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More "Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ones about the West India Islands, within the reefs of which there are large swamps. All the reefs I have myself seen could be associated only with nearly pure calcareous rocks. I have received a description of a reef lying some way off the coast near Belize (terra firma), where a thick bed of mud seems to have invaded and covered a coral reef, leaving but very few islets yet free from it. But I can give you no precise information without my notes (even if ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... kept 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 was ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... to an opposite conclusion, he stood out with his fleet into the open lake and fell in with the Governor Simcoe. A chase was commenced, and the Governor Simcoe narrowly escaped by running over a reef of rocks, and making for Kingston, which, like the Royal George, she reached more hotly pursued than she had bargained for. It was late in the season, and the weather becoming more and more boisterous, the Americans bore away for Sackett's Harbour, in making for which ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... was not a very auspicious one, for on leaving the harbor of St. John (or "havre de Menuagoesche," as Villebon calls it) at 2 o'clock on the afternoon of the 2nd of August, d'Iberville ran the Envieux upon a reef; however, the damage was not serious as the ship floated when the tide rose. At Penobscot Baron St. Castin joined the expedition with 130 Indians. The French priests Simon and Thury, as the event proved, were no mere figure heads; they actively assisted in the operations of the siege and ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... battling ship. All the night is mad and murderous: who shall front the night? Not the prow that labours, helpless as a storm-blown leaf, Where the rocks and waters, darkling depth and beetling height, Rage with wave on shattering wave and thundering reef on reef. Death is fallen upon the prisoners there of darkness, bound Like as thralls with links of iron fast in bonds of doom; How shall any way to break the bands of death be found, Any hand avail to pluck them from that raging ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number of men, women and children, standing round Mr. Inglis at the entrance of his garden. I explained to him the reason of the Bishop's being unable to land, that ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the American catboat. The cat can sail into the very eye of the wind, while before the wind she is a flier, and yet she is not the best sail boat for a beginner. Let me tell you why: First, the sail is heavy and so it is hard to hoist and reef. Second, in going before the wind there is constant danger of jibing with serious results. Third, the catboat has a very bad habit of rolling when sailing before the wind, and each time the boat ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... uncle who had also been a sea-captain, and who, in rescuing a wrecked crew from an Australian reef, was himself capsized, and after a long swim finally eaten by a shark,—said shark being captured next day, and found to contain his head entire, two gold rings still in his ears, which he wore for near-sightedness, after the manner of common sailors, and one of which, after ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... islands, between which and the island to the N E, 4 leagues apart, I directed my course; but a lee current very unexpectedly set us very near to the shore, and I could only get clear of it by rowing, passing close to the reef that surrounded the rocky isles. We now observed two large sailing canoes coming swiftly after us along shore, and, being apprehensive of their intentions, we rowed with some anxiety, being sensible ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... my stormy shriek! Toilers upon the sea, the Whistling-buoy would speak! List to my sobbing shout! list, for my word is brief: Death is beneath me here! death on the sunken reef Where the jagged ledge is hid and the slimy seaweeds grow, And the long kelp streamers wave in the dark green depths below, Where, under the shell-clad hulk, the gaunt shark makes his lair,— Toilers upon the sea, ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... only penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day after leaving Ulietea, at eleven o'clock a.m., we saw land bearing N.W., which, upon a nearer approach, we found to be a low reef island about four leagues in compass, and of a circular form. It is composed of several small patches connected together by breakers, the largest lying on the N.E. part. This is Howe Island, discovered by Captain Wallis, who, I think, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... 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 ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... 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
... veranda in front, covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps of cocoa-nut-trees and dwarf palms, with bare gaunt stems and tufted tops, stood out here and there along the rocky slopes, while lesser vegetation of cactus and mangrove bushes ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... succor where there seemed to be none, he remembered the One Hundred and Seventh Psalm: "He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder." And the morning dawned clear, the ice was moving and their prison widening. On July 3, Haabet cleared the last ice-reef, and the shore ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... "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, ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... bird trims her to the gale I trim myself to the storm of time; I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime; "Lowly faithful banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... sort of a boat he had; she cleared the waves like a sea-bird, without so much as a drop coming in, and he therefore judged that he did not need to take in a reef, which in an ordinary ten-oared boat he would be obliged to do in ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... enough to send the boat over, and she had already a dangerous lot of water surging among the ballast; while, when they were forced to put her head to the wind, she drifted with a heavily running tide, and right to leeward was a long reef of rocks that would inevitably crunch her into matchwood. The younger brothers said not a word, but looked at Rob, ready to obey his slightest gesture, and Rob stood by the mast calling out from ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... helmsman answers, when he knows he has a mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is one of the mutineers himself. "Put him aout y'rself, 'f ye a'n't ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... and mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they trace a law whose harmony is its glory, and whose mystery ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... a reef in when you round the corner," he said, brushing the snow from his clothes. "Don't run your city editor down again." And he ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Faint and fading shadows here; Never a tear, but only Grief; Dance, but not the limbs that move; Songs in Song shall disappear; Instead of lovers, Love shall be; For hearts, Immutability; And there, on the Ideal Reef, Thunders ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... came a set expression 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 their slip at ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... past his usual anchorage, making all speed. You will know the reason for it at sundown today. Tell Captain Blizzard to go around the point—he will know—and continue for twelve leagues farther on. This must be done by night, for he must not slacken. Then he will see by moonlight a reef. The water is phosphorescent, and when it breaks over the reef it will shine in the night. Then must he heave to, and you will go over the side, and as a fish, find out the channel, for the coral is dangerous and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... I take it," Frank surmised. "The two bumps the Sea Lion got from the Shark must have given him the impression that we had collided with a rock or reef." ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... shouts. No one needed to tell us what it meant, and down came the call, 'Don't wait to save your things, only wraps, ladies! Up on deck! Life- belts if you can!' I remember Bernard standing at the top of the ladder, helping us up, and somehow, I understand from him, that we were on a reef, and might either remain there, and sink, or be washed off. The fog was clearing, and there was a dim light up high, somewhere, one of the lighthouses, I believe. I don't quite know how it all went; I think we kept in the background, round the Bishop, and that a boat full of emigrant women ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... low tone from the darkness above, calling for a volunteer boat's crew to reconnoiter and to look for an opening through the reef. Before the words were out of his mouth O'Reilly ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... stern 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
... 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 then try it ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... place, she was intoxicated with the delights of the ocean. Perhaps I should say rather, of the ocean and the rocks and the air and the sky, and of everything at Appledore, Where she sat, she had a low brown reef in sight, jutting out into the sea just below her; and upon this reef the billows were rolling and breaking in a way utterly and wholly entrancing. There was no wind, to speak of, yet there was much more motion in the sea than yesterday; which often happens from the effect of winds that have been ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... entering upon an unknown coast in the dark, we stood off all night, which was well for us, as we found ourselves at day-break next morning, 7th May, within a ship's length of a great reef of rocks, which extended from one island to the other, and thinking to have gone between the islands, we had nearly run upon this dangerous ledge. Having a small breeze from shore we were fortunately able to stand off, and went to the westermost island, because we ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... and slack each reef an' tack, Gae her sail, boys, while it may sit; She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore, An' she'll roar through a heavier yet. When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep, In the tempest's angry moan, We dash through the drift, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the Alma, a P. and O. vessel which had struck on a coral reef not far from Mocha. The wreck had happened in the dead of night, and there had been only time to get the passengers into the boats, in which they were rowed to another reef near at hand; there they had remained for eighty hours in their scanty night garments, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the eminent geologist and authority on volcanology, declares there is danger that all the West Indian reef islands will collapse and sink into the sea from the effects of the volcanic disturbances now in progress. More than that, he says, the Nicaraguan canal route is in danger because it ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... bravely has she sailed o'er every sea, Withstood the storm-rack, spurned the sullen reef; Cherished her strength; and held her guerdon fief To him who saith, "My ship ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with him as geologist a Mr. Taylor, and as botanist, Dr. Tate, a survivor of the melancholy New Guinea expedition that left Sydney in the brig MARIA, only to suffer wreck on the Barrier Reef, where, in the sea and amongst the cannibals north of Rockingham Bay, most of the unfortunates left their bones. Apparently, his ardour for exploration had not been damped by ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... problems required of a thorough sailing master. On the deck of a vessel he was in his element, and there was not a point in navigation or seamanship with which he was not familiar. He could not only hand, reef, and steer, but he could knot and splice, parcel and serve, as neatly and as skilfully as a veteran man-of-war's man. He was interested in such matters, and had spent hours and hours in making short and long splices, eye splices, ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... of the fellows only spurred Judd to shake forth another reef, so that without knowing it he ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... Bayrose!" she murmured. "They had put her and the maids into one of the boats—there at the first, when the ship crashed on the reef. They ran back to fetch me, but before they could rush me across, a wave more terrible than all the others swept the ship. It tore loose the boat and whirled them ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... of living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days,— Take ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... outstretched and her head flung back, in an attitude of utter abandonment. Harber felt his heart stir swiftly. He knew what she was feeling, as she looked out over the shimmering half-moon of harbour, across the moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it. There would be no voicing ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... "that Mrs. William had rather have you come safe than unexpected. Be modest, Skipper Bill, and reef the Venture ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... only seven men to work that ship, and after all these years I marvel at our temerity. Time and again the cry "All hands" would come down the hatch and summon the three of us from below to make sail, or reef, or furl, or man the braces. Weary and almost blind with sleep, we would stagger on deck and pull and haul, or would swarm aloft and strive to cope with the sails. The cook, and even Roger, served tricks at the wheel, turn and turn ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... that he had not only never executed so delicate a piece of workmanship, but he had never seen its equal. Every curve of the exquisite-hued waves was studied from the swell that sometimes swept grandly in from the lake on the long reef of rocks a few miles above St. Ignace. The form of the goddess was modelled from his remembrance of the Greek antique. It was a gem worthy of an emperor. What should he ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... from you: For what man ever yet had grace Ne'er to abuse his power and place? No magic of her voice or smile Suddenly raised a fairy isle, But fondness for her underwent An unregarded increment, Like that which lifts, through centuries, The coral-reef within the seas, Till, lo! the land where was the wave. Alas! 'tis everywhere ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... were removed by the Athenians. But the most awkward part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, as might be expected ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... one. The Endeavour, raised by a wave over the ridge of a reef, had fallen again into a hollow in the rock, and by the moonlight, portions of the false keel and the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... through which the Sabine finds an outlet to the Gulf, the shore lies low and barren. The fort or sand battery was placed at the turn about one half mile below the hamlet called Sabine City, opposite the upper end of the oyster reef that for nearly a mile divides the channel into two parts, each narrow and neither straight. The Sachem, followed by the Arizona, took the eastern or Louisiana channel, and was hardly under fire before a shot struck her steampipe ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... to keep quiet, and the ladies and children to dress and sit at the doors of their state-rooms, there to await the advice and action of the officers of the ship, who were perfectly cool and self-possessed. Meantime the ship was working over a reef-for a time I feared she would break in two; but, as the water gradually rose inside to a level with the sea outside, the ship swung broadside to the swell, and all her keel seemed to rest on the rock or sand. At no time did the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost the vessel swept T'wards the reef of Norman's Woe. ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... sails were now bulging out and shaking in the wind. Out flew the active topmen to the yard-arms. Jack, as he had often before done, ran out to get hold of the weather earing. He was hauling away on it while the men hauled the reef over to him. He had already taken two outer turns with it, when, as he leaned back, he felt himself suddenly thrown from his hold. In vain he tried to clutch the earing; it slipped through his fingers. Headlong he came down, striking the leech of the sail. Mechanically he clutched ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... from Seaborn & Company. If he had been this story would never have been written. He was down at Hunter's Point drydock, superintending the repairs to the steam schooner Amelia Ricks, which recently on a voyage to Seattle had essayed the overland route via Duxbury Reef. When Matt reached home that night he found his ingenious father-in-law fairly purring ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fissured. Vast masses of it have toppled into the sea; and the black ruins project from the deep in a hundred shapes of menace. Sometimes our boat glides between a double line of these; or takes a zigzag course through labyrinths of reef-channels. So swiftly and deftly is the little craft impelled to right and left, that one could almost believe it sees its own way and moves by its own intelligence. And again we pass by extraordinary islets of prismatic rock whose ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... blackbird village right under Hakatuea. No matter which way you approach, you can't miss it. Hakatuea's a dead volcano, with ashes on top and just enough fire inside to cast a glow against the sky at night. There's a fair anchorage inside the reef, but it takes a good man to land through the surf at high tide in a whaleboat. I used to do it regular. Aranuka was a nice place, with plenty of fresh water, and some of the Island schooners, and once in a while a British gunboat would stop there. Gawd, McGuffey, but when ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... got nearer to the turn of the land the reefs began to be sown here and there on our very path; and Mr. Riach sometimes cried down to us to change the course. Sometimes, indeed, none too soon; for one reef was so close on the brig's weather board that when a sea burst upon it the lighter sprays fell upon her deck and wetted us ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a dim mass which rose into dizzy pinnacles and domes, increasing the tumbling menace of the sky. A fleet of clouds of deep draught ran into Africa from the north; went aground on those crags, were wrecked and burst, their contents streaming from them and hiding the aerial reef on which they had struck. The land vanished, till only Bougie and its quay and the Celestine remained, with one last detached fragment of mountain high over us. That, too, dissolved. There was only our steamer and the quay ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the low comedy Shoes with the swollen Promontories and the Trousers with the double Reef and the folding Cuffs and the Hair with the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... for? Why, just to find out what was the matter with his trial balance, that's all. When one of Labe's trial balances starts out for snug harbor and ends up on a reef with six foot of water in her hold, naturally Labe wants to get her afloat and pumped dry as quick as possible. He ain't used to it, for one thing, and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... ornaments, and the bearers stagger with her into the creek, where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly decorated, and the whole party marches ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... and the Sphinx, the graphic representation is intellectually perfect. The objects live again in all their external surroundings. I feel the Khamsinn, the desert wind that scorched me at the foot of Pompey's Column; I hear the sea breaking into foam on the barrier reef of Tahiti. But the image does not lead to evocation ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... 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 ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... believed, like most miners, that this fine gold is carried along the beds of the larger rivers and distributed by the action of the sea along the different beaches where it is found. His theory was that if the drift of the gold sands could be traced to their source, a great quartz reef would be found which would make the discoverers wealthy men. But he and his mates knew nothing about geology, and they wanted somebody to go with them who could chart the course, and lead them to the launching point ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... back in the cruiser to the Colonies, and then again sailed for Eastern Polynesia, trading in the Gambiers, Paumotus, and Easter and Pitcairn Islands. In this part of the ocean he picked up an abandoned French barque on a reef, floated her, and loaded her with coconuts, intending to sail her to New Zealand with a native crew, but they went ashore in a hurricane and lost everything. Meeting with Mr Tom de Wolf, the managing partner of a Liverpool firm, he took service with him as a trader in the ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... Worship's Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a fellow as ever went between stem and stern of a ship, and can hand, reef, steer, and clap two ends of a rope together, as well as e'er a He that ever crossed Salt-water; but I was taken by one George Bradley (the name of the Judge) a notorious Pirate, and a sad rogue as ever was hanged, and he forced me, an't please ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in the distant ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... said, with a yawn. "Brace, who's got geology on the brain ever since he struck cinnabar ore, says he isn't sure the Injins ain't right when they believe that the Pacific Ocean used to roll straight up to the Presidio, and there wasn't any channel—and that reef of rocks was upheaved in their time. But what's the use of it? it never really waked them up." "Perhaps they're waiting for another kind of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... parted very good friends when he took me back to the cabin on the termination of our inspection of the ship—he promising to teach me how to make a reef-knot and a running-bowline the next time I came on board, and I shaking hands with him as a right good fellow whom I would only be too glad to meet again under ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... we cried, "It is then to Frenchmen we will owe our deliverance." We instantly recognised the brig to be the Argus; it was then about two gun-shots from us. We were terribly impatient to see her reef her sails, which at last she did, and fresh cries of joy arose from our raft. The Argus came and lay-to on our starboard, about half a pistol-shot from us. The crew, ranged upon the deck and on the shrouds, announced to us, by the waving of their hands and hats, the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... or ten tons of marmalade on board. We went to the Isle of Aves, where the Count d'Estrees's whole squadron, sent to take Curacoa for the French, had been wrecked. Coming in from the eastward, the count fell in on the back of the reef, and fired guns to give warning to the rest. But they, supposing their admiral was engaged with enemies, crowded all sail and ran ashore after him, for his light in the maintop was an unhappy beacon. The men had time enough to get ashore, yet many perished. There were about forty ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... with legs quivering uneasily; when I took no notice, he lay down between my feet and stared out to sea as I was doing. And never a cry, never a word of human voice to be heard anywhere; nothing; only the heavy rush of the wind about my head. There was a reef of rocks far out, lying all apart; when the sea raged up over it the water towered like a crazy screw; nay, like a sea-god rising wet in the air, and snorting, till hair and beard stood out like a wheel about his head. Then he plunged down into the breakers ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... stealthiness in approaching to bite his enemy, but this designation, together with his "missionary" name "Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss Gordon Cumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated into English. For women they were such as Spray of the Coral Reef, Queen of Parrot's Land, Queen of Strangers, Smooth Water, Wife of the Morning Star, Mother of Her Grandchildren, Ten Whale's Teeth, Mother of Cockroaches, Lady Nettle, Drinker of Blood, Waited For, Rose of Rewa, Lady Thakombau, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... 1769, he left England for ever. The Aurora was never heard of more! Some vague rumours, indeed, prevailed of a contradictory character—that she had been burned—that she had foundered in the Mozambique Channel—that she had been cast away on a reef of rocks near Macao—that five persons had been saved from her wreck, but nothing certain transpired, except that she was lost; and this fine singer of the sea along with her. Unfortunate Aurora! dawn soon overcast! Unfortunate ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... tormentors, and obtain a night's sleep. At last they entered a fishing canoe, paddled some distance from shore, and dropped the native anchor, a stone secured to a rope. They were awakened in the morning by the motion of their boat. Zeke was wading in the shallow water, and towing them from a reef towards which they had drifted. "The water-sprites had rolled our stone out of its noose, and we had floated away." This was a narrow escape, but nevertheless they stuck to their floating bedstead as the only possible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... went into his mouth—open, as he panted with the exertion of keeping up this unnatural position. Then he tried again, but still the bolt would not move. So now he tied his handkerchief—the one with the bacon-fat and marmalade on it—to the bolt, and Robert's handkerchief to that, in a reef knot, which cannot come undone however much you pull, and, indeed, gets tighter and tighter the more you pull it. This must not be confused with a granny knot, which comes undone if you look at it. And then he and Robert pulled, and the girls put their ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... (stingy) they were called Kaweleau alapaa. This ready imitativeness, often converted into caricature, enters into the minutest detail of life and is the clew to many a familiar proverb like that of the canoe on the coral reef quoted in the text.[3] The chants abound in such symbols. Man is "a long-legged fish" offered to the gods. Ignorance is the "night of the mind." The cloud hanging over Kaula is a bird which flies before ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... of the above authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, and nearly the same in that which accompanies ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... fringe of trees, I caught sight of a thin line across the water, slanting from shore to shore—not a ripple, but as though the edge of an invisible reef slightly affected the smooth-flowing, glassy surface ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... necessarily funereal. A garden should be got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim. Expecting high winds, we bring everything into close reef. Some men there are who never shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of their families. I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n't shave) to satisfy his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... gray, but with clearing skies. The force of the wind increased, becoming unsteady, and causing a choppy sea, so that I felt impelled to lower the topsails and take a reef in the larger canvas. Nothing was reported in sight, but to reassure myself, I climbed into the main crosstrees, and swept the horizon with a glass. Not so much as a speck rewarded my efforts, and I descended the ratlines, shouting to ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... As these forces would be raised chiefly in New England, they could be employed first to protect Springfield. Any open avowal of this plan was avoided, however, lest the insurgents should take alarm and immediately attack the arsenal. But these plans were wrecked on the reef of financial bankruptcy. Congress could only supplicate the States for money and borrow what it might on its expectations. Recruiting went on so slowly that the rebellion was practically over when two companies of artillery, numbering seventy-three men each, which ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... information of our readers, we must state that the Esquerques, or Shirki, are a reef of sunken rocks lying about eighty miles west from Sicily, and about forty-eight from Cape Bon, on the coast of Africa. In 1806, the charts were not as accurate as they are in the present day, and the reef was not laid ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... Maister Welsh a wee. Lads will be lads, ye ken. But Maister Ralph's soond on the fundamentals—I learned him the Shorter Questions mysel', sae I should ken—forbye the hunner an' nineteenth Psalm that he learned on my knee, and how to mak' a Fifer's knot, an' the double reef, an' a heap o' usefu' knowledge forbye; an' noo to tak' it into your heid that yer ain son's no soond in the faith, a' because he has fa'en oot wi' a ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... day ashore, and the captain had gone over to the cable office. The boys, after dinner, had wandered around through the crowds, avidly watching everything, from the Portuguese women selling fruit, to the phosphorescent surf rolling in across the reef in ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... most southern of the Bahama group, because he erroneously assumed that Columbus always shaped a westerly course in sailing from island to island; and Turk Island, being farthest east, would give most room for such a course. This island has large lagoons, and is surrounded by a reef. So far it resembles Guanahani. But the second island, according to Navarrete, is Caicos, bearing W. N. W., while the second island of Columbus bore S. W. from the first. The third island of Columbus was in sight from the second. Inagua Chica (Little Inagua), Navarrete's third ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and the staple export consists of maize in some quantities; of cantaria, a grey trachyte which works more freely than the brown or black basalt, and of an impure limestone from Ilheu Baixo, the only calcaire used in Funchal. This rock is apparently an elevated coral-reef: it also produces moulds of sea-shells, delicately traced and embedded in blocks of apparently unbroken limestone. Of late a fine vein of manganese has been found in the northern or mountainous part of the island: specimens shown to me by Mr. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... maple-boughs, I know by heart each burning leaf, Yet would that like a barren reef Stripped to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... entirely on cisterns and casks in which they preserve the rain; neither has it any lake, but several salt ponds, which furnish the sole production of the island. Turk's Island cannot be approached on the east or northeast side, in consequence of the reef that surrounds it. It has no harbor, but has an open road on the west side, which vessels at anchor there have to leave and put to sea whenever the wind comes from any other quarter than that of ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... finish, making maps 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 ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... island of Pamban at the entrance of Palk's Passage in the Straits of Manaar, which is distinguished by its magnificent colonnade and corridors. (Fergusson, Hist. Ind. and Eastern Arch., vol. i, pp. 380-3, ed. 1910.) The island forms part of the so-called Adam's Bridge, a reef of comparatively recent formation, which almost joins Ceylon with the mainland. A railway now runs along the 'bridge', and the pilgrims have ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... they enjoyed it. Jenieve could see their night fires begin to twinkle on Round Island and Bois Blanc, and the rising hubbub of their carnival came to her like echoes across the strait. There was one growing star on the long hooked reef which reached out from Round Island, and figures of Indians were silhouetted against the lake, running back and forth along that high stone ridge. Evening coolness stole up to Jenieve, for the whole water world was purpling; and sweet pine and cedar ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... with Glory 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
... pretty deep," commented Amos Henderson. "Luckily it was soft mud instead of a rocky reef or we'd have damaged the ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... Comfort Island!" sputtered Andy through the spray, as he and Jamie sprang for the mainsail to reef it. ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... reef which lies in its way, and on which too often it founders, is habit; habit would be a better and more powerful means of action if it remained free, but in so far as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we have the average types round which fluctuates ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... for ridge or reef. Toward the middle of the eighties the first mine was discovered on what is the present site of Johannesburg. The original excavation was on the historic place known as Witwatersrand, which means White Water Reef. Kimberley history ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus, while still upon his arm He lean'd; not rising, from supreme contempt. "Or shall we listen to the over-wise, Or to the over-foolish, Giant-Gods? 310 Not thunderbolt on thunderbolt, till all That ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... anchorage at No. 2. Boat excursions. Remarks on the Percy Isles; with nautical observations. Coral reefs: courses amongst them during eleven days search for a passage through, to sea. Description of a reef. Anchorage at an eastern Cumberland Isle. The Lady Nelson sent back to Port Jackson. Continuation of coral reefs; and courses amongst them during three other days. Cape Gloucester. An opening discovered, and the reefs quitted. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... location in the North Pacific Ocean; Johnston Island and Sand Island are natural islands, which have been expanded by coral dredging; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; the egg-shaped reef is 34 km in circumference; closed to the public; a former US nuclear weapons test site; site of now-closed Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS); most facilities dismantled and cleanup complete in 2004; ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... coast before a place could be found at which it was possible to land the stores and provisions. So completely do the rocks surround the island, that it was not easy to find a place even to land a man. At length, however, they succeeded, having discovered at the south-west end, a small opening in a reef that runs across a bay. Here the people, provisions and stores were all put on shore in perfect safety. The Commandant wrote in high spirits at the promising appearance of his new territory; and subsequent accounts have proved, that the opinion ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... and all the stars in the Heavens seemed to shine out together, and to look down at themselves in the sea, over one another's shoulders, millions deep. Next morning, we cast anchor off the Island. There was a snug harbour within a little reef; there was a sandy beach; there were cocoa-nut trees with high straight stems, quite bare, and foliage at the top like plumes of magnificent green feathers; there were all the objects that are usually seen in those ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 14 US - American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Newton for security during the night—his nervous anxiety during the day—became a source of laughter and ridicule to Captain Oughton; who once observed to him,—"Newton, my boy, I see how the land lies, but depend upon it the old ship won't tumble overboard a bit sooner than before; so one reef in the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... mulberry-leaf To shining silk; the lapidary's skill Makes the rough diamond sparkle at his will, And cuts a gem from quartz or coral-reef. Better a skillful cobbler at his last Than unlearned poet twangling on the lyre; Who sails on land and gallops on the blast, And mounts the welkin on a braying ass, Clattering a shattered cymbal bright with brass, And slips his girth and tumbles in the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Through tingling silence of the frosty night— Who lies and listens, till the last note fails, And then, in fancy, faring with the flock Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales, Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock; And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned Within the mightier music of the deep, No more remembers the sweet piping sound That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep; So I, first waking from oblivion, heard, With heart that kindled ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... nothing there, and was not sorry. The place was too eerie to stay in long. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake when we met again on the inner reef, "I've knowed they amateurs run straight off home when they've a-found theirselves under Hospital. A terr'ble place! Yu knows now. Did 'ee set your ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Joseph and Helena, making from Havana to Cadiz in 1753 was carried from her course by adverse winds and tossed against a reef, near New London, Connecticut, receiving injuries that compelled her to run into that port for repairs. To reach her broken ribs more easily her freight was put on shore in charge of the collector of the port, but when it was desired to ship ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones—curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... removed. Mr. Hume with his usual perseverance, walked out when the camp was formed; and, at a little distance from it, ascended a ridge of pure sand, crowned with cypresses. From this, he descended to the westward, and, at length, struck upon the river, where a reef of rocks creased its channel, and formed a dry passage from one side to the other; but the bend, which the river must have taken, appeared to him so singular, that he doubted whether it was the same beside which we had been travelling during the day. Curiosity led him to cross it, when ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... happen), and are fast asleep in a minute. But we have not been an hour in the Land of Nod, ere three heavy blows from a handspike are struck on the forecastle hatch, which is then slid back, and a hoarse voice bawls: 'All ha-ands a-ho-oy! tumble up to reef tops'ls!' Out we bundle, and grope for our clothes (the forecastle being as dark as a dog's mouth), get them on somehow, and hurry-scurry on deck. We find the weather and sea altered much for the worse, and the Old Man (captain) ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... from the capital in time, well and good. If no more than time to replenish stores was allowed, good enough, despite the loss of sales. But what if the Spanish fleet arrived? The 'King's Island' was a low little reef right in the mouth of the harbor, which it all but barred. Moreover, no vessel could live through a northerly gale inside the harbor—the only one on that coast—unless securely moored to the island itself. Consequently whoever held the island ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... great favourite among the crew, and ran no slight chance of being spoilt. I could dance a hornpipe with any man on board; and as for singing a rollicking sea-song, there were few who could match me. I soon learned to hand reef, steer, and heave the lead, as well as any man on board. My mother was proud of me, and so was my father; and they had reason to be, and ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... understood that I express no opinion on the controverted points. I doubt if there are ten living men who, having a practical knowledge of what a coral-reef is, have endeavoured to master the very difficult biological and geological problems involved in their study. I happen to have spent the best part of three years among coral-reefs and to have made that attempt; and, when Mr. Murray's work appeared, I said to myself that until ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Redouble duobligi. Redoubt (fortification) reduto. Redoubtable timinda. Redress (amend) rebonigi, ripari. Reduce (to powder) pisti. Reduce (dissolve) solvi. Reduce malpliigi. Redundance suficxego. Redundant suficxega. Reed kano. Reef (rocks) rifo. Reel (stagger) sxanceligxi. Re-enter reeniri. Re-establish reigi. Refection mangxeto. Refectory mangxejo. Refer to turni sin. Referring to rilate al. Refine rafini. Refined (manners) bonmaniera, gxentila. Refiner rafinisto. Refinery ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... these and more surged through the brain of the captain, while he slowly paced back and forth, with eyes and ears wide open. Inez still slumbered, and all was silent, excepting the boom of the ocean against the coral-reef; while, as the night wore on, the captain maintained his ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... the cabin boy—and went to sleep. The rest of the crew also were asleep. And the boy who, I suppose, felt quite big to think that he was really steering the Admiral's flagship, was a little too smart; for, before he knew it, he had driven the Santa Maria plump upon a hidden reef. And there she was wrecked. They worked hard to get her off but it was no use. She keeled over on her side, her seams opened, the water leaked in, the waves broke over her, the masts fell out and the Santa Maria ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... Mississippi arrived out, and before the city and castle were taken, a terrible 'norther' sprung up, and destroyed much shipping in the harbor. One vessel, on which were a number of passengers, was thrown high upon a reef, and when morning broke, the heavy sea was making a clear breach through her. She lay about a mile from the Mississippi, and it soon became known on board the steamer, that a mother and her infant were in the wreck, and that unless succor came ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... the shore, a land-floe, of some thirty miles in width, followed the sinuosities of the coast-line. Bergs here and there strewed its surface; but the major part of them formed what is called a "reef," in the neighbourhood of Devil's Thumb, denoting either a bank or shoal ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... lightened ship, you choose to make all sorts of nasty insinuations about us wanting to knock you out! Shows where your mind is. Another fellow wouldn't ever let such a fool notion get a grip on him. And you'd better put a reef in that tongue of yours, my boy, unless you want to have it ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... blow a gale. The master gave the word to take in sail, but the storm forbade obedience, for such is the roar of the winds and waves his orders are unheard. The men, of their own accord, busy themselves to secure the oars, to strengthen the ship, to reef the sail. While they thus do what to each one seems best, the storm increases. The shouting of the men, the rattling of the shrouds, and the dashing of the waves, mingle with the roar of the thunder. The swelling sea seems lifted up ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... sq km land area: 5 sq km comparative area: about eight times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... on 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
... hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,—these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... name, I dinna ken. Well, if you mind, she struck on the reef there, and the skipper dropped all his treasure chests overboard, in mortal fear that the Orkney wreckers would rob him of them. I suppose he took his bearings, but for many a day the wreckers searched the waters, and never a thing did they find. Well, years and years after that ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... was supposed that the reef-builders inhabited very deep waters; for they were sometimes brought up upon sounding-lines from a depth of many hundreds or even thousands of feet, and it was taken for granted that they must have had their home where they were found: but the facts recently ascertained respecting the subsidence ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 through and watch ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... its somewhat intricate manipulation has been mastered. My husband's directions for the arrangement of a hunting-tie are as follows:—"The centre of the stock is placed on the front of the neck, the ends are passed in opposite directions round the back of the neck, brought in front, tied in a reef knot, crossed in front of this knot, and finally secured, as a rule, by means of a pin or brooch of the safety or horse-shoe or fox pattern. A gold safety pin is often used. A brooch pin is naturally safer than an ordinary pin. Nowadays, hunting ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... that walks the deck, How does it happen you're not a wreck? One and another have come to grief, How have you dodged by rock and reef?" ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas; From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe, The coastguard lights of England watch the ships ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... and the snowwhite roaring surf on our left. By the time I speak of, the swell had been lashed up into breaking waves, and after shipping more salt water than I had bargained for, we were obliged, about four PM, to shove into a cove within the reef, called Naranja. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the expense of the Consolidated Press. Why, he ought to pay them to let him go. Can't you see him, confound him, sitting under a palm-tree in white flannels, with a glass of Jamaica rum in his fist, while we're dodging yellow fever on this coral-reef, and losing our salaries ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... Uncle William—"like enough. Easy there!" He seized the stern of the Andrew Halloran and sprang on board. They worked in swift silence, hoisting the anchor, letting out the sail,—a single reef,—making it fast. "All she'll stan'," said Uncle William. He turned ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... and the flat congewoi-covered ledges of reef on the southern side of the bar lie bare and exposed to the sun. Here and there in the crystal pools among the rocks, fish have been left by the tide, and as you step over the congewoi, whose teats spurt out jets of water to the pressure of your foot, large silvery bream and gaily-hued ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... a shred, sir," said Philip; "the scissors shall only be used to cut the threads, with which the ladies take in a reef here and there, when ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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 wail, then dying ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... "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 then ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... Tunis broke in sharply. "Just keep your mind on what you are doing now, Horry. You're supposed to be steering the Seamew into Big Wreck Cove. Don't undertake to shave a piece off the Lighthouse Point reef." ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... side, and the land trends away northerly to the north shore, then turns about again to the westward, making the south side of the bay. About three leagues and a half from the bottom of the bay on this side there is a small island about a musket-shot from the shore; and a reef of rocks that runs from it to the eastward about a mile. On the west side of the island is a channel of three fathom at low-water, of which depth it is also within, where ships may haul in and careen. West from ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... preceded the event which is regarded as its effect. Thus, if one man's death is ascribed to another's desire of revenge, this desire may have been entertained for years before the assassination occurred: similarly, if a shipwreck is ascribed to a sunken reef, the rock was waiting for ages before the ship sailed that way. But, of course, neither the desire of revenge nor the sunken rock was 'the sum of the conditions' on which the one or the other event depended: as soon as this is complete the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... “there goes a bit of smoke, Mr. Wiltshire, behind the break of the reef. That’s Falesá, where your station is, the last village to the east; nobody lives to windward—I don’t know why. Take my glass, and you ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... living waves that roll On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal 'Mid fatal lands; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves And all birds sing,— Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days,— ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... tides. Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come, chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a thousand tiny things picked up at ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... were on deck. "Breakers starboard! breakers larboard! breakers all around!" was the ominous cry a moment afterward, and all was confusion. The words were scarcely uttered, when, and before the helm was up, the ill-fated ship struck, and, after a few tremendous shocks against the sunken reef, she parted about midship. Ropes and stays were cut away—all rushed forward, as if instinctively, and had barely reached the forecastle, when the stern and quarter-deck broke asunder with a violent crash, and sunk to rise no more. Two of the seamen miserably ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... ease the strain on their anchors. Early on Monday morning we beheld with consternation that the tide did not reach our boat, and by dint of hard labor we constructed a railroad from a neighboring fence, and moved the Mayeta on rollers upon it over the mud and the projecting reef of rocks some five hundred feet to the water, then embarking, rowed close along the shore to avoid the current. A deep fog settled down upon us, and we were driven to camp again on the left bank, where a cataract tumbled over the rocks fifty or more feet. Tuesday was a sunny ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... eight rocks, near the surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at the mouth of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... shear clear through some of the larger seas, and you didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no more pressure; the freshening wind had worked the ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... with a fork like a sparrow-beak during the monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her appreciation of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and her admiration of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he had less the look of a ship driving on to reef—some of his images of the country. He called for claret and water, sighing as he munched bread in vast portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered bread was to abstain from luxury. He praised passingly the quality of the bread. It came from Steynham, and so ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... signal of distress!" cried the woman. "Oh! the ship, the ship! The wind is dead upon the shore, and the long reef, out by the Battery Point, has seen many a vessel wrecked between ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,— she was laden with all the stores of the colony,—he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... be in the stream waiting for a fair breeze-then the Maggy 'll play her part. Bless yer soul! the little craft and me's coasted down the coast nobody knows how many years; and she knows every nook, creek, reef, and point, just as well as I does. Just give her a double-reefed mainsail, and the lug of a standing jib, and in my soul I believe she'd make the passage without compass, chart, or a hand aboard. By the word of an old sailor, such a craft is the Maggy ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 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. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... first practice game staged for Merriwell. The first one had degenerated into a farce, for the spirit of fun had taken untimely grip of the players and a promising exhibition had gone to pieces on a reef of horseplay. Spink and Handy, for the club, had waited upon Merry and tendered apologies, and a second game had been arranged. Circumstances over which Merry had had little control had kept him away from that second game; and now, four days later, the Ophir eleven were ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... always good at getting out of scrapes) at that very moment he contracted a suspicion that something moist was getting up into his own big hazel eyes; and so he began to whistle briskly, and then to cry out, loud enough to call all hands to close reef the topsails in a gale of wind: "Port and Starboard! Port and Starboard! come here, old curs and landlubbers that you are,—come, bear a hand and be lively there, ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... as on the opposite side; not a thing to be seen but the boundless ocean with not a speck of a sail or a bit of land within sight. It was a little kingdom all of its own. A quarter of a mile from shore the low rollers broke ceaselessly on a coral reef, while overhead, the gulls swept around and around, their plaintive whistle ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the rein Lest that fiery 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, And tragic ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... trade wind. This necessitated frequent tacks, so that, overhead, the mainsail was ever swooping across from port tack to starboard tack and back again, making air-noises like the swish of wings, sharply rat-tat-tatting its reef points and loudly crashing its mainsheet gear along the traveller. Half a dozen times, as it swooped overhead, Jerry leaped for it, mouth open to grip, lips writhed clear of the clean puppy teeth that shone in the ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... "I dare not do it; it would be risking too much. Ha! look there; here it comes! Fore and main-topsail halliards let go, and man your reef-tackles!" he shouted, as a long line of white foam appeared on the western horizon, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... The dam of brush and uncemented smooth brown stones, stretching across the Pinas, was gradually rising. The hillside section of ditch through the fields was finished and only the miners continued at the granite reef, the ring of their hammers on drills going steadily and the roar of the shots now and again booming out at nightfall. Excavation went forward in the spaces between the drops on the ridge leading forth upon the mesa. The carpenters had finished and ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... was being sought by the Exchange. So this mighty tempest in a tea pot resulted from the excessive zeal of an outsider who while trying to pilot the Committee into safe waters succeeded in running it on a reef of his ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... please your Worship's Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a poor Fellow as ever went between Stem and Stern of a Ship, and can hand, reef, steer, and clap two Ends of a Rope together, as well as e'er a He that ever cross'd salt Water; but I was taken by one George Bradley' (the Name of him that sat as Judge,) 'a notorious Pyrate, a sad Rogue as ever was unhang'd, and he forc'd ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... Captain Riggs at me. "She's gone smash flat into a bed of coral! See that green streak running away from us to seaward? That's a reef running out from the mainland and we've piled up on it, and if we don't slip off we're safe until it comes on ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... day we left Kuchin, we had upwards of seventy men on the sick report. The same day, at noon, the anchor was weighed, and we dropped down the river with the ebb tide. Strange to say, in spite of all our precautions, we struck on the same reef of rocks again; fortunately, however, the ship turned with the tide and grounded in the mud close to the bushes, from whence there was no extricating her till the flood tide had made. In the afternoon, when it was low ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... or Bell Rock, is a dangerous reef in the North Sea, east of the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, and twelve miles from all land. The story of the forethought of the abbot of Aberbrothok in placing the bell on the buoy as a warning to sailors is an ancient one, and one old writer ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... 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 ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the mouth of a river, called Ruim, a bowshot across at the mouth. And when we sighted this river, which was sixty miles beyond C. Verde, we cast anchor at sunset in ten or twelve paces of water, four or five miles from the shore, but when it was day, as the look-out saw there was a reef of rocks on which the sea broke itself, we sailed on and came to the mouth of another river as large as the Senegal, with trees growing down to the water's edge and promising a most fertile country." Cadamosto determined to land a scout here, and caused ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the uncontradicted statements of seamen of all classes, that the bell-buoy, fixed to one of the outer Manacles, is utterly inadequate to warn vessels of their nearness to danger. And when the sounds of that bell came in the landward breeze to where I stood looking across the reef, they seemed, not a message of warning to those who cross the deep, but as the death-knell of the hundreds of men, women, and children who have breathed their last in the sea around ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... fall of 1803, the frigate Philadelphia, one of the best ships of our little navy, while chasing a piratical craft, ran upon a sunken reef near the harbor of Tripoli. The good ship was helpless either to fight ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... March 1770, the frigate, after a tempestuous cruise, came to anchor at Marseilles. An equinoctial gale came on, and after two days of desperate exertion, and throwing many of the guns overboard, the frigate was driven from her anchors, stranded on a reef of rocks, and the crew in such peril that they were saved only by the most extraordinary exertions, and the assistance of the people on shore. The port officer, M. de Peltier, exhibited great kindness and activity, and the ship was rapidly repaired, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... the Alma, a P. and O. vessel which had struck on a coral reef not far from Mocha. The wreck had happened in the dead of night, and there had been only time to get the passengers into the boats, in which they were rowed to another reef near at hand; there they had remained for eighty hours in their scanty ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Harry Shafto's morning watch; he had just relieved the second-lieutenant. Willy was for'ard. It was blowing somewhat fresh, and the ship had a reef in her topsails and her courses set. The night was very dark. Willy having just been aroused from a midshipman's sound sleep, was rubbing his eyes to get them clear. Now he peered out ahead into the darkness, ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about the treasure-ship. The old man told him that it had been wrecked on a reef of shoals a few leagues from Hispaniola, and just north of Port de la Plata, which place got its name from the landing there of a boat-load of sailors with plate saved from the sinking vessel. Phips proceeded thither and searched narrowly, but ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... at a reach of the river where the big steamer might sit down on another reef, and the men were kept on guard at the bow, with hardly an intermission, gauging the depth of the water with their striped poles, to guide the helmsman by their monotonous calls: "Vosim!" "Schest-s-polovino-o-o-iu!" ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... realized in a few places, yet on the whole the agreement was very good. The borings revealed two depressions or channels where the rock surface passed below the grade of the projected tunnels, these depressions being separated by a rock reef which extends down stream from Blackwell's Island. In 32d and 33d Streets in Manhattan, borings were made from the river to the station site at intervals of about 100 ft., wash-borings and core-borings alternating. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Alfred Noble
... 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
... later, Jim had landed his boat on a tiny sand reef a half-mile off the coast of Florida with a tent and complete outfit for camping. Like two romping children, they tied the boat to a stake and rushed over the sand-dunes to the beach. They explored their domain from end to end within an hour. Not a tree obscured the endless panorama of sea and ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of San Juan de Ulloa lies half a mile east and to seaward of the city of Vera Cruz, which it commands, and from which it is separated by water averaging from fifteen to twenty feet deep. It is built on the inner extremity of a reef that extends from it a little over a mile to the eastward, in the general prolongation of the line connecting the castle and the town. This shoal being covered by a foot or two of water, the builders ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... 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 ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... said Captain Kittridge; "once when I was to the Bahamas,—it was one Sunday morning in June, the first Sunday in the month,—we cast anchor pretty nigh a reef of coral, and I was jist a-sittin' down to read my Bible, when up comes a merman over the side of the ship, all dressed as fine as any old beau that ever ye see, with cocked hat and silk stockings, and shoe-buckles, and his clothes were ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the storm has kept the people away from the appointment. But the next night they make it up, and the preacher tries to make it up, too. When Mr. Thompson brought me down, six years ago, we came straight through by fording, belly-deep to the horses, across the reef, three miles long, that forms the nexus between the Nueces Bay and the Corpus Christi Bay. On either side was deep water or miring sand. Once, since that, he has had to tote his passengers out on his back. The reef has been washed out in spots. Lo! this time we go up ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various
... whole mine—only a vein or two. Yes, this is very interesting," I went on, as I got among the West Africans. "The scoring seems to be pretty low; I suppose it must have been a wet wicket. 'H.E. Reef, 1-3/4, 2'—he did a little better in the second innings. '1/2, Boffin River, 5/16, 7/16'—they followed on, you see, but they saved the innings defeat. By the way, which figure do I really keep my eye on when I want to watch ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... about ten o'clock; but, though it might have been prudent to take in a reef, the pilot, after carefully examining the heavens, let the craft remain rigged as before. The Tankadere bore sail admirably, as she drew a great deal of water, and everything was prepared for high speed in ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... veerin' t' the s'uth'ard," said the skipper, anxiously, while they put a double reef in the mainsail. "'Twill be a rough ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... when we saw at the top of the fore-mast a large white flag, and we cried, "It is then to Frenchmen we will owe our deliverance." We instantly recognised the brig to be the Argus; it was then about two gun-shots from us. We were terribly impatient to see her reef her sails, which at last she did, and fresh cries of joy arose from our raft. The Argus came and lay-to on our starboard, about half a pistol-shot from us. The crew, ranged upon the deck and on the shrouds, announced to us, by the waving of their hands and hats, the pleasure ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... stretched away landward its plush of green at an appraisement of two hundred dollars a front foot to a bungalow equally dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward, glimpsed through a fringe of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean; beyond the reef a dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within the reef all the silken gamut of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... another. It is about two or three leagues long, and at the south-west point there is another small, low, woody island, about a mile round, and about a mile from the other. Between them there runs a reef of rocks which joins them. (The biggest ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... glamour of romance about him when he was at sea, and "JACK ashore" was for ages held up as the presentment of all that was happy, and contented, and free from care. His hardest duty was supposed to be shinning up the ratlin to "reef," or "brail up," or "splice the mainbrace," or do some other of those mysterious things that caused him to look so mythical to the minds of land-lubbers and the simple-hearted kind of women that used to be, but now no longer are. His ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... stone building, with a spacious veranda in front, covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps of cocoa-nut-trees and dwarf palms, with bare gaunt stems and tufted tops, stood out here and there along the rocky slopes, while lesser vegetation of cactus and mangrove bushes were scattered thickly over ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall. When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two were standing on the bridge, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... devilry I put in with Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually. And we abandoned the Oakland ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Recour John Red James Redfield Edward Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil Michael Renow ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... by now was coming inboard regularly, and Bess knew she should be carrying less sail; but it would mean a lot of time to reef the mainsail, and if she was to get on there was small time for reefing, 'specially as the wind was hauling to the east. A beat home now, as Captain Leary warned her, 'twould be. Surely she would never ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... Hutted 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 presentation ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... 159 degrees 50 minutes East, and named Sir Charles Middleton Island: his other discoveries, not being so immediately in the vicinity of this territory, were not likely to be of any advantage to the settlement; but it was of some importance to it to learn that an extensive reef was so near, and to find its situation ascertained to be in the track of ships bound from hence to the northward; for if Sir Charles Middleton Island should hereafter be found to possess a safe and convenient harbour, it might prove ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... was given for the sambuks to keep near together because the pilot of the first one was sailing less skillfully than the other. Suddenly, in the twilight the men in the second sambuk felt a shock, then another, and a third. The water poured into it rapidly. It had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk had been able to pass on account of its lighter draft. Soon the stranded boat began to list over, and the twenty-eight men aboard had to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... once bought a mine from that man. His name was Algernon Maddox Cholmondely then, and he was homeward bound to assume the ancestral acres in Flint. He escorted me down the hole and displayed visible gold sparkling all along the reef. A week after he had gone I found that he had put it there with a shot-gun—an old "salter's" trick, but new to me at the time. You are not likely to be seeing Patrick Algernon Terence Maddox O'Ryan-Cholmondely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the cataclysm of that dreadful night—bones which now waste to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... 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
... developed to the highest pitch? Is a native of the Andaman Islands the superior of Socrates? If you admit that Socrates is superior to the savage, where do you draw the line between the natural and the artificial? If a coral reef is natural and beautiful because it is the work of insects, and a town artificial and ugly because made by man, we must reject as unnatural all the best products of the human race. If you distinguish between different works of man, the distinction ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... they wouldn't, you scoundrel!" stormed the first-mate. "Can you reef and splice and take your turn ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... The floor of the cabin was littered with portions of the cargo, which the murderous savages had plundered. Taking all that remained of value upon his own craft, Gallop cut loose the pinnace; and she drifted away, to go to pieces on a reef ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... social call, eh? Well, that's good. I don't get much company these days. Sit down, have a reef." ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... were going to Hopedale, went on board and they set sail; but the same evening it came on to blow exceedingly hard, with an immense fall of snow and very thick weather, so that they could not see the length of the ship, and being within half a mile of a dangerous reef of rocks, the captain was obliged to carry a press of sail to clear them, which he did but just accomplish, for after that the gale increased to such a degree, the wind being right on shore, that he could not carry sail any longer, and was obliged ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... now she was vigilant even when she seemed asleep, and anything the least bit out of the ordinary was enough to make her take alarm. As she lay sluggishly rocking, the great blackish round of her head and back now all awash, now rising like a reef above the waves, she suddenly caught sight of a white furry head with a black tip to its nose, swiftly cleaving the water. She knew it was only a white bear swimming, and she knew also that it was not big enough to dare attack her calf. But with her foolish mother fears ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 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 ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... creek, where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... toes. We have got her head to the southward and westward again; another reef in the topsails," (which word Mr. Truck pronounced tawsails, with great unction,) "England well under our lee, and the Atlantic ocean right before us. Six hours on this course, and we make ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Yorker. At dusk our boats entered a little sound, and by nine o'clock in the evening we arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, in a region of shoal water, much cut up by oyster reefs. The tide being very low, the boats were anchored inside of an oyster reef, which afforded protection from the inflowing swell of the sea. We shaped our course next day for St. Marks, along a low, marshy coast, where oyster reefs, in shoal water, frequently barred our progress. From South Cape to St. Marks the coast, broken by the mouths of several ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... greatest risk of damage, blame, inroad, and confiscation. The only course on which he could determine, was to stand by the helm like a resolute pilot, watch every contingence, do his best to weather each reef and shoal, and commit the rest ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... while she laughed, the Sun himself Leapt laughing through the rain And struck his harper hand along The ringing coast; and that wind-song Whose joy is mixed with pain Forgot the undertone of grief And joined the jocund strain, And over every hidden reef Whereon the waves broke merrily Rose jets and sprays of melody ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... to the S.E., but chiefly under water. It consists of large blocks of a volcanic conglomerate, some of which measure nineteen feet by six or eight, and ten feet in thickness; whilst a little farther north another wall extends E.N.E. to a natural reef of rocks." (Hamilton, Researches in Asia ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... had been despatched to Tripoli to demand satisfaction for losses suffered by our merchant marine at the hands of Algerian pirates, who had been preying upon the commerce of the world for years. Arriving on the Algerian coast, she was led upon a reef by pirates whom she was chasing, her officers and crew were taken prisoners, her guns were thrown overboard, and she was taken into the harbor by her captors, and there remanned, regunned and made ready to defend the city against ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... hours, and were in the act of eating a lobster for the first time in our lives, when the captain and the sailors began to swear violently at the pilot, whom I could see at the helm, rigid with fear, striving to avoid a reef—barely visible above the water—towards which our ship was being driven. Great was our terror at this violent tumult, for we naturally thought ourselves in the most extreme danger. The vessel did actually receive a severe shock, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... me. He had been a quarter-master in the Essex and was the melancholy possessor of a cancelled master's certificate. He owed this to drink, of course, as most men do who pile their ships up on the first reef that comes handy. But when he was sober he was a good old fellow. He took me round to the Sailors' Home in Salthouse Lane, and introduced me to the man who ran it. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... boys," said Considine, "and let her head lie up the river; and be alive, for I see they're bailing a boat below the little reef there, and will be after us in ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... his projects, closed his house to the world, and lived in his home. But here he found another reef. The poor soldier had one of those eccentric souls which need perpetual motion. Diard was one of the men who are instinctively compelled to start again the moment they arrive, and whose vital object seems to be to come and go incessantly, like ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... a large rock, about a mile to the left of the town of D——, which was surrounded by numerous small ones. This place was called the wrecker's reef, and was covered at high water, but when the tide was low, Isabel and the others often went there to get shells. They had to be careful to watch the rise of the tide, as, long before the rock was covered the retreat ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... ship passes on and after adventures and tempests in many seas at last reaches the far Pacific. There the torch-bearers pass from island to island and the light flames like a beacon fire across many a blue lagoon and coral reef. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... cell; One after one the stars begin to shine In drifted beds, like pearls through shallow brine; And lo! through clouds that part before the chase Of silent winds—a belt of milky white, The Galaxy, a crested surge of light, A reef of worlds along the sea of Space: I hear my sweet musicians far withdrawn, Below my wreathed lattice, on the lawn, With harp, and lute, and lyre, And passionate voices full of tears and fire; And envious nightingales with rich disdain Filling the pauses of the languid strain; My soul ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... events, the glimpses must be partial, and only to be obtained on a fine 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 great ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... pedantic mode of saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the Hesperus was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... "Laiacio has a haven, and a shoal in front of it that we might rather call a reef, and to this shoal the hawsers of vessels are moored whilst the anchors are laid out towards the land." (II. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... us to make sail. But the weather looking somewhat wild in the west with the red light of the sun among the clouds there, and the dark heave of the swell running into a sickly crimson under the sun and then glowing out dusky again, I got them to treble-reef the mainsail and hoist it, and then thanking them, advised them to be off. Then, putting Cromwell to the tiller, I went forward with the others and set the topsail and forestaysail (the spritsail lying furled), which would be ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... On the other hand, I partly expected this. There's better stuff in the reef. We're a little too high, for one thing; I look for more encouraging results when we start the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... bed quite well, and the next morning they got up the same. Still there was not a breath of wind, the whole sea was as smooth as glass, and the vessel laid where she was the night before, in about six fathoms of water, about a mile from the reef, and you could see the coral rocks beneath her bottom as plain as if they were high and dry; and what alarmed them the next morning was that the three large sharks were still slowly swimming round and ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sundry mammals existing, there were no reptiles; while the absence of mammals in the deposits of the Galapagos Archipelago, where there are plenty of reptiles, might be held to prove the reverse. And at the same time, from the formations extending for two thousand miles along the great barrier-reef of Australia—formations in which are imbedded nothing but corals, echinoderms, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, along with an occasional turtle, or bird, or cetacean—it might be inferred that there lived in our epoch neither terrestrial reptiles, nor ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... hardy sailor who had been on the lakes in the roughest weather, "no boat would live now to reach the reef. Better ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... and repressed the natural gaiety which was a part of her. Those who have been in serious wrecks are never quite the same afterward; and she had seen her fairest dream beaten and crumpled upon the reef of disillusion. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... hammock (or berth, as it may happen), and are fast asleep in a minute. But we have not been an hour in the Land of Nod, ere three heavy blows from a handspike are struck on the forecastle hatch, which is then slid back, and a hoarse voice bawls: 'All ha-ands a-ho-oy! tumble up to reef tops'ls!' Out we bundle, and grope for our clothes (the forecastle being as dark as a dog's mouth), get them on somehow, and hurry-scurry on deck. We find the weather and sea altered much for the worse, and the Old Man (captain) himself on the quarter-deck, giving orders ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... Let me think a bit—and don't worry. Just lie quietly, and understand that I'll do the worrying. And while I'm amusing myself with a little quiet reflection as to ways and means, just take your own bearings from this reef; and set a true course once more, Gerald. That is all the reproach, all the criticism you are going to get from me. Deal with yourself ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... popular or so generally useful as the American catboat. The cat can sail into the very eye of the wind, while before the wind she is a flier, and yet she is not the best sail boat for a beginner. Let me tell you why: First, the sail is heavy and so it is hard to hoist and reef. Second, in going before the wind there is constant danger of jibing with serious results. Third, the catboat has a very bad habit of rolling when sailing before the wind, and each time the boat rolls from side to side she is liable to dip the end of her heavy boom in the water ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... ship Nancy Bell That we sailed to the Indian sea, And there on a reef we come to grief, Which ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... and lit the magic isle and never turned to night, and how someone sang always and endlessly to lure the soul of a King who might by enchantment pass the guarding reefs to find rest on the pearl island and not be troubled more, but only see sorrows on the outer reef battered and broken. Then Soul of the South rose up and sang a song of a fountain that ever sought to reach the sky and was ever doomed to fall to the earth ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... him, and swam along on a 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 the ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from the shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base, and storm-birds—born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... never have been written. He was down at Hunter's Point drydock, superintending the repairs to the steam schooner Amelia Ricks, which recently on a voyage to Seattle had essayed the overland route via Duxbury Reef. When Matt reached home that night he found his ingenious ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... we were hugging the land in order to lead to our destination. A good wind was carried as far as Loch Ryan, when it slowly died away and became flat calm. One of my friends and myself were walking the deck together, when he excitedly observed, "What is that on our starboard beam; is it a reef?" I assured him there were no shoals in the vicinity of the yacht; and I took up the field-glasses, and saw quite plainly that it was a bottle-nosed whale. It soon began to move and send masses of water into the air. The calm continued, and some anxiety was felt ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... the s'uth'ard," said the skipper, anxiously, while they put a double reef in the mainsail. "'Twill be ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... Inez consents to wed Don Pedro; and the latter, to cheat Vasco of his fame, takes command of the expedition under the pilotage of Nelusko, and sets sail for the new land. The Indian, thirsting for vengeance, directs the vessel out of her course towards a reef; but Vasco, who has followed in another vessel, arrives in time to warn Don Pedro of his danger. He disregards the warning, distrusts his motives, and orders him to be shot; but before the sentence can ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... being the day after leaving Ulietea, at eleven o'clock a.m., we saw land bearing N.W., which, upon a nearer approach, we found to be a low reef island about four leagues in compass, and of a circular form. It is composed of several small patches connected together by breakers, the largest lying on the N.E. part. This is Howe Island, discovered by Captain Wallis, who, I think, sent his boat to examine it; and, if I have not ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... of his smile, when he met the young Ohioan here five years ago. He's a bad man accompanied with foul weather wherever he goes, and I know it just so long as I know the cat's paw, the white creeping mist, like a dirty thing which makes me cry out to my crew, 'All hands to reef! Quick! All hands to reef!'" The old man was silent for a moment, smoking his pipe, while his eyes were on the floor. Had he looked up, he would have seen a decidedly mischievous look in the face of Morgianna, which certainly did not indicate ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... looked wild, without a trace of man, And girt by formidable waves; but they Were mad for land, and thus their course they ran, Though right ahead the roaring breakers lay: A reef between them also now began To show its boiling surf and bounding spray, But finding no place for their landing better, They ran the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... up and down, and held their course by the stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came down from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that followed, there is no record of the one among their number who was afterwards to reef and steer and hold his course to such mighty purpose. For this period, then, we must leave him to the sea, and to the vast anonymity ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... in a reef or two, then, that's all," said Herrick. "Bear a hand, my boy, and we'll soon turn you ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... want to run on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... Both live by Heaven's free gale, that plays aloud In the stretch'd canvass and the piping shroud; The rush of winds, the flapping sails above, And rattling planks within, are sounds we love; Calms are our dread; when tempests plough the deep, We take a reef, and to the rocking sleep." "Ha!" quoth the Miller, moved at speech so rash, "Art thou like me? then where thy notes and cash? Away to Wapping, and a wife command, With all thy wealth, a guinea in thine hand; There with thy messmates quaff the muddy cheer, And leave ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... placed erect, we might now compare to the increasing [Page: 110] nodes of a growing stem, or rather say the layers of a coral reef, in which each generation constructs its characteristic stony skeleton as a contribution to the growing yet dying and wearying whole. I have elaborated this example of the panoramic aspect of Old Edinburgh as a widely familiar instance ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence are a part of their material; ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... good stack of letters and memos on the desk waiting for him. On top of the mail stack was a letter labeled PRIVATE in a beamed spacegram envelope. He did not recognize the name at the head of it but the return address was General Delivery, Reef Three, The ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... hands in exchange for their country. As for the tribes, they enjoyed it. Jenieve could see their night fires begin to twinkle on Round Island and Bois Blanc, and the rising hubbub of their carnival came to her like echoes across the strait. There was one growing star on the long hooked reef which reached out from Round Island, and figures of Indians were silhouetted against the lake, running back and forth along that high stone ridge. Evening coolness stole up to Jenieve, for the whole water world was purpling; and sweet pine ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Seamen on the ship's books: these two letters are often used as an epithet for the person so rated. He must be equal to all the duties required of a seaman in a ship—not only as regards the saying to "hand, reef, and steer," but also to strop a block, splice, knot, turn in rigging, raise a mouse on the main-stay, and be an example to the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Reef the sail canvas fast! See, the Spirit of Storm with wildest commotion Has to heaven's arched vaulting his coronal pressed, While his heels dam the flood gates of ocean! Furious storm-cloud his undulent drapery, Girded round with the lightning wide flashing; O'er the sea's leaden billows from ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... they could not defy the powers of pure accident. In the same gale the "Empire City" was dismantled, having all of her upper works swept off, while the "Illinois" was injured by being on the Colorado Reef. They have both been undergoing most costly repairs for several weeks. While writing this, the "Philadelphia" is also in the shop. She recently broke her shaft and her cross-tail, and had to put into Charleston. All of these repairs ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... 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 ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... shore. He gave chase at once with perhaps more zeal than discretion, following his quarry well in shore in the hope of disabling her before she could make the harbor. Failing to intercept the corsair, he went about and was heading out to sea when the frigate ran on an uncharted reef and stuck fast. A worse predicament could scarcely be imagined. Every device known to Yankee seamen was employed to free the unlucky vessel. "The sails were promptly laid a-back," Bainbridge reported, "and the forward guns run ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 15 United States—American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... afterwards the San Antonio joined and passed under our stern, when Mr. Hemmans informed me that the guns he had fired were intended as signals to his boat, and that they were not meant for us. He had been aground, he said, on a reef near the Palm Islands, but had received no damage: light, however, as he pretended to make of this accident, it was a sufficient lesson for him, and we soon found he had profited by it, for instead of preceding us, he quietly fell into our wake, a station which he never afterwards left, until ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... flight of Amelia EARHART and Fred NOONAN; the aviators left Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island but were never seen again; the airstrip is no longer serviceable Johnston Atoll: one closed and not maintained Kingman Reef: lagoon was used as a halfway station between Hawaii and American Samoa by Pan American Airways for flying boats in 1937 and 1938 Midway Islands: 3 - one operational (2,409 m paved); no fuel for sale except emergencies Palmyra Atoll: ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his face aside, and busied himself with taking another reef in his suspenders. "The Rev'und Gawge wanted me to go," he said, in a low tone. "Besides, how can I know what all's in the books he done left me ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of hands, with lingers entwined, tight as a reef-knot—then relaxed with reluctance—after which they separate. The mid, jumping into the dingy, is rowed back towards the Crusader; while Harry re-hires the truckman; but now only to stay by, and take care of his boat, till he can return to it, after executing ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... But we're piled up on the reef outside. She may hold fast—I hope so, for there's deep water astern, and if she slips off she'll ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... o'clock, being three miles nearer, we had 35 fathoms, sand, coral, and shells. The bottom then gradually shoaled to 22 fathoms; upon which we steered along the outer edge of a line of breakers that fronted the shore, and after rounding a projection of the reef, steered to the East-North-East, towards the extreme ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... remove the obstacles from another's way, scatter the scales from the eyes of the blind, strip the dead coral from the reef." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... 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
... sires made earth this new creation Where, from San Salvadore and Plymouth Reef To Westward Mission Trails, ascends belief In God and, therefore, in the Soul's Salvation Through Freedom, in white, spiral spray which grief Sees, spite earth-mists, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... or pulled him to the right there, I believe he would have gone straight before him in any direction till stopped by a wall or some other obstacle. I steered him into my bedroom, and sat down at once to write letters. This was the only place in the world (unless, perhaps, the Walpole Reef—but that was not so handy) where he could have it out with himself without being bothered by the rest of the universe. The damned thing—as he had expressed it—had not made him invisible, but I behaved exactly as though ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Terns or Sea Swallows that you have seen about the reef nest there also; and this island, as well as the mainland near by, is a favorite stopping-place for all the shore and water birds in their journeys,—from Sandpipers to great flocks ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... bought a mine from that man. His name was Algernon Maddox Cholmondely then, and he was homeward bound to assume the ancestral acres in Flint. He escorted me down the hole and displayed visible gold sparkling all along the reef. A week after he had gone I found that he had put it there with a shot-gun—an old "salter's" trick, but new to me at the time. You are not likely to be seeing Patrick Algernon Terence Maddox O'Ryan-Cholmondely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... faster gait of the fellows only spurred Judd to shake forth another reef, so that without knowing it he was ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... another that a cross of St. Louis had been found. But the element of probability in the various stories evaporated on investigation. Flinders, sailing north from Port Jackson in the INVESTIGATOR in 1802, kept a sharp lookout on the Barrier Reef, the possibility of finding some trace being "always present to my mind." But no ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... blowing a gale to which a vessel close-hauled could have shown no more than a single close-reefed sail; but as we were going before it, we could carry on. Accordingly, hands were sent aloft and a reef shaken out of the topsails, and the reefed foresail set. When we came to masthead the topsail yards, with all hands at the halyards, we struck up, "Cheerly, men," with a chorus which might have been heard halfway ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of the room like an exasperated turkey-cock; her face, from heat, anger, and the quantity she had drank, being as red as her gown. Indeed, she looked for all the world as if she had been put into a furnace and blown red hot. Jorrocks having got rid of his "worser half," as he calls her, let out a reef or two of his acre of white waistcoat, and each man made himself comfortable according to his acceptation of the term. "Gentlemen," says Jorrocks, "I'll trouble you to charge your glasses, 'eel-taps off—a bumper toast—no ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... aleak, the sailor works at the pumps, till, faint and weary, is heard from below, six feet of water in the hold, the boats are got ready, but before they are into them, the vessel dashed against a reef of rocks, some in despair throw themselves into the sea, others get on the rocks without any clothes or provisions, and linger a few days, perhaps weeks or months, living on shell fish or perhaps taken up by some ship. Others get on pieces of the wreck, and ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... Ulunda is almost a new ship, and has been used principally as a cargo steamer, though she is provided also with a saloon and staterooms for a few passengers. She was on her way from St. John, New Brunswick, to Halifax, when during a thick fog she struck on Cowl Ledge, a reef between Bryer and Long Islands, on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, about half a mile from the shore. The cause of the disaster was probably one of the strong tide eddies which exist in the Bay of Fundy, and which had set her in toward the shore. It was calm at the time, and she ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... bearers stagger with her into the creek, where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly decorated, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... bachelors"—who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his watch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has ever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but he is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the large black stone, just as one ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... time expired and I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... had eight knots way upon her. When the cry of 'half-six' was heard, the helm was put hard down and the yards were ordered to be braced sharp up. While the ship was coming up fast to the wind, and before she had lost her way, she struck a reef forwards, and shot on it until she lifted between five and ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie, dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold. Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds of thousands of pounds capital with which this unique proposition might ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... with which to equip the canoe, for he despaired of being able to teach the apes to wield the paddles, though he did manage to get several of them to embark in the frail craft which he and Mugambi paddled about inside the reef where the water was ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, as might ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... his men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail with a gentle ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship — the reek of the slaver's ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... fury. For four hours the vessel had been driven before the blast; and the captain now declared it was impossible she could weather the tempest much longer, ordered the long boat to be in readiness. His orders were scarcely executed, when the ship bulged upon a reef of rocks, and the impetuous waves rushed into the vessel:—a general groan ensued. Ferdinand flew to save his sister, whom he carried to the boat, which was nearly filled by the captain and most of the crew. The sea ran ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... three to fourteen tons. Large nets are used, which, during the months between March and October, are dragged, dredge-like, over the rocks. A large crew will haul in a season from 600 to 900 pounds. To prevent the destruction of the industry, the reef is divided into ten parts, only one being worked a year, and by the time the tenth is reached the first is overgrown again with a new growth. In 1873 the Algerian fisheries alone, employing 3,150 men, realized half a million of dollars. The choice grades are always valuable, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... imagination. Borden had nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the Liberals pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves to a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took a reef out of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing the British Preference and sent a contingent to the South African War in the name of Empire. Laurier was master in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces he created, in immigration, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... Junior. "Number Eight is ready, and I know I've at last got that reefing down fine. It will work, and it will revolutionize flying. Speed—that's what's needed, and so are the large sustaining surfaces for getting started and for altitude. I've got them both. Once I'm up I reef down. There it is. The smaller the sustaining surface, the higher the speed. That was the law discovered by Langley. And I've applied it. I can rise when the air is calm and full of holes, and ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... over to where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... innumerable sails Dawn on the far horizon and draw near; Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach: Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there, And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef, The long, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Desfosses and Doret, and two engineer officers, Commandant Mangin-Lecreux and Captain Chauchard, to make rather an odd sort of reconnaissance. To understand its nature, my readers must know that the fort of Saint Juan d'Ulloa is set on a great reef, separated from Vera Cruz by a narrow arm of the sea. On the edge of the reef looking towards the town, the walls of the fort, into which huge iron rings for mooring big ships are built, go perpendicularly down into the sea. On the opposite ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... produced in very many instances by dikes which cross the stream. So, too, though rarely, only one striking instance being known, an ancient coral reef which has become buried in strata may afford rock of such hardness that when the river comes to cross it it forms a cascade, as at the Falls of the Ohio, at Louisville, Ky. It is a characteristic of all other falls, except those first mentioned, that they rarely plunge with a clean ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... with relays of twelve mules waiting every ten miles. They speak of his gambling propensities, of ten-thousand-acre farms that changed hands at the turn of a card, and there are stories that are less printable. When M'Lupi, a little Mashona chief, found gold in '92, and refused to locate the reef, it was John Minute who staked him out and lit a grass fire on his ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... a shell fell in her maintop and set fire to the mainsail, and another having burst in the port side and set fire to the hammock-nettings. The Rodney, however, suffered still more in masts and rigging, she having tailed on the reef, whence she was got off by the gallant exertions of Commander Kynaston, of the Spiteful. The Albion and Arethusa suffered ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 then ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... modification of this metaphor, 'The water that I shall give him shall be in him a fountain of water.' Arabs in desert round dried—up springs. Hagar. Shipwrecked sailors on a reef. Christ opens 'rivers in the wilderness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the 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
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... good recovery, as things go. But that means she won't be herself again for a twelvemonth, if then!" Granny Marrable looked so unhappy over this, that the doctor took in a reef. "Less if we're lucky—less if we're lucky!" said he. "She's being very well looked ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... that," Hugh said at last, sitting down on the edge of the hole they had dug. "Gold is the most gambly stuff imaginable. We know a lady who was as poor as a washerwoman one day, and then at breakfast one morning she got a letter to say her goldmine shares had struck a reef, and she got so rich she simply didn't know what to do with her money. She came to see Papa about it. She was an old maid, so naturally there wasn't much she wanted. You never know who is going to be rich ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... they was there. Janet, I've got t' tell ye somethin' 'bout yer mother! It oughter come to ye from a woman, God knows, but there ain't no likely woman t' hand, an' I must do my best. She, yer mother, was powerful 'fraid ye might wreck yerself on the same kind o' reef what she struck. She wanted ye should be a boy 'long o' that fear, but she 'lowed if ye were a girl, I was t' tell ye in time if I saw danger, an', Janet, I ain't done my duty!" Billy's voice was hoarse from ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... and which Plato calls the memory of divine beings whom we knew in some anterior life, that recognition of kindred natures which precedes reason and asks no leave of the understanding, is not a gradual and cautious attraction, like the growth of a coral reef, but sudden and magnetic as the coalescence of two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... discomforts. Among the many points of interest to be seen are the picturesque Columbia River Bar, the beautiful Ocean Beach at Clatsop, the towering heights of Cape Hancock, the lonely Mid-Ocean Lighthouse at Tillamook Rock, the historical Rogue River Reef, Cape Mendocino, Humboldt Bay, Point Arena, and last, but not least, the world-renowned ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... given for the sambuks to keep near together because the pilot of the first one was sailing less skillfully than the other. Suddenly, in the twilight the men in the second sambuk felt a shock, then another, and a third. The water poured into it rapidly. It had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk had been able to pass on account of its lighter draft. Soon the stranded boat began to list over, and the twenty-eight men aboard had to sit on ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... was the response; "we'll reef." He nodded to the gunner and the reef points were quickly tied, thus enabling the three boats to ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... future exploration will develop Midian as it has done India. The quartzose outcrop called the "Wynaad reef" (Madras Presidency) produced only a few poor penny-weights per ton, two and seven being the extremes, while much of it was practically unproductive. Presently, in February, 1878, the district was visited by Sir Andrew Clarke, of Australian experience, member of the Viceregal Council. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to scrape over them at high-tide. Even ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... the pilot boat. Well, we hoisted our jib, drew aft our foresheet, and were soon clear of the harbour; but we found that there was a devil of a sea running, and more wind than we bargained for; the brig came out of the harbour with a flowing sheet, and we lowered down the foresail to reef it—father and brother busy about that, while I stood at the helm, when the agent said to me, 'When do you mean to make a voyage?' 'Sooner than father thinks for,' said I, 'for I want to see the world.' It was sooner than I thought for too, as you shall hear. As soon as the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezen, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still called the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... within four walls. They tell us of the seductive calm that first lured them on to those waters, of the sufferings they endured throughout the voyage, the thirst, the sea-sickness, the briny drenchings; and how at last their luckless craft went to pieces upon some hidden reef or at the foot of some steep crag, leaving them to swim for it, and to land naked and utterly destitute. All this they tell us: but I have ever suspected them of having convenient lapses of memory, and omitting the worst part ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... talk with his father, Roddy, ignorant of Mr. Caldwell's intentions, was in Venezuela, sitting on the edge of a construction-raft, dangling his rubber boots in the ocean, and watching a steel skeleton creep up from a coral reef into a blazing, burning sky. At intervals he would wake to remove his cigarette, and shout fiercely: "O-i-i-ga, you Moso! Get a move on! Pronto! If you don't I'll do ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... wraith-like shadows he saw the armored forms of Conquistadores in mortal strife with vulpine buccaneers. In the whirring of the bats which flouted his face he heard the singing of arrows and the hiss of hurled rocks. In the moan of the ocean as it broke on the coral reef below sounded the boom of cannon, the curses of combatants, and the groans of the dying. Here and there moved tonsured monks, now absolving in the name of the peaceful Christ the frenzied defenders of the Heroic City, now turning to hurl curses ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... His nerves seemed all on edge, and ever upon the glowing midday heat, the jarring thump of the Crown Reef battery beat its monotonous time. Then the door ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... away landward its plush of green at an appraisement of two hundred dollars a front foot to a bungalow equally dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward, glimpsed through a fringe of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean; beyond the reef a dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within the reef all the silken gamut of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... in all standing, on top o' some sails below; and next day he was as sick as a greenhorn could be, cleaning out his land-ballast where he lay, nor I didn't see him till he'd got better. 'Twas blowing a strong breeze, with light canvas all in aloft, and a single reef in the tops'ls; but fine enough for the Channel, except the rain—when what does I see but the "Green Hand" on the weather quarter-deck, holding on by the belaying-pins, with a yumbrella over his head. The men for'ard ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... senate swept the mighty chief, Like some great ocean wave across the bar Of intercepting rock, whose jagged reef But frets the victor whom it cannot mar. Into the senate his triumphal car Rushed like a conqueror's through the broken gates Of some fallen city, whose defenders are Powerful no longer to resist the fates, But yield at last to ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... was in Aves to hear the landward breeze, A-swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees, With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roar Of the breakers on the reef outside, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... maps 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
... attempted to cross the reef by the narrow channel, and happily succeeding, found myself in the open sea, and speeding homeward, joyfully saw our flag flying, and heard ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... himself, and was very grateful. While I was sitting with him one day, having a yarn of old times, he gave me an account of the pearl islands, and assured me that he could find them again, having carefully noted the distance the schooner had run to the reef on which she was wrecked, as also its position on the chart. He then showed me the necklace, of which he had not spoken to any one. His narrative first put our proposed venture into my head. When ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... or from discovery. I don't say that we shall make anything. The chances are, of course, that we may lose all before we are a month out, but it is always well to be business-like. There is gold in Central Africa. We may discover a gold reef. There are new animals in the forest. We may catch an okapi, and if we could land it in England it would fetch a large sum. We might snare a live gorilla, and there is not a gorilla in the zoological ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... Juan de Ulloa lies half a mile east and to seaward of the city of Vera Cruz, which it commands, and from which it is separated by water averaging from fifteen to twenty feet deep. It is built on the inner extremity of a reef that extends from it a little over a mile to the eastward, in the general prolongation of the line connecting the castle and the town. This shoal being covered by a foot or two of water, the builders of the fort counted upon it for protection in that direction against ships, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... called Nick, after they had been moving along in procession for some time, the Tramp leading the way—for George realized that he must curb his speed propensity while navigating these deceptive shallow waters, unless he wanted to take chances of wrecking his beloved craft on an unseen oyster reef, or a sandbar that lay just ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... in the Gold Reef City There are mothers and children too! And they cry 'Hurry up for pity!' So what can a brave ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Passage in the Straits of Manaar, which is distinguished by its magnificent colonnade and corridors. (Fergusson, Hist. Ind. and Eastern Arch., vol. i, pp. 380-3, ed. 1910.) The island forms part of the so-called Adam's Bridge, a reef of comparatively recent formation, which almost joins Ceylon with the mainland. A railway now runs along the 'bridge', and the pilgrims have ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of reefs extending S from White Head Island is all good ground in summer for cod and for pollock, also, when the herring schools are on this ground. Currents are very heavy here. The ledges that make up this reef are more or less connected. Among these are Brazil Shoal, Tinker, Inner Diamond, Outer Diamond, Crawleys, Rans, Proprietor (Foul Ground), and the Old Proprietor. While virtually all this reef is pollock ground, Crawleys and Rans perhaps furnish the ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... the Mediterranean, and gave him a great Insight into the practical Part of Navigation. He grew fond of this Life, and was resolved to be a compleat Sailor, which made him always one of the first on a Yard Arm, either to Hand or Reef, and very inquisitive in the different Methods of working a Ship: His Discourse was turn'd on no other Subject, and he would often get the Boatswain and Carpenter to teach him in their Cabbins the constituent ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the relics on my knee. The metal of each was ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... going to make a lot of money out of it. Now, even this material balm was denied him. He had sold out, and he was feeling like the man who parts for a song with shares in an apparently goldless gold mine, only to read in the papers next morning that a new reef has been located. Into each life some rain must fall. Quite a shower was falling now ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the work you deem sublime Is like the grain of pink-hued lime Which once was a coral insect's shell, But now is a microscopic cell, Entombed with countless billions more In a lonely reef on ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... raft glides into the still waters beyond the reef, we can see it more clearly. Can it be JILL'S bed, with OLIVER in his pyjamas perched on the rail, and holding up his bath-towel? Does he shorten sail for a moment to thump his chest and say, "But OLIVER was made of stern mettle"? ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... them to take in a certain sail and reef another—directions which, even if they could have heard them, would have been as Greek to the occupants of the boat; but the wind carried her voice away, and she stood helpless, watching Herbert's bungling attempts. Another moment, and the mast was broken, and in falling dealt Herbert ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... Man's Misery, on a lower level, leads from the Bridal Chamber to the Big Dome, a large room with a fine dome-shaped ceiling from which heavy masses of crystals have fallen to the floor; and down a steep incline from here is Reef Rock, an immense fallen rock with box work on the under side, which at one time served to ornament the ceiling; and now this rock marks the beginning of Poverty Flat, a broad, low passage of great extent, ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... to run upon the reef, but to get off was another matter, especially with a falling tide. The motor churned the water, but at first seemed to make no impression. Even when all the boys went aft, so as to lighten the ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... spinsters as my enemies, and their proposals for excursions, and luncheons, and dinners caused me much misgiving, not only because they separated me from Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic, might prove a shipwrecking reef. One cannot predict what will happen. Life is so full of incidents; a woman's jealous tongue or the arrival of some acquaintance might bring about a catastrophe. A love affair hangs upon a gossamer thread, you ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... love to look to but he—"I alone am alone! The whole world is in love with me, and I'm utterly alone." Alone as a wreck upon a desert ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some ship-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock? must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness he ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... that it is some dangerous reef!" exclaimed Kit; "some hole or cavern which the water ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... a question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... many-colored. limestone hills, on which no palm-tree flourishes and in which no humble desert-plant can strike root. Rocky crevasses and gorges cut more or less deeply into the mountain range, and up to its ridge extends the desert, destructive of all life, with sand and stones, with rocky cliffs and reef-like, desert hills. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... call into father's, and he'll give you a real right down genuine New England breakfast, and if that don't happify your heart, then my name's not Sam Slick. It will make you feel about among the stiffest, I tell you. It will blow your jacket out like a pig at sea. You'll have to shake a reef or two out of your waistban's and make good stowage, I guess, to carry it all under hatches. There's nothin' like a good pastur' to cover the ribs, and make the ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... shadows down upon the bay, and upon the group of yellow stucco bungalows that clustered together upon the edge of the water, upon the narrow strip of land lying between the sea and the sheer sides of the backing mountains. The bay was a crescent, almost closed, and a coral reef ran in an encircling sweep from the headland beyond, and the translucent, sparkling waters of the harbour seemed beautiful beyond belief. His heart beat wildly when for the first time he beheld his new home—it exceeded ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... 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 what the blacks spear and the thieves ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... the name of a Godwin, shipwrecked on a false system, and a Shelley, shipwrecked on an extravagant version of that false system—and a Hazlitt, shipwrecked on no system at all—and a Hall, driven upon the rugged reef of madness—and a Foster, cast high and dry upon the dark shore of Misanthropy—and an Edward Irving, inflated into sublime idiocy by the breath of popular favor, and in the subsidence of that breath, left to roll at the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... no rocks on the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface of the wintry sea, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Swallows that you have seen about the reef nest there also; and this island, as well as the mainland near by, is a favorite stopping-place for all the shore and water birds in their journeys,—from Sandpipers to great flocks ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... loved; on the contrary, he kept her in the bluest and least cloudy heaven of love. The problem of eternal beatitude is one of those whose solution is known only to God. Here, below, the sublimest poets have simply harassed their readers when attempting to picture paradise. Dante's reef was that of Vandenesse; all honor to ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... a shabby, barelegged girl of thirteen, standing in the cockpit of his sloop, holding the little vessel on its course while he and old Caleb took a reef in the mainsail. The wilderness of gold that was her uncared-for hair blew behind her like a sunny burgee; her sea-blue eyes were fixed on the mainsail, out of which she adroitly spilled the wind at the proper moment, in order that Donald and her father might haul the reef-points home ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... northern littoral of Australia and submit a report. Choosing the most suitable season of the year to make the tour, I left Brisbane in the company of the then Government Resident of the Northern Territory, Doctor Gilruth. The voyage along the coast of Queensland, sailing within the Great Barrier Reef northwards to Torres Straits, is one of the most interesting voyages in the world. After leaving the Reef and clearing Cape York, you enter the Torres Straits and make for a group of islands, the most important of which is Thursday Island. It is the headquarters ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... spars, and hull and rigging, possess a harmony of tone which can only be acquired by age. Its cordage being rotten and very limp, hangs, on that account, all the more gracefully in waving lines of beauty and elegant festoons; the reef points hang quite straight, and patter softly on the sails—in short, the tout ensemble of the little craft is eminently picturesque— draped, as it were, with the mellowness of antiquity; and the whole— hull, spars, sails, cordage, and reef points,—clearly and sharply ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... admit that his men were of no great use to him, "But, then," he would say, "there is little to do on a gunboat trim I can hand, and reef, and steer, and fire my big gun too— And it IS such a treat to sail ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... exposed places these come forth, seeking the shade, searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible sign of their ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... axe or a paddle. Harry, I'm not getting back down in one piece. Somehow, I know it. Don't you let them do it to anyone else unless there are manual controls from the ejection onwards. Don't do it. This isn't just nosing into the Slot, over the reef between the town and the island and letting go then, and beginning to sweat. This is much more, Harry. This is bloody frightening. Are the three minutes up yet? My stomach is crawling at the thought of you pushing that button ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... at the north end of the row, watching a smart cutter that was beating from the north against a strong S.S.E. wind and heavy sea, which broke heavily on the beach and over an outlying reef of rocks which forms a natural breakwater and shelters the fishermen's cobles from the strong winds that blow in from the sea during the winter months. The cutter tacked close in to the north end of the ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... it with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... out and look at this famous harbour for lumber," he said. "It is not good for much else, Daisy; I thought yesterday we should certainly make shipwreck on that reef. Is it possible there is no better along ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... mussels all jammed close together, and through the clear water more and more were coming and piling themselves together. Almost at once his boat was slowly lifted—the top of the mussel heap showed through the water, and there he was, high and dry on a mussel reef. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... wish to refuse the Admiral, if he proposed coming on board; but he now made up his mind that it should only be as a passenger, and that he would himself retain the command. At present he contented himself with dropping his anchor outside, clear of the reef, where he was sheltered by a bluff cape, under which the water was smooth, about a mile distant from where the Admiral's ship lay on shore; and he employed his crew in replenishing his water-casks from a rivulet close to ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... vertical walls of coral in very deep water. When there is a little wind, it is dangerous to come near these rocks; but luckily it was quite smooth, so we moored to their edge, while the men crawled over the reef to the land, to make; a fire and cook our dinner-the boat having no accommodation for more than heating water for my morning and evening coffee. We then rowed along the edge of the reef to the end of the island, and were glad to get a nice westerly breeze, which carried ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt. All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef. At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more ragged than ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... foresheet, and were soon clear of the harbour; but we found that there was a devil of a sea running, and more wind than we bargained for; the brig came out of the harbour with a flowing sheet, and we lowered down the foresail to reef it—father and brother busy about that, while I stood at the helm, when the agent said to me, 'When do you mean to make a voyage?' 'Sooner than father thinks for,' said I, 'for I want to see the world.' It was sooner than I thought for too, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the floods and thunder, To her pale dry healing blue— To the lift of the great Cape combers, And the smell of the baked Karroo. To the growl of the sluicing stamp-head— To the reef and the water-gold, To the last and the largest Empire, To the map ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... your Worship's Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a fellow as ever went between stem and stern of a ship, and can hand, reef, steer, and clap two ends of a rope together, as well as e'er a He that ever crossed Salt-water; but I was taken by one George Bradley (the name of the Judge) a notorious Pirate, and a sad rogue as ever was hanged, and he forced me, an't ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Wake Island note: from 18 July 1947 until 1 October 1994, the US administered the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, but recently entered ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... heard a circumstantial story of a wreck in the South Seas told by the plucky little wife of the captain, who had stayed by her husband's side—"Papa" she called him—while the ship slowly sank on a coral reef, and then drifted about in an open boat for ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... rode the shallow torquoise-tinted waters at anchor, rocking gently just off the snowy coral reef on which we were now camping. The youthful waitress who, for economy's sake, wore her cap, apron, collar and cuffs over her dainty print dress, was seated by the signal fire writing in her diary. Sometimes she thoughtfully touched her pencil point with ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... in? His nerves seemed all on edge, and ever upon the glowing midday heat, the jarring thump of the Crown Reef battery beat its monotonous time. Then the door opened softly, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the summit of the rock, he has laid hands on the gold. He cries, "You shall make love in the dark!... I quench your light, I tear your gold from the reef. I shall forge me the ring of vengeance, for, let the flood hear me declare it: I here curse love!" Tearing from its socket their splendid lamp, which utters just once its golden cry, all distorted ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... it: "Laiacio has a haven, and a shoal in front of it that we might rather call a reef, and to this shoal the hawsers of vessels are moored whilst the anchors are laid out towards the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec,—shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles, the Virgin from the porch,—and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the thought ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and under the rains the great rubber forest of M'Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n'sambyas, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... worlds upon bewildered space," Rose in me, "All? or did thy hand grow dull Building this world that bears a piteous race? O was it launched too soon or launched too late? Or can it be a derelict that drifts Beyond thy ken toward some reef of Fate On which ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... cooperation in hundreds of workaday tasks: of currencies kept in effective relation, of development loans meshed together, of standardized weapons, and concerted diplomatic positions. The Atlantic Community grows, not like a volcanic mountain, by one mighty explosion, but like a coral reef, from the accumulating activity ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... of the following knots: Reef, sheet-bend, clove-hitch, bow line, middleman's, fisherman's, sheepshank," ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... the eastern roots of the mountains start in toothed reef and low, premonitory sweep from the level of the plains. Broken chains and spurs edged up toward it. Far beyond, in a faint aerial distance, the soaring solidity of vast ranges hung on the horizon, cloudy crests painted ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... wild, lurid world-wreck, has blinded with its sheen. Then, with a fond insistence, pathetic and serene, They pass among their fellows for lost minds none can save, Bent on their single business, and marvel why men rave. Now far away a sighing comes from the buried reef, As though the sea were mourning above an ancient grief. For once the restless Mother of all the weary lands Went down to him in beauty, with trouble in her hands, And gave to him forever all memory to keep, But to her wayward children oblivion and sleep, That no immortal ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... three hundred and sixty miles from Sydney to New Caledonia, a long, narrow island lying just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and completely surrounded by belts of coral reef crenellated here and there, and forming channels or passes where ships may enter. Navigation through these channels is, however, exceedingly hazardous in any but calm weather; and it was formerly thought that the island was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... late in the fall of 1803, the frigate Philadelphia, one of the best ships of our little navy, while chasing a piratical craft, ran upon a sunken reef near the harbor of Tripoli. The good ship was helpless either to fight or ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... here's no rushing of exasperate wind, Booming revolt amidst a factious tide; Nor hateful shock on toothed reef and blind, Of foaming waves that with a ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... whistled to himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs her off the ground." A tiny spit of flame, pale against the moonlight, jerked out from under the awnings ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... through the water; whilst the loose folds of my shirt, being washed out to seawards by the tide, kept getting entangled with my arm. I grew weak and faint but still swam my best, and at last I providentially reached a reef of rocks which projected from the opposite shore, and to which I clung until I had somewhat ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... as if I was coming up into a reg'lar twister, and thought it would be safer to reef a mite and make for ca'm waters. My head begun to whirl, and I cal'lated I'd best weigh anchor while my ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... knowing that a reef of uncharted genitives stretched ahead of him, on which in spite of M'Turk's sailing-directions he would ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... take in a reef or two, then, that's all," said Herrick. "Bear a hand, my boy, and we'll soon ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... his "missionary" name "Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss Gordon Cumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated into English. For women they were such as Spray of the Coral Reef, Queen of Parrot's Land, Queen of Strangers, Smooth Water, Wife of the Morning Star, Mother of Her Grandchildren, Ten Whale's Teeth, Mother of Cockroaches, Lady Nettle, Drinker of Blood, Waited For, Rose of Rewa, Lady Thakombau, Lady Flag, etc. The men's names were such as The Stone ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... seemed as if the other sails were about to share the same fate. The ship flew from billow to billow, after recovering from the first rude shock, as if she were but a dark cloud on the sea, and the spray flew high over her masts, drenching the men on the topsail-yards while they laboured to reef the sails. ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... beat over golden shores and red clouds extended as an army in regular column upon column. At the zenith, billows of scarlet leaped in feathery foam against a purple continent and the flaming tide extended from reef to reef among a thousand aerial bays and estuaries of alternating gloom and glow until shrouded and dimmed in an orange tawny haze of infinite distance. In the immediate foreground of this majestic display, like a handful ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Manaar, which is distinguished by its magnificent colonnade and corridors. (Fergusson, Hist. Ind. and Eastern Arch., vol. i, pp. 380-3, ed. 1910.) The island forms part of the so-called Adam's Bridge, a reef of comparatively recent formation, which almost joins Ceylon with the mainland. A railway now runs along the 'bridge', and the pilgrims have ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... large. No death occurred among them until 1837, when Mrs. R. Davis was called to her rest. Dangers abounded on every hand, yet accidents were rare. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis were lost at sea; Marsden was wrecked on the Brampton reef, but escaped unhurt with all his party. Henry Williams passed through a terrible experience when returning from Tauranga in 1832. For two days his little vessel had been enveloped in driving rain and had been blown quite out of her course, when the missionary, ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... and fields." Orion, coming in winter, warned them to prepare for tempest. All navigation was regulated by these two constellations. The one said to shipmaster and crew: "Hoist sail for the sea, and gather merchandise from other lands." But Orion was the storm-signal, and said: "Reef sail, make things snug, or put into harbor, for the hurricanes are getting their wings out." As the Pleiades were the sweet evangels of the spring, Orion was the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Company. If he had been this story would never have been written. He was down at Hunter's Point drydock, superintending the repairs to the steam schooner Amelia Ricks, which recently on a voyage to Seattle had essayed the overland route via Duxbury Reef. When Matt reached home that night he found his ingenious father-in-law ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... clear through some of the larger seas, and you didn't need watch her long to make you reckon you'd seen the last of her. Then Mr. Robinson, talking like a man half in a rage, half in a fright, orders me to pack sail on the schooner; but it was already blowing a single-reef breeze, and I had no idea of losing our spars, and so I told him very firmly that the yacht had all she needed, and that more would only stop her by burying her: and I had my way. But we were foaming through it, too; we wanted no more pressure; the ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... raised her beautiful eyes towards the west, where golden gleams and violet shadows were battling for possession of a reef of cloud islets, which dotted the azure upper sea of air, and were reflected ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... mountains (i. e. Lumpu Balong and the range) show steep and well in the background. Game abounds, by report. Europeans are subject to complaints of the eyes, and occasionally to fever. Any vessel running in should be very careful, for the charts are defective, and Boele Comba reef is said to project farther to the westward of the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... all along the Atlantic coast. The chief forecaster ventured the assertion that a volcanic eruption had occurred somewhere on the line from Halifax to Bermuda. He thought that the probable location of the upheaval had been at Munn's Reef, about halfway between those points, and the more he discussed his theory the readier he became to stake his reputation on its correctness, for, he said, it was impossible that any combination of ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... was that you had endangered the safety of one of her Majesty's cruisers by trying to run through an unexplored opening in the Barrier Reef. Was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... There is an irony, if we may so say, in making the hatred of these men the very means of their brother's advancement, and the occasion of blessing to themselves. As coral insects work, not knowing the plan of their reef, still less the fair vegetation and smiling homes which it will one day carry, but blindly building from the material supplied by the ocean a barrier against it; so even evil-doers are carrying on God's plan, and sin is made to counterwork itself, and be the black ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... do you handle the brace and the bow-line, the wheel and the lead-line, the reef-point and the top-rope? The paddle is a good thing, out of doubt, in a canoe; but of what use ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... which might easily be mistaken for a couple of gulls. In and out of these reefs the ship went like a serpent. There was barely passage for it between them; but of course no pilot would attempt it save in broad daylight. At length we reached the inner reef. We found the open roadstead full of ships, with hardly room to swing, and a strong north- west wind, so that we could not get a place. We ran right into the first at anchor, the Standard, a trading-ship of Shields, built of iron. Richard ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... his usual perseverance, walked out when the camp was formed; and, at a little distance from it, ascended a ridge of pure sand, crowned with cypresses. From this, he descended to the westward, and, at length, struck upon the river, where a reef of rocks creased its channel, and formed a dry passage from one side to the other; but the bend, which the river must have taken, appeared to him so singular, that he doubted whether it was the same beside which ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... and to remain in the vicinity of the first boat, because its pilot was sailing less skillfully than mine. Suddenly, in the twilight, I felt a shock, then another, and still another. The water poured in rapidly. I had run upon the reef of a small island, where the smaller sambuk was able barely to pass because it had a foot less draught than mine. Soon my ship was quite full, listed over, and all of us—twenty-eight men—had to sit on the uptilted edge of the boat. The little island lies at Jesirat Marka, 200 miles ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... president was the terrible Lucius Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, not ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... half-caste pointed out beyond the frothing surf that marked the position of the reef constituting one of the stronghold's main defences. Away beyond it, a mile or so distant, a sail was standing out to sea. "There she ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... harbor somewhere, for was there not the light? Another flash showed the vessel still nearer, drifting broadside on; involuntarily he ran out on the long sandy point where it seemed that soon she must strike. But sooner came a crash, then a grinding sound; there was a reef outside then, and she was on it, the rocks cutting her, and the waves pounding her down on their merciless edges. 'Strange!' he thought. 'The harbor must be on the other side I suppose, and yet it seems as though I came this way.' Looking around, there was the light high up behind him, burning ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... her hands on the spokes he went forward and lowered the sail. There were two lines of reef points in the section of canvas and Dan took in both. When he hoisted it again there was just a patch ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... of obstacles consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef areas," or regions in which coral reefs are found. There is a very notable ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley
... future. As we lay hove-to in the cul- de-sac, discussing the question of what should next be done, our attention had been more than once attracted toward a large hummock of rock rising some thirty or forty feet above the general level of the reef, at no great distance from the margin of the channel; and Gurney's proposal was that, before attempting anything else, we should land, make our way to the hummock, climb it, and ascertain whether any observations of value ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... standing off and on; and at day-break the next morning, I steered for the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... are; but the Florina will stand almost anything in the shape of a blow. All you have to do is to reef, and let her go it. But you can always tell when it is going to be bad weather, and you can make a harbor. With a boat of this size you can run into any creek or river, anchor, and eat and sleep ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... Flinders. How Australia grew on the map. Mediaeval controversies on antipodes. Period of vague speculation. Sixteenth century maps. The Dutch voyagers. The Batavia on the Abrolhos Reef. The Duyfhen in the Gulf. Torres. The three periods of Australian maritime discovery. Geographers and their views of Australia. The theory of the dividing strait. Cook and Furneaux. The untraced ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge. But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the threads ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... horse, is carried on a slow canter around the ring. He evidently impersonates a member of the horse marines, for he executes elaborate imitations of pulling ropes, reefing and furling sails. Probably the horse marines reef topsails on horseback. In the absence of opposing testimony we accept his theory, and are greatly pleased to find that the equestrian sailor finally escapes being wrecked on the lower row of benches, and so meeting a watery grave among the sawdust, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... we left the entrance of the harbor and bore away for Kennebeck river. In the latter part of the night, there came on a thick fog and our fleet was separated. At break of day we found ourselves in a most dangerous situation, very near a reef of rocks. The rocks indeed appeared on all sides of us, so that we feared we should have been dashed to pieces on some of them. We were brought into this deplorable situation by means of liquor being dealt out too freely ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... comment on the beauty of sky and cliff. As they halted once more the enchantment seemed to spread; a delicate haze enveloped the sea; hints of rose colour tinted the waves; over the uplands a pale mauve bloom grew; the sunlight turned redder, slanting on the rocks, and every kelp-covered reef became a spongy golden ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Carrigeen Glos, a low, sullen line of rocks. A group of cormorants, either gorged with mackerel fry or hopeless of an evening meal, perched together at one end of the reef, and stared at the setting sun. A few terns swept round and round overhead, soaring or sliding downwards with easy motion. A large seal lay basking on a bare rock just above the water's edge. I pointed it out to Peter, and he said ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... every possible advantage of the stiff breeze that blew. During the day, those sails proved almost as much of a nuisance as a help. The fiendish, sullen williwaws that blow furiously and without warning about the Strait required watching, and more than once it was necessary to reef everything and depend ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... and has been used principally as a cargo steamer, though she is provided also with a saloon and staterooms for a few passengers. She was on her way from St. John, New Brunswick, to Halifax, when during a thick fog she struck on Cowl Ledge, a reef between Bryer and Long Islands, on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, about half a mile from the shore. The cause of the disaster was probably one of the strong tide eddies which exist in the Bay of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. In the microscopic animalculae; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of Uranus in its orbit, they trace a law whose harmony is its glory, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... is a sunken reef on this side. Head for the cove." He pointed to the north end of the floating mass, and Captain Cromwell put about. The island, now that he was close, appeared to be making good headway—at least four or five miles an hour. There was a swish ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... 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, ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought—gigantic, breaking seas—went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... gambling propensities, of ten-thousand-acre farms that changed hands at the turn of a card, and there are stories that are less printable. When M'Lupi, a little Mashona chief, found gold in '92, and refused to locate the reef, it was John Minute who staked him out and lit a grass fire on his chest until ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all his tribe. These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef. By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a continent. But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself. I had rather be a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and sails over the seas where they have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... daily life as if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not so sure of untroubled passage. But ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly decorated, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... surprise those well experienced in mining matters. It is the decrease of water as the greater depths are reached. In the Magdala shaft at 950 ft. the water has decreased to a MINIMUM; in the Crown Cross Reef Company's shaft, at 800 ft., notwithstanding the two reefs recently struck, no extra water has been met with; and in the long drive of the Extended Cross Reef Company, at a depth of over 800 ft., the water is lighter than it was nearer ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... vessels left Holland for the Dutch East Indies. Among these ships was the Batavia, commanded by Francis Pelsart. A terrible storm destroyed ten of the fleet, and on June 4, 1629, the Batavia was driven ashore on the reef still known as Houtman's Abrolhos, which had been discovered and named by a Dutch East Indiaman some years earlier—probably by the commander of the Leeuwin, who discovered and named after his ship the cape at the southwest point of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... little rock of refuge, we landed at the Twenty-five Mile, where lately a rich reef had been found. We pegged out a claim on which we worked, camped under the shade of a "Kurrajong" tree, close above a large granite rock on which we depended for our water; and here we spent several months busy on our reef, during which time Lord Douglas went home to England, with financial ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... obtain a night's sleep. At last they entered a fishing canoe, paddled some distance from shore, and dropped the native anchor, a stone secured to a rope. They were awakened in the morning by the motion of their boat. Zeke was wading in the shallow water, and towing them from a reef towards which they had drifted. "The water-sprites had rolled our stone out of its noose, and we had floated away." This was a narrow escape, but nevertheless they stuck to their floating bedstead as the only possible sleeping place. A day's successful hunting, followed by a famous supper and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... 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 of the ship's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Southern brightness over the same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... United States, charged with the duty of protecting not only its honor, but its interests, in arranging terms of peace, to content themselves with little Porto Rico, away off a third of the way to Spain, plus the petty reef of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific, as indemnity for an unprovoked war that had cost and was ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty—it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes, it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... a human leg. His arms closed instantaneously on it, and pulled. There was a yelp of dismay, and a crash. The lantern bounced away across the room, and wrecked itself on the reef of the steam-heater. Its owner collapsed in a heap on top ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... mart, is the seat of the political sickness of Samoa. At the foot of a peaked, woody mountain, the coast makes a deep indent, roughly semicircular. In front the barrier reef is broken by the fresh water of the streams; if the swell be from the north, it enters almost without diminution; and the war-ships roll dizzily at their moorings, and along the fringing coral which follows the configuration ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hold, Hangin' on by teeth and toes, dippin' when she rolled; Ginger Dan the donkeyman, Joe the 'doctor's' mate, Lumpers off the water-front, greasers from the Plate, That's the sort o' crowd we had to reef and steer and haul, Bringin' home the Rio Grande—ship and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... was correct. In a few minutes the ship was enveloped in a livid creeping mist, and he heard the Captain shout, "All hands stand by to reef!" Reef they did, but Pentland's temper was rapidly rising, and in a few minutes there was an impetuous shout for the storm jib, "Quick," and down came a blast from the north, and with a rip and a ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... possible to land the stores and provisions. So completely do the rocks surround the island, that it was not easy to find a place even to land a man. At length, however, they succeeded, having discovered at the south-west end, a small opening in a reef that runs across a bay. Here the people, provisions and stores were all put on shore in perfect safety. The Commandant wrote in high spirits at the promising appearance of his new territory; and subsequent accounts have proved, that ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... sea for a thousand years, For that is our doom and pride, As it was when they sailed with the Golden Hind, Or the wreck that struck last tide— Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef Where the ghastly blue lights flare. If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha' ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... of these bold frontiersmen aroused Brock's admiration. His own example had again acted as an inspiration. Shortly after leaving Port Talbot, his batteau, pounding in the sea, ran upon a reef that extended far from shore, and despite oars and pike-poles, remained fast. In the height of the confusion "Master Isaac" sprang overboard, and a moment later voyageur and raw recruit, waist deep in water, following the example of the hero of Castle ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... fluttering from a staff at the stern, and the house flag of David Verity & Co. was at the fore, but these emblems did not satisfy Coke's fighting mettle. The Andromeda would probably crack like an eggshell the instant she touched the reef towards which she was hurrying; he determined that she would go down with colors flying if he were not put out of action by a bullet before he ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... been careless on this excursion day before yesterday and have caught a cold. He had wanted to take her out in the little yacht, but this had now been postponed until Sunday. He asked Tidemand to come along; there would be a few more; they would sail out to some reef ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... the 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 Amphitrite, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... rose out of the sea like a volcanic peak, and was evidently encircled with a barrier reef, as we could trace a line of snowy surf breaking on its outer verge, and parting the sapphire blue of the deep water without from the emerald green shoals within. The coast, sweeping in beautiful bays, dotted with overgrown islets, and fended ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... warned them to prepare for tempest. All navigation was regulated by these two constellations. The one said to shipmaster and crew: "Hoist sail for the sea, and gather merchandise from other lands." But Orion was the storm-signal, and said: "Reef sail, make things snug, or put into harbor, for the hurricanes are getting their wings out." As the Pleiades were the sweet evangels of the spring, Orion was the warning ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... spring, but just then a huge wave rose high over the vessel, the white-crested tip hissing like an angry snake, and Jan looked down, down, down into a dark hole and below it gleamed the jagged peaks of the reef, like threatening teeth of a hidden monster. He knew the danger. Drawing back he turned ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... guns, and the torpedo-boat Wasp came up eager to assist. The first American soldier to step on the Cuban shore from this expedition was Lieutenant Crofton, Captain O'Connor with the first boatload having gone a longer route. A reef near the beach threw the men out, and they stumbled through the water up to their breasts. When they reached dry land they immediately went into the bush to form a picket-line. Two horses had been forced to ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... 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, ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... 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
... their repast—a repast as strange and surprising as the island itself—they had drifted half a mile upstream with the incoming tide. Here the sturdy underpinning of the desert isle caught upon a tiny reef and the island swung slowly around like a sleepy carrousel ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... downward curve, her mast was a beautiful spar, and her topmast was elegantly tapered and set up in good shape. Unlike most of the regular highflyer yachts, her jib and mainsail were not unreasonably large. Mr. Ramsay did not intend that it should be necessary to reef when it blew a twelve-knot breeze, and, like the Skylark, she was expected to carry all sail in anything short of a full gale. But she was provided with an abundance of "kites," including an immense gaff-topsail, which extended on poles far above the topmast head, and far ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... snow when the ship came to Ungava. She had run on a reef in leaving Cartwright, her first port of call on the Labrador coast; her keel was ripped out from stem to stern, and for a month she had lain in dry dock for repairs at St. John's, Newfoundland. It was October 22nd when I said good-bye to my kind friends at the post and in ten ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... defiance, terminating in a bold headland. The violence of the sea has caused extensive and picturesque excavations and caverns; and at the end of the cliff, two sharp rocks called the Needles, raised their heads at low water, connected by a low, sunken reef. In a westerly gale these rocks were very dangerous to homeward-bound ships, and I have often sat with admiration in the heights above, watching the grotesque forms and silvery spray of the gigantic breakers, which after being broken in their progress, heaved ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies the Inchcape or Bell Rock. It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four hundred and twenty-seven. At a little more than half-flood in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs it is buried sixteen feet. As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of the rock are seen to be clothed by Conferva rupestris as by a sward of grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the lion's share of the winnings; but it is only as a disinterested bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the parties, and guides his confederate by hints so adroitly managed as not to alarm the pigeon. The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely frank as to arouse indignation; at Philadelphia they are so ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the coast with great attention. Stretched out below them was the sandy shore, bounded on the right of the river's mouth by lines of breakers. The rocks which were visible appeared like amphibious monsters reposing in the surf. Beyond the reef, the sea sparkled beneath the sun's rays. To the south a sharp point closed the horizon, and it could not be seen if the land was prolonged in that direction, or if it ran southeast and southwest, which would have made this coast a very long peninsula. At the northern ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... Seizing Rope. Loops. Cuckolds' Necks. Clinches. Overhand and Figure-eight Knots. Square and Reef Knots. Granny Knots. Open-hand and Fishermen's Knots. Ordinary Knots and Weavers' Knots. Garrick Bends and Hawser ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... sighed Shortie. "Peggy, will you excuse me, but I have surely got to let out a reef if anything more is coming," and Shortie let out a hole or two in the leather belt which encircled the region into ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... mentioned, his hero performs rather a feat in shearing three and a half pounds of washed wool in twenty-three and one-half minutes, A Mexican would have to take a reef in his big hat if he could not do better than that. His tin check is worth four and a half cents to him, and a fair hand ought to have at least fifty in his pocket at sunset, in return for as many seven-pound unwashed fleeces,—always provided ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... a spacious veranda in front, covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps of cocoa-nut-trees and dwarf palms, with bare gaunt stems and tufted tops, stood out here and there along the rocky slopes, while lesser vegetation of cactus and mangrove bushes were scattered thickly over the island, cropping out with jagged edges ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... works supplied by the first two streams only command small areas. The Lower Swat Canal was begun in 1876, but the tribesmen were hostile and the diggers had to sleep in fortified enclosures. The work was not opened till 1885. A reef in the river has made it possible to dispense with a permanent weir. The country is not an ideal one for irrigation, being much cut up by ravines. But a large area has been brought under command, and the irrigation ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... with a word or two t' le'ward of what ye might call a speakin' acquaintance with the skipper. I 'lowed he'd strike the Rattler; but he cleared the Rattler, by good luck, an' fetched up at dawn on the Devil's Teeth, a mean, low reef o' them parts, where the poor Will-o'-the-Wisp broke her back an' went on in splinters with the sea an' wind. 'Twas over soon, Dannie; 'twas all over soon, by kindness o' Providence: the ol' craft went t' pieces an' was swep' on t' ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... of pity, half of sympathy, and shrugged up his shoulders as he replied"Wait, young manwait till your bark has been battered by the storm of sixty years of mortal vicissitude: you will learn by that time, to reef your sails, that she may obey the helm;or, in the language of this world, you will find distresses enough, endured and to endure, to keep your feelings and sympathies in full exercise, without concerning yourself more in the fate of others ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... as well as the clinging lad, went sweeping over the side of the vessel, and carried safely above the reef, started in toward the beach on a roller that ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... highest officials said that it was over. The recruiting-sergeant went out into the highways and hedges to collect the fuel for Lord Kitchener's final operation. It mattered not the quality—it was only quantity. The war was over. The gates of the Gold Reef City would again be open. Then the mass of degraded manhood which had fled from Johannesburg at the first muttering of thunder in the war-cloud flocked from their hiding-places on the Cape Colony seaboard and fell upon the recruiting-sergeant's ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... of the keel as she was forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the vessel; the hurrying up of the ship's company without their clothes; and then the enormous waves which again bore her up and carried her clean over the reef, will never be effaced ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... and body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... way through the Narrows and passing in procession up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over range, the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York—not then as colossal as they are to-day, but already ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... belay away the jib or reef the upper hatchways?" Ingram called out to Sheila when they had fairly got ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was already on her and, at six o'clock, the captain had two of its reefs shaken out; and the other reef was also loosed, when Mr. Probert came up and took charge of the first watch, at eight bells. That night Bob lay on the floor, for the motion was more violent than before—the vessel rolling, gunwale under—for ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... middy about half M-'s size, a very tiny ten-year-older, who has been my delight; he is so completely 'the officer and the gentleman'. My maternal entrails turned like old Alvarez, when that baby lay out on the very end of the cross-jack yard to reef, in the gale; it was quite voluntary, and the other newcomers all declined. I always called him 'Mr. -, sir', and asked his leave gravely, or, on occasions, his protection and assistance; and his little dignity was lovely. He is polite to the ladies, and slightly distant to the passenger-boys, bigger ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... expression 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
... after adventures and tempests in many seas at last reaches the far Pacific. There the torch-bearers pass from island to island and the light flames like a beacon fire across many a blue lagoon and coral reef. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... 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 the huge tree trunk Big Boy sat cooling his feet. ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 14 US - American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... meant, and down came the call, 'Don't wait to save your things, only wraps, ladies! Up on deck! Life- belts if you can!' I remember Bernard standing at the top of the ladder, helping us up, and somehow, I understand from him, that we were on a reef, and might either remain there, and sink, or be washed off. The fog was clearing, and there was a dim light up high, somewhere, one of the lighthouses, I believe. I don't quite know how it all went; I think we kept in the background, round ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... are girls in the Gold Reef City There are mothers and children too! And they cry 'Hurry up for pity!' So what ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... taking in two reefs. The "Pilgrim" did not carry, like the majority of modern ships, a double top-sail, 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
... mind, go ahead again. Got another claim on the surface-hill. No search for licence: thank God, had none. Nasty, sneaky, cheeky little things of flies got into my eyes: could see no more, no ways. Mud water one shilling a bucket! Got the dysentery; very bad. Thought, one night, to reef the yards and drop the anchor. Got on a better tack though. Promenaded up to the famous Bendigo. Had no particular objection to Celestials there, but had no particular taste for their tartaric water. ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... may phrase it) within four walls. They tell us of the seductive calm that first lured them on to those waters, of the sufferings they endured throughout the voyage, the thirst, the sea-sickness, the briny drenchings; and how at last their luckless craft went to pieces upon some hidden reef or at the foot of some steep crag, leaving them to swim for it, and to land naked and utterly destitute. All this they tell us: but I have ever suspected them of having convenient lapses of memory, and omitting the worst part for very ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... brought him on deck. He scanned the water and the sky, and as these experienced commanders have a subtle insight into the weather, especially in familiar latitudes, he remarked to the first lieutenant that it looked rather unsettled; and, as a matter of prudence, ordered a reef in the topsails, and the royal yards to be sent down: ship to be steered W. by S. This done, he turned in, but told them to call him if there was ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... none other than the pit marked on the old Dom's map, the Great Road branched into two and circumvented it. In many places, by the way, this surrounding road was built entirely out of blocks of stone, apparently with the object of supporting the edges of the pit and preventing falls of reef. Along this path we pressed, driven by curiosity to see what were the three towering objects which we could discern from the hither side of the great gulf. As we drew near we perceived that they were Colossi of some sort or another, ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... the bottom, save him whose strap had broken. This one struck out, not to the shore, but down the stream, striving to keep up with his comrades. A couple of hundred feet below, the rapid dashed over a toothed-reef of rocks, and here, a minute later, they appeared. The cart, still loaded, showed first, smashing a wheel and turning over and over into the next plunge. The men followed in a miserable tangle. They were beaten against the submerged rocks and swept on, all but one. Frona, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... was again off, running out of the south channel, past the grim walls of old Fort Taylor, and a few miles farther on passing Sand Key light, which rises from a bit of coral reef barely lifted above the wash of a tranquil sea. At that time this was the most southerly point of United States territory. In the deep water just beyond Sand Key lay a great battle-ship, tugging sullenly at her pondrous anchors, and looking ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... plants and seeds which I intended planting on and about the children's graves—and two young women. We started early in the morning, for I intended staying at the north end till late in the afternoon, whilst the two girls went crayfishing on the reef. ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the question. On the other hand, 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 by little ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... all this, I had not got my "sea legs on,'' was dreadfully sea-sick, with hardly strength enough to hold on to anything, and it was "pitch dark.'' This was my condition when I was ordered aloft, for the first time, to reef topsails. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Charles de Massas presented a project (the first in order of date), which consisted in constructing upon the Eclat reef a semi-lunate dike, and a breakwater at Cape Heve. Moreover, upon the emergent parts of the Eclat reef and heights of the roadstead he proposed to erect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... French uniforms; another that a cross of St. Louis had been found. But the element of probability in the various stories evaporated on investigation. Flinders, sailing north from Port Jackson in the INVESTIGATOR in 1802, kept a sharp lookout on the Barrier Reef, the possibility of finding some trace being "always present to my mind." ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... Sir!" hollered our capting. "Reef your arft hoss, splice your main jib-boom, and hail your chamber-maid! ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen by the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1471—Capt. Billop, 26 Oct. 1712.] Bruce, encountering dirty weather on the Irish coast, when in command of the Hawke, out of thirty-two pressed men "could not get above seven to go upon a yard to reef his courses," but was obliged to order his warrant officers and master aloft on that duty. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1477—Capt. Bruce, 6 Oct. 1741.] Belitha, of the Scipio, had but one man aboard him, out of a ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Alderney—a paltry place, named St. Anne, or in common parlance La Ville; and there a detachment of troops is generally stationed. Small vessels only can enter the harbour, which is shelterless, and rendered difficult of access by a sunken reef. At sunset Alderney was far astern, and three of its sister islands, Sark, Herm, and Jethau, were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... of facts to be treasured up for use in his eager and retentive mind, but those habits of observation which were to be of the greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another vessel—the Porpoise—Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four feet above the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... he joined the Zephyrs in an excursion up the lake, and another lighthouse was erected in the vicinity of a dangerous reef. ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... was found at a place called Reef o' Angel; and jointly with the gold came a plague which scars the face and rots the body; and Indians died by hundreds and white men by scores; and Pere Champagne, of all who were not stricken down, feared nothing, and did not flee, but went among the sick and dying, and did those deeds ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... finish his sentence, for the stress of the flying seconds choked down his words. Two possibilities they held, and each big with doom. Either the schooner must dash upon the Raney—a reef, barely covered at high water, barring entrance to the cove—or avoiding this, must be shattered on the black wall of rock under their very feet. The end of the little vessel was written—all but one word: and that must be added within a ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... came to his assistance, get him off in time to bear a part in the action. His ship, however, served as a beacon to the ALEXANDER and SWIFTSURE, which would else, from the course which they were holding, have gone considerably further on the reef, and must inevitably have been lost. These ships entered the bay, and took their stations in the darkness, in a manner still spoken of with admiration by all who remember it. Captain Hallowell, in the SWIFTSURE, as he was ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... erroneously assumed that Columbus always shaped a westerly course in sailing from island to island; and Turk Island, being farthest east, would give most room for such a course. This island has large lagoons, and is surrounded by a reef. So far it resembles Guanahani. But the second island, according to Navarrete, is Caicos, bearing W. N. W., while the second island of Columbus bore S. W. from the first. The third island of Columbus was in ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... stone of a second lighthouse was laid on a reef near a small island at the eastern entrance to the Straits of Malacca called "The Coney." It was also laid with masonic honours by the Worshipful Master and Brethren of the Lodge Zetland in the East, No. 748, in the presence of the ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... in the morning we had above a hundred fathoms; we then stood-to the S.S.E.; this course made almost a right angle with that which we had followed in the night: it bore directly in-shore, the approach to which, in this place, is rendered terrible by a very long reef, called Arguin, which according to instructions we had on board extends above thirty leagues in breadth.[12] According to the instructions given by the Minister of the Marine, this danger is avoided by running only ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... the looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar, to hand, reef and steer, and to run a steam-launch. In all of these, and in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly. He was well on to forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three when he killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more single-mindedly rejoiced in these pursuits. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... current issues: uncontrolled deforestation especially in watershed areas; soil erosion; air and water pollution in major urban centers; coral reef degradation; increasing pollution of coastal mangrove swamps that are important ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is High-Mass; so is Wenchthorpe; so is forewarp, which is the rope you throw out from the stem to the little man in the boat who comes to moor you along the west gully in the Ramsgate Harbour; so is Longnose, the name of a buoy, and of a reef of rocks just north of the North Foreland; so are a great many other words. But I digress. I only put in these words to show you in case you had any dissolving doubts remaining upon the matter, that the kind of stuff you read is very often all nonsense, and that you must ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... of Vera Cruz and were passing Anton Lizardo, the place to which we were bound. But a reef was between us and the anchorage where the fleet was quietly lying. The Captain of the schooner said he could cross the reef. Taking his place in the rigging from where he could better observe the breakers and the ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith
... group, which forms part of the Finnish province of Abo-Bjorneborg, consists of nearly three hundred islands, of which about eighty are inhabited, the remainder being desolate rocks. These islands form a continuation of a dangerous granite reef extending along the south coast of Finland. They formerly belonged to Sweden, and in the neighbourhood the first victory of the Russian fleet Over the Swedes was gained by Peter the Great in 1714. They were ceded to Russia in 1809. They occupy a total area of 1426 sq. km., and their present ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... blew quite a gale; and the commodore, at the helm, instinctively kept the boat before the wind; and by so doing, ran over for the opposite island of Imeeo. Crossing the channel, by almost a miracle they went straight through an opening in the reef, and shot upon a ledge of coral, where the waters were tolerably smooth. Here they lay until morning, when the natives came off to them in their canoes. By the help of the islanders, the schooner was hove over on her beam-ends; when, finding the bottom knocked to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... practically a reef completely submerged at full tide and only a few feet of its crest visible at low water. To raise a tower on it meant placing a foundation under water, ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... hugging the land in order to lead to our destination. A good wind was carried as far as Loch Ryan, when it slowly died away and became flat calm. One of my friends and myself were walking the deck together, when he excitedly observed, "What is that on our starboard beam; is it a reef?" I assured him there were no shoals in the vicinity of the yacht; and I took up the field-glasses, and saw quite plainly that it was a bottle-nosed whale. It soon began to move and send masses of water into the air. The calm continued, and some ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... (until c. 1780) lateen, i.e., triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezen, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still called the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... elaborate of Mather's biographies. This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... illuminating search-light of war was turned upon the island of Key West, it was, to the people of the North generally, little more than a name attached to a small, arid coral reef lying on the verge of the Gulf Stream off the southern extremity of Florida. Few people knew anything definitely about it, and to nine readers out of ten its name suggested nothing more interesting or attractive than Cuban filibusters, sponges, and cigars. In ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... it is called, to be built on the site of Lo Bengula's kraal. But the spot was not a convenient one for the creation of a European town, for it was a good way from any stream, and there was believed to be a valuable gold-reef immediately under it. Accordingly, a new site was chosen, on somewhat lower ground, about two miles to the south-west. Here new Bulawayo stands, having risen with a rapidity rivalling that of a mining-camp in Western America. The site ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... 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. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of the sea. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... km land area: 5 sq km comparative area: about eight times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) and ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... had been noted all along the Atlantic coast. The chief forecaster ventured the assertion that a volcanic eruption had occurred somewhere on the line from Halifax to Bermuda. He thought that the probable location of the upheaval had been at Munn's Reef, about halfway between those points, and the more he discussed his theory the readier he became to stake his reputation on its correctness, for, he said, it was impossible that any combination of the effects of high and low pressures could have created ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... idle. A very old craft, she may have foundered; or laid her bones upon some treacherous reef; but as with many a far rover, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... rocks on the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... about a mile to the left of the town of D——, which was surrounded by numerous small ones. This place was called the wrecker's reef, and was covered at high water, but when the tide was low, Isabel and the others often went there to get shells. They had to be careful to watch the rise of the tide, as, long before the rock was covered the retreat was cut off by the water surrounding ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... women join in splashing water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab, tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted claws. After that she is freshly decorated, and ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Drake stood with Glory 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
... possible, and for this purpose he altered the ship's course to an island he sighted on the horizon which we made during the same afternoon, when we came to anchor in a natural harbour formed by a coral reef and opposite to a hard sandy beach well suited ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... boulders, bursting into foam and gyrating in dizzy whirlpools, its surface broken by explosions of spray or pitted by devouring vortices resembling the oily mouths of marine monsters. Below this, in turn, is the White Horse, worst of all. Here the flood somersaults over a tremendous reef, flinging on high a gleaming curtain of spray. These rapids are well named, for the tossing waves resemble nothing more than runaway white horses ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... burning aloft into orange. Here waves of fire beat over golden shores and red clouds extended as an army in regular column upon column. At the zenith, billows of scarlet leaped in feathery foam against a purple continent and the flaming tide extended from reef to reef among a thousand aerial bays and estuaries of alternating gloom and glow until shrouded and dimmed in an orange tawny haze of infinite distance. In the immediate foreground of this majestic display, like a handful of rose-leaves ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... on any hidden reef," said the master of the vessel. "If we do we may go down or be laid up for a long while for repairs. These waters are fairly well charted, but there is still a great deal to be learned about them. From time to time they have had earthquakes down here, and volcano ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... time it was supposed that the reef-builders inhabited very deep waters; for they were sometimes brought up upon sounding-lines from a depth of many hundreds or even thousands of feet, and it was taken for granted that they must have had their home where they were found: but the facts recently ascertained respecting the subsidence ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sign to hush the child's merry tongue; and peering forth in intense anxiety, the others perceived a lateen sail passing perilously near, but happily keeping aloof from the sharp reef of rocks around their shelter. Arthur had forgotten the child's prayers and his own, but Ulysse connected them with dressing, and the alarm of the passing ship had recalled them to the young man's mind, though he felt shy as he found ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the remaining destroyer, running well within range of the shore batteries to get at her, and within ten minutes had so riddled her with a storm of small projectiles that she lowered her colors, turned in towards the beach, struck on a reef, and in another moment was being helplessly pounded to pieces by the surf. At the same time small boats from the plucky yacht that had placed her in this sad plight were busily engaged in rescuing such of her crew as could ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... that future exploration will develop Midian as it has done India. The quartzose outcrop called the "Wynaad reef" (Madras Presidency) produced only a few poor penny-weights per ton, two and seven being the extremes, while much of it was practically unproductive. Presently, in February, 1878, the district was visited by Sir Andrew Clarke, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... eyes—appraising eyes, indeed—from time to time as the younger man's interminable stream of talk of the Cause flowed on. But the Doctor had his passion also. When it burst its bonds, he was saying: "Look here, you crazy man—take a reef in your canvas picture of jocund day upon the misty mountain tops—get down to grass roots." Grant turned an exalted face upon the Doctor in astonishment. The Doctor ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... politics by imagination. Borden had nothing but a demoralized remnant, which the Liberals pillaged when they discarded Free Trade, helped themselves to a high, virtually protective, tariff for revenue only, took a reef out of the Tory "old flag" monopoly by establishing the British Preference and sent a contingent to the South African War in the name of Empire. Laurier was master in Quebec, in the new West whose two new Provinces he created, in immigration, in great ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... West Indies, he met with an old Spaniard who remembered the wreck of the Spanish ship, and gave him directions how to find the very spot. It was on a reef of rocks, a few leagues from Porto ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and ships were considerably impeded in their course. A new island was thrown up, consisting of high cliffs, which was claimed by his Danish Majesty, and named "Nyoe," or the New Island; but before a year had elapsed it sunk beneath the sea, leaving a reef of rocks thirty ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... concerto must be, at the same time, serious in thoughts and in their developments, graceful and brilliant, in order to bring forth the talent of execution of the virtuoso. Here is a double reef to avoid, and here many artists have been wrecked. Vieuxtemps and Leonard are the modern masters who have been the most successful in this difficult style; but how ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... 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 ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... shining tiny things Frolic on every wave that flings Against the prow its showery spray; All creatures joying in the morn, Save them forever from joyance torn, Whose bark was lost where now the dolphins play; Save them that by the fabled shore, Down the pale stream are washed away, Far to the reef of bones are borne; And never revisits them the light, Nor sight of long-sought land and pilot more; Nor heed they now the lone bird's flight Round the lone ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... Wales, on the 17th of March, bound for Hong Kong. Everything went well until the 9th of the following month, when she encountered a severe gale. Despite all that skillful seamanship could do, and in the face of the most strenuous exertions, she struck the dangerous Susanne Reef, near Poseat Island, one of the Caroline ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder." And the morning dawned clear, the ice was moving and their prison widening. On July 3, Haabet cleared the last ice-reef, and the shore lay open ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... of this first trip, arising from the poor appliances he had, were enough to discourage, if not deter, a heart less bold than his, but to him a new difficulty only meant the letting out of another reef in his resolution to conquer it. Thus it was that immediately upon his return from this, his first trip, he not only announced that he would make another ascent the ensuing week, but that he would undertake something never previously undertaken in aerial navigation, namely, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... fence round &c. (circumscribe) 229; house, nestle, ensconce; take charge of. escort, convoy; garrison; watch, mount guard, patrol. make assurance doubly sure &c. (caution) 864; take up a loose thread; take precautions &c. (prepare for) 673; double reef topsails. seek safety; take shelter, find shelter &c. 666. Adj. safe, secure, sure; in safety, in security; on the safe side; under the shield of, under the shade of, under the wing of, under the shadow of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 great inroads on the neighbouring coast. The ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... followed by fresh narratives; in particular, of a vessel he had run upon the Florida reef at night, where wreckers had been retained in advance to look out for signals, and come on board and quarrel on pretense and set fire to the vessel, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... (fortification) reduto. Redoubtable timinda. Redress (amend) rebonigi, ripari. Reduce (to powder) pisti. Reduce (dissolve) solvi. Reduce malpliigi. Redundance suficxego. Redundant suficxega. Reed kano. Reef (rocks) rifo. Reel (stagger) sxanceligxi. Re-enter reeniri. Re-establish reigi. Refection mangxeto. Refectory mangxejo. Refer to turni sin. Referring to rilate al. Refine rafini. Refined (manners) bonmaniera, gxentila. Refiner rafinisto. Refinery ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... came upon him the dim sense of a foaming reef of argument ahead—such as this: "Then there ought to be no death! And what ought not to be, cannot be! But there is death: what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... and cracks; the skirting, having absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... their course lay is now dotted with mining-fields and townships, and fertile spaces of tilled tropical plantations. The coast-line rich in harbours is the busy haunt of steamers, and the narrow waterway between the mainland and the great barrier reef the home of many lightships. But when Kennedy and his party made their pioneer journey, the great desolation of the wilderness beset them on every side from the land, whilst the sea off-shore held ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... ended. The heaven was all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall, and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a hardy sailor who had been on the lakes in the roughest weather, "no boat would live now to reach the reef. Better wait ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... there, and was not sorry. The place was too eerie to stay in long. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake when we met again on the inner reef, "I've knowed they amateurs run straight off home when they've a-found theirselves under Hospital. A terr'ble place! Yu knows now. Did 'ee ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... 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
... Edward Redick Benjamin Redman Andre Read Barnard Reed Christian Reed Curtis Reed Eliphaz Reed George Reed Jeremiah Reed Job Reed John Reed (2) Jonathan Reed Joseph Reed Levi Reed Thomas Reed (2) William Reed (2) John Reef Nicholas Reen Thomas Reeves Jacques Refitter Julian Regan Hugh Reid Jacob Reiton Jean Remong Jean Nosta Renan Louis Renand John Renean Pierre Renear Thomas Renee Thomas Rennick Frederick Reno Jean Renovil ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... Cartier Islands These uninhabited islands came under Australian authority in 1931; formal administration began two years later. Ashmore Reef supports a rich and diverse avian and marine habitat; in 1983, it became a National Nature Reserve. Cartier Island, a former bombing range, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... yards to the S.E., but chiefly under water. It consists of large blocks of a volcanic conglomerate, some of which measure nineteen feet by six or eight, and ten feet in thickness; whilst a little farther north another wall extends E.N.E. to a natural reef of rocks." (Hamilton, Researches in Asia Minor, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... evil hour Declared his message, that the gift was thine. Whereat the hero, while the shooting spasm Had fastened on the lungs, seized him by the foot Where the ankle turns i' the socket, and, with a thought, Hurl'd on a surf-vex'd reef that showed i' the sea: And rained the grey pulp from the hair, the brain Being scattered with the blood. Then the great throng Saddened their festival with piteous wail For one in death and one in ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Restoration with the Spaniards was the insurgents' port of entry and the base of considerable illicit trade with Turks Island. The harbor of Puerto Plata, the most important city on the north coast, is formed by a small bay, enclosed on the sea side by a reef of coral rock. There is plenty of depth within, but little room, and only three or four large steamers can with safety anchor here at the same time. The harbor is well protected except on the north. During gales from that direction it becomes exceedingly uncomfortable, and the narrow entrance ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... incurred in connection with the girls who worked in my establishment. With my complexion and my pronounced liking for variety, a score of girls, nearly all of them pretty and seductive, as most Paris girls are, was a reef on which my virtue made shipwreck every day. Curiosity had a good deal to do with it, and they profited by my impatience to take possession by selling their favours dearly. They all followed the example ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... undertone to the captain, who listened to him deferentially, apparently regarding his passenger as the commander, rather than himself. Unobserved in the fog, and skilfully piloted, the Claymore coasted along the steep shore to the north of Jersey, hugging the land to avoid the formidable reef of Pierres-de-Leeq, which lies in the middle of the strait between Jersey and Sark. Gacquoil, at the helm, sighting in turn Greve de Leeq, Gros Nez, and Plermont, making the corvette glide in among those chains of reefs, felt his way along to a certain extent but with the self-confidence ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... of the name. But there are certainly many caves under the fields and vineyards of Salissa. There is one excellent natural harbour, a bay, about a mile wide, in the south coast of the island. It is protected from heavy seas by a reef of rock, a natural breakwater, which stretches across and almost blocks the ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... not. But if they keep their course another half-minute they'll be on the sunk reef, and a lot of 'em'll be drowned. I wonder will the old Laocoon ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... hear! Hark to my stormy shriek! Toilers upon the sea, the Whistling-buoy would speak! List to my sobbing shout! list, for my word is brief: Death is beneath me here! death on the sunken reef Where the jagged ledge is hid and the slimy seaweeds grow, And the long kelp streamers wave in the dark green depths below, Where, under the shell-clad hulk, the gaunt shark makes his lair,— Toilers upon the sea, here is ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... eastern shores, has been the scene of numerous surveys, among the latest of which was that by Captain Blackwood in the Fly. One important result of this survey was the finding of a passage through the great Barrier Reef for vessels navigating Torres Strait; but as more than one passage was considered essential to the safety of a route so much frequented, the Rattlesnake was commissioned, in September 1846, for a further survey, to be ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... like the sun in his breast. Weariness fell from him, and he leaped overside, not feeling the chill of the shallows. With a grunt, he heaved the boat up on the narrow strand and knotted the painter to a fang-like jut of reef. ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... after considering audibly which island he should visit first, gave him the position of Bowers's Island and began to discuss coral reefs and volcanic action. They were now well in among the islands. Two they passed at a distance, and went so close to a third—a mere reef with a few palms upon it—that Mr. Chalk, after a lengthy inspection through his binoculars, was able ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
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