"Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 in ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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
... after sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the run he passed several ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... 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 |
