"Rafts" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have broken up this spring unusually late, and the ice is now floating down in large masses. The settlers, who went to Pembina and the plains, for buffaloe meat in the Fall, are returning upon rafts, or in canoes formed by hollowing the large trunks of trees: many of them are as improvident of to-morrow as the Indians, and have brought with them no dried provisions for the summer. This is not the case however with ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... produced. No fewer than 280 models and drawings were sent in, and the plans, specifications, and descriptions of these formed five folio manuscript volumes! The various models were in the shape of pontoons, catamarans or rafts, north-country cobles, and ordinary boats, slightly modified. The committee appointed to decide on their respective merits had a difficult task to perform. After six months' careful, patient investigation and experiment, they awarded the prize to Mr James Beeching, ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... for reinforcements from Sir Hugh Gough at Hong Kong. A notice was issued advising all Englishmen to leave Canton that day. On the following night the Chinese sacked the opium warehouses and fired upon the British ships lying at anchor. Fire rafts were let loose against the squadron, but drifted astray. The British promptly took the offensive. They sunk forty war junks, and dismantled the Chinese batteries. On May 24, Sir Hugh Gough arrived at Canton with all his forces. The fleet advanced ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... a size sufficient to carry five or six horses and a dozen men. These boats have been employed from the remotest antiquity through all this region, and are often depicted on the old Assyrian monuments. Equally ancient are the rafts called kellek, constructed of inflated goat-skins, covered with a framework of wood, often supporting a small house for passengers, which descend the Tigris from above Diarbekr. The wood of these rafts is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... to the horses being frightened. We had to abandon our carts, so we burned them; and by the light of that fire we saw great mounds of Turkish supplies that they intended to float down the river to Bagdad on strange rafts made of goatskins. The sentries guarding the stores put up a little fight, and five more of us were wounded, but finally we burned the stores, and the flames were so bright and high that we had to gallop for two miles before we could be safe again in ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... Mr. Mott," broke in the Captain, lifting his head and setting his jaw, "you'd better set all available hands to work on the rafts immediately. It's true God has helped us through a lot, but it strikes me we'd better be on the safe side and help God a little at this stage of the game. He is wonderful, Andrew, but He isn't wonderful enough to keep man afloat very long unless man himself builds the raft. So don't ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... complete, it cannot be his sober calculation, but only his fond hope, that many have travelled without accident. No firm arch, overspanning the Impassable with paved highway, could the Editor construct; only, as was said, some zigzag series of rafts floating tumultuously thereon. Alas, and the leaps from raft to raft were too often of a breakneck character; the darkness, the nature of the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... was operated in Northampton County, Pa., as early as 1805. In 1826 James M. Porter and Samuel Taylor engaged in the business, obtaining their supplies from the Kittanninny Mountains. From this time the business developed rapidly, the village of Slateford being an outgrowth of it, and large rafts being employed to float the product down the Schuylkill to Philadelphia. By 1860 the industry had reached the capacity of 20,000 cases of slate, valued at $10 a case, annually. In 1839 quarries were ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... slaver went ashore off Jamaica, and the officers and crew speedily got out the boats and made for the beach, leaving the human cargo to perish. When dawn broke it was seen that the slaves had rid themselves of their fetters and were busily making rafts on which the women and children were put, while the men, plunging into the sea, swam alongside, and guided the rafts toward the shore. Now mark what the white man, the supposed representative of civilization and Christianity, did. Fearing that the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Trains ran through the streets laden with barrels of petroleum or piled as high as possible with charcoal and coal. That fine river, the Ohio, carried along with it steamers, barges, loads of timber fastened together and forming enormous rafts, which floated down the river alone, to be stopped on the way by the owner for whom they were destined. The timber is marked, and no one else thinks of taking it. I am told that the wood is not conveyed in this way now, which ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... every direction on foot. Where the parts do not fit closely there is, of course, open water, which freezes over, in a few hours after giving off volumes of "frost-smoke." In obedience to renewed pressure this young ice "rafts," so forming double thicknesses of a toffee-like consistency. Again the opposing edges of heavy floes rear up in slow and almost silent conflict, till high "hedgerows" are formed round each part of the puzzle. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... to the place, and he commenced some works to block up the mouth of the harbor. He built piers on each side, extending out as far into the sea as the depth of the water would allow them to be built. He then constructed a series of rafts, which he anchored on the deep water, in a line extending from one pier to the other. He built towers upon these rafts, and garrisoned them with soldiers, in hopes by this means to prevent all egress from the fort. He thought that, when this work was completed, Pompey would be entirely ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... 700 or 800 men, was besieging Fort Stanwix, on the Mohawk, and had given a severe defeat to a party sent to relieve it. General Burgoyne, desiring to effect a junction with St. Leger, moved down the east bank of the Hudson to Saratoga, where he threw a bridge of rafts over the river, and crossed an advanced corps. Being almost destitute of supplies, and too weak to maintain his communications with Fort George, he detached a force to surprise the enemy's magazines at Bennington; but on the 15th of August it was overpowered and defeated, with considerable ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... the Parana, not much more than fifty miles above the cataract. After the last of the once-flourishing six Jesuit reductions had been evacuated at the orders of Montoya, he collected all the boats, rafts, and canoes, and after much persuasion got all the Indians persuaded to follow him to seek for safer habitations lower down the Parana. The population of the six reductions has been estimated at about one hundred thousand souls; but of ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... feet in length, raised on trestles. The track of these "slides," as they are technically termed, consisted of a series of wooden rollers, along which the deals raced in endless sequence from the saws, to drop with a plunge into a spacious basin, at the lower end of which they were gathered into rafts. Whenever there was a break in the procession of deals, the rollers would be left spinning briskly with a cheerful murmur. There was also a shorter and steeper "slide," diverging to the lumber yard, where clapboards and such light stuff were piled till they could ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... port," said Mr. Fluxion. "Those great rafts which float down the Rhine from Switzerland are mostly brought to this place. I hope the boys will have a chance to see one of those rafts, for they are stupendous affairs. One of them sometimes contains a hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of lumber, and has a crew ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... Bisayas and living near Bruni to-day. The discus-knife, a wooden weapon, is not now in use, but is known to have been used formerly. The wild Kadayans sacrifice after every new moon, and are forbidden to eat a number of things until they have done so. The Malanaus set laden rafts afloat on the rivers to propitiate the spirits of the sea. The very names of the two kinds of cotton, then evidently a novelty to the Chinese, are found in Borneo: KAPOK is a well-known Malay word; but ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... loads were not as heavy as they looked, but the boys were having a hard time of it, to judge from their distressed faces peering anxiously from underneath the rafts which, at each step, rocked to and fro and seemed always on the point of toppling. Frantic clutches of small brown hands and the quick shifting of feet alone ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... fossilized, future generations would marvel at the evidence of some gigantic prehistoric animal, an alligator with a human-shaped foot. These Indians have lived in these mud bottoms so long, crossing the streams on rafts made of bundles of tules, and only going to the higher land when their homes are inundated by the floods, that they have become a near approach to ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... heads and oaring themselves with their wings over the furrows and through the bushes, stretched out broadly their spurred feet; behind them slowly advanced a puffed-up turkey cock, fretting at the complaints of his garrulous spouse; there the peacocks, like rafts, steered themselves over the meadow with their long tails, and here and there a silver-winged dove would fall from on high like a tassel of snow. In the middle of the circle of greensward extended a noisy, moving circle of birds, girt round with a belt of doves, like a white ribbon, mottled ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... tall, feather-headed bamboos, upon its banks. Sometimes the enclosures run down into the stream itself, some of them being duck-grounds, and others bathing-places. The shore is fringed with canoes, nets, rafts, and fishing apparatus. Heavily-laden boats float down the stream, and small canoes ply from bank to bank between the groups of bathers. The most lively traffic is to be seen in the tiendas, large sheds, corresponding to the Javanese harongs, which ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... batteries of Forts Jackson and St. Philip opened simultaneously upon the Cayuga. It was some time before the navy could reply, but soon every gun was in action. Beset by perils on every hand, the fleet pressed steadily up the river. The Confederate boats were destroyed, the fire-rafts were overcome, the gunners of the forts were driven from their guns, and when the sun rose Farragut was above the forts with the whole of his fleet, except the Itasca, Winona, and Kennebec, which put back disabled, and ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne, blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like cunning crocodiles, the ins and outs of the shallow Seine! those banks of pollard willows, where girls in white caps tended flocks of geese and turkeys, and where, every silver-spangled morning, the shore was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... it looked as though they were trapped on the island. The natives didn't dare to attack again, but no hunting party was safe, and the food supply was dropping. They had gotten on the island only by the help of the natives, who had ferried them over on rafts. But getting off was another thing, now that the natives were hostile. Cutting down trees to build rafts might possibly be managed, but during the loading the little company would be too vulnerable ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest; Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air, Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there, Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with— down he dings His bleached both and woolwoven ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... them in sight of the Tigris, at Beshabor. The next day they crossed on rafts supported by inflated goat-skins, and, on the 30th, rode six and a half hours to a Yezidee village. Next morning, after riding an hour, Mrs. Mitchell became too ill to proceed, and she lay four days in a mud ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... boating on the rivers, The voyage down the St. Lawrence, the superb scenery, the steamers, The ships sailing, the Thousand Islands, the occasional timber-raft and the raftsmen with long-reaching sweep-oars, The little huts on the rafts, and the stream of smoke when they cook ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... wonderful ancient damming of the river, and a temple to the constructor, who wrote, twenty centuries ago, 'dig out your ditches, but keep your banks low.' On we were taken along mountain trails over high snow-filled passes and across rivers on bamboo bridges to Wassoo, a timber centre from which great rafts of lumber are shot down the river, over fearsome rapids, freighted with Chinamen. 'They generally come through all ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... as few boats as would satisfy the laws. These, twenty-four in number, were securely covered and lashed down to their chocks on the upper deck, and if launched would hold five hundred people. She carried no useless, cumbersome life-rafts; but—because the law required it—each of the three thousand berths in the passengers', officers', and crew's quarters contained a cork jacket, while about twenty circular life-buoys were strewn ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... of our rafts, watching the installation of a new ray machine. A storm was raging, but the great raft, a thousand feet long, and five hundred wide, was as steady as a rock. We were 700 miles out; the great push of '92, that drove us back to within 150 miles of our coast and almost ended ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... story-tellers, Mami proved rather prolix. His tale was nearly as long as his travel. He insisted on describing his reception at every village. At each river he had his story of difficulty and danger in constructing rafts or building bridges. He counted the minutes he lost in awaiting the diminution of floods. Anon, he would catalogue the various fish with which a famous river teemed; and, when he got fairly into the woods, there was no end of adventures and ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... status something above a wallaby—the largest animal other than himself of his native land which, when hunted, occasionally swam towards the opposite shore, he constructed one or other of two rafts or floats, both derivable from Nature's models. One was in the form of an eagle's nest, and not nearly so large as that in which some eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... evening under the ruins of the castles on the hills. The lords of the Rhine that once heard them are gone forever. The vineyards creep up the hills on the light trellises, and the sun and the earth, as it were, fill the grapes with wine. The woods are as green as of old. The rafts go drifting down the light waves as on feet of air. But the river of history is changed, and one feels the spirit of the change with deep sadness as one ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... up the river again, looking for a place where he could safely cross to explore the country on the opposite side. After ascending from the spot where he found the letters for five or six days, he concluded they could cross by means of rafts. In the construction of these rafts he invited the help of the natives of the neighbourhood. He was probably up near the Chocolate Mountains and the Cumanas, who were hostile to Alarcon, and whose sorcerer had attempted to destroy him by means of the magic reeds. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... paddle their rafts through the jungle; They swim through a network of leaves; They clamber with never a bungle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... Britannia, commanding some gunboats, took an active part. This compelled the enemy to abandon the Principalities. Jack after this had to return to Constantinople, where Sir Edmund Lyons and Sir George Brown were busy in preparing rafts and chartering steamers for the embarkation of the artillery ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... rain-water from our cistern, tightly covered; one barrel we left open to the warm sun and air, and the other we covered with the finest mosquito netting. The barrel left open was soon thronged with mosquitoes, constructing their little rafts of eggs and paving their way for the swarms of young wigglers that in the course of a week or two made their appearance in the open barrel in immense numbers. The process by which these wigglers hatch out into mosquitoes ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... which there died away so many useless efforts, and in which there struggled so much weariness: families devoured by society, morals tortured by the laws, wounds gangrened by penalties, poverty gnawed by taxes, wrecked intelligence swallowed up by ignorance, rafts in distress alive with the famished, feuds, dearth, death-rattles, cries, disappearances. He felt the vague oppression of a keen, universal suffering. He saw the vision of the foaming wave of misery dashing over the crowd of humanity. He was safe in port himself, as he watched ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their long drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile waterway a world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and each post and gathering place along its length was turned into ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... if it doesn't, we'll get everybody off in the rafts and the launch; the sea is going ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... on the authority of the historian Oneskritus, for Alexander himself relates that they abandoned their rafts, and waded through this second torrent under arms, with the water up to their breasts. After crossing, he himself rode on some twenty furlongs in advance of the infantry, thinking that if the enemy met him with their cavalry ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... then they did not stop entirely, but slid by and tossed ropes to the people on the raft, dragging them aboard one by one. A seaman standing near Jimmie explained this procedure; it appeared that the submarines were accustomed to lurk near rafts and life-boats, preying upon those vessels which came to their rescue. Distressed castaways were bait—"live bait", explained the seaman; the U-boats would lurk about for days, sometimes for a week, watching the people in the life-boats struggle against the waves, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... unloading of the vessel. If auxiliary power were used, the ship could then steam to within half a mile of the shore, but as it is, a sailing-vessel has to anchor about two miles off and the oil is towed in rafts over that distance. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... ponies gave the best results, but do not abound in sufficient quantities to enable an army in Afghanistan to dispense with camels. A successful experiment in rafting, from Jelalabad to Dakka, was tried. The rafts consisted of inflated skins lashed together with a light framework; between June 4-13, seven thousand skins were used, and, in all, 885 soldiers and one thousand tons of stores were transported forty miles down the Kabul River, the journey taking ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... ours—the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in the stately streets turned into rushing rivers by the relentless floods—brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the muddy deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon thousands, wet, weeping, shivering, hungry, helpless and homeless, with the host of their unrecognized and unburied dead, in ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... shallows, as if boasting aloud of the victory it had achieved in breaking its way through such mighty barriers; but within the Gap it sleeps in quiet pools, or flows in deep glassy currents. By the side of these you see large rafts composed of enormous trunks of trees that have floated down with the spring floods from the New York forests, and here wait for their turn in the saw-mills along the shore. It was a bright morning, with a keen autumnal air, and we dismounted from our ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... going up this river to Fairy-land much better," said Jack. So suddenly the river became full of thousands of little people coming down the stream in rafts. They had come to take the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... road, and seldom any visible track; and their Indian guides led them often, unavoidably, through tangled thickets, and deep and broken ravines, and across swamps, or bogs, where the horses mired and plunged to the great danger of the riders. They had to pass large rivers on rafts, and cause the horses to wade and swim; and to ford others. During most of the way their resolute leader was under the necessity of sleeping in the open air, wrapped in his cloak or a blanket, and with his portmanteau for a pillow; or, if the night-weather ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... any kind of property escaped the ravages of the fire, which swept off the surface everything coming in contact with it, leaving but time for the unfortunate inhabitants to fly to the shore; and there, by means of boats, canoes, rafts of timber, logs, or any article, however ill calculated for the purpose, they endeavoured to escape from the dreadful scene and reach the town of Chatham, numbers of men, women, and ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... Atkinson. Not altogether a very veracious book, but a fascinating book for all that. In it were alluring pictures of the broad, placid river. Rich forests came down to the water's edge. And on its surface were depicted delightful rafts and canoes. To glide down such a river, to camp on its banks and plunge into the forests which clothed them, seemed a joy second only to the joy of scrambling about the Himalaya. So with Mr. H. E. M. James—now Sir Evan James—I went to Manchuria, not, indeed, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... south of Madras. After laying out a bower anchor, and hauling the ship off, we set about preparing the boats to weigh it in the usual way. But the master-attendant of Porto Novo, who had come off to our assistance with a fleet of canoes and rafts, suggested to Sir Samuel Hood that it might he a good opportunity to try the skill of the natives, who were celebrated for their expertness in raising great weights from the bottom. The proposal was one which delighted the Admiral, who enjoyed everything ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... the villages and laying hands on slaves and cattle. The fugitives escaped over the Euphrates, vainly hoping that they would be secure in the very heart of the Khati. Tiglath-pileser, however, crossed the river on rafts supported on skins, and gave the provinces of Mount Bishri over to fire and sword:* six walled towns opened their gates to him without having ventured to strike a blow, and he quitted the country laden with spoil before the kings of the surrounding cities ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... February 17th, I rode to the head of General Howard's column, and found that during the night he had ferried Stone's brigade of Woods's division of the Fifteenth Corps across by rafts made of the pontoons, and that brigade was then deployed on the opposite bank to cover the construction ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... means the intention of this sagacious youth to walk all the way to the sea-coast. There was a much more convenient way at that time of accomplishing the distance, even to a young man with only two dollars in his pocket. The Black Forest is partly in Astor's native Baden. The rafts of timber cut in the Black Forest, instead of floating down the Rhine in the manner practised in America, used to be rowed by sixty or eighty men each, who were paid high wages, as the labor ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... was not five o'clock before I was aroused by a loud din of voices and splashing of water under my balcony. Looking out, I beheld the grand canal so entirely covered with fruits and vegetables, on rafts and in barges, that I could scarcely distinguish a wave. Loads of grapes, peaches, and melons arrived, and disappeared in an instant, for every vessel was in motion; and the crowds of purchasers hurrying from boat to boat, formed one of the liveliest ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... thickness, and tapers gradually to a point. It is thus easily cut down, and, several trunks being lashed together, a canoe is quickly formed. A war party on several occasions, embarking in a fleet of these rafts, have descended the river, and made raids on other tribes, carrying off women and children as captives, and large herds ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... quarter of Central and North-eastern Europe, and surrounded himself by a crowd of subject kings, the captains of his host, he set forward in the spring of 451 for the lands of the Rhine. The trees which his soldiers felled in the great Hercynian forest of Central Germany were fashioned into rude rafts or canoes, on which they crossed the Rhine; and soon the terrible Hun and his "horde of many-nationed spoilers" were passing over the regions which we now call Belgium and Lorraine in a desolating stream. The Huns, not only barbarians, but heathens, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... this must surely be of great consequence for the rise of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... our travellers awaited them, lifted his buffalo out of the water, and reshouldered it, that the latter learnt to their surprise that what they had taken for buffaloes were nothing more than the inflated skins of these animals that were thus employed as rafts by the rude but ingenious ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... usurped; he mounted a white flag and a cross above his house, being desirous of forming an alliance with the Spaniards, but they, being warned by experience with the treasons of the Moros, continued the hostilities, without attaching any importance to that signal. While they constructed rafts with which to attack the fortress of Corralat, Captain Antonio de Palacios went to destroy the village of Tampacan and its environs; and Adjutant Antonio Vazquez disembarked with orders to cut ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... security which those years of labor had builded up about us might vanish in a breath. And I needed new flannelette for the Twins' nighties, and a reefer for little Dinky-Dunk, and an aluminum double-boiler that didn't leak for me maun's porritch. There were rafts of things I needed, rafts and rafts of them. But here we were bust, so far as I could tell, on the rocks, swamped, stranded ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... weather you may be sure that we in Totland Bay have not been idle. We swim, men, women and children, and we perform great feats of diving from the moored rafts which the authorities have kindly provided for that purpose. And we toil off on the usual picnic parties and inhale great draughts of health as we lie on our backs on the heather-clad slopes of the hill. But even while we pursue these simple pleasures our thoughts are with the great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... all. But to get rid of it, turned out to be a very difficult task. He wandered along the bank of the Ekaterininsky Canal for half an hour or more and looked several times at the steps running down to the water, but he could not think of carrying out his plan; either rafts stood at the steps' edge, and women were washing clothes on them, or boats were moored there, and people were swarming everywhere. Moreover he could be seen and noticed from the banks on all sides; it would look suspicious for a man to go down on purpose, stop, and throw something ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Coblenz side of the bridge there are two or three lengths of it which can be taken out when necessary, in order to let the steamers, or rafts, or tow boats, that may be coming up or down the river, pass through. Rollo was very much interested, while he remained at Coblenz, in looking out from the windows of his hotel, which faced the river, and ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... the chart house and met the navigator, Lieutenant Leonard, and asked him if he had sent any radio, and he replied "No." I then directed him and accompanied him to the main deck and told him to take charge of cutting away forward dories and life rafts. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... across them, but the rivers were too wide to bridge, too cold and dangerous to swim. In nearly every case he had to make a raft. A good scout takes no chances. A slight raft means a risky passage; a good one, a safe crossing but loss of time in preparations. Fifteen good rafts did Rolf make in that cross-country journey of three days: dry spruce logs he found each time and bound them together with leather-wood and withes of willow. It meant a delay of at least an hour each time; that is five hours each ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered here—this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... jeer and gibe if you saw a man sinking in the waves time after time in spite o' rafts and life-preservers thrown out to him ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... stripped, and sawed into logs the huge trees. To Dennis and others remained the arduous labour of guiding, with the help of windlasses, these immense logs to the river, whence they would descend in due time to the inlet, there to be joined together into vast rafts, later on again to be towed to their destination. Of all labour, this steering of logs through dense forest to their appointed waterway is the hardest and roughest. Dennis, of course, wore thick gloves, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... unknown streams, to cut the pine or oak lumber,—such being the name they give to the felled stems of trees,—which are then hewn, and in the winter dragged out upon the ice, where they are formed into rafts, and in spring floated down the waters till they reach the great St. Lawrence, and are, after innumerable difficulties and casualties, finally shipped for England. I have likewise known European gentlemen voluntarily leave the comforts of a civilized home and associate themselves with the ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... Upon a single feast day, tradition had it, a hundred mules with tinkling silver bells followed the high priest, in scarlet robes, to the tiny cone, their sharp feet clawing the lava road, their strong backs aching beneath the precious burden. This was then transferred to rafts and gay barges by men blindfolded by the priests and taken to the secret spot which lay above the sunken shrine. The worshipers knelt in prayer beneath the uplifted arms of their pious leaders, then raised high their golden bowls. For a moment ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... had no ticket. Jonah was disobedient, and of a fault-finding, complaining disposition, and deserves to be lightly spoken of, almost. The timbers used in the construction of Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening in the reef through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider or a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then. Such is the sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good seaport has now and always ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Manta in that province, had sent an express to Gonzalo giving his opinion that these vessels seemed hostile, as they had not called at the port for refreshments. He at the same time sent some Indians on board, in their ordinary rafts or flat boats, to inquire the purpose of their voyage; by means of which Indians Aldana transmitted letters to D'Olmos, urging him to quit the insurgent party, with copies of all the papers connected with the mission of the president. After perusing these papers, D'Olmos ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... might take for blood, but which I decidedly declare to be ink; an unconscionably awkward scribe must have lodged here, or another Luther repeatedly hurled big inkstands at his opponents. * * * Exceedingly strange figures, brown, with broad hats and wide trousers, are floating about on long wooden rafts in the Danube below. I regret I am not an artist; I should like to let you see these wild faces, mustached, long-haired with excited black eyes, and the ragged, picturesque drapery which hangs about them, as they appeared to me all day yesterday. * * * Farewell, my heart. God bless you and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... sinking lower and lower; the crew desert the pumps, and hold out their hands imploringly towards us as we drive down towards them. Their boats have been all washed away: it were madness in us to attempt to lower one. Some with hatchets are cutting away at the bulwarks and companion hatch to form rafts, others run shrieking below to the spirit-room, or rush bewildered here and there; not one do I see on bended knees imploring aid from heaven. The vessel now labours more heavily than ever; a huge sea rolls towards her,—she gives a fearful plunge. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... out soon. Get your floating mines ready," ordered Captain Blaise. That was my work, and in anticipation of it I had knocked together two small rafts loaded with explosives and a large one with explosives and combustible stuff to burn brightly for half an hour ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... play in the water. When we had no ponies, we often had swimming matches of our own and sometimes made rafts with which we crossed lakes and rivers. It was a common thing to "duck" a young or timid boy or to carry him into deep water to struggle as best ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... those ashes Which all must be. Well used, they serve us well. I heard a saying in Egypt, that ambition Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink, The more you thirst—yea—drink too much, as men Have done on rafts of wreck—it drives you mad. I will be no such wreck, am no such gamester As, having won the stake, would dare the chance Of double, or losing all. The Roman Senate, For I have always play'd into their hands, ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... This is well-written and full of action. The formula is very much the same as Kingston's—gales, shipwrecks, rafts, hand-to-hand battles, and above all, a super-smart midshipman who doesn't even shave yet, but who ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... in the midst of the seas, With thy rafts of cedar trees, Thy merchandise and thy ships, Thou, too, art become as naught, A phantom, a shadow, a thought, A ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... together, that in four days they only advanced about thirty miles, and they now began to suffer from hunger. They also met with many rapid foaming streams, to cross some of which they had to stop and build rafts. ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... from foreign countries. Artillerymen arrived from Holland and Austria, engineers from Prussia, and Admiral Lima from Venice. Peter hurried on the creation of a fleet with feverish impatience. He built of green wood twenty-two galleys, a hundred rafts, and seventeen hundred boats or barks. All the small ports of the Don were metamorphosed into dock-yards; twenty-six thousand workmen were assembled there from all parts of the empire. It was like the camp of Boulogne. No misfortune—neither ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the earth's crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks run in disorder upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals. Some of these fragments of land appeared, indeed, no bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat, lay awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts of stone; several, heavily timbered and round at the base, emerged in squat domes of deep green foliage that shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch of cloud shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally season. The thunderstorms of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... a town now called Senn. During the first of these five days, they saw on the opposite side of the Tigris a large town called Kaenae, from whence they received supplies of provisions, brought across by the inhabitants upon rafts supported by ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... sent to England, to form gateways to the palace of the Queen. And when some of these giants, now in the British Museum, were actually removed, with infinite pains and labor, to be dragged down to the Tigris, and floated down the river on rafts, there was no end to the astonishment of Layard's simple friends. On one such occasion an Arab Sheikh, or chieftain, whose tribe had engaged to assist in moving one of the winged bulls, opened his heart to him. "In the name of the Most High," said he, "tell me, O Bey, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... had said about the Tierra del Fuegans lashing their rude rafts together, so he took down with him from the house a quantity of old clothes-lines which he had discovered in the back garden. These he now utilised in tying the pieces of paling from the fences together with, after which a number of small boughs and branches from the hedges were laid on ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... Another took its place, and another and another. All that night the torches flared and the decks drummed to a ceaseless activity. In the morning Boyd sent a squad of fishermen ashore to clear the ground for his buildings, and all day new rafts of lumber and material helped to increase the pile ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... expended in one season by a boy who has any taste for the water in building rafts, and converting tubs and packing-boxes into sea-going vessels, would, if well directed, build a good-sized ship; but, from lack of knowledge and system, the results of ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... indents the south-east corner of the island, he directed that land should be cleared for the building. The work of evacuating Ste Marie began early in May, and on the 15th of the month the buildings were set on fire. The valuables of the mission were placed in a large boat and on rafts; and, with heavy hearts, the fathers and their helpers went aboard for the journey to their new ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself; whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap. Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green seas ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wood came floating to the shore on which he lived; and he wanted to know where that wood grew. So he loaded a boat with provisions for a two years' voyage, and sailed away in the direction from which the rafts used to drift. For months and months he sailed on, over an always placid sea; and at last he arrived at a pleasant shore, where wonderful trees were growing. He moored his boat, and proceeded alone into ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... he met no resistance except at Panormis (Palermo), but observing that his masts overtopped the walls, he hung up small rafts full of archers, whose arrows disconcerted the inhabitants so that they surrendered, and the whole island was restored to the Roman power. Theodatus tried to treat with Justinian, and while the negotiations were going on, Belisarius crossed over to the African province, which was threatened by the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... were met with many apologies. A bamboo bridge had been built across the stream a few days before so that our cars might cross, but yesterday's rain had washed it down, and would we try to cross on rafts? We looked at the rafts, bamboo platforms built over large bancas (canoes, double-enders cut out of a single log), the bamboos being lashed together with bejuco (rattan, the native substitute for ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... adequate supplies. The pack-horses were not able to carry more than a little extra ammunition, a few articles of clothing, some simple cooking utensils and such tools as were needed in improvising rafts and canoes. Consequently, although buffalo and deer were sometimes plentiful, they furnished no lasting supply of meat, because it could not be transported; and as the army neared Vincennes wild animals became scarce, so that the men began to suffer ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... manner as to produce the most striking and splendid effect. Some of these trees were of seventy and others of eighty years growth. Being skilfully taken up they were placed carefully in carriages, conveyed over a space of from three to four miles in extent, transported on rafts across both the rivers, and on being replanted in the island, so favourable were both soil and vegetation in that genial climate, that they immediately struck root, and even bore fruit during the first year after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... lighted all over Norway on the night of June the twenty-third, Midsummer Eve, Old Style. As many as fifty or sixty bonfires may often be counted burning on the hills round Bergen. Sometimes fuel is piled on rafts, ignited, and allowed to drift blazing across the fiords in the darkness of night. The fires are thought to be kindled in order to keep off the witches, who are said to be flying from all parts that night to the Blocksberg, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... shining there, and the grass was green, and the view was spread out for miles; while from where I stood there were the great black buildings, the tall shafts, and close beneath me the dam which, in spite of the sunshine, suggested nothing but men coming down from the head on rafts of wood to ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... small eminence more than sixty feet above the flood tide was a great fleet of barges and rafts of logs, which had borne heavy blocks of cut stone from far to the southward down on the tide to construct our tombs ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... disembarked its load, And then returning on its way, Sped here and there in merry play. Then swimming elephants appeared With flying pennons high upreared. And as the drivers urged them o'er, The look of winged mountains wore. Some men in barges reached the strand, Others on rafts came safe to land: Some buoyed with pitchers crossed the tide, And others on their arms relied. Thus with the help the monarch gave The army crossed pure Ganga's wave: Then in auspicious hour it stood Within Prayaga's famous wood. The prince with cheering ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... and friendship. Philosophers opposed their principles, as barriers to the inundation of profligacy or despair, and the only ramparts to protect the invaded territory of human life; the religious, hoping now for their reward, clung fast to their creeds, as the rafts and planks which over the tempest-vexed sea of suffering, would bear them in safety to the harbour of the Unknown Continent. The loving heart, obliged to contract its view, bestowed its overflow of affection in triple portion on the few that remained. Yet, even among these, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... impossible any longer to keep up his communications with Canada by way of the lakes, so as to supply his army on his southward march; but having by unremitting exertions collected provisions for thirty days, he crossed the Hudson by means of a bridge of rafts, and, marching a short distance along its western bank, he encamped on the 14th of September on the heights of Saratoga, about sixteen miles from Albany. The Americans had fallen back from Saratoga, and were now strongly posted near Stillwater, about half way between Saratoga ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... too near, so I hoisted the mainsail again and stood for the open sea. There was a good supply of guns and ammunition on board, and it would have been an easy matter for me to have sunk one or two of the native catamarans, which are mere primitive rafts or floats, and so cooled their enthusiasm a bit; but I refrained, on reflecting that I should not gain anything ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... to the Islands, village by village, with Taku-Wakin close on my trail, which was the trail of the Grass-Eaters. They swam the sloughs with their children on their shoulders, and made rafts of reeds to push their food bundles over. By night they camped on the hummocks and built fires that burned for days in the thick litter of reeds. Red reflections glanced like fishes along the water. Then there would be ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... put me to work on a river," he said, "I should not mind. Here one has plenty to eat, and the work is not hard, and there is a warm room to sleep in, but I should like to be employed in cutting timber and taking it in rafts down the river to the sea. I love the river, and I can shoot. All the Ostjaks can shoot, though shooting has brought me bad luck. If I had not had my bow in my hand when that Russian struck me I should not be here now. It was all done in a moment. ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... into many provinces on the South Sea. They who go to look for them, and do not enter there, will be lost. On the coast is no maize: the inhabitants eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in the sea from rafts, not having canoes. With grass and straw the women cover their nudity. They are ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... the tiers of shipping, but chiefly at the south, lie numberless steamboats of all sizes; and yet again, flanking these, are fleets of those rude rafts and arks constructed by the dwellers on the hundred waters of the far West; and thence pushed forth, freighted with the produce of their farms, to find, after many days, a safe haven and a sure ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... how it could be done, all the wiseacres caught the idea, and after that I put a big gang to work making more rafts, and by and by I had sixteen of them in operation, and was hauling more stone than the masons could set. But I won't go into all that. Here is the pyramid; it speaks for itself. One year more and I'll have the top course laid and begin on ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... see, I have been on lost ships afore now, an' I know there is no larboard nor starboard rules when men are skeered. So I shall make my raft to hold the womenfolk, for the boats will be for the sailors—mark my word—and them that's wise will wait till the press is over and take the rafts." ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... on the youth-bereft rafts of the barges, yonder, stood many stupefied elders, staring at the river, staring back from the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... among which is the Osage plum of a superior size and quality. On the morning of the 12th, we passed through difficult places in the river, and reached Plum creek on the south side. At one o'clock, we met two rafts loaded, the one with furs, the other with the tallow of buffaloe; they were from the Sioux nation, and on their way to St. Louis; but we were fortunate enough to engage one of them, a Mr. Durion, who had lived ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of the country, cross the Elbe; for the high officers, dames, damosels and lordships of degree, and thousandfold spectators, lodge on both sides of the Elbe: three Bridges, one of pontoons, one of wood-rafts, one of barrels; immensely long, made for the occasion. The whole Saxon Army, 30,000 horse and foot with their artillery, all in beautiful brand-new uniforms and equipments, lies beautifully encamped in tents and wooden huts, near ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... to Louisa and to Prestonburg. If he stops to ask a night's lodging at one of the farm-houses that are to be found at the junction of the creeks with the rivers, log-houses with their primitive out-buildings, their half-constructed rafts of lumber ready to float down-stream with the next rise, their 'dug-outs' for the necessities of river-intercourse, and their rough oxcarts for hauling to and from the mill, he will see before him such a home as that in which I passed the first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... seven men could be taken over at a time, the work of crossing the troops was slow and tedious. General Clinch and Colonels Samuel Parkhill and Read crossed over, and, in conjunction with General Call, began the construction of rafts on which the baggage and stores could be crossed over. The regulars were all over by twelve o'clock, and Major Alexander C.W. Fanning marched them into an open field surrounded on all sides either by a thick swamp or hammock, and there formed ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... groups and halted at the river bank, where the work of rafting and wagon boating went methodically forward. Scores of individual craft, tipsy and risky, two or three logs lashed together, angled across and landed far below. Horsemen swam across with lines and larger rafts were steadied fore and aft with ropes snubbed around tree trunks on either bank. Once started, the resourceful pioneer found a dozen ways to skin his cat, as one man phrased it, and presently the falling waters ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... not help thinking it— how awful must have been the night when the great ship swung over the Asiatic peak, and the sounds of creation were blotted out from the world. She thought, too, of mariners clinging to spars, and of poor women who were lashed to rafts and beaten to death by the cruel sea. She tried to thank God that she was thus spared, and lifted her eyes from the baby who had fallen into a fretful sleep. Suddenly, away to the southward, a great light lifted itself out of the gloom, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... completely covers the floor and often raises its waters ten or fifteen feet up the canyon side. In recent years a road has been cut in the rocks above the flood waters, but even to-day most of the traffic between Abra and the coast is carried on by means of rafts which are ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them. Even of a very good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring, when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... I went ashore and, making my way to the carpenter's shop which formed part of our shore establishment among the islands, ordered a certain number of small triangular rafts to be made, of a size just sufficient to support a bamboo staff ten feet long, to the top of which a flag six feet long by three feet wide was to be firmly lashed, the flags to be of different colours, arranged ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... might well have appalled a less stout heart than his, for the troops had scarcely landed when a sudden summer storm burst upon the scene, churned the river into angry waves, broke some of the smaller ships from their moorings, casting them upon the rocks, and staving in many of the boats and rafts. The people of Quebec, who for weeks had been urging upon the Divinity in their peculiar way that they, his chosen people, were in danger, would not have been Canadian Catholics of their generation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier and his infamous noyades. The most hideous episode of the Revolution was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire. The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the air noble, in France always reminds me of those dreadful years—of the street-scenes of the Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing could ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... into the river toward it, so as to get a stand-point for his engines nearer the walls, where they could have some chance of doing execution. So he set his men at work to prepare fascines, and bundles, and rafts of timber, which were to be loaded with the stones and sunk in the river to form the foundation for the proposed bank. The men would bring the stones down to the bank in their hands, and then horsemen, who were ready on the brink, would ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... neighbouring trees. In foul weather we shifted into an old rotten tent; this came by way of adventure for new. This was our Church till we built a homely thing like a barne set upon Cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge, and earth; so also was the walls; the best of our houses were of like curiosity.... Yet we had daily Common Prayer morning and evening; every Sunday two sermons; and every three months a holy ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... to construct a raft of some kind, or else to retrace my steps and remount the banks of the Jordan. I had once happened to give some attention to the subject of military bridges—a branch of military science which includes the construction of rafts and contrivances of the like sort—and I should have been very proud indeed if I could have carried my party and my baggage across by dint of any idea gathered from Sir Howard Douglas or Robinson Crusoe. But we were all faint and languid from want of food, and besides, there were no materials. Higher ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... all the canoes and boats which he could obtain up and down the river. He built large rafts, attaching to them the skins of beasts sewed together and inflated, to give them buoyancy. When all was ready, they began the transportation of the army in the night, in a place where the enemy had not expected ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... enormous rafts are made on the shore and then floated to the works, where they are weighted by stones and sunk in the required position. Within a few weeks large quantities of silt and mud accumulate, and the whole forms an exceedingly tough and strong elevation under ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... the Mississippi was crossed. Not by redmen in canoes, nor white on logs or clumsy rafts, nor yet by multiwheeled locomotives gliding over steel bridges nor airplanes so high the wide stream was a thread below. Nature and devastation, hand in hand, for the moment one and the same, crossed it today as Quantrell or Kirby Smith or Nathan Bedford Forrest crossed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... despairing. The whites continued down the Wisconsin to Helena, where General Atkinson took command. Helena was a deserted village which had been built to carry on shot-making. The soldiers tore down the log houses and made rafts of the logs to cross the river. Five days in all were consumed before the Black Hawk trail was discovered, and then the pursuers were guided to it by crows and buzzards gathering in the air over the bodies of dead refugees left by ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... harbor at this time appears to have been more effective than convenient. Twenty boats or rafts filled with earth and stone were sunk with a purpose of destroying the harbor. De Saint Luc, the governor, succeeded in removing only four or five. The entrance for vessels afterward remained difficult ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... pull in a rickety sampan across the harbour of Sourabaya involves numerous collisions with fruit-boats, canoes, and rafts, before reaching the steamer in the offing. Intervals of comparative safety permit cursory observation of the gorgeously-painted praus with upturned stern, curving bamboo masts, and striped sails, the outline of the gaudy boats accentuated by a black line, and producing ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the legs of the tetel, and to each other's shoulders, when we launched it in the river. This plan is well worthy of the attention of military men; troops, when on service, are seldom without bullocks; in the absence of boats or rafts, not only can the men be thus safely conveyed across the river, but the ammunition can be packed within the skins, wrapped up in straw, and ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... with Poppaea and the Augustians, and sat beneath the purple tent-roof, the oars struck the water, the boats moved, the golden cords stretched, and the raft with the feast and the guests began to move and describe circles on the pond. Other boats surrounded it, and other smaller rafts, filled with women playing on citharae and harps, women whose rosy bodies on the blue background of the sky and the water and in the reflections from golden instruments seemed to absorb that blue and those reflections, and to change and bloom ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... down from the country on rafts (rakit), which are sometimes composed of rough timbers, but usually of large bamboos, with a platform of split bamboos to keep the cargo dry. They are steered at both head and stern, in the more rapid rivers with a kind of rudder, or scull rather, having a broad blade fixed in a fork ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... river-bank shines with sunlit canvas—tents, tents everywhere, as far as eye can see, a mushroom growth masking the older cabins. The water-front swarms with craft, scows and canoes, birch, canvas, peterboro; the great bateaux of the northern lumberman, neat little skiffs, clumsy rafts; heavy "double-enders," whip-sawed from green timber, with capacity of two to five tons; lighters and barges carrying as much as forty tons—all having come through the perils of the upper lakes ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... this bridge, we entered Mingrelia, where we followed our wonted custom of sleeping under the canopy of heaven, though we had many worse inconveniencies and dangers to encounter: for, on the 25th of July, having passed over a river by means of rafts, we were conducted to the dwelling of a certain lady, named Maresca, sister of the deceased prince Badian, who received us at first with much civility, and treated us with bread and wine, after which we were conducted into a field belonging to her, which was close ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... they had passed the region of roads and bridges they had to literally hew their way; cutting down bushes, prying their wagon out of bog-holes, building bridges or poling themselves across streams on rafts. But, in defiance of every ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... possible, shall be crossed only on well-made rafts, and without any danger to the soldiers or overturning ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... name, of that region where there are no roads for (the passage of) horses and cars and elephants, and good vehicles, and asses, and goats and bullocks, and palanquins; where there is swimming only by rafts and floats.' Yayati next addressed Anu and said, 'O Anu, take my weakness and decrepitude. I shall with thy youth enjoy the pleasures of life for a thousand years.' To this Anu replied, 'Those that are decrepit always eat like children and are always impure. They cannot pour libations ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... sufficient plank and logs of wood for the construction of a raft. These were both completed in a few days, and the party embarked on them in two divisions, to effect a passage to the Persian shore. One of these rafts was lost in the attempt, and all on board her perished; while the raft, with the remainder of ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... appeared to be quite a harbor for bateaux and canoes; seven or eight of the former were lying about, and there was a small scow for hay, and a capstan on a platform, now high and dry, ready to be floated and anchored to tow rafts with. It was a very primitive kind of harbor, where boats were drawn up amid the stumps,—such a one, methought, as the Argo might have been launched in. There were five other huts with small clearings on the opposite side of the lake, all at this end and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... McClellan's shells struck during the first day's bombardment, and split it into fragments. At Gloucester Point, across the York river, the great guns of the Merrimac were planted, it is said, and a fleet of fire-rafts and torpedo-ships were moored in the stream. By all accounts, there could have been no less than five hundred guns behind the Confederate entrenchments, the greater portion, of course, field-pieces, and, as the defending ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... manner of marine crustacea, they capture many insects in the air. They nest in large colonies in marshes, both along the coast and in the interior, making a nest of decayed reeds and grasses, or often laying their eggs upon rafts of decayed vegetation which are floating on the water. The nesting season commences in May, they laying three eggs of a brownish or greenish color, very heavily blotched with blackish brown. Size 1.35 x .95. Data.—Winnebago City, Minn., ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... Rafts could not come down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been sawed into long rough planks, and piled in the lumber-yards, ready to be rafted as soon ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... fishers, a Maltese speronare, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrento lug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers, called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdam flat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts—anything from anywhere that could bear a human freight on water had come, and was here: and all, I knew, had been making westward, or northward, or both; and all, I knew, were crowded; and all were tombs, listlessly wandering, my God, on the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... reported, and the different chiefs, ignorant of the real cause of the alarm, contended themselves with waiting in their several quarters; under arms. About four thousand of the sultan's troops, in this interim, crossed the river in boats and rafts which had been prepared for the purpose. The enemy's foot, stationed to oppose the passage, terrified by the alarm in camp and the approach of the sultan's forces, fled in confusion without waiting to be attacked. Before the morning Feroze Shaw had crossed the river with his whole ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... Richelieu, 45 miles from Montreal. Thence Lake St. Peter, nine miles wide. The St. Lawrence does not average more than one mile. We then approach the Richelieu Rapids. The river again becomes interesting. The churches appear with their tin domes and spires. The rafts, with houses built upon them, are floating down the river like some moving world. We left the eastern townships on the right, south of the St. Lawrence, which join the State of Maine and Vermont on the left, or north. We pass Cape Health River, ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... Ross and the Indians refer to just such experiences. With his vexation at having thus had his trail so suddenly broken, there flashed into his memory the stories of how some of the Indians, when in just such dangerous places, had escaped by making great rafts of the ice and on them floating across the open water. No sooner had this thought come to Sam than he fairly ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... the fleet was astir; and in an hour the defences were cut down, the timber, bamboos, &c., formed into rafts ready for transportation, and the stockade, by breakfast-time, had as completely vanished as though it had been bodily lifted away by some genius of the Wonderful Lamp. Everything was ready for a start, and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... trees and waving corn-fields; here and there a rock peeps picturesquely forth; cottages and distant chateaux are betrayed by their glittering slate roofs; islets as wild as those of the South Sea rise on the bosom of the waters like verdure-clad rafts, and no Captain Cook has ever mentioned these Otaheites ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... approach, giving the semblance of a lake, on whose surface vessels of every nation lie at anchor, some with the sails hung out to dry, gracefully drooping from the taper spars; others refitting again for sea, and loading the huge pine-trunks moored as vast rafts to the stern. There were people everywhere, all was motion, life and activity. Jolly-boats with twenty oars, man-of-war gigs bounding rapidly past them with eight; canoes skimming by without a ripple, and seemingly without impulse, till you caught sight of the lounging figure, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... in surprise; for old women travelling on rafts were not common in that country. 'Who are you, and why have ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... we came to the Tower of Apes we set fruits before them, and they did not harm us. When we came to the Tower of Serpents we gave them warm milk in howls of brass, and they let us go by. Three times in our journey we came to the banks of the Oxus. We crossed it on rafts of wood with great bladders of blown hide. The river-horses raged against us and sought to slay us. When the ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde |
