"Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wind was driving the black smoke of the steamers, far out at sea, in long funereal wreaths, athwart the foaming wake, and the silver-sailed schooners began to reef, in anticipation of the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson light hung motionless, against which leafless trees lifted ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... came rioting down over the rocks and where the trail crossed there was a mighty sycamore that almost dammed its course. With its gnarled and swollen roots half dug from their crevices by the tumultuous violence of cloudbursts, it clung like an octopus to a shattered reef of rocks and sucked up its nourishment from the water. In the pool formed by its roots the minnows leapt and darted, solemn bull-frogs stared forth from dark holes, and in a natural seat against ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... such a benefit on the sailors of all nations—for it was impossible to calculate how many lives had been saved during the 120 years his lighthouse had been protecting the ships of all nations from the dangerous reef on which it stood. The old lighthouse now forms a conspicuous object on the Hoe, and contains some interesting relics, and in the lantern are the candlesticks in which the lights were placed that guided the mariners across the stormy ocean in past ages. Over the lantern ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... has he started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride through deserted country—suppose it should be raining and the roads slippery ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Cartier Islands no indigenous inhabitants note: Indonesian fishermen are allowed access to the lagoon and fresh water at Ashmore Reef's West Island; access to East and Middle Islands ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to tie a square knot. If the student would render efficient help in accidents and emergencies, to say nothing of service on scores of other occasions, he must learn how to tie a square or "reef" knot. This knot is secure and does not slip as does the "granny" knot. The square knot is the one used by surgeons in ligating vessels and securing bandages. Unless one knew the difference, the insecure ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... bight's mouth, they found, as they had expected, coral rocks, and too many of them; so that they had to run along the edge of the reef a long way before they could find a passage for the boats. While they were so doing, and those of them who were new to the Indies were admiring through the clear element those living flower-beds, and subaqueous gardens of Nereus and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... church-town—a single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church—stands high and a mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef, a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road downhill from the ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... lightened ship, you choose to make all sorts of nasty insinuations about us wanting to knock you out! Shows where your mind is. Another fellow wouldn't ever let such a fool notion get a grip on him. And you'd better put a reef in that tongue of yours, my boy, unless you want to have ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... Giving herself all silvery to the sea From that Leucadian rock. Beneath your feet Lie sand and surf in curving parallels. Off shore, a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back Dripping with brine, and guards a sunken reef Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel; There frets the sea and turns white at the lip, And in ill-weather lets the ledge show fang. A very pleasant nook in ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pieces o' white I-talian marble that had been wrecked three years before off the harbor of Hamilton. They ran from three to twenty-one tons each, he said. So off I started with the Screamer. He didn't say, though, that the wreck lay on a coral reef eight miles from land, or I'd stayed to home ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... craze for the place. Now it was gold; now it was land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and "twenty pieces of silver"; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... i.e., triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezen, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... crimson maple-boughs, I know by heart each burning leaf, Yet would that like a barren reef Stripped to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... mbroidery. The stock-ins was a littel too big, so I had to fill em up with hankercheefs. The waste jest but-tened up on me, at the waste line, but it tuk half a dozen piller cases, and a cuppel of sheets, to stuff the upper part of the front. I had to put a reef in crinny line, cos it showd, and it tuk ma's pach-wurk quilt to mak my bussel ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... may write—for friends there be, On a stone from the gray sea wall, "Jungle and town and reef and sea— I loved God's Earth and His Earth loved me, Taken for all ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... around, and when the moon came up she seemed to be glowering from her shroud. Joe was anxious to take in something, but the skipper said, "Don't think there'll be much of it. We can reef her when it comes away. I want to be home." All the night it seemed as though something evil were in the air, and even the men below were depressed. Sometimes it happens that if you work long in a lonely ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... the strongest flow of water, the channel such as it was, set directly for the obstruction, and it might be possible to drop down on it from above—if one provided some means for getting back again. Stonor marked the position of every rock, every reef above, and little ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... lightning, moved slowly downwards. Before them surged the foaming waters, the waves white-crested. A gust of wind struck the boat; the water began to beat heavily against it, so that it was tossed about like a piece of cork. Since Simon had not put up the sail there was now no need to reef it. Flakes of foam flew over the spars, the beams groaned. The clouds rushed on, driving the heaving, thundering waves before them. Soon the little boat was overtaken by darkness, which was only relieved by flashes of lightning. Long ago Simon had let go the rudder, and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... the truth of these words, "Because I am God, and not man, therefore the children of men are not consumed"—just as it is because the ship rides by a cable, and not a cobweb, that, when sails are rent, and yards are gone, and breakers are foaming on the reef, she mounts the billows and survives the storm. That we are not suffering the pains of hell, that we have hopes of heaven and ever shall be there, we owe not to our good works, but to God's good will; to that only. Till converted, man does not desire this good will; and ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... left two of these to the north and one to the south of our course; the most northerly being a large high island full of trees. Between the two southermost of these three islands, ten leagues distant, and half way between them, there is a dangerous reef of rocks, to avoid which we steered through a very good passage within two leagues of the middle island, the reef being then to the south, about three leagues from us, and is very dangerous for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... like itself, forcible, but clear. That is why sea-slang is so poetical; there is a word for everything and every act, and a thing and an act for every word. Seamen must speak quick and bold, but also with utmost precision. They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect—therefore,—(Steamboat bell rings.) But I must say a ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... soul of thine Whirl thee out of the listed plain, Past the olives, and o'er the line. Dire and grievous the charge he brings. See thou answer him, noble heart, Not with passionate bickerings. Shape thy course with a sailor's art, Reef the canvas, shorten the sails, Shift them edgewise to shun the gales. When the breezes are soft and low, Then, well under control, you'll go Quick and quicker to strike the foe. O first of all the Hellenic bards high loftily-towering verse to rear, ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... etc. At 5.30 p.m. got underweigh and stood to the north-west, the soundings for five miles varying from three and three-quarters to seven fathoms; the sea breaking heavily for about a mile in a northerly direction from the end of the sheltering reef, showing a much greater extent of shoalwater than is noted on the charts. Established a routine of watches of two hours each, for the members of the expedition to attend upon ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... direction to the sublimity of a mountain chain. The distance across from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo may be about twenty-five miles, yet it took the dull and lazy dhows ten hours before they dropped anchor on the top of the coral reef plainly visible a few feet below the surface of the water, within a hundred ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... a dangerous reef which is never above water, though some small round black rocks are seen at low tide awash. They look like the kettles in which cooks get up a boiled dinner; and for this reason the Arabs call the reef Abu Kizan, which ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... published by Arrowsmith, Port Grey is laid down as a spacious, well-sheltered harbour, with a convenient point of land extending a couple of miles out to sea from its northern extremity, and having a useful reef of rocks projecting, most happily, to the same distance, affording altogether a secure shelter for shipping in ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... versatility of talent, discoursed learnedly to the skipper upon the beauty of his vessel's "lines" (whatever those were), her spread of canvas and build generally,—discussed the comparative merits of single and double topsails, and new patent yard-slings, and reef-tackle, and altogether displayed such an amount of nautical learning that it completely crushed me and staggered ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... day. The Cevennes mountains rise, however, to a tolerable height in the distance to the west; and to the south-east, the remains of the old town and cathedral of Maguelone, form a striking distant group, projecting like a low reef of rocks into the sea at the distance of three or four miles. To judge from the site of this ancient town, which tradition describes as the original nucleus of Montpelier, the sea must have made ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... old sailor kneeling upon the bench, looking intently through his telescope at some object at sea. My eyes followed the direction of the glass, and I saw distinctly, about two miles beyond the east cliff, a vessel lying dismasted upon the reef, with the sea breaking continually ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... His heavy head dropped under water, and his sodden crest rolled over, like sea-weed where a wave breaks. The stream had him all at its mercy, and showed no more than his savage master had, but swept him a wallowing lump away, and over the reef of the crossing. With both feet locked in the twisted stirrups, and right arm broken at the elbow, the rider was swung (like the mast of a wreck) and flung with his head upon his father's chain. There he was held by his great square chin—for ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... boat from driving on the dangerous reef, was just as much as the oarsmen could accomplish. Weakened as they were, by long suffering and starvation, they had a tough struggle to hold the pinnace as it were in statu quo—all the tougher from the disproportion between such a heavy craft and ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... on my bed with hair brushes, razors and things, they got to talking of Australia; and that was all about fighting too: dog fights, fist fights between bullockies on the long road from Northern Queensland, riots in Perth when the pearlers came in off the Barrier Reef to spend their pay, rows in the big shearing sheds when the Union men objected to unskilled labour—you'd have thought Australia was one big battlefield, with nothing else but fights worth talking of ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... bridge stood the pilot. He is the man who tells just where to make the steamer go in the harbor. He knows where everything is. He knows where the rocks are on the right and he didn't let the steamer bump them. He knows where the sand reef is on the left and he didn't let the steamer get on to that. He knows just where the deep water is and he kept the steamer in ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... in Graciosa Bay Frontispiece Facing page Women From the Reef Islands in Carlisle Bay 3 Native Taro Field on Maevo 10 Man from Nitendi working the Loom 15 A Cannibal before his Hut on Tanna 22 Dancing Table near Port Sandwich 31 Old Man with Young Wife on Ambrym 40 Front of a Chief's House on Venua Lava 47 Man from Nitendi 54 Cannibal ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... had thought in his inmost heart. So 'every one of us shall give an account of himself to God'; and like a man in the bankruptcy court, we shall have to explain our books, and go into all our transactions. We are working in the dark today. Our work will be seen as it is, in the light. The coral reef rises in the ocean, and the creatures that made it do not see it. The ocean will be drained away, and the reef will stand up ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a little south of the usual route, fell in with some of the Paumotu Group, and finally discovered Tahiti, where she anchored at Royal Bay, after grounding on a reef at its entrance, with her people, as usual, decimated by scurvy. They were almost immediately attacked by the natives, who, however, received such a reception that they speedily made friends, and fast friends too. The remainder of the month of the Dolphin stay ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... of 1875, after I left "The Reef," I worked for a short time near the head of the creek. One day a friend named McCallum came and showed me a piece of gold he had picked up on a headland which jutted over the Blyde River near Peach tree ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... hollered our capting. "Reef your arft hoss, splice your main jib-boom, and hail your chamber-maid! What's up ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... facts to be treasured up for use in his eager and retentive mind, but those habits of observation which were to be of the greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another vessel—the Porpoise—Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four feet above the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... but its path was almost exclusively a "water-track." It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano. Seldom has a more striking proof been given of the vividness of human ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... suggested, "the sooner we know it the better. She must break it off, if her heart is broken in the process. If he does love her—my private opinion is he thinks he does—I won't have Peggy's whole future wrecked by one of Aunt Elizabeth's flirtations. The reef is too small for the catastrophe. I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. Oh yes, I shall find Aunt Elizabeth! I have no more doubt of that than I have that Matilda is putting too much onion in the croquettes for Tom this blessed minute. If I find ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... ship, so that some of us rose and dressed; but the ship had apparently sustained no injury, and we proceeded on our way. Whether we had struck a rock, or only a sand-bar, we never knew, for the ship's men laughed and evaded our questions; but the passengers believed that the boat had touched a reef or rock, hidden, perhaps, beneath the surface ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... a hardy navigator," continued Kurz Pacha, "who sails for the boreal pole. It is glittering enough, but shipwreck by daylight upon a coral reef, is no pleasanter than by night ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... had a sort of vague consciousness that I had been hearing it before. The next instant I was broad awake and on my feet. Eight ahead, and so near that my heart stood still, was a long line of breakers, heaving and frothing. It was the coral reef girdling the island. Behind it, and almost casting their shadows upon the deck, were the sleeping mountains, about whose hazy peaks the gray dawn was just breaking. The breeze had freshened, and with a steady, gliding motion, we were running ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... kind was out of the question, and sleep would have been impossible to any but worn-out sailormen. Even then, they were often roused in the blackness of the night, when she lay with her lee rail under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... so powerful in his own element, on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value or consideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide a wheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we have before remarked, find their social value completely ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... others, the ship plunging and rearing like a mad horse, till I felt like being jerked off the spar; then, indeed, I thought of a feather-bed at home, and hung on with tooth and nail; with no chance for snoring. But a few repetitions, soon made me used to it; and before long, I tied my reef-point as quickly and expertly as the best of them; never making what they call a "granny- knot," and slipt down on deck by the bare stays, instead of the shrouds. It is surprising, how soon a boy overcomes his timidity about going aloft. For my own part, my nerves ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... haste, in finding our way down to the beach. Putting some provisions and water into her, including some of the turtle we had cooked, we once more launched her, and then, with no small amount of sorrow and apprehension, I saw my companions pull out towards the passage through the reef, when they were soon lost to sight in the gloom of night. One of Mr Henley's last charges to me had been to keep up a large fire all night, to enable him the better to steer his course, and also to find ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... which facilitates the operation. It was necessary, then, to work as formerly—that is to say, to run out on the foot-ropes, pull toward you a sail beaten by the wind, and lash it firmly with its reef-lines. It was difficult, long, perilous; but, finally, the diminished top-sail gave less surface to the wind, and the schooner was ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... him and harsh laughter clattering in echoes along the shore; then his boat struck and filled, and the dark flood curtained off the sky. Wagner has made familiar the legend of the Rhine daughters, singing impossibly under the river as they swim about the reef of gold,—the treasure stolen by the gnome, Alberich, who in that act brought envy, strife, greed, and injustice into the world, and accomplished the destruction of the gods themselves. The wild ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... of reef of Kaakaukukui. Beginning at the Government Survey Station known as the "Battery" [delta] from which, Punchbowl [delta] bears N. 48 deg. 18' 30" E. true and ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... Islands were easily visible. The principal one lay upon the water in the distance, a long, dull-colored body; scalloped with slight hills and valleys. We could not go straight at it, but had to travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is fenced with an invisible coral reef. At last we sighted buoys, bobbing here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them, "raised the reef," and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further shoaled into pale green, with a surface scarcely rippled. Now came the resurrection ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lodged on a reef a few feet down stream, but the lantern was gone beyond recovery. The situation was serious. Nugget's lantern was in Randy's canoe, and worse than all, only four matches ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... line with the breakers for some distance, until at length an opening appeared, into which he directed his course. Passing through this we reached still water, which seemed like a lagoon surrounded by a coral reef. The athaleb swam on farther, and at length we saw before us an island with a broad, sandy beach, beyond which was the shadowy outline of a forest. Here the monster landed, and dragged himself wearily upon ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... pictures that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them—not without protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her outrageously. I, for one, hold her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... is the lad who jumps to his work, chucks himself right into it, and puts his last ounce of strength on a rope. That is the fellow who will make a good officer, and who, if needs be, can set an example to the men when they have to go aloft to reef a sail in a stiff gale. So, as I understand, Mr. Prendergast, he is going to leave the sea for a bit. It ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... desolate; I know the winds have stripp'd the gardens green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, but we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths beguile; There let us land, there dream for evermore: "It may be we shall ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... four A. M. it began to blow in squalls very hard, took in one reef in each top-sail, and continued so until eight A. M. the weather being still ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... lines of rosy land from which vegetable life was wholly absent. The sand of the desert advances with its waves, as sterile as those of the sea, eternally disturbed by the winds and beating upon the islet of cultivated earth surrounded and stormed by dusty foam, as upon a reef which it endeavours to cover up. In Egypt, whatever lies above the level of the flood is smitten with death. There is no transition; where stops Osiris, Typhon begins; here luxuriant vegetation, there not a blade of grass, not a bit of ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... streak of lightning showed the white outlines of the reef and the next moment a wave mountain high washed ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... deck against the force of the wind. He could only cling to his place and see the vessel driven ashore, without being able to lift a hand to save her. Suddenly he was conscious of a grating, grinding sensation beneath his feet, and knew that the vessel had struck a coral reef. She swung round broadside to the wind; the boats on the weather side were wrenched from their davits and hurled away in splinters; and in the midst of such fury and turmoil there was no possibility of launching the remaining two boats and ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... Philip, all seemed a mere negation; there was a vacuum where his place had been. At most the thought of him came to her as some strange, vague thrill of added torture, penetrating her soul and then passing; just as ever and anon there came the sound of the fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef, miles away, piercing the dull air with its shrill and desolate ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... pile, about a hundred and twenty feet high, stuck on a coral reef at the mouth of the harbor. 'Bout like our Fowey Rocks, off the Florida coast. She's backing in." His eyes were still on the Tampico, the floes of North River ice hemming her in on all sides. "Passengers'll be off ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... out of the cabin door, jabbered some unintelligible words and pointed to the sails. The boy nodded, for he understood they wanted to attend to the rigging. So the crew trooped forth, rather fearfully, and began to reef the sails and put the ship into condition ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... from a deck beam, but the water had risen in the cabin so that his descent was prevented. The Roebuck had run upon a reef or shoal in such a manner that her bow was projected far out of the water, while her stern was almost submerged in the waves. Noddy's quick perception enabled him to comprehend the position of the vessel, and he placed his charge on the companion ladder, which was protected in a measure ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a wide berth, as a dangerous reef makes out from the land, eastward, for a mile or more. The fixed light at this point is a hundred and thirty feet above sea level, and is visible nearly twenty miles ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... of determination that, even though the countenances wearing it were youthful, boded no good to the treacherous enemies of freedom whose trail they were that very moment following. Then they flashed past Robbin's Reef light and snuggled into ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... There his fluent persuasiveness came again into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and appeared to be large and tall, as thick as they could stand one by another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... second," chimed in Teddy. "Wow!" he cried, as a giant breaker thundered down on the reef, "that must have been the daddy of them all, I guess. Let's go up to the lookout room as soon as we're ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... double sweetness in double rhymes, And a double at Whist and a double Times In profit are certainly double— By doubling, the Hare contrives to escape; And all seamen delight in a doubled Cape, And a double-reef'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... for? Why, just to find out what was the matter with his trial balance, that's all. When one of Labe's trial balances starts out for snug harbor and ends up on a reef with six foot of water in her hold, naturally Labe wants to get her afloat and pumped dry as quick as possible. He ain't used to it, for one thing, and it ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... by his side. He was outwardly calm, but with a proud flush under his pallor; she was visibly excited, and could not stand on the same spot for many seconds together. By this time the noise made by the bookmakers in the inclosure below was like that of ten thousand sea fowl on a reef of rock, and Glory was trying to speak above ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and for the time run and the currents, and all that, and then reckons up where he is. I travelled with a captain once, and so long as he stuck to dead-reckoning he was all right. He made out we were off Cairns, and that's just where we were; because we struck the Great Barrier Reef, and became a total wreck ten minutes after. With the cattle it's just the same. You'll reckon the cattle that you started with, add on each year's calves, subtract all that you sell,—that is, if you ever do sell any—and allow for deaths, and ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... at Vryburg I was also taken by the proprietor of the Vryburg Hotel to see a farm about five miles off, where they were prospecting for gold. Mr. H—— informed me that the reef I saw, was the same description of rock, I should see at Johannesburg. The people in this neighbourhood are very sanguine; I was told that this may prove ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... Emden was now gradually drawing toward land. Suddenly, she swerved and headed straight for a huge reef that could be seen protruding above the surface of the water. A cry of dismay went up from ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... beneath them was white as milk, with the foam which poured over the reef; but Will thought that they were beyond the rocks. Every sea which struck the wreck added to the disaster; until a larger one than usual struck it, and broke it into fragments. The lads clung to the spar, as it fell. It sank deep in the water, but they retained ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... after sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the run he passed several craft engaged in ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... Knoll, one of his beautiful romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingfordits sequel. The long series of his nautical tales was closed by Jack Tier or the Florida Reef, published in 1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit, energy, invention, life-like ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... were no reptiles; while the absence of mammals in the deposits of the Galapagos Archipelago, where there are plenty of reptiles, might be held to prove the reverse. And at the same time, from the formations extending for two thousand miles along the great barrier-reef of Australia—formations in which are imbedded nothing but corals, echinoderms, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, along with an occasional turtle, or bird, or cetacean—it might be inferred that there lived in our epoch neither terrestrial reptiles, nor terrestrial mammals. The ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... southwestern point, which Goork said he believed to be the least frequented portion of the island, as he had never seen boats put off from there. I found a shallow reef running far out into the sea and rather precipitous cliffs running almost to the surf. It was a nasty place to land, and I realized now why it was not used by the natives; but at last I managed, after a good wetting, to beach my canoe and ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... impact alert Jack Benson felt his heart leap into his mouth. It was as though the "Hastings" had struck, lightly, on a reef. Almost by instinct Jack threw the wheel over to port. Something was rasping, forcefully, under the hull of the submarine. As the helm went to port that something underneath, whatever it ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... reefs cover many thousand square miles in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans. There is one reef, or rather great series of reefs, called the Barrier Reef, which stretches, almost continuously, for more than 1,100 miles off the east coast of Australia. Multitudes of the island in the Pacific are either reefs themselves, or are surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea is in many parts ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Historical Note. Robert Southey (1774-1843) was an English poet. From 1813 until his death he was Poet Laureate of England. Bell Rock, or Inchcape, is a reef of red sandstone near the Firth of Tay, on the east coast of Scotland. At the time of the spring tides part of the reef is uncovered to the height of four feet. Because so many vessels were wrecked upon these rocks the Abbot of Aberbrothok is said to have placed ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... water-growths that had survived the emptying of an inland sea than vegetation of the land. Once the dog's tracks led aside to a scummy puddle, saucered by alkali, dotted with the spoor of desert animals that drank the bitter water in extremity. Then it ran straight to a wide reef of lava. Sandy set down the collie. Grit ran fast across the pitted surface, ahead of the horses, waiting for them to cross the lava. They had hard work to get him to come to hand again, but he gave in at last to the knowledge that they would not go ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and the Thursday following he had asked the Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly given and accepted, it was with difficulty he adjusted himself to the discovery on arriving ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... was despatched to apprehend the mutineers, and bring them back to England for trial and punishment. The Pandora reached Tahiti March 23, 1791, set sail, with fourteen prisoners, May 8, and was wrecked on the "Great Barrier Reef" north-east of Queensland, August 29, 1791. Four of the prisoners, including George Stewart, who had been manacled, and were confined in "Pandora's box," perished in the wreck, and the remaining ten were brought back to England, and tried by court-martial. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... thought of this much till one day there came on board, A chap who ventur'd to join as seaman by the Lord! His hair hung down like reef points, and his phiz was very queer, For his mouth was like a shark's, and turn'd down ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... as ever, and the symptoms became alarming. The barometer fell several millimeters. The wind came in violent gusts, and then for a moment or so failed altogether. Under such circumstances a sailing vessel would have had to reef in her topsails and her foresail. Everything showed that the wind was rising in the northwest. The storm-glass became much troubled and its movements were ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... of the river is black, and the western is white. This white color of the Bahar el Abiud is occasioned by a very fine white clay with which its waters are impregnated. At the point of junction between the Bahar el Abiud and the Adit, the Bahar el Abiud is almost barred across by an island and a reef of rocks; this barrier checks its current, otherwise it would probably almost arrest the current of the Adit. It is, nevertheless, sufficiently strong to prevent the Adit from mingling with it immediately, although the current of the Adit is very strong, and enters the Bahar ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until it comes ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... and the loss of sleep, had gone to his stateroom and the first mate was in charge. It was three o'clock, the wind still blowing and the darkness pitchy, when the forward lookout shrieked a warning, "Breakers under the lee!" Almost the next instant the ship was on a coral reef, full of water, and the seas breaking over her from ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for a sea-captain to try to take the clapper out of the bell that floats and tolls above a shoal on which his ship will be wrecked if it strikes? Would it be wise to put out the lighthouse lamps, and then think that you had abolished the reef? Does the signalman with his red flag make the danger of which he warns, and is it not like a baby to hate and to neglect the message that comes to you and says, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than those ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... for four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track." But the slaughter in the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of the picnic was a good way off, being the point of the promontory that shut in the mouth of the river, a great crag, with a long reef of rocks running out into the sea, playfully called the Kitten's Tail, though the antiquarians always deposed that the head had nothing to do with cats or kits, but with the disposition to erect chapels to St. Christopher ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said. "Those are grannies. They would jam so that you'd never untie 'em, besides being ugly. There's wrong ways even in doing up a string. See here." He rapidly twisted the ends together into a reef-knot. "There's strength and beauty together," he said. "Look how neat it is, the ends tidy along the standing part, all so neat as pie. Besides, it'd never jam. Watch how I do it, and ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... protesting Of winds, when the tide runs high; And vainly the deep-sea waters Call out, as the waves speed by; For, deaf to the claim of the ocean, To the threat of the loud winds dumb, Past reef and bar, to shores afar, They rush when the hour ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... valley. So we besought the Almighty and called for succour upon His Apostle (on whom be blessing and peace!), when suddenly a violent squall of wind arose and smote the ship, which rose out of the water and settled upon a great reef, the haunt of sea-monsters, where it broke up and fell asunder into planks and all and everything on board were plunged into the sea. As for me, I tore off all my clothes but my gown and swam a little way, till I happened upon one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with such rites as beseemed her degree. In those days the Quality were very rich in their deaths; and, for my part, I dissent from the starveling and nipcheese performances of modern funerals. It is most true that a hole in the sand, or a coral-reef, full fathom five, has been at many times my likeliest Grave; but I have left it nevertheless in my Will—which let those who come after me dispute if they dare—that I may be buried as a Gentleman of long descent, with all due Blacks, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... close together, and through the clear water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... perpetually the sulphurous vapours from his central iniquity. We cannot credit that any Christian ever had his faith shaken through reading Shelley, unless his faith were shaken before he read Shelley. Is any safely havened bark likely to slip its cable, and make for a flag planted on the very reef where the ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... virgin forest, and tilling the glebes of a rich and untried soil; and, living among them, he would make that place a centre for wide evangelisation— the home of religious enthusiasms and equal laws; or he would go as a missionary to the savage and the cannibal, and, sailing from reef to reef, where the coral-islands of the Pacific mirror in the deep waters of their calm lagoon the reed-huts of the savage, and the feathery coronal of tropic trees, he would devote his life to reclaiming ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... The oar-banks of each other, stem to stern, While the Greek galleys, with no lack of skill, Hemmed them and battered in their sides, and soon The hulls rolled over, and the sea was hid, Crowded with wrecks and butchery of men. No beach nor reef but was with corpses strewn, And every keel of our barbarian host Hurried to flee, in utter disarray. Thereon the foe closed in upon the wrecks And hacked and hewed, with oars and splintered planks, As fishermen hack tunnies or a cast Of netted dolphins, and the briny ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus |
