|
|
|
More "Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is desolate; I know the winds have stripped the garden green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, for we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths, beguile; ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... I may phrase it) within four walls. They tell us of the seductive calm that first lured them on to those waters, of the sufferings they endured throughout the voyage, the thirst, the sea-sickness, the briny drenchings; and how at last their luckless craft went to pieces upon some hidden reef or at the foot of some steep crag, leaving them to swim for it, and to land naked and utterly destitute. All this they tell us: but I have ever suspected them of having convenient lapses of memory, and omitting the worst part for very shame. For myself, I shall ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... loved; on the contrary, he kept her in the bluest and least cloudy heaven of love. The problem of eternal beatitude is one of those whose solution is known only to God. Here, below, the sublimest poets have simply harassed their readers when attempting to picture paradise. Dante's reef was that of Vandenesse; all honor ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... I parted very good friends when he took me back to the cabin on the termination of our inspection of the ship—he promising to teach me how to make a reef-knot and a running-bowline the next time I came on board, and I shaking hands with him as a right good fellow whom I would only be too glad to meet ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to work that ship, and after all these years I marvel at our temerity. Time and again the cry "All hands" would come down the hatch and summon the three of us from below to make sail, or reef, or furl, or man the braces. Weary and almost blind with sleep, we would stagger on deck and pull and haul, or would swarm aloft and strive to cope with the sails. The cook, and even Roger, served tricks at the wheel, turn and ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... water 25 or 30 feet high, it carried us over the warehouses into the first street of the town. This wave in receding took her back toward the beach, and left her nearly perpendicular on the edge of a coral reef, where she has now keeled over to ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... helmsman answers, when he knows he has a mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is one of the mutineers himself. "Put him aout y'rself, 'f ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... morning watch; he had just relieved the second-lieutenant. Willy was for'ard. It was blowing somewhat fresh, and the ship had a reef in her topsails and her courses set. The night was very dark. Willy having just been aroused from a midshipman's sound sleep, was rubbing his eyes to get them clear. Now he peered out ahead into the darkness, now he rubbed them again, and shut and opened them, to satisfy himself ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... town called Villa Franca. Here, as the wind threatened to die away, several others and myself agreed to go onshore: a boat was accordingly lowered, and we pushed off from the ship; but the operation of landing did not prove to be altogether so simple as we had expected. An immense reef of rocks, some under water, others barely above it, but none distinguishable till we had almost run against them, opposed our progress; and it was not without considerable difficulty, and the assistance of the country people, who made signals to us from the beach, that we contrived to discover ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... 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 flew like ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... log of a cutter which sailed from the Clyde to the Amazon in search of a gold reef. It relates how they discovered the buccaneer's treasure in the Spanish Main, fought the Indians, turned aside the river Jamary by blasting, and so laid bare the gold ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... seemed a mere negation; there was a vacuum where his place had been. At most the thought of him came to her as some strange, vague thrill of added torture, penetrating her soul and then passing; just as ever and anon there came the sound of the fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef, miles away, piercing the dull air with its shrill and desolate ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... extend nearly across, with narrow channels between them like the furrows in a plowed field, with occasional openings from one channel into another. Some of the shoals were just awash, others bare. Ahead was a reef on which there appeared but very little water. I could see no opening into the channel beyond. To attempt to haul by the wind on either tack would bring us in a few minutes under fire of the schooner now coming up hand over hand. I ordered the ballast to be thrown overboard, and ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... shore with a paddle devised from the cover of a grub-box. Their outfit was piled amidships. Garth harnessed to the end of a towing-line, plodded through the mud and over the stones of the bank; climbing over fallen trees, and wading bodily into the river, when necessary to drag his tow around a reef. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... wind began all at once to blow hard. He heard the call of the captain, and the loud trampling of the men over his head, as they hauled at the main sheet to get the boom on board that they might take in a reef in the mainsail. Diamond felt about until he had found what seemed the most comfortable place, and there ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips proceeded thither and searched narrowly, but without avail. The sea held its treasures ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... inverted troughs indicating lodgment by solutions from below, as, for instance, in the saddle-reef gold ores of Nova Scotia and Australia, and in certain copper ores of the Jerome camp of Arizona (p. 204.) This occurrence does not indicate whether the solutions were hot or cold, magmatic or meteoric, but in connection with other evidences has sometimes been ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... but myself—piled up on a reef of this island. A master should go with his ship." He clutched at his parcel and began ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... keep what they got, and want to nail what is another's. Is that seamanly behavior, now, I want to know? But I'm a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost it neither; and I'll trick 'em again. I'm not afraid on 'em. I'll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Betterson, taking another reef in her shawl, "that you heard her tell a good deal about us; things that would no doubt tend to prejudice a stranger; though if all the truth was known she wouldn't feel so hard towards us as I have reason ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie, dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold. Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds of thousands ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... by a few able sea-men, form the crew of the ship. They stand watch, make, reef, and take in sail; do all the dirty work, tarring down, painting, scraping, and slushing. They stand watch and watch, keep at night a look-out on the cat-heads, gangways, quarters, and halliards, where they are required to "sing out" their stations every half hour, to be sure that they are awake. ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze, A-swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees, With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roar Of the breakers on the reef outside, that ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... "the sooner we know it the better. She must break it off, if her heart is broken in the process. If he does love her—my private opinion is he thinks he does—I won't have Peggy's whole future wrecked by one of Aunt Elizabeth's flirtations. The reef is too small for the catastrophe. I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. Oh yes, I shall find Aunt Elizabeth! I have no more doubt of that than I have that Matilda is putting too much onion in the croquettes for Tom this blessed minute. If I find her I shall find the boy; but what good is that going ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop. Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed my future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacant ground a ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... made by men in a simple open form of netting, worked on the common principle of the reef knot, and having diamond-shaped holes, with a knot at each corner of each hole. I shall refer to this form of netting as "ordinary network." The nets are made of thick, strong material, except as regards ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... the West Indies, he met with a Spaniard, an old man, 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 ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... did. And what for? Why, just to find out what was the matter with his trial balance, that's all. When one of Labe's trial balances starts out for snug harbor and ends up on a reef with six foot of water in her hold, naturally Labe wants to get her afloat and pumped dry as quick as possible. He ain't used to it, for one thing, and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... 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 cold, ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... Zephyrs in an excursion up the lake, and another lighthouse was erected in the vicinity of a dangerous reef. ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... seen, and there was a brightness in the N.N.W. that omened the wind coming from that direction. At midnight the change came. Orders were given to let the reefs out of the topsails, but it took a considerable time to do this as the reef points and errings were covered with hard, flinty ice, and it was not until marline spikes were used that any progress was made. The men's hands, already covered with wounds, had their fingers badly cut with the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same in that which accompanies the narrative; ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... the fleet came to anchor off a low-lying marshy 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
... in the good ship Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian Sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which has often occurred ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... was not sorry. The place was too eerie to stay in long. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake when we met again on the inner reef, "I've knowed they amateurs run straight off home when they've a-found theirselves under Hospital. A terr'ble place! Yu knows now. Did 'ee set your ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... 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. ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... which they apply to all sorts of obstacles consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef areas," ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley
... gale, of which the swell was the forerunner, came down upon us with a sudden gust. "All hands shorten sail," was shouted along the decks. The men flew aloft, that is, they climbed up so nimbly that they looked as if they were flying, and they lay out on the yards to reef the sail. Snookes had to go also, as he was stationed in the foretop. "Any greens up there to-day?" I asked as he passed me, not looking happy, for the ship was tumbling about, the spray was flying over ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... the halyards. The wind was now due southwest, and blowing a gale to which a vessel close-hauled could have shown no more than a single close-reefed sail; but as we were going before it, we could carry on. Accordingly, hands were sent aloft and a reef shaken out of the topsails, and the reefed foresail set. When we came to masthead the topsail yards, with all hands at the halyards, we struck up, "Cheerly, men," with a chorus which might have been heard ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... his conversation with Arbuthnot, described at second hand the Solomon Islands, the beauties of reef and palm, the delights of a new, free life and laid before her the guarantee of a competence and the possibilities of a fortune. As he talked, Elodie's dark face grew sullen and her eyes hardened. When ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... 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
... enough. I think we both know the position of every reef to within a hundred yards, so we will shape our course for Guernsey. If we happen to hit it off, we can hold on to St. Helier; but if when we think we ought to be within sight of Guernsey we see nothing of it, we must lie to again, till ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... want to run on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... wraith-like shadows he saw the armored forms of Conquistadores in mortal strife with vulpine buccaneers. In the whirring of the bats which flouted his face he heard the singing of arrows and the hiss of hurled rocks. In the moan of the ocean as it broke on the coral reef below sounded the boom of cannon, the curses of combatants, and the groans of the dying. Here and there moved tonsured monks, now absolving in the name of the peaceful Christ the frenzied defenders of the Heroic City, now turning to hurl curses at the swarming ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... together because the pilot of the first one was sailing less skillfully than the other. Suddenly, in the twilight the men in the second sambuk felt a shock, then another, and a third. The water poured into it rapidly. It had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk had been able to pass on account of its lighter draft. Soon the stranded boat began to list over, and the twenty-eight men aboard had ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... a wide berth, as a dangerous reef makes out from the land, eastward, for a mile or more. The fixed light at this point is a hundred and thirty feet above sea level, and is visible nearly ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner in some disgrace; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... came the thunder of the surf. The waters of the pool leapt as if a giant hand had churned them. The foam from beyond the reef overspread them like snow. The whole world became full of the ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... Actif becoming the Hawke. Lieutenant Farrance was promoted to the rank of captain, and given the command of the latter vessel, and some of the survivors of a ship that had a fortnight before been lost on a dangerous reef were told off to her. He was, according to rule, permitted to take a boat's crew and a midshipman with him from his old ship, and he selected Will Gilmore, and, among the ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... however, shows that it was the Antilles and neighbouring islands. He named this island Hispaniola. Having decided to land, Columbus put in towards shore, when the largest of his ships struck a concealed rock and was wrecked. Fortunately the reef stood high in the water, which saved the crew from drowning; the other two boats quickly approached, and all the sailors were taken safely ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... and soon afterwards the San Antonio joined and passed under our stern, when Mr. Hemmans informed me that the guns he had fired were intended as signals to his boat, and that they were not meant for us. He had been aground, he said, on a reef near the Palm Islands, but had received no damage: light, however, as he pretended to make of this accident, it was a sufficient lesson for him, and we soon found he had profited by it, for instead ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... 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 ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... across the river, the vortex being at the right bank, and close in-shore, concentred by a limestone shelf extending to the bank, flanked on the left, and at an acute angle, by a deeply-indented reef of rock. Looking up the river, the view to the west seems inclosed by a long line of trees, which, in the distance, appear to stand in the water. Thence the vast stream sweeps boldly into the south, and with a rush discharges ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... wer coaxin' a lot o' wummen folk to come to a prayer-meetin'! Why don't ye go down in the fo'c's'le an' drive 'em up, if they won't come on deck when they're hailed? Below thaar, d'ye haar?—all hands reef tops'ls!" ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... muzzle and sniff, in a troubled way, with legs quivering uneasily; when I took no notice, he lay down between my feet and stared out to sea as I was doing. And never a cry, never a word of human voice to be heard anywhere; nothing; only the heavy rush of the wind about my head. There was a reef of rocks far out, lying all apart; when the sea raged up over it the water towered like a crazy screw; nay, like a sea-god rising wet in the air, and snorting, till hair and beard stood out like a wheel about his head. Then he ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... however, close the series, for sixty miles farther west stands the group of the Tortugas, isolated in the Gulf of Mexico. Though they seem disconnected, these islands are parts of a submerged Coral Reef, concentric with the shore of the peninsula and continuous underneath the water, but visible above the surface at such points of the summit as have fully ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... finely-adjusted advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what friendly commentators ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Cramped on the Needle's sheaf, To hail the sudden ray Which promises relief? Then, bright; Shine, light! Of hope upon the beacon reef! Though 'tis ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time you were on the reef, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... staple export consists of maize in some quantities; of cantaria, a grey trachyte which works more freely than the brown or black basalt, and of an impure limestone from Ilheu Baixo, the only calcaire used in Funchal. This rock is apparently an elevated coral-reef: it also produces moulds of sea-shells, delicately traced and embedded in blocks of apparently unbroken limestone. Of late a fine vein of manganese has been found in the northern or mountainous part of the island: specimens shown to me by Mr. J. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... But I don't take to the tavern. Not that I'm squeamish; I have lived four years among sailors, and have been in rougher places than you ever dreamed of; but all the same I am afraid of the tavern. I've seen many a brave fellow wrecked on that reef." ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... through even the crimes of unconscious men. There is an irony, if we may so say, in making the hatred of these men the very means of their brother's advancement, and the occasion of blessing to themselves. As coral insects work, not knowing the plan of their reef, still less the fair vegetation and smiling homes which it will one day carry, but blindly building from the material supplied by the ocean a barrier against it; so even evil-doers are carrying on God's plan, and sin ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... this designation, together with his "missionary" name "Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss Gordon Cumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated into English. For women they were such as Spray of the Coral Reef, Queen of Parrot's Land, Queen of Strangers, Smooth Water, Wife of the Morning Star, Mother of Her Grandchildren, Ten Whale's Teeth, Mother of Cockroaches, Lady Nettle, Drinker of Blood, Waited For, Rose of Rewa, Lady Thakombau, Lady Flag, etc. The men's names were such ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Maury, and Guyot, Arago, Agassiz, and Pierce, by observation, philosophy, and mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they trace a law whose harmony is its ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... spent standing off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... get pushed for our pains on to the Teraghlind Reef. We are skirting those rocks more closely than ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... "Reef every thing now!" Riddell shouted, leaping himself first into the rigging like a wild-cat. "Cheerily, men—with a will!" All his ill-humor was gone when the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the Dutch East Indies. Among these ships was the Batavia, commanded by Francis Pelsart. A terrible storm destroyed ten of the fleet, and on June 4, 1629, the Batavia was driven ashore on the reef still known as Houtman's Abrolhos, which had been discovered and named by a Dutch East Indiaman some years earlier—probably by the commander of the Leeuwin, who discovered and named after his ship the cape at the southwest point of the continent. The Batavia, which carried a number of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from the shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base, and storm-birds—born of the wind one might ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than those near our ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... frenzy in matters where unbiased judgment is most of all necessary. It is a rock upon which we have split before; it has taken us many years to recover from the shock, and now we are in danger of altogether losing our political life upon the same reef. Unless we mend our course we inevitably shall. Men forego every consideration of public honor and private conscience for the sake of electing a party candidate. The man at the helm of the party ship has declared that he will sail due north, or south, or east, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... coming down the lake would have to beat up against the wind to reach him; so close to land that any fleet trying to flank him would come within range of the forts; and left only one apparent gap that a foe might try to use, a gap in front of which was a dangerous sunken reef. This was indeed a baited trap. Finally he put out cables, kedges, anchors, and springs, so that with the capstan he could turn his vessels and bring either side to bear on ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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 brought ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... are both Kentish names, and there is a reef off Margate known as the Kentish Knock. We have the plural Knox (cf. Bax, Settlements and Enclosures, Chapter XIII). Knott is sometimes for Cnut, or Canute, which generally becomes Nutt. Both have got ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... weighed anchor Thormod must needs, therefore, reef and double reef his sail, else our ship had been hull down astern before many hours had passed, ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... past the quays and out beyond the ancient fort at the harbour's mouth. On the opposite shore a reef of rock ran out, and on the ridge stood a white wooden cross, "put up," so Nuncey informed her, "because Pontius Pilate landed here one time." Beyond this ridge they found a shingly beach secluded from the town, warmed by the full rays of the westering sun. There ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... spring, but just then a huge wave rose high over the vessel, the white-crested tip hissing like an angry snake, and Jan looked down, down, down into a dark hole and below it gleamed the jagged peaks of the reef, like threatening teeth of a hidden monster. He knew the danger. Drawing back he turned pleading ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... island. Already the Pinta under Martin Pinzon had gone off independently in search of a vague land of gold, to the vexation of the Admiral. A worse disaster was now to befall him. On Christmas Day, off the island of Hayti, the Santa Maria struck upon a reef and went over. Columbus and his crew escaped on board the little Nina. But she was too small to carry home the double crew, and Columbus made a little fortress on the island where the native King was friendly, and left there a ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... fathoms; we then stood-to the S.S.E.; this course made almost a right angle with that which we had followed in the night: it bore directly in-shore, the approach to which, in this place, is rendered terrible by a very long reef, called Arguin, which according to instructions we had on board extends above thirty leagues in breadth.[12] According to the instructions given by the Minister of the Marine, this danger is avoided by running only twenty-two leagues in the open sea; it is true ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... adjoining some high sand-hills, among which we found fresh water by digging. Our vessel being the first, I believe, that ever entered Smoky Bay, on finding an island at its southern end, I named it after that enterprising traveller Mr. Eyre. I also found an island and reef not laid down by Flinders, to the southern of St. Francis Islands. There is also an island 10 miles west of the rocky group of Whidbey's Isles, and about 12 miles from Greenly's Isles. The captain of a French whaler also informed me, that a ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... work, Seth," rejoined the skipper, "for she's now got as much on her as she can carry. But I s'pose it must be done if we're to pick up that poor fellow. Here, boys," he cried out suddenly to the crew, "we must shake a reef out of the mainsail. Look smart, ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... His nerves seemed all on edge, and ever upon the glowing midday heat, the jarring thump of the Crown Reef battery beat its monotonous time. Then the door opened softly, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the entrance of Palk's Passage in the Straits of Manaar, which is distinguished by its magnificent colonnade and corridors. (Fergusson, Hist. Ind. and Eastern Arch., vol. i, pp. 380-3, ed. 1910.) The island forms part of the so-called Adam's Bridge, a reef of comparatively recent formation, which almost joins Ceylon with the mainland. A railway now runs along the 'bridge', and the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of mussels all jammed close together, and through the clear water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... feet a broad band of silver stretched away to the horizon, marking the meridian of the moon. This was broken by the line of coral reef, over which the surf curled and sparkled with a phosphoric brightness. The reef itself, running all round, seemed to gird the islet in a circle of fire. Here only were the waves in motion, as if pressed by some subaqueous and invisible power; for beyond, scarcely ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... narrow channel, about 500 yards wide and 200 yards long, the middle is deep, but the sides are coral reefs and shoal: the deep part seems about 100 yards wide. Outside in the Bay of Mikindany there is no anchorage except on the edge of the reef where the Penguin got seven fathoms, but further in it was only two fathoms. The inner bay is called Pemba, not Pimlea, as erroneously printed in the charts of Owen. It is deep and quite sheltered; another of a similar round form lies somewhat to the south: this bay ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Kahalaopuna longed to be with them. Forgetting the warning, as soon as her mother fell asleep she slipped out with one of her maids and swam out on a surf-board. This was Kauhi's opportunity, and as soon as she was fairly outside the reef he bit her in two and held the upper half of the body up out of the water, so that all the surf-bathers would see and know that he had at last obtained ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... prepared for that wonderful spectacle which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara, yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this land so pregnant ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... task, I rejoined the little group upon the poop. I saw that the boats had already pushed off from the junk, and were pulling at a good pace toward the opening in the reef, while the junk herself had filled away again, and was beating up in the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... to the furious tempest; the vessel is drove among the rocks, is sprung aleak, the sailor works at the pumps, till, faint and weary, is heard from below, six feet of water in the hold, the boats are got ready, but before they are into them, the vessel dashed against a reef of rocks, some in despair throw themselves into the sea, others get on the rocks without any clothes or provisions, and linger a few days, perhaps weeks or months, living on shell fish or perhaps taken up by some ship. Others ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... getting a grip on it somehow, and staying there in company with other people's babies whom they didn't know, and celebrities whom they knew to death, until, one by one, they either stranded upon a motherly dowager by the Fireplace Shoals, or were rescued from the Soda Reef by some gallant wrecker of a strong-minded young lady, with a view to taking salvage out of them ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... this view of the aspirations of humanity. Proctor and Airy absolutely know that they will be forgotten so far out in on-coming time, but still they drudge away, in the belief that man can only acquire knowledge of God's works as the coral reef attains continental proportions—that is, by the infinitesimal contributions of countless unselfish individualities. They are desirous that man should some day know the truth. Is there any unselfishness ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... command of the frigate Philadelphia, and sailing to Algiers, blockaded Tripoli. Being driven from his cruising grounds, Bainbridge pursued a strange ship that was trying to break the blockade. He gave chase, but ran upon a reef on the morning of October 31, 1803. The pirates immediately attacked, and when the ship could no longer be defended they captured and scuttled her, imprisoning the officers and crew. After a treaty of peace between the Dey and the United States had been concluded, the Americans were released ...
— The Mentor: The War of 1812 - Volume 4, Number 3, Serial Number 103; 15 March, 1916. • Albert Bushnell Hart
... below they ran in to the bank, and all four walked down to look at the bad water. The river, which was a succession of rapids, was here deflected toward the right bank by a rocky reef. The whole body of water, rushing crookedly into the narrow passage, accelerated its speed frightfully and was up-flung into huge waves, white and wrathful. This was the dread Mane of the White Horse, and here an even heavier toll of dead had been exacted. On one side of the Mane was a corkscrew ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... among them until 1837, when Mrs. R. Davis was called to her rest. Dangers abounded on every hand, yet accidents were rare. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis were lost at sea; Marsden was wrecked on the Brampton reef, but escaped unhurt with all his party. Henry Williams passed through a terrible experience when returning from Tauranga in 1832. For two days his little vessel had been enveloped in driving rain and had been blown quite out of her course, when the missionary, who had been praying through the whole ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... time we heard the top-gallant-sails come in, one after another, and then the flying jib. This seemed to ease her a good deal, and we were fast going off to the land of Nod, when—bang, bang, bang on the scuttle, and "All hands, reef topsails, ahoy!" started us out of our berths, and it not being very cold weather, we had nothing extra to put on, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the representative of timocracy has a son: at first he begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but presently he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon a sunken reef, and he and all that he has is lost; he may have been a general or some other high officer who is brought to trial under a prejudice raised by informers, and either put to death, or exiled, or deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and all ...
— The Republic • Plato
... came no more. But they tell the tale That, when fogs are thick on the harbor reef, The mackerel-fishers shorten sail; For the signal they know will bring relief, For the voices of children, still at play In a phantom-hulk that drifts alway Through channels whose waters ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... 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 ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... California was calling—the land of miracle—and printer's ink began to pall. Henry George was a sailor; every part of a sailing ship was to him familiar—from bilge- water to pennant, from bowsprit to sternpost. He could swab the mainmast, reef the topsail in a squall, preside in the cook's-galley, or if the mate were drunk and the captain ashore he could take charge of the ship, put for open sea and ride out the storm by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... master and his boat's crew were lost before the Investigator was joined by the Lady Nelson, from Port-Jackson; and when the former ship was condemned, the people embarked with their commander on board the Porpoise, which was wrecked on a coral reef, and nine of the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the bizarre, the slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in "Wardour-street English," the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by mortal man, and composed ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge. But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... tons of marmalade on board. We went to the Isle of Aves, where the Count d'Estrees's whole squadron, sent to take Curacoa for the French, had been wrecked. Coming in from the eastward, the count fell in on the back of the reef, and fired guns to give warning to the rest. But they, supposing their admiral was engaged with enemies, crowded all sail and ran ashore after him, for his light in the maintop was an unhappy beacon. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... witty. Another had shipped as an "able seaman" to get his passage to America. When out at sea it was discovered he didn't know one rope from another. During a storm he and the mate had a terrible fight. "The sea was sweeping the deck and we were ordered to reef a shroud. I didn't know how, and the mate called me a name that no Welshman will stand for. I thought we were all going to be drowned anyhow, and I might as well die with my teeth in his neck. So I flew into him and we fought like wildcats. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... 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 ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... from the impromptu 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 ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... ascertaining the media of contagion in disease and providing for their detection and removal. Its triumphs are so closely interwoven with the appliances of common life that we are prone to lose sight of them. From the aniline dye that beautifies a picture or a dress, to the explosive that lifts a reef or mines the Alps for a highway, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... mischief in those shortened sails, and that Union Jack, the terror of his tribe, rising to a British cheer; he lowered his mainsail, and crawled up on the weather quarter. Arrived within a cable's length, he double-reef'ed his foresail to reduce his rate of sailing nearly to that of the ship; and the next moment a tongue of flame, and then a gush of smoke, issued from his lee bow, and the ball flew screaming like a seagull over ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... waters, washing a shingly shore under shelter of dark cliffs. One of these bays is called Port-y-Vullin, and just outside of it, between the mainland and the head, is a rock, known as the Carrick, a treacherous grey reef, visible at low water, and hidden at flood-tide. On the low brews of Port-y-Vullin stood two houses, the one a mill, worked by the waters coming down from the near mountain of Barrule, the other a weaver's cottage. Three weavers lived together there, all bachelors, and all old, and never ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... in very many instances by dikes which cross the stream. So, too, though rarely, only one striking instance being known, an ancient coral reef which has become buried in strata may afford rock of such hardness that when the river comes to cross it it forms a cascade, as at the Falls of the Ohio, at Louisville, Ky. It is a characteristic of all other falls, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... next night they make it up, and the preacher tries to make it up, too. When Mr. Thompson brought me down, six years ago, we came straight through by fording, belly-deep to the horses, across the reef, three miles long, that forms the nexus between the Nueces Bay and the Corpus Christi Bay. On either side was deep water or miring sand. Once, since that, he has had to tote his passengers out on his back. The reef has been washed out in spots. Lo! this time we ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various
... near the surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... and supposed that the interview was being sought by the Exchange. So this mighty tempest in a tea pot resulted from the excessive zeal of an outsider who while trying to pilot the Committee into safe waters succeeded in running it on a reef of ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... on the 31st of May, and had not proceeded above a few leagues, when a fair breeze sprang up, greatly to the satisfaction of all, but especially of the poor fellows whose toil it relieved. It continued increasing; reef after reef was taken in, till our sheet was finally reduced to a few feet in depth; yet so furious was the gale that we ascended the strongest current with nearly the same velocity we had descended; while the snow fell so thick, ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... my 'arties, if that's yerselves that I see!" continued the voice. "Arrah, 'old on there. I'm so tired wadin', I want a short spell to rest myself. Wait now, and I'll come to yez, as soon as I can take a reef out of ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... southern part of the island; and all the other islands are visible from it,—Smutty Nose, Star Island, and White Island,—on which is the lighthouse,—much of Laighton's island (the proper name of which is Hog, though latterly called Appledore), and Duck Island, which looks like a mere reef of rocks, and about a mile farther into the ocean, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the west side of the bay, towards a reef of rocks which runs out some way into the sea," exclaimed Gerald. "He expects that he shall ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... to tell of reef-fishing in the West Indies; of surf-riding on planks at Muizenberg in South Africa; of the extreme inconvenience to which the inhabitants of Southern China are subjected owing to the inconsiderate habits of their ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... sailed away into the unknown, generally very many years passed before he came back—if ever he came back at all. For the dangers of the seas were then far greater than they now are, and if a ship was not wrecked some dark night on an unknown island or uncharted reef, there was always the probability of meeting a pirate vessel and of having to fight for life and liberty. Steam has nowadays nearly done away with pirates, except on the China coast and in a few other out-of-the-way places. But things ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... was now gradually drawing toward land. Suddenly, she swerved and headed straight for a huge reef that could be seen protruding above the surface of the water. A cry of dismay went up from those ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... "'Tis won'erful like hearin' a man's soul whisperin' in his innards; but unless I've a buzzin' in my ears, Mosheur Lanark, you make much about the same kind o' noises as old Gaffer Macklin—but not quite so loud as young Copper. It sounds like breakers on a reef—a long way ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... to the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... they were able to make out the coast of France, not very far away from them. By the side of the reef lay their little vessel, half in, half out of the water, with a large hole in her side. There was nothing that they could do but wait until some one should see them from the shore, and come off with a boat to ...
— Stories from English History • Hilda T. Skae
... so the trees grew thinner, and I emerged upon a bare, low headland running out into the sombre water. The night was calm and clear, and the reflection of the growing multitude of the stars shivered in the tranquil heaving of the sea. Some way out, the wash upon an irregular band of reef shone with a pallid light of its own. Westward I saw the zodiacal light mingling with the yellow brilliance of the evening star. The coast fell away from me to the east, and westward it was hidden by the shoulder of the cape. Then I recalled the fact that Moreau's ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... effectually prevented them from going to sleep, and made them wish to get out again. They felt also very sick and uncomfortable: the cuddy was hot and close. The gale increased, and old Joe deemed it necessary to take down the last reef and lower the fore-sail, keeping only the small storm-jib set. The operation took some time, and while Stephen was assisting in shifting the jibs, a sea struck the bows, and carried him off his ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... under the outer fringe of trees, I caught sight of a thin line across the water, slanting from shore to shore—not a ripple, but as though the edge of an invisible reef slightly affected the smooth-flowing, glassy surface ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... existing, there were no reptiles; while the absence of mammals in the deposits of the Galapagos Archipelago, where there are plenty of reptiles, might be held to prove the reverse. And at the same time, from the formations extending for two thousand miles along the great barrier-reef of Australia—formations in which are imbedded nothing but corals, echinoderms, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, along with an occasional turtle, or bird, or cetacean—it might be inferred that there lived in our epoch neither ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... consists of large blocks of a volcanic conglomerate, some of which measure nineteen feet by six or eight, and ten feet in thickness; whilst a little farther north another wall extends E.N.E. to a natural reef of rocks." (Hamilton, Researches in Asia ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... in dizzy whirlpools, its surface broken by explosions of spray or pitted by devouring vortices resembling the oily mouths of marine monsters. Below this, in turn, is the White Horse, worst of all. Here the flood somersaults over a tremendous reef, flinging on high a gleaming curtain of spray. These rapids are well named, for the tossing waves resemble nothing more than runaway white horses ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... at a cost of $550,000. The main work mounts eighty heavy guns; but since the Civil War, additional batteries, some of them armed with Rodman guns, have been erected. A little above Fort Hamilton, and a few hundred yards from the shore, is Fort Lafayette, built on a shoal known as Hendricks' Reef. It was begun during the war of 1812, cost $350,000, and was armed with seventy-three guns. It was used during the Civil War as a jail for political prisoners. In December, 1868, it was destroyed by fire, and the Government is now rebuilding ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and shouts. No one needed to tell us what it meant, and down came the call, 'Don't wait to save your things, only wraps, ladies! Up on deck! Life- belts if you can!' I remember Bernard standing at the top of the ladder, helping us up, and somehow, I understand from him, that we were on a reef, and might either remain there, and sink, or be washed off. The fog was clearing, and there was a dim light up high, somewhere, one of the lighthouses, I believe. I don't quite know how it all went; I think ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... screamed Captain Riggs at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until it comes ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... Consolidated Press. Why, he ought to pay them to let him go. Can't you see him, confound him, sitting under a palm-tree in white flannels, with a glass of Jamaica rum in his fist, while we're dodging yellow fever on this coral-reef, and losing our salaries on ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,—as the tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after mile, along the beach,—that the day and night were now just equal, and that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to accompany me on my journey. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... that, given a fair seaway with ideal weather conditions favoring the low visibility tactics of the German sea command, a victory for the Teutonic ships would follow. It was this belief that drew the ships of the German cruiser squadron and High Seas Fleet off the coast of Jutland and Horn Reef into the great battle that decided ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... island. It served, however, to show people's tempers and spirits; and we were able to give a tolerable guess how our men would behave, in case there really were any enemies upon the island. The flaws came heavy off the shore, and we were forced to reef our topsails when we opened the middle bay, where we expected to have found our enemy; but saw all clear, & no ships, nor in the other bay next the north-east end. These two bays are all that ships ride in, which recruit on this island; but the middle bay is by much the best. We guessed there ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... perpendicular, level, and dotted with farm-houses, this singular bit of land stretches several miles out southward to sea, bordered with a rocky beach, and tapered off into the wide ocean with Duxbury Reef—a dangerous rocky reef, curving down to the southward and almost always white with foam, save when the sea is calm, and then the great lazy green waves eddy noiselessly over the half-hidden rocks, or slip like oil over the ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... readers, we must state that the Esquerques, or Shirki, are a reef of sunken rocks lying about eighty miles west from Sicily, and about forty-eight from Cape Bon, on the coast of Africa. In 1806, the charts were not as accurate as they are in the present day, and the reef was not laid down in all ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... that this world was an unlucky reef on which too many ships and cargoes were lost, so that our whole solar system was posted, and skippers of star ships thereafter avoided it? Or they might even have had some rule that when a planet developed a primitive race of its ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... glad Captain Blastblow has come to his senses, and is standing out from the shore," I added. "About five miles to the eastward of the line of Keys, which form part of a circle, from Cape Florida to Pickle Reef, more than forty miles, is a series of reefs and rocks. There is a passage between the reefs and the Keys, through which vessels of light draught may pass. But I believe in having plenty of sea room when the weather ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... wind was driving the black smoke of the steamers, far out at sea, in long funereal wreaths, athwart the foaming wake, and the silver-sailed schooners began to reef, in anticipation of the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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 lifted ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... came rioting down over the rocks and where the trail crossed there was a mighty sycamore that almost dammed its course. With its gnarled and swollen roots half dug from their crevices by the tumultuous violence of cloudbursts, it clung like an octopus to a shattered reef of rocks and sucked up its nourishment from the water. In the pool formed by its roots the minnows leapt and darted, solemn bull-frogs stared forth from dark holes, and in a natural seat against ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... such a benefit on the sailors of all nations—for it was impossible to calculate how many lives had been saved during the 120 years his lighthouse had been protecting the ships of all nations from the dangerous reef on which it stood. The old lighthouse now forms a conspicuous object on the Hoe, and contains some interesting relics, and in the lantern are the candlesticks in which the lights were placed that guided the mariners across the stormy ocean in past ages. Over the lantern ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... has 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 through deserted country—suppose it should be raining and the roads slippery ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Cartier Islands no indigenous inhabitants note: Indonesian fishermen are allowed access to the lagoon and fresh water at Ashmore Reef's West Island; access to East and Middle Islands ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to tie a square knot. If the student would render efficient help in accidents and emergencies, to say nothing of service on scores of other occasions, he must learn how to tie a square or "reef" knot. This knot is secure and does not slip as does the "granny" knot. The square knot is the one used by surgeons in ligating vessels and securing bandages. Unless one knew the difference, the insecure ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... bight's mouth, they found, as they had expected, coral rocks, and too many of them; so that they had to run along the edge of the reef a long way before they could find a passage for the boats. While they were so doing, and those of them who were new to the Indies were admiring through the clear element those living flower-beds, and subaqueous gardens of Nereus and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... church-town—a single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church—stands high and a mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef, a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road downhill from the ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... lightened ship, you choose to make all sorts of nasty insinuations about us wanting to knock you out! Shows where your mind is. Another fellow wouldn't ever let such a fool notion get a grip on him. And you'd better put a reef in that tongue of yours, my boy, unless you want to have ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... Giving herself all silvery to the sea From that Leucadian rock. Beneath your feet Lie sand and surf in curving parallels. Off shore, a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back Dripping with brine, and guards a sunken reef Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel; There frets the sea and turns white at the lip, And in ill-weather lets the ledge show fang. A very pleasant nook in ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pieces o' white I-talian marble that had been wrecked three years before off the harbor of Hamilton. They ran from three to twenty-one tons each, he said. So off I started with the Screamer. He didn't say, though, that the wreck lay on a coral reef eight miles from land, or I'd stayed to home ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... craze for the place. Now it 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
... i.e., triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezen, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... crimson maple-boughs, I know by heart each burning leaf, Yet would that like a barren reef Stripped to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... mbroidery. The stock-ins was a littel too big, so I had to fill em up with hankercheefs. The waste jest but-tened up on me, at the waste line, but it tuk half a dozen piller cases, and a cuppel of sheets, to stuff the upper part of the front. I had to put a reef in crinny line, cos it showd, and it tuk ma's pach-wurk quilt to mak my bussel ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... may write—for friends there be, On a stone from the gray sea wall, "Jungle and town and reef and sea— I loved God's Earth and His Earth loved me, Taken for all ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... around, and when the moon came up she seemed to be glowering from her shroud. Joe was anxious to take in something, but the skipper said, "Don't think there'll be much of it. We can reef her when it comes away. I want to be home." All the night it seemed as though something evil were in the air, and even the men below were depressed. Sometimes it happens that if you work long in a lonely ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... the strongest flow of water, the channel such as it was, set directly for the obstruction, and it might be possible to drop down on it from above—if one provided some means for getting back again. Stonor marked the position of every rock, every reef above, and little ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... lightning, moved slowly downwards. Before them surged the foaming waters, the waves white-crested. A gust of wind struck the boat; the water began to beat heavily against it, so that it was tossed about like a piece of cork. Since Simon had not put up the sail there was now no need to reef it. Flakes of foam flew over the spars, the beams groaned. The clouds rushed on, driving the heaving, thundering waves before them. Soon the little boat was overtaken by darkness, which was only relieved by flashes of lightning. Long ago Simon had let go the rudder, and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... 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 converted, man does not desire this good will; and ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... left two of these to the north and one to the south of our course; the most northerly being a large high island full of trees. Between the two southermost of these three islands, ten leagues distant, and half way between them, there is a dangerous reef of rocks, to avoid which we steered through a very good passage within two leagues of the middle island, the reef being then to the south, about three leagues from us, and is very dangerous for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... like itself, forcible, but clear. That is why sea-slang is so poetical; there is a word for everything and every act, and a thing and an act for every word. Seamen must speak quick and bold, but also with utmost precision. They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect—therefore,—(Steamboat bell rings.) But I must say a ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... soul of thine Whirl thee out of the listed plain, Past the olives, and o'er the line. Dire and grievous the charge he brings. See thou answer him, noble heart, Not with passionate bickerings. Shape thy course with a sailor's art, Reef the canvas, shorten the sails, Shift them edgewise to shun the gales. When the breezes are soft and low, Then, well under control, you'll go Quick and quicker to strike the foe. O first of all the Hellenic bards high loftily-towering verse to rear, ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... etc. At 5.30 p.m. got underweigh and stood to the north-west, the soundings for five miles varying from three and three-quarters to seven fathoms; the sea breaking heavily for about a mile in a northerly direction from the end of the sheltering reef, showing a much greater extent of shoalwater than is noted on the charts. Established a routine of watches of two hours each, for the members of the expedition to attend upon ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... direction to the sublimity of a mountain chain. The distance across from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo may be about twenty-five miles, yet it took the dull and lazy dhows ten hours before they dropped anchor on the top of the coral reef plainly visible a few feet below the surface of the water, within a hundred ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... a dangerous reef which is never above water, though some small round black rocks are seen at low tide awash. They look like the kettles in which cooks get up a boiled dinner; and for this reason the Arabs call the reef Abu Kizan, which ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... published by Arrowsmith, Port Grey is laid down as a spacious, well-sheltered harbour, with a convenient point of land extending a couple of miles out to sea from its northern extremity, and having a useful reef of rocks projecting, most happily, to the same distance, affording altogether a secure shelter for shipping in ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... versatility of talent, discoursed learnedly to the skipper upon the beauty of his vessel's "lines" (whatever those were), her spread of canvas and build generally,—discussed the comparative merits of single and double topsails, and new patent yard-slings, and reef-tackle, and altogether displayed such an amount of nautical learning that it completely crushed me and staggered ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... day. The Cevennes mountains rise, however, to a tolerable height in the distance to the west; and to the south-east, the remains of the old town and cathedral of Maguelone, form a striking distant group, projecting like a low reef of rocks into the sea at the distance of three or four miles. To judge from the site of this ancient town, which tradition describes as the original nucleus of Montpelier, the sea must have made ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... old sailor kneeling upon the bench, looking intently through his telescope at some object at sea. My eyes followed the direction of the glass, and I saw distinctly, about two miles beyond the east cliff, a vessel lying dismasted upon the reef, with the sea breaking continually ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... His heavy head dropped under water, and his sodden crest rolled over, like sea-weed where a wave breaks. The stream had him all at its mercy, and showed no more than his savage master had, but swept him a wallowing lump away, and over the reef of the crossing. With both feet locked in the twisted stirrups, and right arm broken at the elbow, the rider was swung (like the mast of a wreck) and flung with his head upon his father's chain. There he was held by his great square chin—for ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... boat from driving on the dangerous reef, was just as much as the oarsmen could accomplish. Weakened as they were, by long suffering and starvation, they had a tough struggle to hold the pinnace as it were in statu quo—all the tougher from the disproportion between such a heavy craft and ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... on my bed with hair brushes, razors and things, they got to talking of Australia; and that was all about fighting too: dog fights, fist fights between bullockies on the long road from Northern Queensland, riots in Perth when the pearlers came in off the Barrier Reef to spend their pay, rows in the big shearing sheds when the Union men objected to unskilled labour—you'd have thought Australia was one big battlefield, with nothing else but fights worth talking of ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... bridge stood the pilot. He is the man who tells just where to make the steamer go in the harbor. He knows where everything is. He knows where the rocks are on the right and he didn't let the steamer bump them. He knows where the sand reef is on the left and he didn't let the steamer get on to that. He knows just where the deep water is and he kept the steamer in ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... in Graciosa Bay Frontispiece Facing page Women From the Reef Islands in Carlisle Bay 3 Native Taro Field on Maevo 10 Man from Nitendi working the Loom 15 A Cannibal before his Hut on Tanna 22 Dancing Table near Port Sandwich 31 Old Man with Young Wife on Ambrym 40 Front of a Chief's House on Venua Lava 47 Man from Nitendi 54 Cannibal ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... had thought in his inmost heart. So 'every one of us shall give an account of himself to God'; and like a man in the bankruptcy court, we shall have to explain our books, and go into all our transactions. We are working in the dark today. Our work will be seen as it is, in the light. The coral reef rises in the ocean, and the creatures that made it do not see it. The ocean will be drained away, and the reef will stand up ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a little south of the usual route, fell in with some of the Paumotu Group, and finally discovered Tahiti, where she anchored at Royal Bay, after grounding on a reef at its entrance, with her people, as usual, decimated by scurvy. They were almost immediately attacked by the natives, who, however, received such a reception that they speedily made friends, and fast friends too. The remainder of the month of the Dolphin stay ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... of 1875, after I left "The Reef," I worked for a short time near the head of the creek. One day a friend named McCallum came and showed me a piece of gold he had picked up on a headland which jutted over the Blyde River near Peach tree ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... hollered our capting. "Reef your arft hoss, splice your main jib-boom, and hail your chamber-maid! What's up ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... facts to be treasured up for use in his eager and retentive mind, but those habits of observation which were to be of the greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another vessel—the Porpoise—Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four feet above the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... islands 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, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... but its path was almost exclusively a "water-track." It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano. Seldom has a more striking proof been given of the vividness of human ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... suggested, "the sooner we know it the better. She must break it off, if her heart is broken in the process. If he does love her—my private opinion is he thinks he does—I won't have Peggy's whole future wrecked by one of Aunt Elizabeth's flirtations. The reef is too small for the catastrophe. I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. Oh yes, I shall find Aunt Elizabeth! I have no more doubt of that than I have that Matilda is putting too much onion in the croquettes for Tom this blessed minute. If I find ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... ship, so that some of us rose and dressed; but the ship had apparently sustained no injury, and we proceeded on our way. Whether we had struck a rock, or only a sand-bar, we never knew, for the ship's men laughed and evaded our questions; but the passengers believed that the boat had touched a reef or rock, hidden, perhaps, beneath the surface ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... a hardy navigator," continued Kurz Pacha, "who sails for the boreal pole. It is glittering enough, but shipwreck by daylight upon a coral reef, is no pleasanter than by night ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... had a sort of vague consciousness that I had been hearing it before. The next instant I was broad awake and on my feet. Eight ahead, and so near that my heart stood still, was a long line of breakers, heaving and frothing. It was the coral reef girdling the island. Behind it, and almost casting their shadows upon the deck, were the sleeping mountains, about whose hazy peaks the gray dawn was just breaking. The breeze had freshened, and with a steady, gliding motion, we were running ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... kind was out of the question, and sleep would have been impossible to any but worn-out sailormen. Even then, they were often roused in the blackness of the night, when she lay with her lee rail under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... so powerful in his own element, on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before remarked, find their social value completely ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... others, the ship plunging and rearing like a mad horse, till I felt like being jerked off the spar; then, indeed, I thought of a feather-bed at home, and hung on with tooth and nail; with no chance for snoring. But a few repetitions, soon made me used to it; and before long, I tied my reef-point as quickly and expertly as the best of them; never making what they call a "granny- knot," and slipt down on deck by the bare stays, instead of the shrouds. It is surprising, how soon a boy overcomes his timidity about going aloft. For my own part, my nerves ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... haste, in finding our way down to the beach. Putting some provisions and water into her, including some of the turtle we had cooked, we once more launched her, and then, with no small amount of sorrow and apprehension, I saw my companions pull out towards the passage through the reef, when they were soon lost to sight in the gloom of night. One of Mr Henley's last charges to me had been to keep up a large fire all night, to enable him the better to steer his course, and also to find ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... which facilitates the operation. It was necessary, then, to work as formerly—that is to say, to run out on the foot-ropes, pull toward you a sail beaten by the wind, and lash it firmly with its reef-lines. It was difficult, long, perilous; but, finally, the diminished top-sail gave less surface to the wind, and the schooner was ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... him and harsh laughter clattering in echoes along the shore; then his boat struck and filled, and the dark flood curtained off the sky. Wagner has made familiar the legend of the Rhine daughters, singing impossibly under the river as they swim about the reef of gold,—the treasure stolen by the gnome, Alberich, who in that act brought envy, strife, greed, and injustice into the world, and accomplished the destruction of the gods themselves. The wild ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... of reef of Kaakaukukui. Beginning at the Government Survey Station known as the "Battery" [delta] from which, Punchbowl [delta] bears N. 48 deg. 18' 30" E. true and ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... 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 scarcely rippled. Now came the resurrection ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lodged on a reef a few feet down stream, but the lantern was gone beyond recovery. The situation was serious. Nugget's lantern was in Randy's canoe, and worse than all, only four matches ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... line with the breakers for some distance, until at length an opening appeared, into which he directed his course. Passing through this we reached still water, which seemed like a lagoon surrounded by a coral reef. The athaleb swam on farther, and at length we saw before us an island with a broad, sandy beach, beyond which was the shadowy outline of a forest. Here the monster landed, and dragged himself wearily upon ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... pictures that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them—not without protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her outrageously. I, for one, hold her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... is the lad who jumps to his work, chucks himself right into it, and puts his last ounce of strength on a rope. That is the fellow who will make a good officer, and who, if needs be, can set an example to the men when they have to go aloft to reef a sail in a stiff gale. So, as I understand, Mr. Prendergast, he is going to leave the sea for a bit. It ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... desolate; I know the winds have stripp'd the gardens green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, but we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths beguile; There let us land, there dream for evermore: "It may be we shall ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... four A. M. it began to blow in squalls very hard, took in one reef in each top-sail, and continued so until eight A. M. the weather being still ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... lines of rosy land from which vegetable life was wholly absent. The sand of the desert advances with its waves, as sterile as those of the sea, eternally disturbed by the winds and beating upon the islet of cultivated earth surrounded and stormed by dusty foam, as upon a reef which it endeavours to cover up. In Egypt, whatever lies above the level of the flood is smitten with death. There is no transition; where stops Osiris, Typhon begins; here luxuriant vegetation, there not a blade of grass, not a bit of ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... streak of lightning showed the white outlines of the reef and the next moment a wave mountain high washed ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... deck against the force of the wind. He could only cling to his place and see the vessel driven ashore, without being able to lift a hand to save her. Suddenly he was conscious of a grating, grinding sensation beneath his feet, and knew that the vessel had struck a coral reef. She swung round broadside to the wind; the boats on the weather side were wrenched from their davits and hurled away in splinters; and in the midst of such fury and turmoil there was no possibility of launching the remaining two boats and ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... Philip, all seemed a mere negation; there was a vacuum where his place had been. At most the thought of him came to her as some strange, vague thrill of added torture, penetrating her soul and then passing; just as ever and anon there came the sound of the fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef, miles away, piercing the dull air with its shrill and desolate ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... pile, about a hundred and twenty feet high, stuck on a coral reef at the mouth of the harbor. 'Bout like our Fowey Rocks, off the Florida coast. She's backing in." His eyes were still on the Tampico, the floes of North River ice hemming her in on all sides. "Passengers'll be off ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... out of the cabin door, jabbered some unintelligible words and pointed to the sails. The boy nodded, for he understood they wanted to attend to the rigging. So the crew trooped forth, rather fearfully, and began to reef the sails and put the ship into condition ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... from a deck beam, but the water had risen in the cabin so that his descent was prevented. The Roebuck had run upon a reef or shoal in such a manner that her bow was projected far out of the water, while her stern was almost submerged in the waves. Noddy's quick perception enabled him to comprehend the position of the vessel, and he placed his charge on the companion ladder, which was protected in a measure ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... of determination that, even though the countenances wearing it were youthful, boded no good to the treacherous enemies of freedom whose trail they were that very moment following. Then they flashed past Robbin's Reef light and snuggled into ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... There his fluent persuasiveness came again into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and appeared to be large and tall, as thick as they could stand one by another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... second," chimed in Teddy. "Wow!" he cried, as a giant breaker thundered down on the reef, "that must have been the daddy of them all, I guess. Let's go up to the lookout room as soon as we're ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... double sweetness in double rhymes, And a double at Whist and a double Times In profit are certainly double— By doubling, the Hare contrives to escape; And all seamen delight in a doubled Cape, And a double-reef'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... for? Why, just to find out what was the matter with his trial balance, that's all. When one of Labe's trial balances starts out for snug harbor and ends up on a reef with six foot of water in her hold, naturally Labe wants to get her afloat and pumped dry as quick as possible. He ain't used to it, for one thing, and it ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... by his side. He was outwardly calm, but with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and for the time run and the currents, and all that, and then reckons up where he is. I travelled with a captain once, and so long as he stuck to dead-reckoning he was all right. He made out we were off Cairns, and that's just where we were; because we struck the Great Barrier Reef, and became a total wreck ten minutes after. With the cattle it's just the same. You'll reckon the cattle that you started with, add on each year's calves, subtract all that you sell,—that is, if you ever do sell any—and allow for deaths, and ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... at Vryburg I was also taken by the proprietor of the Vryburg Hotel to see a farm about five miles off, where they were prospecting for gold. Mr. H—— informed me that the reef I saw, was the same description of rock, I should see at Johannesburg. The people in this neighbourhood are very sanguine; I was told that this may prove ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... Emden was now gradually drawing toward land. Suddenly, she swerved and headed straight for a huge reef that could be seen protruding above the surface of the water. A cry of dismay went up from ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... beneath them was white as milk, with the foam which poured over the reef; but Will thought that they were beyond the rocks. Every sea which struck the wreck added to the disaster; until a larger one than usual struck it, and broke it into fragments. The lads clung to the spar, as it fell. It sank deep in the water, but they retained ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... Knoll, one of his beautiful romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingfordits sequel. The long series of his nautical tales was closed by Jack Tier or the Florida Reef, published in 1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit, energy, invention, life-like ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... were no reptiles; while the absence of mammals in the deposits of the Galapagos Archipelago, where there are plenty of reptiles, might be held to prove the reverse. And at the same time, from the formations extending for two thousand miles along the great barrier-reef of Australia—formations in which are imbedded nothing but corals, echinoderms, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, along with an occasional turtle, or bird, or cetacean—it might be inferred that there lived in our epoch neither terrestrial reptiles, nor terrestrial mammals. The ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... southwestern point, which Goork said he believed to be the least frequented portion of the island, as he had never seen boats put off from there. I found a shallow reef running far out into the sea and rather precipitous cliffs running almost to the surf. It was a nasty place to land, and I realized now why it was not used by the natives; but at last I managed, after a good wetting, to beach my canoe and ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... impact alert Jack Benson felt his heart leap into his mouth. It was as though the "Hastings" had struck, lightly, on a reef. Almost by instinct Jack threw the wheel over to port. Something was rasping, forcefully, under the hull of the submarine. As the helm went to port that something underneath, whatever it ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... reefs cover many thousand square miles in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans. There is one reef, or rather great series of reefs, called the Barrier Reef, which stretches, almost continuously, for more than 1,100 miles off the east coast of Australia. Multitudes of the island in the Pacific are either reefs themselves, or are surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea is in many parts ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Historical Note. Robert Southey (1774-1843) was an English poet. From 1813 until his death he was Poet Laureate of England. Bell Rock, or Inchcape, is a reef of red sandstone near the Firth of Tay, on the east coast of Scotland. At the time of the spring tides part of the reef is uncovered to the height of four feet. Because so many vessels were wrecked upon these rocks the Abbot of Aberbrothok is said to have placed ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... water-growths that had survived the emptying of an inland sea than vegetation of the land. Once the dog's tracks led aside to a scummy puddle, saucered by alkali, dotted with the spoor of desert animals that drank the bitter water in extremity. Then it ran straight to a wide reef of lava. Sandy set down the collie. Grit ran fast across the pitted surface, ahead of the horses, waiting for them to cross the lava. They had hard work to get him to come to hand again, but he gave in at last to the knowledge that they would not go ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... 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 difficulty he adjusted himself to the discovery on arriving ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... was despatched to apprehend the mutineers, and bring them back to England for trial and punishment. The Pandora reached Tahiti March 23, 1791, set sail, with fourteen prisoners, May 8, and was wrecked on the "Great Barrier Reef" north-east of Queensland, August 29, 1791. Four of the prisoners, including George Stewart, who had been manacled, and were confined in "Pandora's box," perished in the wreck, and the remaining ten were brought back to England, and tried by court-martial. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... thought of this much till one day there came on board, A chap who ventur'd to join as seaman by the Lord! His hair hung down like reef points, and his phiz was very queer, For his mouth was like a shark's, and turn'd down ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... as ever, and the symptoms became alarming. The barometer fell several millimeters. The wind came in violent gusts, and then for a moment or so failed altogether. Under such circumstances a sailing vessel would have had to reef in her topsails and her foresail. Everything showed that the wind was rising in the northwest. The storm-glass became much troubled and its movements were ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... of the river is black, and the western is white. This white color of the Bahar el Abiud is occasioned by a very fine white clay with which its waters are impregnated. At the point of junction between the Bahar el Abiud and the Adit, the Bahar el Abiud is almost barred across by an island and a reef of rocks; this barrier checks its current, otherwise it would probably almost arrest the current of the Adit. It is, nevertheless, sufficiently strong to prevent the Adit from mingling with it immediately, although the current of the Adit is very strong, and enters the Bahar ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... 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 it comes ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... and the loss of sleep, had gone to his stateroom and the first mate was in charge. It was three o'clock, the wind still blowing and the darkness pitchy, when the forward lookout shrieked a warning, "Breakers under the lee!" Almost the next instant the ship was on a coral reef, full of water, and the seas breaking over her from ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for a sea-captain to try to take the clapper out of the bell that floats and tolls above a shoal on which his ship will be wrecked if it strikes? Would it be wise to put out the lighthouse lamps, and then think that you had abolished the reef? Does the signalman with his red flag make the danger of which he warns, and is it not like a baby to hate and to neglect the message that comes to you and says, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... for four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track." But the slaughter in the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of 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 chapels to St. Christopher ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said. "Those 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 ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... protesting Of winds, when the tide runs high; And vainly the deep-sea waters Call out, as the waves speed by; For, deaf to the claim of the ocean, To the threat of the loud winds dumb, Past reef and bar, to shores afar, They rush when the hour ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... valley. So we besought the Almighty and called for succour upon His Apostle (on whom be blessing and peace!), when suddenly a violent squall of wind arose and smote the ship, which rose out of the water and settled upon a great reef, the haunt of sea-monsters, where it broke up and fell asunder into planks and all and everything on board were plunged into the sea. As for me, I tore off all my clothes but my gown and swam a little way, till I happened upon one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with such rites as beseemed her degree. In those days the Quality were very rich in their deaths; and, for my part, I dissent from the starveling and nipcheese performances of modern funerals. It is most true that a hole in the sand, or a coral-reef, full fathom five, has been at many times my likeliest Grave; but I have left it nevertheless in my Will—which let those who come after me dispute if they dare—that I may be buried as a Gentleman of long descent, with all due Blacks, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... close together, and through the clear water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... perpetually the sulphurous vapours from his central iniquity. We cannot credit that any Christian ever had his faith shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he read Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and make for a flag planted on the very reef where the ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... virgin forest, and tilling the glebes of a rich and untried soil; and, living among them, he would make that place a centre for wide evangelisation— the home of religious enthusiasms and equal laws; or he would go as a missionary to the savage and the cannibal, and, sailing from reef to reef, where the coral-islands of the Pacific mirror in the deep waters of their calm lagoon the reed-huts of the savage, and the feathery coronal of tropic trees, he would devote his life to reclaiming ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... The oar-banks of each other, stem to stern, While the Greek galleys, with no lack of skill, Hemmed them and battered in their sides, and soon The hulls rolled over, and the sea was hid, Crowded with wrecks and butchery of men. No beach nor reef but was with corpses strewn, And every keel of our barbarian host Hurried to flee, in utter disarray. Thereon the foe closed in upon the wrecks And hacked and hewed, with oars and splintered planks, As fishermen hack tunnies or a cast Of netted dolphins, and the briny ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... talk him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, Harve? Take ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... He could only cling to his place and see the vessel driven ashore, without being able to lift a hand to save her. Suddenly he was conscious of a grating, grinding sensation beneath his feet, and knew that the vessel had struck a coral reef. She swung round broadside to the wind; the boats on the weather side were wrenched from their davits and hurled away in splinters; and in the midst of such fury and turmoil there was no possibility ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... adventure. The admiral sent me, with Messrs. Desfosses and Doret, and two engineer officers, Commandant Mangin-Lecreux and Captain Chauchard, to make rather an odd sort of reconnaissance. To understand its nature, my readers must know that the fort of Saint Juan d'Ulloa is set on a great reef, separated from Vera Cruz by a narrow arm of the sea. On the edge of the reef looking towards the town, the walls of the fort, into which huge iron rings for mooring big ships are built, go perpendicularly down into the sea. On the opposite side the glacis runs into a sort of large lake ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... murmured. "They had put her and the maids into one of the boats—there at the first, when the ship crashed on the reef. They ran back to fetch me, but before they could rush me across, a wave more terrible than all the others swept the ship. It tore loose the boat and whirled ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank. As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... tingling silence of the frosty night— Who lies and listens, till the last note fails, And then, in fancy, faring with the flock Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales, Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock; And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned Within the mightier music of the deep, No more remembers the sweet piping sound That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep; So I, first waking from oblivion, heard, With heart that kindled to the call of song, The voice ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... lays their course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all! And ez to the child keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o' things," continued Joe, in sententious cynicism. "Ef an able seaman had fallen from the yard-arm that night he'd ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... therefore, hove the vessels to, and soon afterwards the San Antonio joined and passed under our stern, when Mr. Hemmans informed me that the guns he had fired were intended as signals to his boat, and that they were not meant for us. He had been aground, he said, on a reef near the Palm Islands, but had received no damage: light, however, as he pretended to make of this accident, it was a sufficient lesson for him, and we soon found he had profited by it, for instead of preceding us, he quietly fell into our wake, a station which he never ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... had, up till now, been held in abeyance by Merelli, who had foreseen difficulty. And, now that it was reached, it proved a reef indeed. For, of the four singers, only the basso had any conception of time. Thus when Merelli, in despair, came apologetically to Ivan to suggest an alteration of the rhythm—which made the whole beauty of the song—Ivan rose from his place swearing, savagely, that not one other note ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to draw nearer and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... good stack of letters and memos on the desk waiting for him. On top of the mail stack was a letter labeled PRIVATE in a beamed spacegram envelope. He did not recognize the name at the head of it but the return address was General Delivery, Reef ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... once bought a mine from that man. His name was Algernon Maddox Cholmondely then, and he was homeward bound to assume the ancestral acres in Flint. He escorted me down the hole and displayed visible gold sparkling all along the reef. A week after he had gone I found that he had put it there with a shot-gun—an old "salter's" trick, but new to me at the time. You are not likely to be seeing Patrick Algernon Terence Maddox O'Ryan-Cholmondely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... in a few places, yet on the whole the agreement was very good. The borings revealed two depressions or channels where the rock surface passed below the grade of the projected tunnels, these depressions being separated by a rock reef which extends down stream from Blackwell's Island. In 32d and 33d Streets in Manhattan, borings were made from the river to the station site at intervals of about 100 ft., wash-borings and core-borings alternating. In Long Island City, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Alfred Noble
... own languages, so that the Fin and Mowree, (Maori,) the Lascar and the Armorican, meeting on the same deck, find a common tongue whereby to carry on the ship's work,—the language in which to "hand, reef, and steer." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... 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 Porto de ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... ship Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian Sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which has often ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the most awkward part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, as might be expected between two hostile armies confronting ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... projected himself gratuitously; and having assumed the offices of chief factor, he would have to see the affair through, victim of his own greediness. It did not serve to marshal excuses. He had frankly entered the affair in the role of buccaneer; and here he was, high and dry on the reef. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... first their shadowy helms in the faint distance The tree-tops rear; then, as he nearer glides, The white surf gleams where the firm reef's resistance Meets and hurls back ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... "but I can't help watching that Chapman boy; he's only got one reef in, and the next time he jibs he'll capsize, and he can't swim, and he'll drown. I told ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... to say that the man who can carry these objects out with success has deserved better of the country than the officer of a battleship, tacking from Ushant to the Black Rocks and back again until she builds up a reef with her beef-bones." ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw one or more caravels sent from Lagos southward to follow the coast of the main-land; but they skirted no shores that were not desert, and turned back baffled by their own fears. Cape Boyador long remained a barrier whose imaginary dangers of reef and shoal served as an excuse for the still more unreal horrors of the ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... served only as a landmark to the fishermen, for they had found by experience that by keeping the laird's chimney and the white tower of Cloomber in a line they could steer their way through the ugly reef which raises its jagged back, like that of some sleeping monster, above the troubled waters of ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Melbourne, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the graphic representation is intellectually perfect. The objects live again in all their external surroundings. I feel the Khamsinn, the desert wind that scorched me at the foot of Pompey's Column; I hear the sea breaking into foam on the barrier reef of Tahiti. But the image does not lead to evocation ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... knowledge of it was large, nor confined to that of his own country, although that alone was at present available for either of his pupils. His seclusion from what is called the world had brought him into larger and closer contact with what is really the world. The breakers upon reef and shore may be the ocean to some, but he who would know the ocean indeed must leave them afar, sinking into silence, and sail into wider and lonelier spaces. Through Godfrey, Mary came to know of a land never promised, yet open—a land of whose nature ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... noted Ports of the Mediterranean, and gave him a great Insight into the practical Part of Navigation. He grew fond of this Life, and was resolved to be a compleat Sailor, which made him always one of the first on a Yard Arm, either to Hand or Reef, and very inquisitive in the different Methods of working a Ship: His Discourse was turn'd on no other Subject, and he would often get the Boatswain and Carpenter to teach him in their Cabbins the constituent Parts of a Ship's Hull, and how to rigg her, ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... a large rock, about a mile to the left of the town of D——, which was surrounded by numerous small ones. This place was called the wrecker's reef, and was covered at high water, but when the tide was low, Isabel and the others often went there to get shells. They had to be careful to watch the rise of the tide, as, long before the rock was covered the retreat ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... idle. A very old craft, she may have foundered; or laid her bones upon some treacherous reef; but as with many a far rover, her fate is ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... hardy sailor who had been on the lakes in the roughest weather, "no boat would live now to reach the reef. Better ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... as the fresh breeze steadied in her sails the sloop heeled far to port. She moved faster and faster, while the white water surged away under her lee. This was sailing worth while! The returning wind had come in much stronger than before the flaw, and was now almost worthy of at least one reef under ordinary conditions. With her extra canvas, the James was canted over perilously. Her lee scuppers were often awash and a good deal of water was coming ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... African tour of the regiment, in January, 1883, to reduce the garrisons in West Africa from six to three companies, and the steamship Bolivar was chartered to carry out the relief in two trips. That vessel, however, was wrecked off the Cobbler's Reef, at Barbados, and H.M.S. Tyne was sent in her place. The latter embarked H Company at Cape Coast Castle on the 6th of February, 1883, and F and G Companies at Sierra Leone on the 14th, all three proceeding to Jamaica under the command of Major C.J.L. Hill. On ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... sail was (until c. 1780) lateen, i.e., triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezen, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still called ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... form of a wall of water 25 or 30 feet high, it carried us over the warehouses into the first street of the town. This wave in receding took her back toward the beach, and left her nearly perpendicular on the edge of a coral reef, where she has now keeled over to an angle of ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in the distant tavai trees chant ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... the Speedy was again off, running out of the south channel, past the grim walls of old Fort Taylor, and a few miles farther on passing Sand Key light, which rises from a bit of coral reef barely lifted above the wash of a tranquil sea. At that time this was the most southerly point of United States territory. In the deep water just beyond Sand Key lay a great battle-ship, tugging sullenly at her pondrous anchors, and looking like ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... the already flourishing sugar-works were burnt, he and Caramuru were both obliged to abandon the settlement and retire to Ilheos. Soon afterwards, however, he made peace with the Indians; but on his return to the Reconcave, he was wrecked on the reef off Itaporica, where the natives murdered him, but spared Caramuru, who returned to his ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... upon a coral reef. They become lithified as it were and constitute the strata of the psychozoic stage'—I told you the butter's at the spring. Will you leave me alone? That's the third page I've spoiled over psycho-what-you-call-it. Go on back and herd your goats, and for gracious sake, can that tulip-and-rose song! ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... so many Italians, having lived in England and America, can speak English and know something of us and our ways, accounts for much. For a foreign language is the Great Barrier Reef against the voyages of ordinary people towards international understanding. And the country counts for something, too. Its natural obstacles compel admiration for an Army which has achieved so much in spite of them. And I ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... cargo steamer, though she is provided also with a saloon and staterooms for a few passengers. She was on her way from St. John, New Brunswick, to Halifax, when during a thick fog she struck on Cowl Ledge, a reef between Bryer and Long Islands, on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, about half a mile from the shore. The cause of the disaster was probably one of the strong tide eddies which exist in the Bay of Fundy, and which had set her in toward the shore. It was calm at the time, and she was making ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail from day to day, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... at the north end of the row, watching a smart cutter that was beating from the north against a strong S.S.E. wind and heavy sea, which broke heavily on the beach and over an outlying reef of rocks which forms a natural breakwater and shelters the fishermen's cobles from the strong winds that blow in from the sea during the winter months. The cutter tacked close in to the north end of the ridge several times during the forenoon. Her appearance was that of a Government ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... and the first mate was in charge. It was three o'clock, the wind still blowing and the darkness pitchy, when the forward lookout shrieked a warning, "Breakers under the lee!" Almost the next instant the ship was on a coral reef, full of water, and the seas breaking over ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the sloop-of-war was out of repair. We then changed to another steamer, which carried away the cap of her rudder during a heavy sea and fresh northerly gale. Fortunately our English shipwrights were on board, and Lieutenant Baker, R.N., knew his work; thus we escaped drowning on a coral reef, which would assuredly have been our fate had we been left to the ignorance ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... board the Thetis a few hours, and were in the act of eating a lobster for the first time in our lives, when the captain and the sailors began to swear violently at the pilot, whom I could see at the helm, rigid with fear, striving to avoid a reef—barely visible above the water—towards which our ship was being driven. Great was our terror at this violent tumult, for we naturally thought ourselves in the most extreme danger. The vessel did actually receive a severe shock, which, to my vivid imagination, seemed ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Pearce. Error in position of Cape Rulhieres. Obtain soundings on supposed Sahul Shoal. Discover a shoal patch on it. Ascertain extent of bank of soundings off the Australian shore. Strange winds in Monsoon. See Scott's Reef. Discover error in its position. Make Depuch Island. Prevalence of westerly winds near it. Sperm whales. Tedious passage. Death and burial of the ship's cook. Anecdotes of his life. Good landfall. Arrival at Swan River. Find Colony improved. Hospitality of Colonists. Lieutenant Roe's account of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... tell ME about Henry," he protested. "I've known Henry twenty-five years. If Henry got his deserts," he exclaimed hotly, "he wouldn't be a consul on this coral reef; he'd be a minister in Europe. Look at me! We're the same age. We started together. When Lincoln sent him to Morocco as consul, he signed my commission as a midshipman. Now I'm an admiral. Henry has twice my brains and he's been a consul-general, and he's HERE, ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... those habits of observation which were to be of the greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another vessel—the Porpoise—Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four feet above the surface of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... against him. He was promptly tried by court-martial and beheaded. The other ship, the "Kwang-chia," never reached Port Arthur. She was wrecked during the night after the battle, with much loss of life, on a reef outside Talienwan Bay. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... tons. Large nets are used, which, during the months between March and October, are dragged, dredge-like, over the rocks. A large crew will haul in a season from 600 to 900 pounds. To prevent the destruction of the industry, the reef is divided into ten parts, only one being worked a year, and by the time the tenth is reached the first is overgrown again with a new growth. In 1873 the Algerian fisheries alone, employing 3,150 men, realized half a million of dollars. The choice grades are always valuable, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... April 1699 the Narrator arrived at Anguilla in the West-Indies and sent his Boat on Shore, where his men had the News That he and his People were proclaimed Pirates, which put them into such a Consternation that they sought all Opportunitys to run the Ship on shore upon some reef or Shoal, fearing the Narrator should carry them ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... as a pilot, only as an able seaman, if you know how to hand, reef, and steer, and how ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... he, 'We're lost, every soul and the good money! we've struck a reef, Adam, and 'tis the end and O the good money!' Hereupon I climbed 'bove deck, the vessel on her beam ends and in desperate plight and nought to be seen i' the dark save the white spume as the seas broke over ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... reefing and tacking, were assigned to them. As the officers who had volunteered to serve before the mast were thorough seamen, the task was speedily accomplished. There were no "green hands" to be favored, for every one was competent to hand, reef, and steer. By the time the squadron was well in the offing, the ship's company was in condition to make sail. About ten miles outside of the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... Tottenham, bound to New South Wales with 200 convicts. On June the 8th I joined her. After receiving all the ship's and government stores on board, we proceeded to Woolwich, and received on board 50 of our number, and in the afternoon of the same day we made sail, and on a sudden struck on a reef at low water; we were lying high and dry; every means was used to get her off, but without success, till we sent our convicts up to the hulks, and discharged our stores into the different crafts sent for that purpose, and by that means lightened her so, that at ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... intrench^, fence round &c (circumscribe) 229; house, nestle, ensconce; take charge of. escort, convoy; garrison; watch, mount guard, patrol. make assurance doubly sure &c (caution) 864; take up a loose thread; take precautions &c (prepare for) 673; double reef topsails. seek safety; take shelter, find shelter &c 666. Adj. safe, secure, sure; in safety, in security; on the safe side; under the shield of, under the shade of, under the wing of, under the shadow of one's wing; under ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to be none, he remembered the One Hundred and Seventh Psalm: "He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder." And the morning dawned clear, the ice was moving and their prison widening. On July 3, Haabet cleared the last ice-reef, and the shore lay ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Mrs. Betterson, taking another reef in her shawl, "that you heard her tell a good deal about us; things that would no doubt tend to prejudice a stranger; though if all the truth was known she wouldn't feel so hard towards us as I have reason to think ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... from driving on the dangerous reef, was just as much as the oarsmen could accomplish. Weakened as they were, by long suffering and starvation, they had a tough struggle to hold the pinnace as it were in statu quo—all the tougher from the disproportion between such a heavy craft and the light oar-stroke of which her ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... Pierce, by observation, philosophy, and mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they trace a law whose harmony is its glory, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... of His embrace; that dwells by waters of comfort and lies down in the green pastures of the Heavenly Love; while, round this little island of salvation in an ocean of terror, the thunders of wrath sound only as the noise of surge on a far-off reef. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... the Psyche had shot up to its full height; the reef points of the mainsail were loose, and the gaff was crowned with its topsail; foresail and jib were full; and she was flying as if her soul thirsted within her after infinite spaces. Yet what more could she want? All around her was wave rushing upon wave, and ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... connection with the girls who worked in my establishment. With my complexion and my pronounced liking for variety, a score of girls, nearly all of them pretty and seductive, as most Paris girls are, was a reef on which my virtue made shipwreck every day. Curiosity had a good deal to do with it, and they profited by my impatience to take possession by selling their favours dearly. They all followed the example of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... was a 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 could ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of the Spratly Islands are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam; parts of them are claimed by Malaysia and the Philippines; in 1984, Brunei established an exclusive economic zone, which encompasses Louisa Reef, but has not publicly claimed ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... But they tell the tale That, when fogs are thick on the harbor reef, The mackerel-fishers shorten sail; For the signal they know will bring relief, For the voices of children, still at play In a phantom-hulk that drifts alway Through channels whose ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... 'Small reef birds (tern) were present in prodigious numbers, skimming the waters of the coast with an erratic, rapid, but yet graceful flight, like that of the stormy petrel. At night they assembled in vast numbers on an islet in the lagoon, to roost on the trees. They are about the size of ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... 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 the moonlight, jerked out from under the awnings of the steamer's ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... down within a mile of a small island lying near the northeast point of Winter Island. On the 31st the tide took us through between these, the breadth of the passage being three quarters of a mile, in no less than sixteen fathoms water. We then passed within a dangerous reef of rocks, lying a full mile from the shore, and having numerous heavy masses of grounded ice upon it. After clearing this in a good depth of water, we were, by the evening, carried along shore within a mile ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... saw-mill of a New Yorker. At dusk our boats entered a little sound, and by nine o'clock in the evening we arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, in a region of shoal water, much cut up by oyster reefs. The tide being very low, the boats were anchored inside of an oyster reef, which afforded protection from the inflowing swell of the sea. We shaped our course next day for St. Marks, along a low, marshy coast, where oyster reefs, in shoal water, frequently barred our progress. From South Cape to ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... is falling," remarked Rucker as he prepared to go below. "We're going to have a nasty spell, I guess. You might take a double reef in that jib if it gets worse. If there's any shortnin' of sail beyond that, ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... way, with legs quivering uneasily; when I took no notice, he lay down between my feet and stared out to sea as I was doing. And never a cry, never a word of human voice to be heard anywhere; nothing; only the heavy rush of the wind about my head. There was a reef of rocks far out, lying all apart; when the sea raged up over it the water towered like a crazy screw; nay, like a sea-god rising wet in the air, and snorting, till hair and beard stood out like a wheel about ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... 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 ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... of the West. She lived for its mountains and lochs, its rivers and burns, its magnificent coast and its fascinating animal life. She knew every little creek and inlet, every rock and shallow, every reef and current from Fort William to the Gair Loch. I have even heard it said that when she was twelve she could draw an accurate outline of Benbecula and North Uist, a feat that would be a great deal beyond the vast ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... curious eyes—appraising eyes, indeed—from time to time as the younger man's interminable stream of talk of the Cause flowed on. But the Doctor had his passion also. When it burst its bonds, he was saying: "Look here, you crazy man—take a reef in your canvas picture of jocund day upon the misty mountain tops—get down to grass roots." Grant turned an exalted face upon the Doctor in astonishment. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top. There is another crash and more screams at the other side of the street, and before the driver has diagnosed the case, he has hit the Exchange Street crossing, which sticks out like the Reef of Norman's Woe. When he has landed on the other side of this crossing, he slows down and goes meekly out of town at ten miles an hour, while we saunter forth and pick up small objects of value such as wrenches, luncheon ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... original Dutch walghvogel. It is a curious coincidence, that as the bird of Nazareth has been found in books only, so the island of Nazareth has been found only on paper. At first, it appeared quite a respectable island; as maritime discovery progressed, it degenerated to a reef, and from that to a shoal; till at last, expunged from the more correct charts of modern hydrographers, it no longer can boast of a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... the Spratly Islands are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam; parts of them are claimed by Malaysia and the Philippines; in 1984, Brunei established an exclusive fishing zone, which encompasses Louisa Reef in the southern Spratly Islands, but has not ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... wreathed with spindrift and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. From reef and rock and skerry—over headland, ness and voe— The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... about a hundred and twenty feet high, stuck on a coral reef at the mouth of the harbor. 'Bout like our Fowey Rocks, off the Florida coast. She's backing in." His eyes were still on the Tampico, the floes of North River ice hemming her in on all sides. "Passengers'll be off in an hour. Wonder ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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
... his pipe, glanced toward his bunk and started to take off his coat. Human nature has its limit; he had passed many sleepless nights and now felt entitled to a brief respite, especially as the chart showed neither reef nor rock anywhere in the neighborhood. But he had only one arm out of the garment when something happened that caused him to change his mind; abruptly hurled to the other end of the cabin, he found ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... had been trailing along the coastline, and now it angled out to glide over a long finger of cape, rocky and waterworn, which pointed at almost a right angle into the sea. This dwindled into a reef of rock, like the nail on a finger. The sea ahead was no unbroken expanse. Instead there was a series of islands, some merely tops of reefs over which the waves broke, others more substantial, rising well above the threatening ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... axes, quickly severed the shrouds of the mizen-mast, and some attacked it, while others went to the mainmast, in spite of the mad cries of the captain to "hold fast." Their object was thus to force the ship over the reef—if it was a reef we were on—head first, or closer to the shore if we were on an island. The seas came thundering against our sides, often dashing over the decks, so that with difficulty any of us could save ourselves from being carried away by them. Several poor people were thus swept away soon ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... When they allowed the jib to fill, even that was enough to send the boat over, and she had already a dangerous lot of water surging among the ballast; while, when they were forced to put her head to the wind, she drifted with a heavily running tide, and right to leeward was a long reef of rocks that would inevitably crunch her into matchwood. The younger brothers said not a word, but looked at Rob, ready to obey his slightest gesture, and Rob stood by the mast calling out from time ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... of fog? I don't know what to make of it. No wind at all; the glass steady as a rock; and a heavy swell rolling up from westward. Take hold of my glass and bring it to bear on the Monk"—this was the lighthouse guarding the westernmost reef of the Off Islands. "Every now and then a sea'll ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... horizon and draw near; Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach: Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there, And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef, The ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Gold Reef City There are mothers and children too! And they cry 'Hurry up for pity!' So what ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Cythera long is desolate; I know the winds have stripped the garden green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, for we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths, beguile; There let us land, there dream for evermore: 'It ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... rush so. She'd shear clear through some of the larger seas, and you didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,— Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the gulfs of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... distance of twelve miles from the coast, which does not, however, close the series, for sixty miles farther west stands the group of the Tortugas, isolated in the Gulf of Mexico. Though they seem disconnected, these islands are parts of a submerged Coral Reef, concentric with the shore of the peninsula and continuous underneath the water, but visible above the surface at such points of the summit as have fully completed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... revolver in hand, while more than once a swift bullet was sent shrilling over our heads at some great fin rising out of the sea beyond. On our trip to and from Bongao, one of the Tawi Tawi Islands, on a wrecking expedition to save the launch Maud, stranded there on a coral reef, all the Signal Corps officers were at liberty, too, which made life on the ship even more agreeable, the delightful experience being again repeated on our return trip to Manila ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... be shipped; but as I am sending you the flank companies of the Newfoundland Regiment by the 'Lady Prevost,' she cannot take the provisions." Trivial details these may seem; but in war, as in other matters, trivialities sometimes decide great issues, as the touching of a button may blow up a reef. The battle of Lake Erie, as before said, was ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... deep shadows down upon the bay, and upon the group of yellow stucco bungalows that clustered together upon the edge of the water, upon the narrow strip of land lying between the sea and the sheer sides of the backing mountains. The bay was a crescent, almost closed, and a coral reef ran in an encircling sweep from the headland beyond, and the translucent, sparkling waters of the harbour seemed beautiful beyond belief. His heart beat wildly when for the first time he beheld his new home—it exceeded in beauty anything ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... usual, was Courtlandt Classon; the ornamental Miriam, Mrs. O'Hara; and the children of the preferred stock started North with cymbals and with dances, making a joyful noise, and camping en route at Ormond—vastly more beautiful than the fashion-infested coral reef from which they started—at Saint Augustine, on corporate compulsion, at the great inns of Hampton, Hot Springs, and Old Point, for fashion's sake—taking their falling temperature by degrees—as ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... prodigy; any lad of intelligence; who possesses a sufficient knowledge of mathematics, may do the same. He learned to steer, beginning first in fine weather, and he soon could go aloft and and and reef with any of the lads in the ship, some of whom had already made two or three voyages. The rapid proficiency he acquired, and the favour bestowed upon him by the captain, created some jealousy in the breasts of several ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... surgeon, the cooper and a sailor had died, and the slave cargo was daily diminishing. Five weeks of sailing then carried the ship across the Atlantic, where she put into Tobago to refill her leaking water casks. Sailing thence she struck a reef near her destination at Curacao and was abandoned by her officers and crew. Finally a sloop sent by the Curacao governor to remove the surviving slaves was captured by a privateer with them on board. Of the 195 negroes comprising the cargo on June 30, from one to five died nearly ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes down ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... goes a bit of smoke, Mr. Wiltshire, behind the break of the reef. That’s Falesá, where your station is, the last village to the east; nobody lives to windward—I don’t know why. Take my glass, and you can make the ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in white water, was owing to the circumstance that the rocks all around it lay so near the surface of the sea as to prevent the possibility of agitating the element very seriously, and to the fact that she was near the lee side of the reef. Had the breakers been of the magnitude of those which are seen where the deep rolling billows of the ocean first meet the weather side of shoals or rocks, a craft of that size, and so loaded, could not possibly have passed the first line of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... Nevertheless, in one lay not a rock, while the other was strewn with danger. In the latter channel, after a hundred strokes of the oars, the ships in single file, led by the Pretoria, would have been dragged by a submarine current toward a reef of rocks which was visible in the distance, and over which the sea, calm everywhere else, broke tumultuously. The commanders of the several galleys could perceive their peril only one by one; each would be made aware of it only by the rapid drifting ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... darkness was very great, for the hurrying clouds hid the starlight. Presently a sound arose above the turmoil of the storm, a crashing thunderous sound towards which the send of the sea gradually bore them. The sound came from the waves that beat upon the Bryngelly reef. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... to his own oar to rehead the boat. It was a perilous move, and in a perilous place. Here the water ran, troubled and white-capped, over a hidden reef. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... 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, not only the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... which is deepest and most sacred, and which Plato calls the memory of divine beings whom we knew in some anterior life, that recognition of kindred natures which precedes reason and asks no leave of the understanding, is not a gradual and cautious attraction, like the growth of a coral reef, but sudden and magnetic as the coalescence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mulberry-leaf To shining silk; the lapidary's skill Makes the rough diamond sparkle at his will, And cuts a gem from quartz or coral-reef. Better a skillful cobbler at his last Than unlearned poet twangling on the lyre; Who sails on land and gallops on the blast, And mounts the welkin on a braying ass, Clattering a shattered cymbal bright with brass, And slips his girth and ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... through the midnight, dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost the vessel swept, Toward the reef of Norman's ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... went along smoothly, for Mrs. Morrison was an excellent housekeeper, and could make a dollar go a great ways without appearing to be niggardly; but unexpected misfortune overtook them, and the company in which most of the carpenter's savings had been invested struck a reef, so that not only did the little income cease from this source but there was danger that the principal ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... grating of the keel as she was forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the vessel; the hurrying up of the ship's company without their clothes; and then the enormous waves which again bore her up and carried her clean over the reef, will never be effaced ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... minutes it blew a stiff breeze. Some time before the admiral spoke the vessels outside, he was compelled to take in all his light canvass; and when he filled, again, after giving his orders to the frigate and sloop, the topgallant sheets were let fly, a single reef was taken in the top-sails, and the lighter sails were set over them. This change in the weather, more especially as the night threatened to be clouded, if not absolutely dark, would necessarily bring about a corresponding change ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and slack each reef an' tack, Gae her sail, boys, while it may sit; She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore, An' she'll roar through a heavier yet. When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep, In the tempest's angry moan, We dash through the drift, and sing to the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... ever knew. Neither did they know how many times she had tried to imagine the moment when her despairing mother, with death near, and with prayers and tears, had cast her adrift, hoping that the one little life most dear to that mother might be saved. The fatal reef where those parents had gone down also held for her a weird fascination, and at times the voice of the ocean seemed like the despairing cries of mortals. One picture, and it was her best, was a view of the wreck, as near as Uncle Terry could describe it, with human forms clinging ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... sub-order of lizards. Their chief characteristic is their adhesive toes, which enable them to cling to and run on smoothest surfaces even when upside down. They do not like the hot sunlight and largely feed at twilight and at night. The Reef Gecko is found in Florida; the Warty Gecko, so called on account of the rows of large wart-like scales on its back and sides, inhabits Lower California; the Cape Gecko, Lower California; the Banded ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... Honolulu, and in the near realization of what had been, to some of us, a beautiful dream for years. And were we disappointed? Oh, no! No picture of our imagination had ever been so bright, so beautiful as that spread out before us, as our gallant ship sailed majestically through the coral reef into the beautiful harbor of Honolulu. It was like entering a new world; everything was bright with tropical splendor. The mountains, in whose hearts had slumbered volcanic fires, which, from time to time, ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... using his sextant to ascertain the position of the ship. One night we were awakened by a tremendous shock; and, to spare you the details of a shipwreck, which have nothing to do with my story, we found ourselves when day broke fast on a coral reef, about a mile from an island of no great size, and out of sight of all other land. The sextant having been broken to pieces, I had no means of ascertaining the position of this island, nor do I now know anything of it except that it lay, in the month of August, within the region ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... possible" was being done by the Imperial authorities, His Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard the lives and property of the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef Town in the event of an attack ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 the moonlight, jerked out ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... summer of 1783 a volcanic eruption took place about 30 miles from Cape Reykjanaes, on the west coast. An island was thrown up from which fire and smoke continued to issue, but in less than a year the waves had washed the loose pumice away, leaving a submerged reef from 5 to 30 fathoms below sea level. About a month later followed the frightful outbreak of Skaptar-Jökull, a distance of nearly 200 miles from ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... craters, one inside the 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 ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island; Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Wake Island. Since 18 July 1947, the US has administered the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, but recently entered into a new political relationship with three ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the bizarre, the slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in "Wardour-street ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... forcible, but clear. That is why sea-slang is so poetical; there is a word for everything and every act, and a thing and an act for every word. Seamen must speak quick and bold, but also with utmost precision. They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect—therefore,—(Steamboat bell rings.) But I must say ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the Isle of Good Promise, which, grandly unmoved by their fuming rage, turned them up into the black sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought—gigantic, breaking seas—went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... at which it was possible to land the stores and provisions. So completely do the rocks surround the island, that it was not easy to find a place even to land a man. At length, however, they succeeded, having discovered at the south-west end, a small opening in a reef that runs across a bay. Here the people, provisions and stores were all put on shore in perfect safety. The Commandant wrote in high spirits at the promising appearance of his new territory; and subsequent accounts have proved, that the opinion he then formed was ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... the portents became more pronounced; the wind increased to such an extent that we first had to stow our topgallantsails again and then single-reef the topsails, and a very nasty short, choppy sea quickly got up, into which the frigate plunged viciously to the height of her figurehead, sending deluges of spray over her weather cathead and into the hollow of her foresail until the canvas was darkened with wet half-way up to the yard, while it ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... lose a shred, sir," said Philip; "the scissors shall only be used to cut the threads, with which the ladies take in a reef here and there, ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... But there are still some cases where the little we know of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye, suggests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by the corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near the mouth of rivers. Hence the change of the outlet of a stream, often a very busy matter, may promote the construction of a barrier to coast navigation at one ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... chance,—these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Le Teton, and the Petite Sambiere, rise up like volcanic monuments from a floor of lava and trailing vraic, which at half-tide makes the sea a tender mauve and violet. The passages of safety between these ranges of reef are but narrow at high tide; at half-tide, when the currents are changing most, the violet field becomes the floor of a vast ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from the shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base, and storm-birds—born of the wind one might suppose, as ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... enjoyed it. Jenieve could see their night fires begin to twinkle on Round Island and Bois Blanc, and the rising hubbub of their carnival came to her like echoes across the strait. There was one growing star on the long hooked reef which reached out from Round Island, and figures of Indians were silhouetted against the lake, running back and forth along that high stone ridge. Evening coolness stole up to Jenieve, for the whole ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... on the lookout for subs, as far out as the Reef," Ikey said solemnly. "I don't believe they've got this coast half patrolled. We don't often see one of those chasers in the ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... regarding its capabilities." In the map of his route, published by Arrowsmith, Port Grey is laid down as a spacious, well-sheltered harbour, with a convenient point of land extending a couple of miles out to sea from its northern extremity, and having a useful reef of rocks projecting, most happily, to the same distance, affording altogether a secure shelter for shipping in ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... and mangrove swamps with mud, or like some imperfect ones about the 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 ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... some never go out. They satisfy themselves with the channel trade." He pointed. "We're getting out to the open sea now, past the reef." ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... scene: the island mountains crowned with the perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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, ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... I'll show you whether my appetite has a reef in it or not. I can eat more than the living skeleton can, and for a thin man he's got anything stopped for appetite that I ever saw," answered Teddy Tucker, scrambling to his feet and ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... ships, the "Arctic" and "Pacific," they could not defy the powers of pure accident. In the same gale the "Empire City" was dismantled, having all of her upper works swept off, while the "Illinois" was injured by being on the Colorado Reef. They have both been undergoing most costly repairs for several weeks. While writing this, the "Philadelphia" is also in the shop. She recently broke her shaft and her cross-tail, and had to put into Charleston. All of these repairs cost an immense sum of money, and are calculated, ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... but, by the native saying, it was death to bathe there. "There is nothing in that," said the missionary; and he came to the bay, and went swimming. Presently an eddy took him and bore him towards the reef. "Oho!" thought the missionary, "it seems there is something in it after all." And he swam the harder, but the eddy carried him away. "I do not care about this eddy," said the missionary; and even as he said it, he was aware of a house raised on piles above the sea; it was built of yellow ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... water may not have a disastrous effect on the boilers and hull, but an engine can't stand any rust at all and still remain one hundred per cent efficient. I tell you I know, Gus. I had my Amelia Ricks submerged on Duxbury Reef for a week; then I hauled her off and she lay on the tide flats in Mission Bay another three weeks until I could patch her up and float her into the dry dock. Do you know what it cost me to make her engines over again? Thirteen thousand dollars, young ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... long is desolate; I know the winds have stripp'd the gardens green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, but we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths beguile; There let us land, there dream for evermore: ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... carry another inch of canvas," expostulated English as the mate shook out a reef in the mainsail, but Coppin and Clarke were now in command, since only they professed to know the coast, and the warning was unheeded, especially as the wind had for a moment lulled or rather drawn back for a more formidable spring, swooping down as the last reef point was loosed with a force that ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the oil, And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... handle the brace and the bow-line, the wheel and the lead-line, the reef-point and the top-rope? The paddle is a good thing, out of doubt, in a canoe; but of what use is ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... to make good his derivation of the name. But there are certainly many caves under the fields and vineyards of Salissa. There is one excellent natural harbour, a bay, about a mile wide, in the south coast of the island. It is protected from heavy seas by a reef of rock, a natural breakwater, which stretches across and almost blocks the entrance of ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... voyage, a shipwreck, led him to his long-wished-for goal. God uses even man's malice and opposition to the Gospel to advance the progress of the Gospel. Men, like coral insects, build their little bit, all unaware of the whole of which it is a part, but the reef rises above the waves and ocean ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... task to shorten sail with the pressure of the wind on it. But Frank Racer had considerable skill in handling boats, and with his brother at the helm, to ease off when he gave the word, he managed to cast off the throat and peak lines, lower the gaff and sail, and then take a double reef in ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... out of his mouth and sent it overboard. His face of mutiny left him, and was replaced by an expression of gratitude. Five minutes later the old Hindoo Merchant was thrusting through it with her nose heading for the river Hooghley, and the darkeys tying a single reef in the foretopsail. ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... presume," returned Mrs. Betterson, taking another reef in her shawl, "that you heard her tell a good deal about us; things that would no doubt tend to prejudice a stranger; though if all the truth was known she wouldn't feel so hard towards us as I have reason to ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... made camp for the night beside a stream of cold water. Next morning it blew hard from the north, and in a driving rain we crept down the Carolina coast. One incident of the day I remember. I took in a reef or two, and adjusted the sheets, for this was a game I knew and loved. The Indian watched me closely, and made a sign to me to take the helm. He had guessed that I knew more than himself about the handling of a boat in wind, and since we were in an open sea, where ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... a hundred and twenty feet high, stuck on a coral reef at the mouth of the harbor. 'Bout like our Fowey Rocks, off the Florida coast. She's backing in." His eyes were still on the Tampico, the floes of North River ice hemming her in on all sides. "Passengers'll ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Lewis Recour John Red James Redfield Edward Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil Michael Renow Jean Reo Barton Repent Jean ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... bursting into foam and gyrating in dizzy whirlpools, its surface broken by explosions of spray or pitted by devouring vortices resembling the oily mouths of marine monsters. Below this, in turn, is the White Horse, worst of all. Here the flood somersaults over a tremendous reef, flinging on high a gleaming curtain of spray. These rapids are well named, for the tossing waves resemble nothing more than runaway white horses with streaming ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... hoof, the traveller is next desired to look at a natural tunnel in the outer cliff, which pierces it through from one end to the other. Then his attention is directed to a lighthouse built on a reef of rocks detached from the land; and he is told of the great waves which break over the top of the building during the winter storms. Lastly, he is requested to inspect a quaint protuberance in a pile of granite at a little ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... will be the first to go under. He will say, and may be perfectly right in saying, that there is no real cause for anxiety. He will prepare to run slap through the storm, and refuse to reef a single financial sail. He forgets that the mere existence of panic in the minds of others is in itself as hard a factor in the situation as the real value of the properties on the market which are being stampeded. The atmosphere of the business world is ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... a life at sea are not as great as fiction writers sometimes indicate, according to this old sea dog. He says that in all his voyages, he has been in only one serious wreck. That was on a reef of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... about sixty miles east of the Lizard, is a straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to scrape over them at high-tide. Even ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... run on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes down ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... now she was vigilant even when she seemed asleep, and anything the least bit out of the ordinary was enough to make her take alarm. As she lay sluggishly rocking, the great blackish round of her head and back now all awash, now rising like a reef above the waves, she suddenly caught sight of a white furry head with a black tip to its nose, swiftly cleaving the water. She knew it was only a white bear swimming, and she knew also that it was not big ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the regiment, in January, 1883, to reduce the garrisons in West Africa from six to three companies, and the steamship Bolivar was chartered to carry out the relief in two trips. That vessel, however, was wrecked off the Cobbler's Reef, at Barbados, and H.M.S. Tyne was sent in her place. The latter embarked H Company at Cape Coast Castle on the 6th of February, 1883, and F and G Companies at Sierra Leone on the 14th, all three ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or the quiescence of the deep - the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land, imminent ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was all the wavering air. We heard the reef's far rollers croon About the ocean's margent, where Loitered the waning moon ... So fond the hour; the scene so fair; And fate came home so soon ... Some sorrow wept,—I knew not where. Some sudden presence made the air ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... from the wharf and beckoned so frantically that the big man swarmed up the rigging to the dock as though he were going aloft to reef a topsail ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... this, I had not got my "sea legs on,'' was dreadfully sea-sick, with hardly strength enough to hold on to anything, and it was "pitch dark.'' This was my condition when I was ordered aloft, for the first time, to reef topsails. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... 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 chapels to St. Christopher on the points of land where they might first greet the mariners' eyes. Beneath ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rising tide and drowned, Hammond Rock springing up immediately after to mark the spot. His wives, who were watching him at the time, resolved to drown themselves, and were changed into some dry rocks upon an adjacent reef named after them Ipile, or ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... our through the broken bulwark, and the boat rose again on the waves as they swept one after another down upon her stern. The channel was well marked now, for the sands on either side were covered with breaking water. Joe Chambers shouted to the sailors to close reef the mizzen and hoist it, so that he might have the boat better under control. The wind was not directly astern but somewhat on the quarter; and small as was the amount of sail shown, the boat lay over till her lee rail was at times under water; the following ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... tie four of the following knots: reef, sheet-bend, clove hitch, bowline, fisherman's, and sheep-shank ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... and Comus had been examining Turk's Island, to the eastward of the Caicos, and had passed to the northward of it on the larboard tack, standing in for the northern point of the reef, which joined on to the great Caicos Island. They were, therefore, in a situation to intercept the Avenger before she arrived at her anchorage, had it not been for the reefs which barred their passage. The only plan which ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... fresh water from the rain which had fallen in a hollow of the rock, was all that the unfortunate colonists possessed. Their last hope, the vessel, had been shattered to pieces. They had no means of quitting the reef; no fire, nor any means of obtaining it. It seemed that they ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... supposition was correct. In a few minutes the ship was enveloped in a livid creeping mist, and he heard the Captain shout, "All hands stand by to reef!" Reef they did, but Pentland's temper was rapidly rising, and in a few minutes there was an impetuous shout for the storm jib, "Quick," and down came a blast from the north, and with a rip and a roar the yacht leaped her full length. If her canvas ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... making for the west side of the bay, towards a reef of rocks which runs out some way into the sea," exclaimed Gerald. "He expects that he shall ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... Hateth: and Castor's[10] shame Is hot for her sake, and the reeds Of old Eurotas stir With the noise of the name of her. She slew mine ancient King, The Sower of fifty Seeds[11], And cast forth mine and me, As shipwrecked men, that cling To a reef in ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... 1817, concerning the naval forces on the Great Lakes, was considered in force and observed by the two Governments for a year or more before it was submitted to the Senate at all. Horse Shoe Reef, in Lake Erie, was transferred to the Government by a mere exchange of notes between Lord Palmerston and Mr. Lawrence, our Minister to Great Britain; and I might refer to a long list of arbitrations, some of very ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... rescue of Mr. Mitchell. Such apprehensions of danger, however, as they occur occasionally, do good, and lead men to think of and correct their weak points. What you say of the accessible nature of the southern reef surprises me, and strengthens your recommendation of gunboats as the means of defence which are least to be neglected. I only hang back in regard to them, as the Naval Department could not bear the expense of such defences for the many colonies that would require them, and ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... to the sea wall, and there looked out over a foaming waste of waters. In one place where a sunken reef of coral came close to the surface the waves beat and tore at it as though to wrench it up, and cast it ashore. There the sea boiled and ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... and Seizing Rope. Loops. Cuckolds' Necks. Clinches. Overhand and Figure-eight Knots. Square and Reef Knots. Granny Knots. Open-hand and Fishermen's Knots. Ordinary Knots and Weavers' Knots. Garrick Bends ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... vibrate, and rang in the creeping-on pirate's ears. Fierce, but cunning, he saw mischief in those shortened sails, and that Union Jack, the terror of his tribe, rising to a British cheer; he lowered his mainsail, and crawled up on the weather quarter. Arrived within a cable's length, he double-reef'ed his foresail to reduce his rate of sailing nearly to that of the ship; and the next moment a tongue of flame, and then a gush of smoke, issued from his lee bow, and the ball flew screaming like a seagull over the Agra's mizen top. He then put his helm up, and fired ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and Newport, above a hundred men, and a few women and children. There sprang a leak; all thought of death. Then rose a cry "Land ho!" The storm abated, but the wind carried the Sea Adventure upon this shore and grounded her upon a reef. A certain R. Rich, gentleman, one of the voyagers, made and published a ballad upon the whole event. If it is hardly Shakespearean music, yet it is not ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... 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 Saturday ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... schooner crept on past a sturdy squat headland, and it was pitch dark when her headsails ran down, she turned short on her heel, and her anchor bit into the sandy bottom on the edge of the outer reef; for it was too dangerous then to attempt entering the little bay full of shoals. After the last solemn flutter of the mainsail the murmuring voices of the Moorsom party lingered, very frail, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... not till the next morning, and then very leisurely, that the Ebba began to make preparations for her departure. From the extremity of New-Berne quay the crew might have been seen holystoning the deck, after which they loosened the reef lines, under the direction of Effrondat, the boatswain, hoisted in the boats ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... demand satisfaction for losses suffered by our merchant marine at the hands of Algerian pirates, who had been preying upon the commerce of the world for years. Arriving on the Algerian coast, she was led upon a reef by pirates whom she was chasing, her officers and crew were taken prisoners, her guns were thrown overboard, and she was taken into the harbor by her captors, and there remanned, regunned and made ready ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... 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 ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... obscurity, but its path was almost exclusively a "water-track." It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano. Seldom has a more striking proof been given of the vividness of human curiosity as to the condition of the worlds outside our own, than in ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... below. Her bowsprit had a gentle downward curve, her mast was a beautiful spar, and her topmast was elegantly tapered and set up in good shape. Unlike most of the regular highflyer yachts, her jib and mainsail were not unreasonably large. Mr. Ramsay did not intend that it should be necessary to reef when it blew a twelve-knot breeze, and, like the Skylark, she was expected to carry all sail in anything short of a full gale. But she was provided with an abundance of "kites," including an immense gaff-topsail, which extended on poles far above the topmast head, and far beyond ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... left Sydney for Moreton Bay, in the barque MONARCH, attended by the schooner TOM TOUGH. At Moreton Bay they took on board the remainder of the party, with fifty horses and two hundred sheep, and after some accidents caused by the MONARCH running on a reef, reached Point Pearce at the mouth of the Victoria River, on the 24th September. Here the horses were landed, much weakened by their voyage, and Gregory, Dr. Mueller, and seven men proceeded to the upper part of the Victoria overland, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the clear water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... name which they apply to all sorts of obstacles consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef areas," or regions in ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... is to have the lion's share of the winnings; but it is only as a disinterested bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the parties, and guides his confederate by hints so adroitly managed as not to alarm the pigeon. The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely frank as to ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the Beachbird anchored within sight of shore and outside a long low reef where they saw a palm-plume tossing, and a boat came off, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... of living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days,— Take ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... some white-fringed reef set up their post, And sentinel the coast:— Whilst, round each jutting cape, in pillar'd file, The lichen-bearded rocks Like hoary giants ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... with a lighthouse, one of an extensive reef 10 m. W. of Tiree, on the west coast of Scotland; the light is a revolving one; is seen at the distance ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Gomera, in latitude 27 deg. 47' N. he would have fallen in with one of the desert sandy islands on the coast of Florida, near a place now called Hummock, or might have been wrecked on the Montanilla reef, at the north end of the Bahama banks: his deflection therefore, to the S.W. on the 7th October, was fortunate for the success of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... contribution to the British effort in World Wars I and II. Long-term concerns include pollution, particularly depletion of the ozone layer, and management and conservation of coastal areas, especially the Great Barrier Reef. A referendum to change Australia's status, from a commonwealth headed by the British monarch to an independent ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... refit. 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
... remain motionless by the side of the ship, a few feet below the surface, as distinctly in our sight as a gold-fish in a parlour globe; or he would go under the keel, and gently chafe his broad back to and fro along it, making queer tremors run through the vessel, as if she were scraping over a reef. Whether from superstition or not I cannot tell, but I never saw any creature injured out of pure wantonness, except sharks, while I was on board the CACHALOT. Of course, injuries to men do not count. Had that finback ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... continued with unabated fury. For four hours the vessel had been driven before the blast; and the captain now declared it was impossible she could weather the tempest much longer, ordered the long boat to be in readiness. His orders were scarcely executed, when the ship bulged upon a reef of rocks, and the impetuous waves rushed into the vessel:—a general groan ensued. Ferdinand flew to save his sister, whom he carried to the boat, which was nearly filled by the captain and most of the crew. ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... importance of what followed. Sir Charles imparted a bit of confidential information they were not to breathe to any one until he had verified the particulars. Word had just been brought to him that the Nevski had gone on a reef near a neighboring island and was a total wreck. A passing steamer had stood by, taken off the prince and his crew and landed them. Still Mr. Heatherbloom but vaguely heard; he felt little interest at the moment ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Lumpu Balong and the range) show steep and well in the background. Game abounds, by report. Europeans are subject to complaints of the eyes, and occasionally to fever. Any vessel running in should be very careful, for the charts are defective, and Boele Comba reef is said to project farther to the westward of the fort than ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... a full view, people had found out where I stood, and came crowding round me so close that I had to take in a reef of my pink silk dress, and they kept Cousin Dempster busy as a bee introducing them. So many people had read my writings, so many people had been dying to see me, it was enough to bring blushes to my cheeks and tears to my eyes. This, said I, is fame—and all ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... so delicate a piece of workmanship, but he had never seen its equal. Every curve of the exquisite-hued waves was studied from the swell that sometimes swept grandly in from the lake on the long reef of rocks a few miles above St. Ignace. The form of the goddess was modelled from his remembrance of the Greek antique. It was a gem worthy of an emperor. What should he do ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... graceful, the moonlight bright upon her rapt face, with her arms outstretched and her head flung back, in an attitude of utter abandonment. Harber felt his heart stir swiftly. He knew what she was feeling, as she looked out over the shimmering half-moon of harbour, across the moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it. There would be no voicing that feeling; it must ever remain ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... think we both know the position of every reef to within a hundred yards, so we will shape our course for Guernsey. If we happen to hit it off, we can hold on to St. Helier, but if when we think we ought to be within sight of Guernsey we see nothing of it, we must lie to ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the bo's'n's stentorian voice was heard giving the order to close reef tops'ls, and the hurried tramping of many feet on the deck overhead, coupled with one or two heavy lurches of the ship, seemed to justify the assistant cook's remark—"Sure it's durty weather we're goin' ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... beach; then, again, the ground rose, leaving but a narrow ledge between the foot of the cliffs and the waters. Thus the shore extended on for some distance, forming a lofty headland, when it again sank to its former level. A reef of rocks ran out a considerable distance into the ocean, forming a natural breakwater to the bay. Here and there to the north were several deep indentations, in which fishing-boats and several coasting craft might find shelter. In some of these little bays fishermen had formed ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... green, and appeared to be large and tall, as thick as they could stand one by another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The biggest I named ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... o'clock in the afternoon, and from her uneasy anchorage in the pass the German man-of-war struck the time, four bells. Overhead the sun shone fiercely through a mist of fire; below, the bay gave back a dancing glare; on the outer reef the long breakers foamed and tumbled, white as far as the eye could reach. From his perch beneath the bows of the Northern Light a sailor, paint brush in hand, was slowly wearing out the day—a brown-bearded, straight-nosed, handsome man of thirty, his red shirt ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... with snow when the ship came to Ungava. She had run on a reef in leaving Cartwright, her first port of call on the Labrador coast; her keel was ripped out from stem to stern, and for a month she had lain in dry dock for repairs at St. John's, Newfoundland. It was October 22nd when I said good-bye to my kind ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... background of the sky was a pure beryl gradually burning aloft into orange. Here waves of fire beat over golden shores and red clouds extended as an army in regular column upon column. At the zenith, billows of scarlet leaped in feathery foam against a purple continent and the flaming tide extended from reef to reef among a thousand aerial bays and estuaries of alternating gloom and glow until shrouded and dimmed in an orange tawny haze of infinite distance. In the immediate foreground of this majestic display, like a handful of rose-leaves fallen out of heaven, small ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... after a fierce fight, slain. Swipdag's wife cursed the conqueror, and he was obliged to institute an annual sacrifice to Frey (her brother) at Upsale, who annuls the curse. Loke, in seal's guise, tried to steal the necklace of Freya at the Reef of Treasures, where Swipdag was slain, but Haimdal, also in sealskin, fought him, and recovered it ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... might make better time if we lightened ship, you choose to make all sorts of nasty insinuations about us wanting to knock you out! Shows where your mind is. Another fellow wouldn't ever let such a fool notion get a grip on him. And you'd better put a reef in that tongue of yours, my boy, unless you want to have it ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... yonder mast a flag streams out As bold as a royal pennant; I can watch the good ship lunge about From this tower of which I am tenant; But oh, might I be in the battling ship, Might I seize the rudder and steer her, How gay o'er the foaming reef we'd slip Like the sea-gulls ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the centre of Padre Island the coast of Texas deepens at the rate of about a fathom to the mile, until at twenty fathoms there is a coral reef, and on the easterly side of this reef the water deepens, as by the side of a perpendicular wall, to a very great depth. This reef marks the boundary of the Gulf stream, and also the boundary of the terrible ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... they was there. Janet, I've got t' tell ye somethin' 'bout yer mother! It oughter come to ye from a woman, God knows, but there ain't no likely woman t' hand, an' I must do my best. She, yer mother, was powerful 'fraid ye might wreck yerself on the same kind o' reef what she struck. She wanted ye should be a boy 'long o' that fear, but she 'lowed if ye were a girl, I was t' tell ye in time if I saw danger, an', Janet, I ain't done my duty!" Billy's voice was hoarse from ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... no rocks on the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface of the wintry sea, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... might easily be mistaken for a couple of gulls. In and out of these reefs the ship went like a serpent. There was barely passage for it between them; but of course no pilot would attempt it save in broad daylight. At length we reached the inner reef. We found the open roadstead full of ships, with hardly room to swing, and a strong north- west wind, so that we could not get a place. We ran right into the first at anchor, the Standard, a trading-ship of Shields, built of iron. Richard ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... or two before the boat had way enough to answer the helm. By that time we were within a dozen yards of a reef. Having noticed, however, that the little craft was quick in her stays, I kept her full till the last, put the helm down, and round she spun in a moment. Before I could thank my stars, the pintle, or ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Every year saw one or more caravels sent from Lagos southward to follow the coast of the main-land; but they skirted no shores that were not desert, and turned back baffled by their own fears. Cape Boyador long remained a barrier whose imaginary dangers of reef and shoal served as an excuse for the still more unreal horrors of the "Sea ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... whole world is in love with me, and I'm utterly alone." Alone as a wreck upon a desert ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some ship-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock? must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and a gamble. Skill, acquired by long experience or instinctive—and there are men who seem to possess the latter—counts for much, but chance plays a leading part. Provisions, tents and packhorses are expensive, and though a placer mine may be worked by two partners, a reef or lode can be disposed of only to men with means sufficient to develop it. Even in this delicate matter, in which he had had keen wits against him, Vane had held his own; but there was one side of life with which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... and felt his way looking for it along the coast of Java. Spite of all his care, he was once on the edge of destruction. One evening as night was closing in a grating sound was heard under the Pelican's keel. In another moment she was hard and fast on a reef. The breeze was light and the water smooth, or the world would have heard no more of Francis Drake. She lay immovable till daybreak. At dawn the position was seen not to be entirely desperate. Drake himself showed all the qualities of a great commander. Cannon were thrown over and cargo that ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... Reef. The 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, ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... philosophy was quickly stifled as they recognized the gravity which sat upon the face of its enunciator, and Stuart inquired in all seriousness, "But how does he manage it? There's mains'l and jib and tiller—not to mention center board and boom-crotch—and sometimes the reef-points." ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... great store of facts to be treasured up for use in his eager and retentive mind, but those habits of observation which were to be of the greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another vessel—the Porpoise—Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four feet above the surface ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye, suggests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by the corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near the mouth of rivers. Hence the change of the outlet of a stream, often a very busy matter, may promote the construction of a barrier to coast navigation at one point, and check the formation of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... we can do," my father replied, "and that is to go south." Accordingly, he turned the craft about, gave it full reef, and started by the compass north but, in fact, directly south. The wind was strong, and we seemed to have struck a current that was running with remarkable swiftness in ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... ah, the music of it! Here rings and here sings David the shepherd; the sweet lute, the harp, the wind in the trees, the surge of the ocean-reef. It is music of a high ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... was possible" was being done by the Imperial authorities, His Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard the lives and property of the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef Town in the event of an attack by a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... with spindrift and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. From reef and rock and skerry—over headland, ness and voe— The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the position of Bowers's Island and began to discuss coral reefs and volcanic action. They were now well in among the islands. Two they passed at a distance, and went so close to a third—a mere reef with a few palms upon it—that Mr. Chalk, after a lengthy inspection through his binoculars, was able ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... 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 ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... slack each reef an' tack, Gae her sail, boys, while it may sit; She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore, An' she'll roar through a heavier yet. When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep, In the tempest's angry moan, We dash through ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... your Worship's Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a poor Fellow as ever went between Stem and Stern of a Ship, and can hand, reef, steer, and clap two Ends of a Rope together, as well as e'er a He that ever cross'd salt Water; but I was taken by one George Bradley' (the Name of him that sat as Judge,) 'a notorious Pyrate, a sad Rogue as ever was unhang'd, and he forc'd ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... of the fellows only spurred Judd to shake forth another reef, so that without knowing it he was rapidly tiring ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... sail. But the weather looking somewhat wild in the west with the red light of the sun among the clouds there, and the dark heave of the swell running into a sickly crimson under the sun and then glowing out dusky again, I got them to treble-reef the mainsail and hoist it, and then thanking them, advised them to be off. Then, putting Cromwell to the tiller, I went forward with the others and set the topsail and forestaysail (the spritsail lying furled), which would be show enough of canvas till I saw ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... white-fringed reef set up their post, And sentinel the coast:— Whilst, round each jutting cape, in pillar'd file, The lichen-bearded rocks Like hoary giants ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at the mouth of the Tagus. It is known by its brownish-yellow colour, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... been gazing languidly out a window giving on Brenton's Reef lightship, where several black torpedo boats and destroyers were manoeuvring, smiled and glanced ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... my pilot old, 5 How many watery leagues to sail Ere we shall round the harbour reef And anchor ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... style of a concerto must be, at the same time, serious in thoughts and in their developments, graceful and brilliant, in order to bring forth the talent of execution of the virtuoso. Here is a double reef to avoid, and here many artists have been wrecked. Vieuxtemps and Leonard are the modern masters who have been the most successful in this difficult style; but how many have been ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... 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 ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sort as if I was coming up into a reg'lar twister, and thought it would be safer to reef a mite and make for ca'm waters. My head begun to whirl, and I cal'lated I'd best weigh anchor while my ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... 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
... satisfaction for losses suffered by our merchant marine at the hands of Algerian pirates, who had been preying upon the commerce of the world for years. Arriving on the Algerian coast, she was led upon a reef by pirates whom she was chasing, her officers and crew were taken prisoners, her guns were thrown overboard, and she was taken into the harbor by her captors, and there remanned, regunned and made ready to defend the city against the other American ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... The reef knot (fig. 166) is another useful one, and it has this advantage over the weaver's knot, that both short ends return parallel to the long ones instead of going off at an angle; this makes it ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... of.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} For a long while Wagner's ship sailed happily along this course. There can be no doubt that along it Wagner sought his highest goal.—What happened? A misfortune. The ship dashed on to a reef; Wagner had run aground. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner had stuck fast on a contrary view of the world. What had he set to music? Optimism? Wagner was ashamed. It was moreover an optimism for which Schopenhauer had devised an evil expression,—unscrupulous optimism. He was ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Rope. Whipping and Seizing Rope. Loops. Cuckolds' Necks. Clinches. Overhand and Figure-eight Knots. Square and Reef Knots. Granny Knots. Open-hand and Fishermen's Knots. Ordinary Knots and Weavers' Knots. Garrick Bends ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... bloodshed and woe involved caused a sort of concession on both sides to be agreed upon. Oppression continued will surely lead to a point where it cures itself, and the superior class in England, with a wise weather-eye, saw the reef on which they were in danger of striking. They heard the breakers, and began to grant concessions—unwillingly of course—concessions wrung from them. The censorship was abolished, reform bills introduced, the rights of free speech and a free press were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones—curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... less exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade, searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible sign of their diverse inner excellences ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the reef in 1922. Its sheltered lagoon served as a way station for flying boats on Hawaii-to-American Samoa flights during the late 1930s. There is no flora on the reef, which is frequently awash, but it does support an abundant ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... mine—one of those people who talk about money with an air of familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef in their back-gardens—said to me the other day that I ought to buy a fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined coat or a sealskin jacket, said he. What with the war, and the "sales," and the tradesmen's need of cash, they were simply being thrown ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the broad Atlantic. She fared worse by far when she reached the Bay, having met with a gale of wind that blew most of her cloth to ribbons, carried away her bowsprit, and made hurdles of her bulwarks both forward and amidships. Worse than all, two men were blown from aloft while trying to reef a sail during a squall of more than hurricane violence. I say blown from aloft, and I say so advisedly, for the squall came on after they had gone up, a squall that even the men on deck could not stand against, a squall that levelled the very waves, and made ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... 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
... attempt for the rescue of Mr. Mitchell. Such apprehensions of danger, however, as they occur occasionally, do good, and lead men to think of and correct their weak points. What you say of the accessible nature of the southern reef surprises me, and strengthens your recommendation of gunboats as the means of defence which are least to be neglected. I only hang back in regard to them, as the Naval Department could not bear ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... 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, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... location in the North Pacific Ocean; Johnston Island and Sand Island are natural islands, which have been expanded by coral dredging; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; the egg-shaped reef is 34 km in circumference; closed to the public; a former US nuclear weapons test site; site of now-closed Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS); most facilities dismantled and cleanup complete in 2004; some ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... her. After receiving all the ship's and government stores on board, we proceeded to Woolwich, and received on board 50 of our number, and in the afternoon of the same day we made sail, and on a sudden struck on a reef at low water; we were lying high and dry; every means was used to get her off, but without success, till we sent our convicts up to the hulks, and discharged our stores into the different crafts sent for that purpose, and by that means lightened her so, that at the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... Brunswick; on the shores of the Great Lakes; everywhere in the woodlands of the North and Middle Atlantic states; on the limestone soils of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Virginias; and they thrive in the sandy woods, sea plains and reef-keys of the South Atlantic and Gulf states. While not so common west of the Mississippi, yet some kind of wild grape is found from North Dakota to Texas; grapes grow on the mountains and in the canons of all the Rocky Mountain states; ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... Bintang, is a dangerous reef, on which the clipper-bark Sylph struck in 1835, and on which she lay for four months, defying the fury of the north-east monsoon and the heavy rolling swell from the Chinese Sea; thus proving beyond a doubt the great strength of a teak-built ship. An English ship in the same circumstances ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... will change too. A man's whole state determines the voice with which conscience shall speak to him, and so the worse he is, and the more he needs it, the less he has it. The rebels cut the telegraph wires. The waves break the bell that hangs on the reef, and so the black rocks get many a wreck to gnaw with their sharp teeth. A man makes his conscience dumb by the very sins that require a conscience trumpet-tongued to reprehend them. And therefore it needs that God should speak from Heaven, and say to us, 'Thou art the man,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... large rock, about a mile to the left of the town of D——, which was surrounded by numerous small ones. This place was called the wrecker's reef, and was covered at high water, but when the tide was low, Isabel and the others often went there to get shells. They had to be careful to watch the rise of the tide, as, long before the rock was covered the retreat ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... is nothing to be feared but what maybe seen. The 1st November we saw the point of Jantana, or Johor, and the mount on the island of Bintam, and came next morning in sight of Piedra-branca; about ten o'clock a.m. we came to the dangerous reef that projects four leagues out to sea from the point of Johor. John Huigens van Linschoten describes this shoal well, which we passed not without danger, having the point and three little islands W.S.W. from us. It is good to keep to leewards till you ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... 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
... more of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same in that which accompanies the narrative; but in the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... hundred fathoms; we then stood-to the S.S.E.; this course made almost a right angle with that which we had followed in the night: it bore directly in-shore, the approach to which, in this place, is rendered terrible by a very long reef, called Arguin, which according to instructions we had on board extends above thirty leagues in breadth.[12] According to the instructions given by the Minister of the Marine, this danger is avoided by running only twenty-two leagues in the open ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... very 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
... caught a cold. He had wanted to take her out in the little yacht, but this had now been postponed until Sunday. He asked Tidemand to come along; there would be a few more; they would sail out to some reef and have coffee. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... 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 your foot, large silvery bream ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... message, that the gift was thine. Whereat the hero, while the shooting spasm Had fastened on the lungs, seized him by the foot Where the ankle turns i' the socket, and, with a thought, Hurl'd on a surf-vex'd reef that showed i' the sea: And rained the grey pulp from the hair, the brain Being scattered with the blood. Then the great throng Saddened their festival with piteous wail For one in death and one in agony. And none had courage to approach my sire,— Convulsed upon the ground, then ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... work you deem sublime Is like the grain of pink-hued lime Which once was a coral insect's shell, But now is a microscopic cell, Entombed with countless billions more In a lonely reef ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... the lee-beam lies the land, boys, See all clear to reef each course; Let the fore-sheet go, don't mind, boys, Though ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... again into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips proceeded thither and searched narrowly, but without avail. The sea held its treasures well. The ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... gradually drawing toward land. Suddenly, she swerved and headed straight for a huge reef that could be seen protruding above the surface of the water. A cry of dismay went up from those aboard ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... approach. These are perfectly flat, and are only covered at high water, ending in craggy vertical walls of coral in very deep water. When there is a little wind, it is dangerous to come near these rocks; but luckily it was quite smooth, so we moored to their edge, while the men crawled over the reef to the land, to make; a fire and cook our dinner-the boat having no accommodation for more than heating water for my morning and evening coffee. We then rowed along the edge of the reef to the end of the island, and were glad to get a nice westerly breeze, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... shore the view is charming. The hills are clothed with wood, gradually rising towards the interior, none of them of any considerable height. A singular reef of rocks runs parallel to the coast and forms the harbour of Pernambuco. The vessels are moored betwixt it and the town, safe from every storm. You enter the harbour through a very narrow passage, close by a fort ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... glare for shade, Tartarean heat for coolness, cannon thunder and shouting for quietness, grey enemies for nursing women, and for home a battlefield in a hostile land. Heavy ordnance wagons, far from the guns they were meant to feed, traces cut and horses gone, rested reef-like for the tides to break against. Travelling forges kept them company, and wagons bearing officers' luggage. Beneath several the mules were pinned; dreadful sight could any there have looked or pitied! Looming through there were the great supply wagons, with others of ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... below sounding a deep-toned accompaniment. The bay is not always so peaceful, however, and many wild scenes and terrible shipwrecks have taken place here, as everywhere along our wild north-east coast. The Bondicar rocks, by Hauxley, and the cruel spikes of the reef at Snab Point, near Cresswell, have betrayed many a gallant little vessel to her doom. Not, however, without bringing on many an occasion proof of the courage which is shown as a matter of course ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... being struck with fear, they removed their place of anchorage from Atermision to Chalkis, intending to guard the Euripos, but leaving at the same time watchers by day 170 on the heights of Euboea. Of the ten ships of the Barbarians three sailed up to the reef called Myrmex, 171 which lies between Skiathos and Magnesia; and when the Barbarians had there erected a stone pillar, which for that purpose they brought to the reef, they set forth with their main body 172 from Therma, the ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... in pretty deep," commented Amos Henderson. "Luckily it was soft mud instead of a rocky reef or we'd have damaged the ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... out on the reef—you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. With the squid-stick, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... mob, ruled here and gave the belated one his place, and after a while of squattering about and sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of the series, it remained for LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA MER to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of external force that is brought against him. And here once more the artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour" in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at sea are not as great as fiction writers sometimes indicate, according to this old sea dog. He says that in all his voyages, he has been in only one serious wreck. That was on a reef of coral keys off ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... used to hear the barking of the alderman's revolver in his stable-yard, and the cumulative effect of these noises wore down calumny and incredulity. And, of course, having once begun to practise, the alderman could not decently cease. The absurd situation endured. And a coral reef of ball cartridges might have appeared on the surface of Birches Pond had it not been for the visit (at enormous expense) of Hagentodt's ten tigers to the ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... be mistaken for a couple of gulls. In and out of these reefs the ship went like a serpent. There was barely passage for it between them; but of course no pilot would attempt it save in broad daylight. At length we reached the inner reef. We found the open roadstead full of ships, with hardly room to swing, and a strong north- west wind, so that we could not get a place. We ran right into the first at anchor, the Standard, a trading-ship of Shields, built of iron. Richard and I were standing on ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... live-stock, cracked panes of glass replaced, battening-down boards looked out, new ropes rove, and all preparations made for real hard sea work. How I wish we were going down the east coast of Australia, inside the barrier-reef, instead of down the stormy west coast! I dread this voyage somehow, and begin even to dislike sailing. Perhaps my depression is partly caused by that stupid boy Buzzo having allowed my favourite lark, which I ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... sighted a large vessel half sunk on a dangerous reef, but they could not get near enough to it to read the name. Apparently there was no one left aboard. A mile further on they passed a half broken life-boat nearly full of water, on the bow of which was painted H. M. S. "Sadna." There was ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride through deserted country—suppose ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... dark spot on the ice. The boats were still heavily loaded. We got out of the lanes, and entered a stretch of open water at 11 a.m. A strong easterly breeze was blowing, but the fringe of pack lying outside protected us from the full force of the swell, just as the coral-reef of a tropical island checks the rollers of the Pacific. Our way was across the open sea, and soon after noon we swung round the north end of the pack and laid a course to the westward, the 'James Caird' still in the lead. Immediately our deeply laden boats began to make heavy weather. They ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... of war was turned upon the island of Key West, it was, to the people of the North generally, little more than a name attached to a small, arid coral reef lying on the verge of the Gulf Stream off the southern extremity of Florida. Few people knew anything definitely about it, and to nine readers out of ten its name suggested nothing more interesting or attractive than Cuban filibusters, sponges, and cigars. In less ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... lay in the passage between the shore-reef and the outer-reef. From the latter came the low murmur of a lazy surf, but the sheltered stretch of water, not more than a hundred yards across to the white beach of pounded coral sand, was of glass-like smoothness. Narrow as was the passage, and anchored as ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... May, and had not proceeded above a few leagues, when a fair breeze sprang up, greatly to the satisfaction of all, but especially of the poor fellows whose toil it relieved. It continued increasing; reef after reef was taken in, till our sheet was finally reduced to a few feet in depth; yet so furious was the gale that we ascended the strongest current with nearly the same velocity we had descended; ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... story, just mentioned, his hero performs rather a feat in shearing three and a half pounds of washed wool in twenty-three and one-half minutes, A Mexican would have to take a reef in his big hat if he could not do better than that. His tin check is worth four and a half cents to him, and a fair hand ought to have at least fifty in his pocket at sunset, in return for as many seven-pound unwashed fleeces,—always provided he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the way. The view was the same as on the opposite side; not a thing to be seen but the boundless ocean with not a speck of a sail or a bit of land within sight. It was a little kingdom all of its own. A quarter of a mile from shore the low rollers broke ceaselessly on a coral reef, while overhead, the gulls swept around and around, their plaintive whistle being very distinct ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... gray tower. A faint noise, like an oncoming sigh, above Rosamund's head heralded the organ's awakening, and was followed by the whisper of its most distant voice, a voice which made her think—she knew not why—of the sea whispering about a coral reef in an isle of the Southern Seas, part of God's world, mysteriously linked to "my Welsley." She shut her eyes, seeking to feel more strongly the sensation of unity. When she opened them she saw, sitting close to her in the return stalls, Father Robertson. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... which permeated and added to my life—I am nevertheless forced to recognise that, however suitable it may have been in my special case, in the majority of instances it would have proved but a shipwrecking reef, on which a young man's life would have gone to pieces. What saved me was the intensity of my passion for Art, and a moral revolt against any action that I thought could or would definitely compromise me in that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the Cathedral steps alone. It was a fine morning for flights of the imagination. The soft thunder of the Cathedral organ became at my will the booming of the surf on a distant coral reef. The pigeons wheeling overhead became gulls, whimpering in the cordage. Little did the ancient caretaker reck, as he swept the stretch of flagging before the carved door, that he was washing off the deck of a frigate, whilst I, the rover of the seas, ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... flourishing sugar-works were burnt, he and Caramuru were both obliged to abandon the settlement and retire to Ilheos. Soon afterwards, however, he made peace with the Indians; but on his return to the Reconcave, he was wrecked on the reef off Itaporica, where the natives murdered him, but spared Caramuru, who ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... falter, trotter, stagger; mince, step short; march in slow time, march in funeral procession; take one's time; hang fire &c. (be late) 133. retard, relax; slacken, check, moderate, rein in, curb; reef; strike sail, shorten sail, take in sail; put on the drag, apply the brake; clip the wings; reduce the speed; slacken speed, slacken one's pace; lose ground. Adj. slow, slack; tardy; dilatory &c. (inactive) 683; gentle, easy; leisurely; deliberate, gradual; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... 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 ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... Charles de Massas presented a project (the first in order of date), which consisted in constructing upon the Eclat reef a semi-lunate dike, and a breakwater at Cape Heve. Moreover, upon the emergent parts of the Eclat reef and heights of the roadstead he proposed to erect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... necessarily funereal. A garden should be got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim. Expecting high winds, we bring everything into close reef. Some men there are who never shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of their families. I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n't shave) to satisfy his own conscience, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... near the shore, we would, weather permitting, endeavor to land, either in the boat or upon a raft. If, on the other hand, no land were in sight, and the Chancellor were ascertained to be stranded on some isolated reef, all we could do would be to get her afloat, and put her into condition for reaching the nearest coast. Curtis told us that it was long since he had been able to take any observation of latitude, but there was no doubt the northwest wind had driven us ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... another half hour Vincent had to bring the boat's head up to the wind, lower the lug, and tie down the last reef. ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,—these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sentence, for the stress of the flying seconds choked down his words. Two possibilities they held, and each big with doom. Either the schooner must dash upon the Raney—a reef, barely covered at high water, barring entrance to the cove—or avoiding this, must be shattered on the black wall of rock under their very feet. The end of the little vessel was written—all but one word: and that must be added within a ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Larsen said briskly to the new mate, "keep all hands on deck now they're here. Get in the topsails and jibs and make a good job of it. We're in for a sou'-easter. Better reef the jib and mainsail too, while you're ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... must be goin' in. There is a story in the evenin' paper that I am readin'. Men are divin' in the seas for a treasure, and pirates are watchin' them from behind a reef. And there ain't a woman on land or water or in the air. Good-evenin'." And he trundled his pushcart down the alley and back to the musty court where ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... I take it," Frank surmised. "The two bumps the Sea Lion got from the Shark must have given him the impression that we had collided with a rock or reef." ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... pirates stuck his head out of the cabin door, jabbered some unintelligible words and pointed to the sails. The boy nodded, for he understood they wanted to attend to the rigging. So the crew trooped forth, rather fearfully, and began to reef the sails and put the ship into condition to weather ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... harbour. The sea was blue with a blue she had never seen, and the sky was like an inverted bowl of copper. The low shore, covered with bush, stretched away in the distance; a line of waves was breaking on the reef. They came in sight of the island of Mombassa, with the overgrown ruins of a battery that had once commanded the entrance; and there were white-roofed houses, with deep verandas, which stood in ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... scheme is what they say it is, there'll be roads cut through all along shore. The town could use any of 'em; at least that arrangement might be made. Think it over, Ros. If they do offer and offer enough, I'd sell, if I was you. Say! that would be a reef under His Majesty's bows, hey? Jolt him ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was enough to send the boat over, and she had already a dangerous lot of water surging among the ballast; while, when they were forced to put her head to the wind, she drifted with a heavily running tide, and right to leeward was a long reef of rocks that would inevitably crunch her into matchwood. The younger brothers said not a word, but looked at Rob, ready to obey his slightest gesture, and Rob stood by the mast calling out from time ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... accounts at the bay. Party fitting up mangers, etc. At 5.30 p.m. got underweigh and stood to the north-west, the soundings for five miles varying from three and three-quarters to seven fathoms; the sea breaking heavily for about a mile in a northerly direction from the end of the sheltering reef, showing a much greater extent of shoalwater than is noted on the charts. Established a routine of watches of two hours each, for the members of the expedition to attend ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... hour the Speedy was again off, running out of the south channel, past the grim walls of old Fort Taylor, and a few miles farther on passing Sand Key light, which rises from a bit of coral reef barely lifted above the wash of a tranquil sea. At that time this was the most southerly point of United States territory. In the deep water just beyond Sand Key lay a great battle-ship, tugging sullenly at her pondrous anchors, and looking like some vast sea ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... ones about the 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
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
