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Wreckage   Listen
noun
Wreckage  n.  
1.
The act of wrecking, or state of being wrecked.
2.
That which has been wrecked; remains of a wreck.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books



... packed their dinner in the satchel. They reached the church and found the interior just as they had left it. Taffy was set to work to pick up and sweep together the scraps of broken glass which littered the chancel. His father examined the wreckage of ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Valparaiso, was struck by a tornado off the coast of Peru. The storm, which rose with frightful suddenness, was of short duration, but it left the Castor a helpless wreck. Her masts had snapped off and gone overboard, her rudder-post had been shattered by falling wreckage, and she was rolling in the trough of the sea, with her floating masts and spars thumping and ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... universal in civilized communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism. Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with its small social units and its system of production for use not profits, monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and the Church ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... the Chrysolite worth launching was the life-boat, which stood bottom upward between the main and mizzen masts. At the cry "To the boats!" there was a rush for her. But Anderson is first. He carries in his hand a small axe, meant for clearing away light wreckage. With a vigorous blow the life-boat is stove in. The men stop short, daunted. He turns about and faces them, looking ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... who were clinging to life-belts, broken bulkheads, and anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake again when the close-hauled Clytie came up with the first of the floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but this time their brightness was ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... voice had ceased giving orders. It afterwards transpired that the chief officer, Stoke, was engaged at this time on the sloping decks in tying lifebelts round the women and throwing them overboard, despite their shrieks and struggles. The coastguards found these women strewn along the beach like wreckage below St. Keverne—some that night, some at ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... it's not that. But—... Mind you, I am perfectly clear where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... as long as he lived. They were the death shrieks of his unhappy crew, imprisoned below among the bursting steam-pipes and boilers, the cascade of white-hot coals from the furnaces, and the crumpling wreckage of machinery and torn plates; and he knew that his trim little ship and his gallant comrades were gone from ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood

... shrunken figure on the groat old-fashioned four-post bed, with its voluminous drab damask curtains, its cords, fringes, tassels, and useless decorations—the nerveless, helpless figure of wasted youth, the wreckage of an ill-spent life. The haggard countenance, damp with the dews of mental agony, and of a livid pallor, looked like the face of death. What could medicine do for this man beyond diagnosing his case, and giving an opinion about it, for the satisfaction—God ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost savage, the colour of summer that never ceases, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... bedroom, while Yeo returned to the bed upon which lay the unconscious form of the old man. Cuthbert took a walk to the end of the street where the wreckage of the motor car had now been removed, and asked the policeman what had become of the victims. He was informed that the chauffeur, in a dying condition, had been removed to the Charing Cross Hospital, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume

... cheerfully to its own affairs—and very engrossing affairs they were—and the South faced its new conditions. It was still struggling with the economic wreckage left by four years of battle, invasion and defeat. It had borne the loss of its separate nationality and the flag endeared by countless sacrifices. It had accepted the sudden emancipation of its servile class by the conqueror's ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... of the Dardanelles Commission and the Life of Lord Kitchener, where his side of the story is so admirably set forth by his intimate friend, Sir George Arthur. The tale has been told and retold. Every morsel of the wreckage of our Armada seems to have been brought to the surface. There are fifty reasons against publishing, reasons which I know by heart. On the other side there are only three ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... portions of his voluminous writings which bear the mark of having been written as automatic script—by "this hand," as he often says—are the chaotic and confused portions, full of monotonous repetitions, of undigested and indigestible phrases and the dreary re-shufflings of sub-conscious wreckage. Boehme used to say that "in the time of the lily" his writings would be "much sought after." But I doubt if, even "in the time of the lily," most persons will have the patience to read this shoemaker-prophet's books in their present form, that ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man's face upward. A gaping throat explained the manner ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... this quiet fire, perhaps it occurred to her to wonder how it happened that there were no more hazards, no more cards left to play. She was caught in a net of circumstances too tight for her unravelling. Truly it might be cut, but when she stood in the loose wreckage of it—how should she use her freedom? If it was a cage, at least it was a comfortable cage; at least it was better than the howling darkness of the unfamiliar ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... care. They saw nothing except a strong eddy breaking three cable lengths out, as if those sheets of water had been violently churned. The site's exact bearings were taken, and the Moravian continued on course apparently undamaged. Had it run afoul of an underwater rock or the wreckage of some enormous derelict ship? They were unable to say. But when they examined its undersides in the service yard, they discovered that part of its ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... recovered this vast sum? The people who had been "shaken out"? No, indeed! The votaries of the "System" have made it—they and the frenzied financiers whose haunt is Wall Street, and whose harvest is in such wreckage. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... Most of us allow the mechanism of the human body to shift as best it can and as long as it can, should it happen to become ungeared, ignoring the frequent warnings which the ever increasing morbid changes and wreckage give us. And then we surrender and succumb. What else can we do? Our vital creditors file their claims in the high court of Vital Bankruptcy. What poor business policy, and what a wretched tenant! For fifteen or more years we may have had warning "touches of the piles," sometimes ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... that success is absolutely impossible. Through greater persistence and better methods the new may succeed where the old have failed. Moreover, although we are ready to grant that the pathway to our goal is full of pitfalls, marked by the wreckage of old theories, yet we claim that the skeptic or the mystic can know of their existence only by traveling over the pathway himself; for in the world of the inner life nothing can be known by hearsay. If, then, he would really know that the road to theoretical ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... between the Spaniards and the Indians became most cordial, especially as the Spaniards were gratified to obtain much gold in exchange for articles of insignificant value, owing to which circumstances and to the natural advantages of the location, Columbus determined to build a fort with the wreckage of his vessel. The fort was on a hill east of the site of the present town of Cape Haitien. Columbus gave it the name of La Navidad because he had entered the bay on Christmas day, and leaving thirty-nine men as colonists set out on the Nina on January 4, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... the streets of London, one of innumerable stray dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did not particularly consider himself a victim of injustice. He did not blame Myra. He was simply numbed ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... modern and Western world compared with the ancient and the Oriental. Those individuals among us who have really duplicated something of the spirit of Jesus are always marked by their loving regard for human life, even its wreckage. That sense of sacredness is the basis for the whole missionary and philanthropic activity of Christian ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... straining mainsail, and the shivered mainmast tore from its stays and socket. Above the bawling of wind and water sounded the crash. The ship, with only a small sail upon the poop, blew about into the trough of the sea. A mountain of green water thundered over the prow, bearing away men and wreckage. The "governor," Brasidas's mate, flung away ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... check her, but only partially succeeded. We crashed horribly against the barren gray rock of the Moon. Anita, Venza, Snap and I lived through it, but we could not find the bodies of Miko and Moa in the wreckage. Evidently they were still ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... bought a small model stationary engine and the methylated spirit lamp had by some accident set fire to the carpet, he was found after the conflagration had subsided standing serenely amongst the wreckage. When challenged as to its cause, "I cannot tell a lie," he replied calmly; "I did it with my little gadget." A few months later he and the present Ambassador of Great Britain at Washington had constructed a double line of miniature tracks, which connected all the rooms on the ground floor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various

... were already being repaired, although weeks of work would be needed to restore a condition of order and make the changes we planned. The automobile had been disentangled from the wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed away to receive expert attention. We were awaiting the arrival of the new car I had ordered for the honeymoon tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida had declared two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary to the wedding of a bride who was ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... his quiet way he was coming to be a power. For one thing he was possessed of the political divination that understands how far a leader may go without losing his following. He knew too how to get practical results. It was these qualities that enabled him out of the wreckage of the senatorial defeat to build a foundation of ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was shaken for ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... fix up a place where they can sleep to-night, for one thing. And we'll help them to start clearing away all the rubbish. They've got to have a new house, of course, and they can't even start work on that until all this wreckage ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart

... tent and sat in the sun, which still fell hot and bright. The Governor and his wife had let down the flap of their tent, as if they could no longer bear the pain of watching. Tears came into Agnes' eyes as she waited there in the wreckage of so many human hopes; tears for the mother who had borne that unworthy son, but whose heart was tender for him as if his soul had been without a stain; tears for the old man whose spirit was broken, and tears for herself ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... glide and swim; of sea-grasses and currents; of flowing waves that lap about the body with a cool chill; of palpitating color, that, at great depths, becomes a sort of darkness; of sea-beds of shell and sand, and bits of scattered wreckage; of ooze and tangled sea-plants, dusky shapes, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... to the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... would offer it none too much room consistently to develop. She had engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type, and almost anything square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still conscious herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage. But it contributed hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her experience in the cage and her experience out of it. After keeping quiet for some time about this opposition she suddenly—one Sunday afternoon on a penny chair ...
— In the Cage • Henry James

... revealed, dissolving into clouds The imagined fabric of our universe. "Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand Though all the sycophants bark at him," he cried, Hailing the truth before he, too, went down, Whelmed in the cloudy wreckage ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... already working over the mangled bodies of four American soldiers. The street was littered and unexploded hand grenades lay everywhere. Two soldiers had been carrying gunny sacks filled with grenades when one accidentally exploded, it in turn exploding others until the wreckage was complete. A military investigation would report the cause of the accident and the damage wrought, and thus an incident of war would ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West

... there was the river like an angry sea, and limitless, the wind in its fury whipping the foam from the crests and bearing it off into space. And presently, as we stared, the note lowered and the wind was gone again, and there was the water tossing foolishly, and we lay safe amidst the green wreckage of the forest as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... as Peter said; the two kegs, one empty and the other full, were floating about ten yards off, at the length of the rope by which they were attached to the boys, while with them was a confused mass of wreckage of the boat. ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty

... mansion was strewn with the wreckage of the inaugural reception. A musky odor blent of plant life and massed humanity hung thickly throughout the spacious rooms and corridors; the bower of palms and flowery brightness at the foot of the great staircase, which had fended the orchestra, and incidentally ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... rising through the steam came a small metal vehicle. A pointed cylinder, in height no more than twice that of a man. It came up slowly. Its rectangular door was open. As it reached our level and went past us quite close, I saw a man's figure standing there. Tarrano! Tarrano alone! From the wreckage of his city, making his ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... that noble tree suggested a thought to Tom. The water from the lake was pouring over it, though checked somewhat by the tree and the boat. If this tree, firmly wedged in place, could be made the nucleus of a mass of wreckage, the flood might be effectually checked, temporarily, at least. One thing, a moment's glance at the condition of the cove showed all too certainly what must have happened at the road-crossing. That the little rustic bridge there could have withstood the first overwhelming rush of ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... creed for "the lonely mystery of existence" as Romanes found it? Shall we at the behest of those who put the intellect above the heart endorse an unproved doctrine of descent and share responsibility for the wreckage of all that is spiritual in the lives of our young people? I refuse to have any part in such responsibility. For nearly twenty years I have gone from college to college and talked to students. Wherever I could do so I have pointed ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... these bits of wrecks and wreckage as the captain spoke; and, mingled with a feeling of pity for those who had perished in the tornado, came a ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... world of Ausonius, south-western France in the latter half of the fourth century, 'an Indian summer between ages of storm and wreckage'. Ausonius himself is a scholar and a gentleman, the friend alike of the pagan Symmachus and of St Paulinus of Nela. He is for thirty years professor of rhetoric in the university of Bordeaux, for some time tutor to a prince, praetorian prefect of Gaul, consul, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... danger here at hand Prods them on some side with this goad of fear— This among others—that the earth, withdrawn Abruptly from under their feet, be hurried down, Down into the abyss, and the Sum-of-Things Be following after, utterly fordone, Till be but wrack and wreckage of a world. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... were mostly of the English breed, which made us suppose that they had been landed from some English vessel. We were confirmed in this belief by discovering an old hen-coop, in which they had probably been washed ashore. There were other pieces of wreckage scattered about, but the hut itself was composed entirely of the ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston

... and Matthews close at his heels, went picking his way through the wreckage. He stepped outside and looked carefully among the debris. The force of the explosion seemed to have propelled a major portion of the wreckage in the direction of the backyard. It was here that Professor Brierly found a section ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... armistice victorious America and the Allies found themselves face to face with a terrible situation in Eastern Europe. The liberated peoples of the Baltic states, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, and the Near East, were in a dreadful state of starvation and economic wreckage. A great, responsibility and pressing duty devolved on America, Great Britain, France, and Italy to act promptly for the relief of these peoples who had become temporarily, by the hazards of war, their wards. But the Allies themselves were ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... The wreckage of some name-forgotten barque, Half-buried by the dolorous shore; Whereto the living waters never more Their urgent billows pour; But the salt spray can reach ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... material science, has given enormous and unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small things of the daily life and the old ritual ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... muster for the loading of copra on shipboard, and in their veins runs the blood of English, American, Dane, German, French, Corsican, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Paumotan, Tahitian, and Easter Islander. There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best. Life faints and stumbles and gasps itself away. In this warm, equable clime—a truly terrestrial paradise—where are never extremes of temperature and where the air is like balm, kept ever pure by the ozone-laden southeast trade, asthma, phthisis, and tuberculosis flourish ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... Russian column had advanced from Tirnova up the more gradual northern slopes of the Balkans, and now began to hammer at the defences of the pass on that side. The garrison consisted of six and a half battalions under Khulussi Pasha, and the wreckage of five battalions already badly beaten by Gurko's column. These, with one battery of artillery, held the pass and the neighbouring peaks, which they had ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... of the brusque Sir Felix Solomon gazing, without any visible evidence of distress, upon the wreckage ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace

... and flung the door open. He had never before known such a passion of hatred as raged within him. Throughout his life Simon Harley had left in his wake wreckage and despair. He was the best-hated man of his time, execrated by the working classes, despised by the country at large, and distrusted by his fellow exploiters. Yet, as a business opponent, Ridgway had always taken him impersonally, ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... early stages our route lay across the recent battlefield, where on every hand were the terrible signs of a routed army: dead horses, the wreckage of guns and waggons, rifles with the murderous saw-bayonet attached—a monstrous weapon for any nation to use, little clusters of shells near dismantled battery positions, long rows of sharpened stakes in front of a trench smashed almost out of recognition, ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... I found myself lying in the sand with Mercer sitting beside me. It was still night. The tangled wreckage of our airplane lay near by; evidently Mercer had carried me out ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... lady, you two are evidently in the same boat; but you aren't a bit sneaky, either of you. Let's see the wreckage; I suppose you got into trouble because you wanted to see how things worked, and Johnny, as usual, couldn't keep out of other folks' hot ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... deck, scanned the sea through the blackness in an effort to pick up the German raider if she still remained afloat. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw what he believed was a mass of wreckage some distance away. Gradually the shape in ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... making as if to pursue her aroused be-fuddlement, turned about to follow and came a few steps, lurching like a ship that foundered. The light blazed down upon her upturned face. She lurched into some shadow and, as wreckage swallowed up in the trough of the sea, her face ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were numbed ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... family; but the truth is, one of the corsairs was French and the other Greek; they were not Italians at all. Fernando further says that his father was sailing under them when the battle off Cape St. Vincent was fought; that when the vessels caught fire, his father clung to a piece of wreckage and was washed ashore. Thus does Fernando explain the advent of Columbus into Portugal. But all this took place years before Fernando ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley

... it was a bit of old wreckage," said the other. "Anyway, it wasn't another vessel, and it was too dark for a ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer

... he lay like a piece of wreckage, and it was not till the seventh day that he seemed to rouse a little out of his lethargy, or his indifference—they knew not which it was. In answer to Esora he said he felt easier, and would be glad if they would wheel ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... angles. The walls were covered with Flemish tapestry, six scenes from the Judgment of Solomon, framed in golden garlands, with satyrs and cupids playing among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid down by the present Marquis, and Chesnel had picked up the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between 1793 and 1795; so that there were Louis Quatorze consoles, tables, clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered chairs, which marvelously completed a stately room, large out of all proportion to the house. Luckily, however, there ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... cast a quick look from the broken fence down at the torn and twisted wreckage of the car and gave a ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... the only article that had escaped such wreckage; it really had flourished and now bade fair to grace the table before long. Once in a while, when his spirits needed propping, Steve allowed himself the comfort of gazing upon the vigorous cornstalks, ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... traversed we came on a sort of small square. Here was the yellow village church. It lacked a spire and a cross, and the front door was gone, so we could see the wrecked altar and the splintered pews within. Flanking the church there had been a communal hall, which was now shapeless, irredeemable wreckage. A public well had stood in the open space between church and hall, with a design of stone pillars about it. The open mouth of the well we could see was choked with foul debris; but a shell had struck squarely ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... letting much escape them, owing to lack of science and organization. The new skipper meant to alter this condition of things—and he knew that the waters in the immediate vicinity of Chance Along were neither the most dangerous on the coast, nor the most convenient for the salving of wreckage and fast-drowning cargoes. So he established stations at Squid Beach to the northward, and at Nolan's Cove to the southward, and ordered Nick Leary and Foxey Jack Quinn to take up their abode in the new huts; Nick at Squid Beach, and Foxey Jack at the Cove, had to keep a ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts

... cables cut, ran foul Of one the other, while the ruddy fire Sped on aloft. One ship was stranded. One Foundered, and went down burning; all the sea Red as an angry sunset was made fell With smoke and blazing spars that rode upright, For as the fireships burst they scattered forth Full dangerous wreckage. All the sky they scored With flying sails and rocking masts, and yards Licked of long flames. And flitting tinder sank In eddies on the plagued mixed mob of ships That cared no more for harbour, and were fain At ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if we turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day inhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro (Papuan), blood is ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... been advised by Brigham Young to look out for the Powell expedition and Asa (Joseph Asay) and his sons continued to watch the river, though a false report had come that the Powell expedition was lost. They were looking for wreckage that might give some indication of the fate of the explorers when Powell's boats appeared. Powell was very appreciative of Asaqy's kindness and wrote enthusiastically of the coming, next day from St. Thomas, of James Leithead, with a wagonload of supplies ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... about me for a moment until a large part of the woods was crushed down. Then I bent over and poked around with my finger. Underneath the tangled wreckage of tiny-tree trunks, lay numbers of the Malites. I must have trodden upon a thousand or more, as one would stamp ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... all his vain endeavours to calm it. He grew afraid lest the dog should draw attention. He knew not who—if any—might be in possession of his house. The library, as he looked round, showed a scene of wreckage that excellently matched the exterior. Not a picture on the walls, not an arras, but had been rent to shreds. The great lustre that had hung from the centre of the ceiling was gone. Disorder reigned along the bookshelves, and yet there and elsewhere there was a certain orderliness, suggesting ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... the trio of ships were rapidly overhauling a fourth, which was wallowing along dead ahead of the Aurora. She was a large craft, apparently of about eight hundred tons measurement; her three topmasts were carried away close off by the caps; the wreckage was all lying inboard, cumbering up her decks; her courses and staysails were blown to ribbons; and she was steering so badly that it was difficult to say where she was going, except that her general direction was to leeward. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... amid the wreckage of opinion and belief stands forth the figure of Charles Darwin, calm, imperturbable, serene; scatheless to ridicule, contumely, abuse; unspoiled by ultimate success; unsullied alike by the strife and the victory—take him for all in all, for character, for intellect, for what ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either haste or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to mingle with the debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes. "H'm!" he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. "Silly!" he remarked after a pause. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... daw's plumes, with none to admire or shrug his shoulders, can we think of one such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her personality—that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with, and therefore life in and communion with other people? In the wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people; granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and necessarily into our own lives; we use them ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... horse, hurling it upon its fellow, breaking the pole. Both lost their footing and were driven round. Prescott, flung upon the backs of the horses, grasped the front of the rig, which ran on a yard or two and overturned with a crash. The Clydesdale went down among the wreckage, another horse was on its side, kicking savagely; and Stanton, hurrying up, saw Prescott crawl slowly clear of it. Seizing him, he lifted him to his feet, and to his great surprise the man leaned against a ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... colored troops near by engaged in repairing the roads, and a number of us determined to get up a quartet to sing for the men. We went to where the negroes had built themselves shelters from corrugated-iron sheets and miscellaneous bits of wreckage from the town. We collected three quarters of our quartet and were directed to the mess-shack for the fourth. As we approached I could hear sounds of altercation and a voice that we placed immediately as that of our quarry ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for survival; but about a third of the greatest authors' greatest works had been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in their libraries they ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... footfall raised clouds of pulverised cosmos. For two weeks, amid the wretched scene, hideous by night as by day, I persisted in existing. It was a huge pen with men, horses, camels, donkeys, dogs and poultry hobnobbing amid a daily wreckage of old provision tins, garbage of soiled forage and stable-sweepings and whatnot. All that, with a temperature of 116 degrees to 120 degrees Fahr. in the shade, wore the temper and added amazingly to the consumption of wet things. At the Grenadier Guards' ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... it was a pile of junk, but most interesting junk. Practically all of it consisted in broken bits of the celluloid-like stuff we had seen in the abandoned building. Twisted inextricably about were steel wires and bits of all sorts of material. In the midst of the wreckage was something that looked for all the world like the remains of a gas-motor. It was not rusted, either, which indicated that it had been put ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... helicopter had climbed to position and was circling above, and then turned their attention to the place where the sheet of fused earth and stone bulged upward. It must have been almost ground-zero of one of the hydrogen-bombs; the wreckage of the Cathedral of Learning had fallen predominantly to the north, and the Carnegie Library ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... second later she plowed into the guardhouse. The structure erupted like a box of stove-matches hit with a heavy-caliber soft-nosed slug, like a house of cards and an air-jet. There was a roar and a small gout of flame and then out of the flying wreckage on the far side came Farrow and her stolen car. Out of the mess of brimstone and shingles she came, turning end for end in a crazy, metal-crushing twist and spin. She ground to a broken halt before the last of the debris landed, and then ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... realize that by these wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre imagination of its provincial designer. A fine rain had set in before we found the square, and here indeed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction; despite the wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was razed to the ground, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the Niobe, though she was now disabled, and we could hurt her no more. If the others came up on our weather we should be chewed like a bone in a mastiff's jaws. If she must fight again, the Araminta would be little fit for action till we cleared away the wreckage; so I sheered off to make all sail. We ran under courses with what canvas we had, and got away with a fair breeze and a good squall whitening to windward, while our decks were cleared for action again. The guns on the main-deck had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... in my face was spray, flung up through the open door. When I ran to close it, it almost made me dizzy to see the gray-and-white breakers marching past. The land was gone; the sky shut down heavy overhead; there was a piece of wreckage on the back of a swell, and the Jacob's-ladder was carried clean away. How that sea had picked up so quick I can't think. I looked at my watch and it wasn't four in the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... and ice floes were not the only things that went floating by! Presently the stream came driving with washing piers and bath houses, then with boats and wreckage of bridges. ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof

... skyward and a ghastly light shot far out on the sea. The junk heaved back, settled, turned slowly over and seemed to spread out into a great mass of wreckage. Pieces of timber and plank and spar came tumbling down and a few men scrambled to our decks. We could hear others crying out in the water, as they swam here and there or grasped at planks and beams ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed Lancers." We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad sight—human wreckage ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... any longer—as Andrew rose to his feet he gathered together any stray wreckage of wits that was within his reach and managed, by not looking directly at her, to say in a rational, elderly, friendly tone, slightly ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... had seemed an eternity to this beautiful woman, with the wreckage of her youth staring her in the face: a youth which should have been all sunshine and flowers. She had risked all for the price ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... keel. Some hundreds had been washed overboard, but there were thousands left, and nobody foresaw the day when the market would take the fashion of a storm-swept hulk, with only a chance survivor clinging here and there to the wreckage and exchanging tales of the magnificence that ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... for Ida Mary, and there was no answer from the shack or the store. If she were under that wreckage.... Frantically we clawed at the timbers, clearing a space, looking for a slip of a girl with long auburn braids of hair. It was too dark to see clearly, and in my terror I was ripping the boards in any fashion while Jack strove to ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... father and mother to follow at a slower pace, Nancy and Dan tore up the hill and threw open the kitchen door. There, comfortably dozing on the settle by the fire, sat the Captain! At his feet lay Zeb—also sound asleep with the wreckage of several blackened eggs strewn round him on the hearth-stone! The Captain woke with a start as the children burst into the room and for an instant stood staring in amazement and delight at the scene before them. Zeb, ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... There was a scuffling, a struggling in the corridor, cries and shouting, the sound of wood splintering, the blows of an axe,—a rushing forward of heavy bodies and the trampling of feet. The doors burst open, and a cordon of police dashed over the wreckage, cursing, shouting—and then stopped on the threshold, staring in amazement and panting ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs

... like hell-gate dogs; and, almost at the same moment, close by the Kaiser a column of water hopped with one humph of venom two hundred feet on high: when this dropped back broad-showering with it came showering a rain of wreckage; and instantly a shriek of lamentation floated over the sea, mixed with ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... occupied by a train of refugees. After the sight of a good strong man struck down in his strength, this, perhaps, was the saddest sight of the whole war. How miserable they were, these helpless, hopeless people, trailing sadly along the road, the majority with all they had saved from the wreckage of their homes tied in a sheet, and carried on their backs. Some were leading a cow, others riding a horse, a few were in oxen-driven wagons. They looked as if they had lost faith in everything, even in God. They had the air of people calmly ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... they would never rest till they had taken a tower in open fight. Certainly they fought in the open. We dealt with them thoroughly through a long day: and when all was finished, one man dived clear of the wreckage of his ship, and swam towards shore. I waited, and a wave tumbled him at ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... his hat, I am afraid, is Troubling him — Past all lifting to the ladies By the brim. But, although he'd hardly strike a Girl, would Dan, Yet he wears his wreckage ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson

... one who escaped the wreck alive. The bodies of my shipmates lay scattered along the shore; and a long and arduous day was spent in burying them where they lay, in such shallow graves as I could scoop in the sand with the aid of a piece of splintered plank. The beach was strewed with wreckage which had been washed over the reef and into the smooth water; and I was overjoyed to find amongst this the long-boat, perfectly uninjured. In her I visited the scene of the wreck; and there, after diligent search, I found the means and a sufficiency of appropriate ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood

... Stowe after they got to New York, even though they had both broken ankles previously. Their friends in San Francisco were joking with them about it before they left. They gave Miss Sosnak a doll with a cast on its leg as a gag. The doll was found in the wreckage. Apparently Miss Sosnak had given it to the little girl who was killed on the flight, Barbara Patterson, who actually had a cast on her leg at the time. She had fallen and hurt herself ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith

... and as they stood looking at the wreckage they had made, or, rather, that had been made through no direct fault of their own, the proprietor of the place came out, wearing a long ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach

... western islands, finally being wrecked and losing his life on the island of the Commander group that now bears his name. The survivors of Bering's party reached Kamchatka in a boat constructed from the wreckage of their ship, and reported that the islands were rich in fur-bearing animals. Siberian fur hunters at once flocked to the Commander Islands and gradually moved eastward across the Aleutian Islands to the mainland. In this manner Russia gained a foothold ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... it seemed as though it must be torn away from its foundations. But it had been stoutly built with an eye to resisting just such storms, and held firm. The air was filled with grass, bits of planking, and other wreckage that it had picked up in its furious course. The boys gazed out the windows, wondering mightily at the tremendous force of the gale, which closely approached that of a cyclone. They had been in storms at sea, and a gale was no new ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield

... barn was blown clean over on its side, its roof falling some distance away, so that none of the wreckage came down on ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield

... and chaotic, like an awful birth To Desolation, of a lifeless world! My soul in agony cried out to God, When of a sudden all the place grew calm, Save for the trembling of the mountain peaks And the low moaning of the billowy winds Among the abysses. Dull lights here and there Kindled, like wreckage of a city razed By vandals, and the inky sky cupped up Into a black, impenetrable roof.... But now from out the chaos there arose Another sound more fearful than the wail Of tempest, or the quake of mighty hills— A mortal cry, a ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... own.... I qualified that before. Working on your own is a relative term. At all stages there would be somebody adjacent for your own safety and well-being. I did not at any stage see Ian Gemmell Capt. Gemmell or Ian Wood or David Graham in total isolation in any part of the wreckage." ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan

... the crate broke several things which presumably were in Sir Marcus' pockets were found lying loose amongst the wreckage. That cat-woman was ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... swept through that gateway, reaping as they went, and here and there tremendous trees lay strewed athwart one another with their branches spread abroad in impenetrable tangles. Some had fallen amid the wreckage left by previous gales, which the forest had partly made good, and there was scarcely a rod of the way that was not obstructed by half-rotted trunks. Then there were thick bushes, and an undergrowth of willows ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... was in disorder, the table was overturned, and amid the wreckage of glass and china lay Mark Berwin, with outspread hands—stone dead—stabbed to ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... observable under the mass of limbs and foliage. Jasper was at work stoically chopping away, both for the sake of clearing up the mess and providing some excellent wood for the campfire. After dinner enough of the wreckage was cleared away so that the girls were able to catch a glimpse of the four cots drawn up close together, though they were now crushed down and lay in confusion on the ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge

... toward the dining-room, and there amid the candle drippings and the wreckage of the night before espied the miniature automaton. He picked it up and examined it minutely as ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... cliff house doorway. By the time Lennon reached the tumbledown ranch hut Slade was at the top of the ladder and Pete was beginning to climb. Lennon dashed on along the cliff foot. He gave no heed to the dead Apaches that lay huddled or sprawled amidst the wreckage of the wooden ladder poles and rungs. At the foot of the rope ladder he thrust his rifle through the back of his belt and swung up as ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet

... hear that our friend CHARLES HALL, A.D.C., Trin. Coll. Cam., and Q.C., is likely to be made a Judge. Where will he sit? Admiralty, Probate, and Divorce Court, where wreckage cases of ships and married lives are heard? Health to the Judge that shall be, with a song and chorus, if you please, Gentlemen, to the ancient air of "Samuel Hall," revived for this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various

... this sort of work. They were unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last got under way. We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to shore through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage—boards and a galvanized-iron gasolene tank—apparently from some transport sunk by a submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... hardness of this man (an irreproachable officer) arouses in Marschner mingled anger and suffering. By degrees a fierce but unspoken feud arises between them. At the very end, just when open war is about to break out between the two, a huge shell bursts in their trench and both are buried under the wreckage. The captain comes to himself with a shattered skull. At a few paces' distance lies the implacable lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost strange to him, pale and sad, with timid eyes. The whole expression is ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... about to be made on them, confidence was not lacking in other parts. Most of the foundries and factories near the water front and south of Market Street immediately called in all their employees and began to clear away the wreckage and make ready for continuing business. Great credit is due to the newspapers, nearly all of which continued their daily issues without interruption, although their buildings, with offices and printing plants, were entirely destroyed by the flames which ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... old story of a double life, the wreckage of a promising career. "Just a plain, ordinary thief was Mr. Randall Clayton," said one acute observer; "his case is only extraordinary from the amount taken. And it seems that he robbed for the lucre itself, as the most careful inquiry divulges no stain upon ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... his eyes wander over the wreckage as his right index finger spun the dial. Actually, the room wasn't as much of a shambles as it had looked on first sight. The—burglar?—hadn't tried to get at anything but the Converter. He hadn't known exactly where it was, but he'd been able to follow the leads to its hiding ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett

... out her tapestries after the noon rest and was deep in commerce once again. From the low balconies overhead the Damascene carpets swung, lending festivity to the energetic traffic below. The pillars of stacked ware flanking the fronts of pottery shops were in a constant state of wreckage and reconstruction; the stalls of fruiterers perfumed the air with crushed and over-ripe produce; litters with dark-eyed occupants and fan-bearing attendants stood before the doorways of lapidaries and booths of stuffs; venders of images, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... said Jones. "There are often iron bolts and sharp points about such wreckage that don't require much force to drive 'em through a ship's bottom. Take a look into the hold, Jim, and see ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne



Words linked to "Wreckage" :   ligan, jetsam, flotsam, lagan, part



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