaska calling to him. Latuya Bay called loudest, so that the summer of 1898 found him and his wife threading the mazes of the broken coast-line in seventy-foot Siwash canoes. With them were Indians, also three other men. The Indians landed them and their supplies in a lonely bight of land a hundred miles or so beyond Latuya Bay, and returned to Skaguay; but the three other men remained, for they were members of the organized party. Each had put an equal share of capital into the outfitting, and the profits were ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... km note: includes Andaman Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Great Australian Bight, Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Mozambique Channel, Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Strait of Malacca, and ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... off the poop; he gave me the bight of the halyards. I crept out of the port into the chains and passed it round the lugger's mainmast, as he told me, handing in the bight to him, which he belayed slack to the mainsheet kevel. At the time I perceived a man lying wounded or dead in the main chains, but ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... climes, from Africa to the Mexican Gulf, and their features and complexions partook of every imaginable type, from the light skin and florid complexion of the Swede, to the low brow, oval olive cheek of the Mediterranean, and the coal-black hue and flat nose of the Bight of Benin. Their dress was uniform—frock collars cut square and thrown well back over their ample chests; their nether limbs incased in clean duck or brown linen trowsers, with silk sashes around their ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... falling. But before placing it on the table, our worthy cabin-boy took each plate and glass separately, and polished it on a towel which hung near, and in colour certainly rather resembling the dingy floor of the cabin than the bight-hued rainbow. This could still have been endured, but the article in question really did duty as a towel in the morning, before extending its salutary influence over plates and glasses for the remainder of ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... turn to the expansion of German and British spheres of influence in the Bight of Guinea and along the course of the Rivers Niger and Benue. In the innermost part of the Bight of Guinea, British commercial interests had been paramount up to about 1880; but about that time German factories were founded in increasing numbers, and, owing ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within sight from ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... with the Major to England and contributing his part to the story of the expedition, we find him starting again, six months later, with Captain Pearce and Dr. Morrison as his companions, from Badagry, on the Bight of Benin, on the West Coast of Africa. But the deadly climate soon diminished the little party. It was only three weeks before Clapperton had to read the burial service over the graves of his two comrades, and found himself left to carry ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... but slowly circling his head, he cursed them all with his baleful gaze. The ship's dinghy had been lowered, and he with his hands still tied, was dropped into it on the bight of a rope. ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Again and again I made for him, panting and cursing, shaking off this man and that, straining and wrenching, but never quite free. At last, with my jacket torn nearly off my back and blood dripping from my wrists, I was hauled backwards in the bight of a rope and cords passed round my ankles and ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... again and through from the other side, and I found the ends, and began to wind it up on a piece of paper. It is singular, though, how the unaided wool can tie itself into every kind of a knot—reef, carrick bend, bowline, bowline in a bight, not to mention a variety of hitches and indescribable perversions of entanglement. I was getting on very well, though. I looked up at her face, pale and weary with a sleepless night, but beautiful—ah yes—beautiful beyond ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... dead water and the helping eddies were, and shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows and littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these "points" she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the "bight" of the great binds and thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high "bluff" sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed it up a little too far and touched upon ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... an hour he roamed the arena, which was the greatest area of restricted freedom he had known in the ten weeks of his captivity. Then, a hooked iron rod, thrust through the bars, caught and drew the bight of his trailing rope into the hands of the men outside. Immediately ten of them had hold of it, and he would have charged up to the bars at them had not, at that moment, Mulcachy entered the arena through a door on the opposite side. No bars stood ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... outrageous, valiant, crop-haired, tutt-mouthed boy, roarin' up an' down the narrer seas, with his beard not yet quilted out. He made a laughing-stock of everything all day, and he'd hold our lives in the bight of his arm all the besom-black night among they Dutch sands; and we'd ha' jumped overside to behove him any one time, ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... colour: and the whole of this moor was a spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne—its full flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no ships have any business and your whole traffic is a fishing-boat or two, or a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them, while the sky is spring, the land and the sense ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... treasure and the joy of thine heritage, And where on the wings of his hope is the spirit of Sigurd borne? Yet I bid thee hover awhile as a lark alow on the corn; Yet I bid thee look on the land 'twixt the wood and the silver sea In the bight of the swirling river, and the house that cherished me! There dwelleth mine earthly sister and the king that she hath wed; There morn by morn aforetime I woke on the golden bed; There eve by eve I tarried mid the speech and the lays of kings; There ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... north-east of the village of Faedde. The Faedde Fiord is of great depth, and in a circular bay to which we had now sailed, no anchorage for a vessel of the yacht's tonnage could be found. Running her, therefore, into a bight, ropes from the bow and stern were made fast to a couple of firs, and by belaying them taut, the cutter was kept clear from the base of a mountain that rose, straight as the mast, out of the water to an altitude of several thousand feet. This was the most ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... course of the Great Yang-tzu, descending from Tibet to Yun-nan, forms the great bight or elbow to which allusion has just been made, and which has been a feature known to geographers ever since the publication of D'Anville's atlas. The tract enclosed in this elbow is cut in two by another great Tibetan River, the Yarlung, or Yalung-Kiang, which joins the Kin-sha not far from ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of entrancing inner waters, our own marvellous Lake Country of the East, lies just behind those mountains of Maine that sink their bases in the Atlantic and are fitly termed in Indian nomenclature Waves-of-the-Sea. Bight and bay indent this mountainous coast, in beauty comparable, if less sublime yet more enticing, to the Norwegian fjords; within them are set the islands large and small whereon the sheep, sheltered by cedar coverts, crop the short thick turf that is nourished by mists from the Atlantic. Above ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... or Bamnepo, with its outlying islet-reef of black rock, on which breaks an eternal surf, is the theoretical turning-point from the Windward coast, which begins with the Senegal, to the Leeward, and which ends in the Benin Bight. We ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... thirty 50 Outfits of armor, when the ocean he mounted. The Hetwars by no means had need to be boastful Of their fighting afoot, who forward to meet him Carried their war-shields: not many returned from The brave-mooded battle-knight back to their homesteads. 55 Ecgtheow's bairn o'er the bight-courses swam then, Lone-goer lorn to his land-folk returning, Where Hygd to him tendered ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... matches to his collection Trot made no comment, for she knew these last were to light their way through the caves. The sailor always rowed the boat, for he handled the oars with strength and skill. Trot sat in the stern and steered. The place where they embarked was a little bight or circular bay, and the boat cut across a much larger bay toward a distant headland where the caves were located, right at the water's edge. They were nearly a mile from shore and about halfway across the bay when Trot suddenly sat up straight and exclaimed: "What's ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... ay, and for many a week before. Nay rather, had He not looked on it from all eternity? For is He not the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world? Therefore we may well look on it with Him. It may seem, at first, a painful bight. But shall it cast over our minds only gloom and darkness? Or shall we not see on the Cross the full revelation of Light; of the Light which lightens every man that comes into the world: and find that ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... with some difficulty my father and the agent got on board, for the sea was high and cross, the tide setting against the wind; my brother and I were left in the boat to follow in the wake of the brig; but as my brother was casting off the rope forward, his leg caught in the bight, and into the sea he went; however, they hauled him on board, leaving me alone in the coble. It was not of much consequence, as I could manage to follow before the wind under easy sail, without assistance: so I kept her in the wake of the brig, both of us running nearly ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... kingdom of Denmark comprehends all the districts from which issued, according to the old accounts, the several tribes who invaded Britain upon the fall of the Roman Empire. And the Danes proper (who may be considered to represent the Jutes); the Angles, who live between the Bight of Flensborg and the river Schley on the Baltic; the Frisons, who inhabit the islands along the west coast of Jutland, with a part of the bailiwick of Husum in Schleswig; and the Germans of Holstein (Bede's Old Saxons) are still all recognized ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... a bight of rope from the ship, and I clambered back on deck. Captain Coffin told me to go below and change my dripping clothes, and then I could go in the boat with him and pull the after oar. You may lay ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... sense of dirty discomfort which one is never quit of in London. The morning was harsh, too, and though the wind was from the south-west it was as cold as a north wind; and yet amidst it all, I thought of the corner of the next bight of the river which I could not quite see from where I was, but over which one can see clear of houses and into Richmond Park, looking like the open country; and dirty as the river was, and harsh as was the January wind, they seemed to woo me toward the country-side, where away ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... smokes where the inhabitants were clearing and cultivating their grounds. We had now ran 25 miles to the W S W since noon, and were W five miles from a low point, which in the afternoon I imagined had been the southernmost land, and here the coast formed a deep bend, with low land in the bight that appeared like islands. The west shore was high; but from this part of the coast to the high cape which we were abreast of yesterday noon, the shore is low, and I believe shoal. I particularly remark this situation, because here the very high ridge of mountains, that run from ...
— 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
... was green to the very summit, and from the elevation where they stood they could see a long and narrow stretch to the north, the distance in that direction being much farther than they had traveled from the little bight of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... guesses right—had lifted higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole length of its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with those strong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the mainland, venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern half, rose in dazzling white ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... and the ebb in conjunction, push the spit to the north, and as the sand advances, vegetation consolidates the work. Then comes the season of northerly winds, when the apex of the spit is forced backwards and outwards into a brief but graceful flourish, in the bight of which small boats may nestle, though the seas roar and show white teeth a few yards away. Since the winds of the north are less in duration and persistency than those from the south and east, the tendency of the spit—in defiance of the yearly setback—is to the north. Driftwood, logs, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Polish culture which is one of the glories of Europe. Nations may not inexactly be divided into those who seek and those who avoid the sea. The Poles are of the latter type. This belt, therefore, of Borussia (whence our word Prussia is derived)—roughly from the Vistula up on to the Bight of Libau—was held by the Teutonic knights in a sort of savage independence. The Christian faith, which it had been their pretext and at first their motive to spread, took little root; but they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany itself had absorbed ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... 'Bight you are!' cried Wegg. 'Then,' screwing the weight of his body upon his wooden leg, and screwing his wooden head very much on one side, and screwing up one eye: 'then, I put the question to you, what's this ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... The sun was now peering triumphantly over the hills on the far side of the valley, and the path was (an extraordinary thing in Kashmir) excessively dusty. Up and on we panted, Jane partly supported by having the bight of the shikari's puggaree round her waist while he ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... neither did I, until all at once I heard it break and saw Mr Turnbull fall in and disappear. Many people were close to us, and a rope was laid across the spot to designate the danger. I did not hesitate—I loved Mr Turnbull, and my love and my feelings of resentment were equally potent. I seized the bight of the rope, twisted it round my arm, and plunged in after, recollecting it was ebb tide: fortunate for Mr Turnbull it was that he had accidentally put the question. I sank under the ice, and pushed down the stream, and in a few seconds felt myself grappled ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... envy or ill-will among his humbler neighbors, for his superiority was never questioned. Men bowed to him with honest good-will, and boys, who had been flogged at school for confounding Congo and Coromandel, and putting Borneo in the Bight of Benin, made an awkward obeisance and stared wonderingly, as they met the man who had actually sailed round the world, and had, in his own person, illustrated the experiment of walking with his head downwards among the antipodes. His house had no rival in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Afterwards he had at the peril of his life, made an exploring trip across the base of the northern peninsula of the colony with the intention, as he phrased it, of 'shaking round a bit.' He 'shook round' to some purpose, penetrated to the Big Bight, and got on the tracks of a famous lost explorer. Colin McKeith solved the mystery of that explorer's fate and had his revenge on the Government which had impeached him by pocketing the reward which it had offered any adventurous pioneer ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... was launched and filled with its human freightage. The boatswain went in charge and four seamen tugged at the sweeps. There were trees and clumps of bushes among the hillocks of sand and a tiny bight for a landing place. The bulwark was then chopped away so that the largest raft could be shoved into the water by means of tackles, rollers and handspikes. It floated buoyantly and supported as many as fifteen men, who did not mind in the least getting their ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... coast of New Guinea which were recorded by Freycinet, from the manuscript journal of Coutance, in the history of Baudin's voyage.* A portion of this is unquestionably the land seen by Captain Bligh in 1792—but in addition detached portions of the shores of the great bight of the south-east coast were seen, as in the neighbourhood of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... sails, Come hither to me and to me: Hither, come hither and frolic and play; Here it is only the mew that wails; We will sing to you all the day: Mariner, mariner, furl your sails, For here are the blissful downs and dales, And merrily merrily carol the gales, And the spangle dances in bight [1] and bay, And the rainbow forms and flies on the land Over the islands free; And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand; Hither, come hither and see; And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave, And sweet is the colour of cove ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... back to Jamestown. For this purpose they dispatched a ship across the Bay, with two hundred and fifty men, under the command of Giles Bland, "a man of courage and haughty bearing," and "no great admirer of Sir William's goodness." The ship proceeded to the Accomac shore, anchored in some bight, and sent ashore men to treat with the Governor. But the Governor turned the tables on them. He made himself captor, instead of being made captive. Bland and his lieutenants were taken, whereupon their following surrendered into Berkeley's hands. ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... bay, and been washed away by the undermining of the low alluvial banks on which they grow, and carried out to sea by the current. Along several of the freshwater channels on the western side of the Great Bight examined by the Fly's boats in 1844, I had seen this palm growing on the margin of the stream in great profusion, and according to Giaom, the bisi tree (as she called it) is occasionally carried by the winds ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the most noted of these occasions was the repulse of ten Picaroon barges that attacked the United States topsail schooner "Experiment," and a fleet of merchantmen under her charge. The "Experiment," with her convoy, was lying becalmed in the Bight of Leogane, in the island of San Domingo. Not a breath of air was stirring; and the vessels, drifting about at the mercy of the currents, soon became widely separated, and were an easy prey for the hordes of Picaroons ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... in words: a triangular porch projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device; for, as the post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bowing, (Boats in that climate are so polite,) And sands were a ribbon of green endowing, And O the sun-dazzle on bark and bight! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... might be imagined, some time before we saw the light of his countenance; but when we did, we had no difficulty 30 in getting alongside of him again. My friend Goliath, much to my delight, got there first and succeeded in picking up the bight of the line. But having done so, his chance of distinguishing himself was gone. Hampered by the immense quantity of sunken line which was attached to the whale, he could do nothing and soon received orders to cut the bight of the line and pass the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... vain I called to him to come to me, and lay hold of the boat; he could neither see nor hear, and would have soon joined his illustrious namesake in the Elysian fields, had I not managed to throw the bight of a rope round his neck, and towed him within reach, when I held him up by the collar of his jacket (ducking him under water occasionally to make him cease from howling) until we were rescued by ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the offing, and said: "It is hard work to get hold of a swan, though they are a large bird, and abundant in Currituck Sound. You must use a good rifle to bring one down. After a strong norther has been blowing, and the birds have worked well into the bight of the bay, near Goose Castle Point, if the wind shifts to the south suddenly, gunners approach from the outside, and the birds becoming cramped in the cove are shot as ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... said, Tarboe lay rocking in a bight at Anticosti, with an empty hold and a scanty larder. Still, he was in no ill-humour, for he smoked much and talked more than common. Perhaps that was because Joan was with him—an unusual thing. She was as good a sailor as her father, but she did not care, nor ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a fire-bucket and fill it from the men's kids: Mr. Tickell, see the cook swallow his own mess. Bosen's mate, take a bight of the flying jib sheet stand over him, and start him if he dailies with it." With this the captain went below, and the cook, supping at the bucket delivered himself as follows: "Well, ye lubbers, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and his people were not idle. The tide did not run very strong near the wharves and in the sort of a bight in which the vessel had lain; but, such as it was, it soon took the brig on her inner bow, and began to cast her head off shore. The people at the spring pulled away with all their force, and got sufficient motion on their vessel to overcome the tide, and to give the rudder an influence. The ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... with the gray whale, and the captain had been bemoaning the decay of the whaling industry, the work of bringing the dead whale to the surface had been under way. Letting out more slack on the rope attached to the harpoon a bight of it was passed through a sheave-block at the masthead, thus giving a greater purchase for the lifting of the heavy body. The winch was run by a small donkey-engine, and for about ten minutes the line was hauled in, fathom after fathom being coiled on the deck. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... first authentic information of the death of Park, and recovered his gun, robe, and other relics. Here, embarking in canoes, they ascended the river through its rapids to Yaouri, and thence traced it to the sea in the Bight of Benin. On their way, they discovered the Benue, which joins the Niger two hundred and seventy miles from the ocean, with a volume of water and a width nearly equal to its own. They encountered a large ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... he returned with the other in his boat, which he moored to the opposite side of the Woodville. The middle of the rope was kept on the bottom of the lake by the stone, while the two ends were carried forward by the boys until the bight was drawn under the keel of the steamer, as far as her position on the rocks would permit it to go. Lawry's end was made fast around the smokestack, and Ethan's to ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... began to darken, Sandell listened eagerly for distant signals, until on February 16, in latitude 47 degrees S, the "calls" of three ships in the vicinity of the Great Australian Bight were recognized. After this date news was picked up every night, and all the items were posted on a morning bulletin ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... sheer in for the beach, to a little bight that made up in the land,—across the mouth of which we had to pull, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... he slipped the bight of short rope round Zorzi's body under his arms and got a turn round the rail with both parts, so as to lower him easily. Zorzi helped himself as well as he could, and in a few moments he was lying in the bottom ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... Scorpion from the lower streets of Gib. He did not mention marriage to her, beyond admitting that he had half a dozen wives already, and had been too bored by convention ever to submit to the yoke again. The maid seemed enraptured—delirious in the bight of his lawless arm, forgetful of her wetting, and only afraid when he left her for ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... p.m. weigh'd and run in nearer the South shore and Anchor'd in 4 1/2 fathoms, a soft sandy bottom, the South point of the Bay bearing East, distant 1 Mile, and a River (into which the boats can go at low Water) South-South-East, distant 1 1/2 Miles.* (* The bight in which the Endeavour anchored is now known as Cook Bay.) In the morning the Natives came off again to the Ship, but their behaviour was very different to what it was Yesterday morning, and the little traffick we had with them was carried on very fair ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... that there is good anchorage in the bight to the northward of South Cape on the western side of which Cape Liptrap makes the northern head. The land here is high and the mountains covered with wood. Cape Liptrap is low and flat as is the land ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... it smote the cliff, and striving for the narrow outgate made a prodigious eddy or whirlpool ere it might clear itself of the under-water foot of the ness and make eastward so as to rush on toward the sea. But in the face of the wall, in the bight where the whirlpool turned from it, was a cave the height of a tall man, and some four feet athwart, and below it a ledge thrust out from the sheer rock and hanging over the terrible water, and it was but a yard wide or so. It was but ten feet above the water, and from it to the grass above ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... : 73.6 million sq km note: includes Arabian Sea, Bass Straight, Bay of Bengal, Great Australian Bight, Gulf of Oman, Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Strait of Malacca, and other tributary ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the bay. From Tanjong Datu the coast recedes into a bay, and again forms a low point, which I have christened Tanjong Lundu. The river Lundu disembogues itself into the bay just beyond the point of the same name; and the land on its far bank forms a bight of considerable depth. The Lundu is a barred river with but little water; though, judging from the opening, it is by no means small. Our pilots inform me at the same time, however, that within the bar there is ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... loud groan. He then said quietly to the spectators, "He will drown me in another half minute." But at this critical moment out came from the other extremity of the pool Judge Lynch, swimming with a long rope in his hand; one end of this rope he had made into a bight ere he took the water. He swam behind Walker and Jem, whipped the noose over their heads and tightened it under their shoulders. "Haul!" cried he to Ede, who held the other end of the rope. Ede hauled, and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... one afternoon, they came to Margarita, and, the ship needing water, they entered a placid bight, where a strip of dazzling sand lay between the rippling surf and a heavy wood, but found beforehand with them a small bark from the mainland, her crew ashore filling barrels from a limpid spring, and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... the excellent fish which was caught in shoals, they simply asked, "What will you pay for it?" I imprudently left my keg of specimen-spirits on board this ignoble craft, and the consequence was that it speedily became bone-dry. The Musaybah bight is a direct continuation of the Wady el-Mellah, which, joining that of El-Maka'dah, runs straight up to the Jebel el-Abyaz and to the Filon Husayn. These metalliferous quartzes cannot be further from the coast than a maximum distance of fourteen miles, and the broad, smooth watercourse, with ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Factories, & Public Buildings, Heated by Steam, Low Pressure. Woodward Building, 76 and 78 Center st., cor. of Worth st. (formerly of 77 Beekman st.), N.Y. All parties are hereby cautioned against infringing the Pat. Bight of the above Pump. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... bight of the Southeast shoare of the riuer Cola, there is a good roade in fiue fadome, or foure fadome and a halfe, at a lowe water: but you shall haue no land Northnortheast of you then, I proued with our pinnesse, that the depth goeth ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... Where, about the windy Nare, Foxes breed and falcons pair; Where the gannet dries a wing Wet with fishy harvesting, And the cormorants resort, Flapping slowly from their sport With the fat Atlantic shoal, Homeward to Tregeagle's Hole— Walking there, the other day, In a bight within a bay, I espied amid the rocks, Bruis'd and jamm'd, the daintiest box, That the waves had flung and left High upon an ivied cleft. Striped it was with white and red, Satin-lined and carpeted, Hung with bells, and shaped withal Like the queer, fantastical Chinese ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... till we come to Cape Three-points, and about ten leagues westward from that Cape the land begins to rise, and grows higher all the way to the point. Also about 5 leagues west from that Cape there is some broken ground with two great rocks, within which, in the bight of a bay, there is a castle called Arra belonging to the king of Portugal, which is readily known by these rocks, as there are none other between Cape Palmas and Cape Three-points. The coast trends E. by N. and W. by S. From Cape Palmas to Arra castle is 95 leagues, and from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... first ebb making Lumpy and strong in the bight. Boom after boom, and the golf-hut shaking And the jackdaws wild with fright! "Mines located in the fairway, "Boats now working up the chain, "Sweepers—Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... mean, guest? I think them very beautiful, I mean not only the pictures, but the stories; and when we were children we used to imagine them going on in every wood-end, by the bight of every stream: every house in the fields was the Fairyland King's House to ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... in the Gulf of Guinea, or Bight of Biafra, as it is usually called by English navigators, Ferdinand Poo, Princes isle, St Thomas, and Annobon, the discovery of which have been related as follows by Barbot, and his account seems the most probable[2]. Fernando Lopez discovered ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... proceeded to Ambong, a place where it was supposed that an European female had been detained as a slave. Ambong is a pretty little bay, with a Malay village built in the bight of it, and there is a fine view of Keeney Balloo, the great mountain of Borneo, in the back-ground. This mountain, estimated to be 14,000 feet high, is about forty miles from Ambong, and with the aid of a glass we could ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... points; the rope twirled and spun him about; but he got foothold on the deck and managed to hang on. By working cautiously he dodged up to the mast and fastened the little child in a comfortable bight of the rope; then he sent the woman aloft; then he sent the captain, and was hauled up safely himself. Matthews had no reward for this piece of work, and ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... in the coral reef surrounding the island, leading into a large basin, the central portion only of which has sufficient water for shipping. The bottom is mud, which, they say, is fast accumulating, especially in a small bight called the Trou Fanfaron, where a few years ago a line-of-battle ship could float, but which has now scarcely water enough for a large corvette. The reefs about the entrance are nearly dry at low-water, at which time one may wade ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... ago Dr. Grenfell anchored his vessel in Big Bight, and went ashore to visit David Long. David had had a hard winter, and among other kindnesses to the family, Dr. Grenfell presented David's two oldest boys, lads of fifteen or sixteen or thereabouts, with a dozen steel fox traps. Lack of traps had prevented the boys taking part in ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... of the foremast snapped first; then the shrouds on the same side doubled in a great bight and parted; next the mast, with a loud, shrieking crash, splintered and went by the board. It fell slowly and with an air of dignified, solemn resignation, like Caesar under the daggers of the conspirators. The cross stays flew apart like cobwebs, but the lee shrouds unfortunately ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the pirates' head-quarters. There is a little bight just at the junction of the old and the new channels, and it is there that they lie in ambush with their junks. Now, sir, you can perhaps see their masts standing up behind that ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... takes another sweep to the west and northward, and comes out again three or four leagues to the north-east, at a low but somewhat cliffy projection, to which I gave the name of Point Bolingbroke. The large bight within received the appellation of Louth Bay; and two low islands in it, of which the largest is more than a mile in length, were called Louth Isles. At Point Bolingbroke the land appeared to trend north or westward, and could no further ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... stood by Lake Tiberias, in the sun Of the bight Orient; and beheld the lame, The sick, and blind, kneel at the Master's feet, And rise up whole. And, sweetly over all, Dropping the ladder of their hymn of praise From heaven to earth, in silver rounds of song, He heard the blessed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... interrupted Kennedy McClure, who had come up from below, "what think ye of the landing? Can we make the auld place within the bight of the Mays Water? That would be the nearest to the Bothy on ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... gets a bight 'round ye, ye never git away from it," groaned the Cap'n. "The law sharks is always waitin' for seafarin' men. There ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... the following ingenious way. Near the edge of the floe was a crack in the ice of considerable length, but only eighteen inches or two feet wide, and three or four feet deep. To this spot the bear turned; and when, on crossing the chasm, the bight of the rope fell into it, he placed himself across the opening; then suspending himself by his hind feet, with a leg on each side, he dropped his head and most part of his body into the chasm; and with a foot applied to each side of the neck, attempted ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... The anchor suspended astern of the Saratoga was let go, and the men hauled in on the hawser that led to the starboard quarter, bringing the ship's stern up over the kedge. The ship now rode by the kedge and by a line that had been bent to a bight in the stream cable, and she was raked badly by the accurate fire of the Linnet. By rousing on the line the ship was at length got so far round that the aftermost gun of the port broadside bore on the Confiance. The men had been sent forward to keep as much ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... deg. 6' S. Lat., about 125 miles east of Aru, and according to the chart we had with us and the estimation of the skippers and steersmen, no more than 2 miles from Nova Guinea, so that the space between us and Nova Guinea seems to be a bight to which on account of its shallows we have given the name of drooge bocht [*] [shallow bight] in the new chart; to the land which we had run along up to now, we have by resolution given the name of 't Westeinde van Nova Guinea (Western extremity of N. G.), seeing ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... therefore only remains for me to fulfil the wishes of the committee, and to inform you that they expect, on your return to Queensland, to be furnished with a copy of your journal and surveys; and that, as Mr. Walker has not arrived so as to enable me to make arrangements for meeting him at the Limmon Bight River, you are to consider that no such arrangement will be made, and that I shall look for your return to this depot within the time specified. And as you have full instructions for your guidance, the ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... made with regard to this stream along shore. It was ascertained that during easterly gales a portion of the water, crowded up into the bight of the coast, escapes seaward by a sub-current. Shells, carefully marked, were deposited in the sea during fine weather, and, after an easterly gale, were picked up on the shore of Fire Island, four miles eastward of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... related the Major, who had really begun to enjoy California, "that the view from this Point includes more varied scenery than any other that is known in the world. Here we see the grand San Bernardino range of mountains; the Spanish Bight on the Mexican shore; the pretty city of San Diego climbing its hills, with the placid bay in front, where float the warships of the Pacific Squadron; the broad stretch of orange and lemon groves, hedged with towering palm trees; Santa Catalina and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... this delightful spot, which I never remember to have seen anywhere else, though, there must often occur in other places similar situations in which it might be imitated. Not far from the house, but quite hid under a thickly-wooded cliff, overhanging a quiet bight or cove, about ten or fifteen yards across, lay a perfectly secluded pool, with a bottom of snow-white sand. It was deep in the middle, but shelved gradually to its margin, which rested on a narrow ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... plain at Maryborough, protected by the surrounding forest from the action of the wind, the heated air accumulates over the surface until carried off in eddies, so, though on a vastly larger scale, in that great bight formed by the coasts of North and South America, having for its apex the Gulf of Mexico, there is an immense area in the northern tropics, nearly surrounded by land, forming a vast oceanic plain, shut off from the regular action of ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... of my old shipmate Ted Gilmour, who commanded the Bucephalus on the West Coast for two commissions and died of fever in the Bight of Benin? Bless my soul, ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... before the Court except at night. But for all this there was no lack of evidence; there were thousands who had been robbed and maltreated, or who had seen these outrages committed on others, and the boldness of the leaders in their bight of power rendered their identification a matter of no ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... half-an-hour, and then a sort of bay or bight appearing on one side, we brought the vessel into it, and moored her stem and stern fast to the trees. There she lay so completely concealed, that any one passing up the canal could not by any possibility have seen her, even in ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... place had one brig-of-war which (erroneously in my last I rated at sixteen guns) mounted but fourteen long 24-pounders and two mortars; she was made fast in a small bight, with a plank on shore and high rocks on each side of her, behind which were posted a strong corps of Albanian troops; she was likewise protected by a battery close under her bow and five other ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane |
