"Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mentioned, his hero performs rather a feat in shearing three and a half pounds of washed wool in twenty-three and one-half minutes, A Mexican would have to take a reef in his big hat if he could not do better than that. His tin check is worth four and a half cents to him, and a fair hand ought to have at least fifty in his pocket at sunset, in return for as many seven-pound unwashed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of Norman's Woe. ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not. One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... round; then to retreat from us. Across our way appears a long band of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color from the extended spur of verdure in which the western end of the island terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on her beam-ends,—the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... other towards the central peak of Mount Maitland, 1700 feet high. On the right bow, low sharp cliff-points of volcanic ash; and on the right again, a circular lake a quarter of a mile across and 40 feet in depth, with a coral reef, almost awash, stretching from it to the ash-cliff on the south side of the harbour mouth. A glance shows that this is none other than an old crater, like that inside English Harbour in Antigua, probably that which has hurled out the boulders and the ash; and one whose temper ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... couch which Abdul had made for him under the shadow of a mighty rock. The desert was no longer a shoreless sea of golden sand; they were reaching the reef of hills ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... rend the battling ship. All the night is mad and murderous: who shall front the night? Not the prow that labours, helpless as a storm-blown leaf, Where the rocks and waters, darkling depth and beetling height, Rage with wave on shattering wave and thundering reef on reef. Death is fallen upon the prisoners there of darkness, bound Like as thralls with links of iron fast in bonds of doom; How shall any way to break the bands of death be found, Any hand avail to pluck them from that raging tomb? All the night is great with child of death: ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while she herself should ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil Michael Renow Jean Reo Barton Repent Jean Requal Jesse Rester Louis Rewof Thomas Reynelds ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... but that reef-girt shore seemed to forbid the approach of a vessel. Nevertheless he set up long poles with flags on them at different points of the island, so that a passing ship might see them for miles out ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... of sketches of island life in the South Seas, not inferior to those contained in 'By Reef and Palm.'"—Speaker. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, 'when I had money of my own, I always gave it.' It was only on ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... zone: 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: none Climate: equatorial; scant rainfall, constant wind, burning sun Terrain: low-lying, nearly level, sandy, coral island surrounded by a narrow fringing reef; depressed central area Natural resources: guano (deposits worked until late 1800s) Land use: arable land: 0% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 5% other: 95% Irrigated land: 0 km2 Environment: almost totally covered with grasses, prostrate vines, and low-growing ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in the morning we were near a point of the coast off which a large reef extended about a mile in length, we ran in between the land and this reef, which we estimated to be in 23 deg. Lat., and thus sailed along the coast, along which there was another reef, inside which the water seemed to be very smooth and still; we did our best to get inside this ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... regard to the cattle, was happily removed. Mr. Hume with his usual perseverance, walked out when the camp was formed; and, at a little distance from it, ascended a ridge of pure sand, crowned with cypresses. From this, he descended to the westward, and, at length, struck upon the river, where a reef of rocks creased its channel, and formed a dry passage from one side to the other; but the bend, which the river must have taken, appeared to him so singular, that he doubted whether it was the same ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... struck upon an unknown reef, a gale of wind in the meantime blowing, and the sea running high. Every effort was made to save the ship by the officers and crew; the poor coolies, battened down beneath the decks, being allowed no chance to aid in saving the ship or themselves. Although the yards ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Captain Riggs at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned, waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... aside, and busied himself with taking another reef in his suspenders. "The Rev'und Gawge wanted me to go," he said, in a low tone. "Besides, how can I know what all's in the books he done left me ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... almost gone, and the dust covered most of what was left: still there was a wonderful spirit and grace, and a wild, weird beauty which attracted us exceedingly; but the captain could only tell us that it had belonged to the wreck of a Danish brig which had been driven on the reef where the lighthouse stands now, and his father had found this on the long sands a day or two afterward. "That was a dreadful storm," said the captain. "I've heard the old folks tell about it; it was when I was only a year or two old. There were three merchantmen wrecked ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... bird trims her to the gale I trim myself to the storm of time; I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime; "Lowly faithful banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... It ain't enough to know how to reef a gasket, you got to make the mate know you know it. That's reputation. The good word, said at the right time, that's the word that makes us; and evil be to him that evil thinks, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... West India Islands, within the reefs of which there are large swamps. All the reefs I have myself seen could be associated only with nearly pure calcareous rocks. I have received a description of a reef lying some way off the coast near Belize (terra firma), where a thick bed of mud seems to have invaded and covered a coral reef, leaving but very few islets yet free from it. But I can give you no precise information without my notes (even if then) ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of ports and storms, mates and ships and logged days. "Remember Oahu like it was when we first made it," he queried, "and the Kanaka girls swimming out to the ship with hybiscus flowers in their hair? Yes, and the anchorage at Tahiti with the swells pounding on the coral reef and Papeete under the mountain? It was nice there in the afternoon, lying off the beach with the white cottages among the palms and orange trees and the band playing in the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... before the admiral spoke the vessels outside, he was compelled to take in all his light canvass; and when he filled, again, after giving his orders to the frigate and sloop, the topgallant sheets were let fly, a single reef was taken in the top-sails, and the lighter sails were set over them. This change in the weather, more especially as the night threatened to be clouded, if not absolutely dark, would necessarily bring about a corresponding change in ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people on different parts of the coast, walking, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... masters. I'll soon find tasks for you. You!" he exclaimed, seizing Dick, "go and help the cook in the galley, you two will pick oakum," he added, turning to Lancelot and me; "and when the hands are sent aloft to reef sails, as you seem active fellows, you'll go to ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 15 United States—American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), Virgin ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is Upper Buchanan, whose river, the St. John's, owns a bar infamous as that of Lagos for surf and sharks. The southernmost, Lower Buchanan, is defended by a long and broken wall of black reef, but the village is far from smooth water. All these 'towns' occupy holes in a curtain of the densest and tallest greenery. They are composed of groups and scatters of whitewashed houses, half of them looking like chapels and the other like toys. Each has its adjunct of brown ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the face of the compass again to assure myself of the direction. I found even this small change an advantage in more ways than one, as the boat moved steadier, and I was able to spread a larger amount of canvas. Lashing the tiller, I crept forward and shook out an additional reef, hauling the ropes taut. By this time the wind had steadied into a brisk breeze, and the rain had ceased. Crawling back across the thwarts, I took the jumping tiller again into my hands, and held her nose to it, seeking every advantage. I had ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Islands were easily visible. The principal one lay upon the water in the distance, a long, dull-colored body; scalloped with slight hills and valleys. We could not go straight at it, but had to travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is fenced with an invisible coral reef. At last we sighted buoys, bobbing here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them, "raised the reef," and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further shoaled into pale green, with a surface ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... he started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the "Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—quarter less twain—then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming—nine ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South America of the intermittent elevation of the land, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... One for saddle, and the other to carry a pack. You see, I've struck color in a curious place, and it promises good. But it's away off, near twenty miles in the foot-hills. It's an outcrop I've been tracing for quite a while, and if my calculations are right, the reef comes right along down here through Barnriff. You see, I've been working on those ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... and hope our chart, With childish glee on our voy'ge we start, The boat glides merrily o'er the wave. But ah! there's many a storm to brave, And many a dang'rous reef to clear, And rushing rapid o'er ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... mended as well as the foresail, and was set anew. The sheets went, however, about two in the morning, and the sail flew from the reef-band like a bit of muslin torn by a shop-boy. The brig now had nothing set but a close-reefed main-topsail, and this I expected, every minute, would follow the other canvass. It rained, blew tremendously, and the sea was ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... carry on; reef none, boy, none; Hang her out on a stretching sail: Gunnel in, gunnel in! for the race we'll win, While the land-lubbers so pale— (Carry on!) While the land-lubbers so pale Are fumbling at their points, my son, For ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... like a thunder-clap-like the roar of breakers on a reef, burst from the spectators; a shout of triumph so mighty that the statues quivered, the brazen altars rang, the hangings swayed, the sacred vessels clattered and the lamps trembled and swung; the echo rolled round the aisles like a whirlpool at the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... who clung to him, he made no attempt to strike out. He knew that the waves would bear him quickly enough on to the rocks, and he reserved himself for the struggle with them. A great roller came surging over the outlying reef. It carried him in like a feather and hurled him up against the face of the cliff. As he struggled upon its crest, he mechanically put out his hands and seized a projecting portion of the rock. The shock of the contact ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shred, sir," said Philip; "the scissors shall only be used to cut the threads, with which the ladies take in a reef here and ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep. Nothing is to be seen out of Sandag Bay, but one small segment of the horizon and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bitter cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson light hung motionless, against which leafless trees ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the whole Bahama group, and the name San Salvador somehow became shifted in time to another island. Thus was the original landfall long lost sight of, and no two writers could agree on the subject. Recently, however, the most careful students have decided upon the reef now called Watling's Island, to-day an English ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... are grannies. They would jam so that you'd never untie 'em, besides being ugly. There's wrong ways even in doing up a string. See here." He rapidly twisted the ends together into a reef-knot. "There's strength and beauty together," he said. "Look how neat it is, the ends tidy along the standing part, all so neat as pie. Besides, it'd never jam. Watch how I do it, and then try it ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... judges were probably Roman knights after the model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... again after sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the run he passed several ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of seeing a fine crystal ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... to some of us, a beautiful dream for years. And were we disappointed? Oh, no! No picture of our imagination had ever been so bright, so beautiful as that spread out before us, as our gallant ship sailed majestically through the coral reef into the beautiful harbor of Honolulu. It was like entering a new world; everything was bright with tropical splendor. The mountains, in whose hearts had slumbered volcanic fires, which, from time to time, had burst forth, lighting up the great ocean with Tartarean brilliancy, and scattering red-hot ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... but rapt eawt wi awt uts reef, un us Berry foke'll elp yo as ard as we kon. Wayn helps Robdin, un wayn elp yo, if yoan ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... for the icebergs of frozen Labrador, Floating spectral in the moonshine along the low, black shore. Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below; And the white squall smites in summer, and the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... was gold; now it was land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and "twenty pieces of silver"; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the picnic was a good way off, being the point of the promontory that shut in the mouth of the river, a great crag, with a long reef of rocks running out into the sea, playfully called the Kitten's Tail, though the antiquarians always deposed that the head had nothing to do with cats or kits, but with the disposition to erect ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... great animation, in his native tongue, about the pleasures of "faahee," or surf-bathing, and the exquisite fun of dodging the "manos," or sharks, among the rollers. Presently he struck out into the lagoon, and before we could guess his intention, he swam over to the reef, and, picking his way across it, plunged fearlessly among the breakers on the outside. He stayed, however, but a short time, and came back saying, that the "manos" were altogether too thick out there, and that a huge blue one, had come near seizing him in the surf, before he ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... likely to be so with the wind rising out of the northeast; and ere long the Petrel's topmast was sent down, and a double reef put in her mainsail. Until midnight it blew hard with a fast rising sea, and a mist as thick as a hedge. After this, it was ugly weather all the way home, and as they passed Ailsa Craig the wind changed to full north, and fetched the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... House at a dinner to meet a little tin soldier cousin in white epaulettes, who was over from Germany ... and (the German Ambassador) Count Munster told me that the French had hoisted their flag on a reef, as he said, within cannon-shot of Jersey, as to the British or neutral nature of which there had long been a dispute between the two Governments.' [Footnote: The Memoir has a note upon this episode of the Ecrehous Books, which led ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... The Spectator, don't know what you miss. The thrilling stories I have listened to! Once I heard a circumstantial story of a wreck in the South Seas told by the plucky little wife of the captain, who had stayed by her husband's side—"Papa" she called him—while the ship slowly sank on a coral reef, and then drifted about in an open boat for days ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... draw nearer and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the uptilted edge of the boat. The little ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... oars, lads, and rig the mast, reef down the sail to the last point; we must show a little to keep her dead before the wind; we shall have a tremendous sea when we are once fairly away from the shelter of the island. This gale will soon knock up the sea, and with the cross swell from the Atlantic it will be as ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... expired and I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked among ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... I express no opinion on the controverted points. I doubt if there are ten living men who, having a practical knowledge of what a coral-reef is, have endeavoured to master the very difficult biological and geological problems involved in their study. I happen to have spent the best part of three years among coral-reefs and to have made that attempt; and, when Mr. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... upon one or more of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... boat there was great store of silver and gold, and some victuals. On the same evening the fleet came to anchor off Melinda, which is eighteen leagues from Mombaza, and is in lat. 3 deg. S. This place has no good harbour, being only an almost open roadstead, having a kind of natural pier or reef of rocks on which the sea beats with much violence, owing to which the ships have to ride at a considerable distance from the shore. The city stands in a broad open plain, along the shore, surrounded with many palms, and other sorts of trees, which are green the whole ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... the expedition was not a very auspicious one, for on leaving the harbor of St. John (or "havre de Menuagoesche," as Villebon calls it) at 2 o'clock on the afternoon of the 2nd of August, d'Iberville ran the Envieux upon a reef; however, the damage was not serious as the ship floated when the tide rose. At Penobscot Baron St. Castin joined the expedition with 130 Indians. The French priests Simon and Thury, as the event proved, were no mere figure heads; they actively ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... the West Indies, he met with an old Spaniard who remembered the wreck of the Spanish ship, and gave him directions how to find the very spot. It was on a reef of rocks, a few leagues from ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... diamond mines; where these two unite below there was formerly a fort. The Landa river is extremely serpentine, deep to the very bushes on both sides, and quite clear of danger up to the town, except near Siminis creek, about ten miles below the fort; here a reef of rocks runs across the stream, and as the fair way over them is somewhat intricate, the channel ought to be buoyed before attempted to be passed. The Barracouta, drawing thirteen feet, just scraped them at ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... see that her eyes rested upon the edge of the wilderness. It seemed to him that she must be thinking of that; and he noted with pain, as often before, the contrast between her and her surroundings. From every direction the forest appeared to be rushing in upon that perilous little reef of a clearing—that unsheltered island of human life, newly displaying itself amid the ancient, blood-flecked, horror-haunted sea of woods. And shipwrecked on this island, tossed to it by one of the long tidal waves of history, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... is low, and the flat congewoi-covered ledges of reef on the southern side of the bar lie bare and exposed to the sun. Here and there in the crystal pools among the rocks, fish have been left by the tide, and as you step over the congewoi, whose teats spurt out jets of water to the pressure of ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... she were headin' west-nor'west, which were a good course, till eight bells in the arternoon watch, when the sea gittin' up so tremendiously we had to furl the reefed mainsail and mizzen topsail and close reef the fore ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... at the low comedy Shoes with the swollen Promontories and the Trousers with the double Reef and the folding Cuffs and the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... twenty-two gneiss reefs extending about six hundred and fifty feet, in front of the entrance to Plymouth Sound. Smeaton's lighthouse, modelled after the trunk of a sturdy oak in Windsor Park, became the model for all subsequent lighthouses. It is as firm to-day as when originally built, but the reef on which it rests has been undermined and shattered by the joint action of the waves and the leverage of the tall stone column, against which the seas strike with prodigious force, causing it to vibrate like ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... rock-bound reef of Unbelief There sat the wild Negation; Then they sank once more and were washed ashore At the Point ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought—gigantic, breaking seas—went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... powers of the microscope. It multiplies by means of buds like those of a tree, the individuals all combining to form a composite stony mass, which is called a polypidom. A number of such polypidoms growing close together form a coral reef. See woodcuts. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... were a portion of the crew of a whaler, which had struck on a reef of rocks about seventy miles off, and that they had been obliged to leave her immediately, as she fell on her broadside a few minutes afterwards; that they had left in two boats, but did not know what had become of the other ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... lee-beam lies the land, boys, See all clear to reef each course; Let the fore-sheet go, don't mind, boys, Though the weather ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... chain of reefs extending S from White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... he should have returned in time; only just in time it was; from the angry look of the outer world the island would now, for many a day be besieged by seas impassable to such small craft as alone could reach the reef. Had he tarried but to the next tide (and how sorely he had been tempted to remain an hour more in the gatekeeper's lodge within sight and hearing of buxom Moggie, Margery's grand-daughter), had he missed the tide, for days, maybe for weeks, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... coast, La Salle had sailed four hundred miles beyond the mouth of the river he sought. Unaware of his mistake, he determined to land and build a temporary fort; but the frigate Aimable, laden with stores, was wrecked upon a reef; Beaujeu, the recreant commander of the Joly, deserted his leader and made sail for France, and presently La Salle was left with only the little frigate Belle. Soon afterwards this vessel also sank beneath the stormy waters of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... whistled to himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs her off the ground." A tiny spit of flame, pale against ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... fearful of entering upon an unknown coast in the dark, we stood off all night, which was well for us, as we found ourselves at day-break next morning, 7th May, within a ship's length of a great reef of rocks, which extended from one island to the other, and thinking to have gone between the islands, we had nearly run upon this dangerous ledge. Having a small breeze from shore we were fortunately able to stand off, and went to the westermost island, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... and the Thursday following he had asked the Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly given and accepted, it was with ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... is thinking of dangers to shun,— Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,— she was laden with all the stores of the colony,—he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than those near our ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... acknowledge the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and breakers are foaming on the reef, she mounts the billows and survives the storm. That we are not suffering the pains of hell, that we have hopes of heaven and ever shall be there, we owe not to our good works, but to God's good will; to that only. Till ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... I cried to Oliver, throwing off my jacket; "we must swim for it!" and seizing him by the arm, I helped him to wade across the reef, and then plunging into the sea, we swam off towards the boat. Her crew perceived our danger, and with sturdy strokes pulled towards us. A glance I cast behind showed me that one of the canoes of the savages had ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, and what-not, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... back to him. There was no one in sight; the island was out of the lines of communication, and a point just north of them shut off the open water. But she saw that the reef to which Windham clung trended in to the shore a little way ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Their names were changed, the Eclaire being rechristened the Sylph, the Actif becoming the Hawke. Lieutenant Farrance was promoted to the rank of captain, and given the command of the latter vessel, and some of the survivors of a ship that had a fortnight before been lost on a dangerous reef were told off to her. He was, according to rule, permitted to take a boat's crew and a midshipman with him from his old ship, and he selected Will Gilmore, and, among the men, Dimchurch and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... future exploration will develop Midian as it has done India. The quartzose outcrop called the "Wynaad reef" (Madras Presidency) produced only a few poor penny-weights per ton, two and seven being the extremes, while much of it was practically unproductive. Presently, in February, 1878, the district was visited by Sir Andrew Clarke, of Australian experience, member of the Viceregal ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... outwardly calm, but with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... seamen. The soldiers carried their swords, and Black Simon bore a brown biscuit-bag over his shoulder. Under his direction the rowers skirted the dangerous surf which beat against the cliffs until they came to a spot where an outlying reef formed a breakwater. Within was a belt of calm water and a shallow cover with a sloping beach. Here the boat was dragged up and the seamen were ordered to wait, while Simon and Aylward started ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no more pressure; the freshening wind had worked the schooner into ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... breadth; has a mean depth of 375 fathoms (greatest 1200); receives no rivers, and owing to the great evaporation its water is very saline; long coral reefs skirt its shores, and of many islands Jebel Zugur, in the Farisan Archipelago, and Dahlak are the largest; the dangerous Daedalus Reef is marked by a lighthouse; as a seaway between Europe and the East its importance was greatly diminished by the discovery of the Cape route, but since the opening of the Suez Canal it has much more than regained its old position; owes its name probably ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her surprise she heard his voice, deep and sonorous as the bell-buoy that was moored by the Spear Point Reef. ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... this day we left the entrance of the harbor and bore away for Kennebeck river. In the latter part of the night, there came on a thick fog and our fleet was separated. At break of day we found ourselves in a most dangerous situation, very near a reef of rocks. The rocks indeed appeared on all sides of us, so that we feared we should have been dashed to pieces on some of them. We were brought into this deplorable situation by means of liquor being dealt out too freely to our pilots.—Their ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... wrapt in murky smoke, both rushed out together, breathing forth flaming fire. And sore afraid were the heroes at the sight. But Jason, setting wide his feet, withstood their onset, as in the sea a rocky reef withstands the waves tossed by the countless blasts. Then in front of him he held his shield; and both the bulls with loud bellowing attacked him with their mighty horns; nor did they stir him a jot by their onset. And as when through the holes of ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... the sects of the philosophers have stranded on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains to avow that God having acted for the best has not ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... survey? It is extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... pearl of Desay; of mad feasts and dances in the barbaric night, and quick dangers and sudden deaths; of the queen's love-making to Desay, of Desay's love-making to the queen's daughter, and of Desay, every joint crushed, still alive, staked out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by the sharks; of the coming of the plague; of the beating of tom-toms and the exorcising of the devil-devil doctors; of the flight over the man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... precipice, from which it was only separated by a parapet built on the ledge of the rock, so low that the eye might easily measure the depth of the crag, and gaze on the conflicting waters which foamed, struggled, and chafed over the reef below. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... all on the raging canal!" said Terrill to his captain, as the team started. "If it comes on to blow, we can take a reef ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... have reached such a state of complete uniformity of soul, mind and body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol—a portrait of ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... biographies. This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... We know that North America had a very different shape during the Cretaceous or even the Middle Tertiary period from what it has now, and that the Gulf of Mexico extended up the valley of the Mississippi as far as the Ohio, by the presence of a great coral reef in the Ohio River near Cincinnati. We know also that Florida and the Southeastern Atlantic States are a very recent addition to the continent, while the pampas of the Argentine Republic have, in a geological sense, but just been upheaved from the sea, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... admit that his men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail with a gentle ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... islands have not since subsided. I have no doubt that I should have considered them as formed during subsidence. But I should have been much troubled in my mind by the sea not being so deep as it usually is round atolls, and by the reef on one side sloping so gradually beneath the sea; for this latter fact, as far as my memory serves me, is a very unusual and almost unparalleled case. I always foresaw that a bank at the proper depth beneath the surface would give rise ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... answered. "If these light airs hold they may overhaul us, because they can spread so much more cloth. But if the westerly freshens—and it nearly always does in the afternoon—I can outsail the Gull. I can drive this old tub full sail in a blow that will make the Gull tie in her last reef." ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... know why, save that life was intolerable at home after the smash-up, and Winnie Morris heard I was getting wild, and turned a cold shoulder on me, I fancied. As to this craft, that reels and tumbles about like a reef of drunkards, she is bound for Australia; so I suppose, in due time, you and I will be landed on the shores of the golden Ophir, if we don't get turned into Davy Jones' ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... and after a while of squattering about and sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... gentle sister spirit, when you smile My soul is like a lonely coral isle, An islet shadowed by a single palm, Ringed round with reef ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... gone, and most of the people had left the wharf by this time. Bobtail, who was on the lookout for the signal, saw it immediately, and headed the yacht for the pier. As Ben Chinks had remarked, it blew hard, and the wind came in heavy flaws. The Skylark had a single reef in her mainsail, and the jib was furled, but even with this short canvas she ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... successor, Vietnam. China has occupied the Paracel Islands since 1974, when its troops seized a South Vietnamese garrison occupying the western islands. China built a military installation on Mischief Reef in 1999. The islands are claimed by ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Winwood Reade in 1872. The inhabitants of Western Africa have worked their gold fields for centuries to very little purpose. Their want of pumps, of quartz-crushing machinery, and of scientific appliances, has limited their labors to scratching the top soil and nibbling at the reef-walls. A large proportion of the country is virtually virgin ground; and a rich harvest has been left for Occidental science, energy, and enterprise. It is fast becoming evident that Africa will one day equal half a dozen Californias. The annual product of gold ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... serious one. The Endeavour, raised by a wave over the ridge of a reef, had fallen again into a hollow in the rock, and by the moonlight, portions of the false keel and the sheathing ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Terns or Sea Swallows that you have seen about the reef nest there also; and this island, as well as the mainland near by, is a favorite stopping-place for all the shore and water birds in their journeys,—from Sandpipers to great flocks ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... coal and reprovision. As he was not allowed to land at Samoa, he went on to Pago-Pago, in complete ignorance that war had been declared, and, not being able to get supplies there, left for Suva. At the latter port the harbor lights being extinguished, he ran his vessel on to the reef in the night time. Rockets were sent up, but no assistance could be given from the shore. Fortunately, however, he got off as the tide made; but ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various |
