"Shoal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Of the shoal spaces which lie between them and the mainland, two-thirds dry at low-water, and the remaining third becomes a system of lagoons whose distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it forces its way through the intervals ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... singly, swimming hurriedly, just giving the leaves a pat with their tails, as if closing the door behind them. These seemed to be messengers, for presently others of a larger size would come along more leisurely, as if to clear the way, and in a short time would appear quite a shoal of these beautiful fish of all sizes, forming a procession, as if they had some kind of carnival or festival afoot, and were making the most ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... they hold correspondence, let them go and come without any let or obstacle: an instance of this was seen in the year 1627, when two galleys from Spain were carrying assistance to Marmora, which was then besieged by the Moors. These galleys struck on a shoal, when the Moors seized all the people on board, making captives of the Christians and setting at liberty all the Moors, who were chained to the oar; as for the Gypsy galley-slaves whom they found amongst these last, they did not make them slaves, but received them ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... swift-sailing squadrons, of strength sufficient to repel his cruisers. And I would carry the war straight into his unprotected ports of trade. I can name a score of such defenceless places, and I know every shoal of their harbours. For example, Whitehaven might be entered. That is a town of fifty thousand inhabitants. The fleet of merchantmen might with the greatest ease be destroyed, a contribution levied, and Ireland's coal cut off for a winter. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... open stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of time, when he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he thought—'ware shoal, everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other's judgments—a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... quarter of an hour's time the boat was dry; we were favoured with little wind and smooth water, otherwise she must have stove to pieces, the ground being very foul; it ebbs dry above a league off, and there is shoal water a great deal further out, so that it is dangerous for a ship to haul into this bay. While the boat was dry got all the water casks out of the hold, and put them ashore to be filled. At six hauled the boat off, having received no damage; at eight, it being four feet flood, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... correct, and this one may be entirely wrong. I shall rely more on keeping a careful watch tonight than on the map; you see this cape? For all I know it may jut out fifty miles east of where it appears to be and we might run into shoal water ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... our clothes: about one o'clock an Indian came running to the shore with a turkey on his back: several others soon joined him, but we had no intercourse with them. We then went on for three miles, but the ascent soon became so obstructed by sandbars and shoal water, that after attempting in vain several channels, we determined to rest for the night under some high bluffs on the south, and send out to examine the best channel. We had made eight miles along high bluffs on each side. The birds we saw were the ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... the construction of boats that had neither the beauty nor the other advantages of the original type. This was particularly true of sharpies built as yachts with large cabins and heavy rigs. Because the stability of the sharpie's shoal hull was limited, the added weight of high, long cabin trunks and attendant furniture reduced the boat's safety potential. Windage of the topside structures necessary on sharpie yachts also affected speed, ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... wrapped in a sheet) were necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal—and who could cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... good deal of hesitation. But they were amply corroborated by Wilkes and others who followed many years later. "Nothing," says Wilkes, "can exceed the beauty of these waters and their safety. Not a shoal exists in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound or Hood's Canal, that can in any way interrupt their navigation by a 74-gun ship. I venture nothing in saying there is no country in the world that possesses ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... in the introduction to this work, that the general impression on the minds of those best qualified to judge was, that the western streams discharged themselves into a central shoal sea. Mr. Oxley thus expresses himself on ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... coincidence, that as the bird of Nazareth has been found in books only, so the island of Nazareth has been found only on paper. At first, it appeared quite a respectable island; as maritime discovery progressed, it degenerated to a reef, and from that to a shoal; till at last, expunged from the more correct charts of modern hydrographers, it no longer can boast of a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... meridian of Greenwich. The coast is exceedingly dangerous; consequently shipwrecks are rare. The owners, as their national wont is, have done their best to make it safe. Two lighthouses to the north of the true Cape mark and define a long shoal with a heavy break, the Almadies rocks, a ledge mostly sunk, but here and there rising above the foam in wicked-looking diabolitos (devilings), or black fangs, of which the largest is die-shaped. A ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Resolution and Doubtful Islands; he believed them to have been discovered by De Bougainville. The following morning at daylight they found themselves almost on the top of what Cook calls "a half drowned island, or rather large coral shoal of about 20 leagues in circuit." In the lagoon which it surrounded they saw a large canoe under sail. The island was named after Furneaux. As they were now in such a dangerous neighbourhood, Cook ordered that at night the cutter with an officer and seven men should keep in advance of the ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... commanding a United States man-of-war, captures an English blockade-runner near an isolated shoal somewhere in the vicinity of Bermuda. England asserts that the shoal is a shore, and that the maritime league is violated. Mr. Seward at once yields, Neptune defends as he always does, the rights of the national Tritons, and of the national flag. The supreme power sides ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... again By day nor yet by night, While man shall take his life to stake At risk of shoal or main (By day nor yet ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... "Passed Proudfoot shoal and arrived at Thursday Island. First sight of Australia. Lot of men came aboard, all called Captain. They are all pearl-fishers or pilots, not a bit like the bushmen I expected. When they came aboard they divided into ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... pilchard schools came nearer, but is now almost abandoned for the drift-net; we shall find seines still common further west. The seine may be described as a wall of netting, buoyed at the surface and weighted below; this is dipped in the thick of the shoal, its ends drawn together, and the fish taken out with a tuck-net. The leaded bottom of the net must touch the ground or the fish will escape; thus seine-fishing is only practicable in shallow waters. With it is associated the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... amber and blue, some with velvety bands of violet and green, others altogether velvety black with spots of vermilion or emerald-green, the under side of the wings corresponding to the spot, while sometimes a shoal of turquoise-blue or wholly canary-colored sprites fluttered in the sunbeams; the flash of sun-birds and the flutter of butterflies giving one an idea of the joy which possibly was intended to be the heritage of all animated existence. In these openings ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... to him eternal friendship. This day was beautiful. Our souls, anxious for more delightful sensations, were in harmony with the aspect of the heavens, and got again a new ray of hope. Towards four in the afternoon, an unlooked for event happened which gave us some consolation. A shoal of flying fish passed under our raft, and as there were an infinite number of openings between the pieces which composed it, the fish were entangled in great quantities. We threw ourselves upon them, and captured a considerable number. ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gaulus and Melita,[47] which mark the boundary between the Adriatic and Tuscan Seas. There a strong east wind arose for them, and on the following day it carried the ships to the point of Libya, at the place which the Romans call in their own tongue "Shoal's Head." For its name is "Caputvada," and it is five days' journey from Carthage ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... arrived. The Covadonga had come up level with the Peruvian monitor, and the Union, being obliged to circle to seaward as she found herself in shoal water, was about three-quarters of a mile astern, although still firing incessantly. Condell gave one last look round and then shouted "Fire!" through the voice-tube which led to the gunboat's little turret. Immediately there came a deafening roar and a tremendous concussion, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... forgit 'er?" granted Stump, "I wish them Romans had looted her. W'en I was goin' down the Hooghly, she was comin' up, in tow. Her rope snapped at the wrong moment, an' she ran me on top of the James an' Mary shoal. Remember 'er, damn 'er!" ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... tributaries still descend nearly to the sea-level, though their fronts are back in narrow fiords, eight or ten miles from the sound. A similar point juts out into the sound five or six miles to the south, while the missing portion is submerged and forms a shoal. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... that?" replied the captain; "there's many a shoal and lone rock down on the charts that nobody ever could find again. I've had my ship right over the Chimneys, near enough to see the smoke, if they had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... push helped to make up his mind. He sat, involuntarily. I pushed with all my might and, slowly and jerkily, the dingy slid off the shoal. But there were others all about. With one hand on the bow I guided her between them and to the edge of the channel. Then, wading along the slippery bank, I brought her to the skiff. My passenger had been making remarks in transit, but I paid no ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... school of mackerel, and the porpoises which fed on the silver fish, all made wonderful by the eerie fires of a summer sea; but I could not tell that all at once. I think that I knew what it was when the great sea pig leaped, for his shape was plain to me. The shoal went its way, and after it the harmless porpoises. But the sea was fairly alight now; all round me it shone with its soft glow, and my body was wondrous with it, and I seemed to float in ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... See the Early Plantagenets, by Bishop Stubbs: one of the very few masterpieces among the shoal of little books on great subjects in which ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... with hair of a dusky yellow on the under side. These, when near the slope, sprang headlong into the water, and, diving with a splash, came up in shoals, darting forward with a springing motion, and emerging and disappearing much like a shoal of porpoises. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... sea to riches grew; Freight after freight the winds in favour blew; Fate steer'd him clear; gulf, rock, nor shoal Of all his bales exacted toll. Of other men the powers of chance and storm Their dues collected in substantial form; While smiling Fortune, in her kindest sport, Took care to waft his vessels to their port. His partners, factors, agents, faithful proved; His goods—tobacco, sugar, spice— Were ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... myself was concerned, it was enough for him to know that I belonged to a family which he knew and liked, and hearing, moreover, of my fervent devotion to modern Italian and French music in particular, he decided that I was the very man for him. He had the whole shoal of Bellini's, Donizetti's, Adam's, and Auber's operatic scores copied out, and I was to give the good people of Riga the benefit of them with ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... At Shoal Creek a rear guard was holding off the Union advance which had started from Athens, the two pronged pinchers General Buford had foreseen. And now the island came ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... wrought up over the poor miserable little children swarming below, I found a nice quiet nook on the shelter deck where I snuggled down and amused myself watching the native boys swim. The water on their bronze bodies made them shine in the sunlight, and they played about like a shoal of young porpoises. I must have stayed there an hour, for when I came down there was considerable stir on board. A passenger was missing and we were being held while a search of the ship was made. I was getting most excited when the purser, who is the ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... barnacles grew very fast. Indeed, the ship's bottom was like a half-tide rock, and when the water washed up the sides, as she rolled, the noise made by the barnacles was like the surf on a sea-beach. We were followed for several days by a shoal of dolphins, which we caught in great numbers night and morning. Finally we got round the Cape, and to St. Helena, where we stayed four days, and employed men to assist us in chopping off grass and barnacles as far as we could reach. ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... slow its wending; But winning is sweet, but right is fine; And shoal of trout, or willowy bending— Though Law ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... a soft grating sound, as though a boat had just touched in shoal water. The Jackal spun round quickly and faced (it is always best to face) the creature he had been talking about. It was a twenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-riveted boiler-plate, studded and keeled ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... bass must have their beds on this shoal here," said Tom, when they paddled back over the place at which success had come to them. "It's early in the season as yet, and a lot of them are still around here. They haven't gone out into deep water with their newly-hatched ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... wer thin an' vew Avore the zummer sky o' blue, An' I'd noo ho but how to vind Zome play to entertain my mind; Along the water, as did wind Wi' zedgy shoal an' hollow crook, How I did ramble by the brook That ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... the long shelving area extending from the coast out to the edge of the continental plateau and stretching from the South Shoal off Nantucket to New York, making in all, from the eastern part of the Grand Bank to New York Bay, a distance of about 2,000 miles, an almost continuous extent of ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... to a friend's house on Dee-side, in Aberdeenshire, I frequently delighted to walk by the banks of the river. I, one day, observed something like a black string moving along the edge of the water where it was quite shallow. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that this was a shoal of young eels, so closely joined together as to appear, on a superficial view, on continued body, moving briskly up against the stream. To avoid the retardment they experienced from the force of the current, they kept close ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... dealer who pitched his earthenware van at the corner was ringing his plates together to prove them indestructible; old Madge Campion, who sold gooseberry-tarts and hot mutton-pies on her board under an awning supported by clothes-props, was surrounded by a shoal of children, as happy as the sunshine; the man with the panorama was exhibiting, at one halfpenny a head, the murder of Lord William Russell to a string of boys and girls who mounted the stool in turn ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... Hartog, as much to give the crew some novel occupation as from any other motive, set the men to work salting and drying the fish, so that we secured three barrels full, as an addition to our ordinary fare, which was very acceptable. The flying fish were pursued by a shoal of dolphins, which continued to play round our ship for several days, and some of these we captured with the line ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... of the creature, for it not only told of its own ways, but at the same time afforded a glimpse into the countless ages of the past, when these crinoids, so rare and so rarely seen nowadays, formed a prominent feature of the animal kingdom. I could see, without great effort of the imagination, the shoal of Lockport teeming with the many genera of crinoids which the geologists of New York have rescued from that prolific Silurian deposit, or recall the formations of my native country, in the hill-sides of which also, among fossils indicating shoal water deposits, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... of oars in her ears. How Betty had lowered the jib, thrown over the anchor, and manned the skiff so quickly would always be a mystery to Louise. But the "able seaman" knew this coast as well, at least, as Lawford Tapp. They were just over a shoal, and there was safe anchorage for a ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... indeed the legend goes. One morning, fifteen summers past, the poor fisherman plunged into the element, that had been his sole sustaining friend from youth, to bathe, and before scarce fifteen minutes had elapsed, surrounded by a shoal of mackerel, and in sight of home and her who made it home, was devoured by these ravenous fish. When he raised his arms from out the water to show the dreadful fate that threatened him, and to rouse the alarm of his unconscious wife, a hundred mackerel hung, like plummets, from the flesh. The ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the seashore, the trawlers lay before thee these gifts by the grace of thine aid from the promontory, having imprisoned a tunny shoal in their nets of spun hemp in the green sea-entrances: a beechen cup and a rude stool of heath and a glass cup holding wine, that thou mayest rest thy foot weary and cramped with dancing while thou chasest away ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... superior Nature, who are capable of effecting what is wonderful, and what is not to be met with in the ordinary course of things. Ulysses's Ship being turned into a Rock, and AEneas's Fleet into a Shoal of Water Nymphs; though they are very surprising Accidents, are nevertheless probable, when we are told that they were the Gods who thus transformed them. It is this kind of Machinery which fills the Poems both of Homer and Virgil with such Circumstances as are wonderful, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... now the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the shallow shoal waters, and move up and down the coast, during the whole of the open season, in great schools acres in extent. Occasionally their passage may be marked from afar by the flight of hungry sea-fowl hovering and flittering above them; the white plumage ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... as to the personal appearance and habits of the latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flittered into the water with a ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... waters of the deep ocean join the water nearer the coast, which has partaken of the movements of the land, as the place where the great wave is first generated; it would also appear that the wave is larger or smaller, according to the extent of shoal water which has been agitated together with the bottom ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... dykes had to be built that the boats might be floated across. Frost set in heavily, and the ice cut the men as they worked in the water to haul the boats over shoals or rocks. The bateaux often needed to be beached and caulked, while both whites and Indians had to help carry the loads round the shoal places. At every Indian village it was necessary to stop, hold a conference, and give presents. At last the Wea village—or Ouiatanon, as Hamilton called it—was reached. Here the Wabash chiefs, who had made peace with the Americans, promptly ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the Sarawak river and the next hill a-head, and as you approach the river's mouth, steer for a small island close to the shore, called Pulo Karra, or Monkey Island. These marks will conduct you over a shoal with 1/4 three, the least depth at high water; you will then deepen your water, and keep away for the low green point on the far side of the river, edging gradually in; and when you are some distance from ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of a dangerous shoal. ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... below and put my feet on the table after we pass the Shoal of Seals," he explained. "That is the time I take my 'watch below,' as we call it, when we come down for a rest or a sleep. But you are eager to hear the story. Very good. Here goes. A good many years ago an expedition came up to this part of the world ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... rewarded the white men for their faith in their disreputable henchman. Charley played with the light craft in the great volume of stream as a feather might yield to a gentle breeze. The canoe sidled in to the shore through a threatening shoal of rocky outcrop, and the first stage of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... Tree-fern and hart's-tongue show verdant fronds, flushed with autumnal red or gold, and a dense growth of starry flowers suggests a bed of many-coloured tulips. Dazzling fish dart through the crystal depths. A shoal of scarlet and green parrot-fish pursue a tribe striped with blue and orange. Gold-fish flash like meteors between uplifted spears of blood-red coral, and the glittering scales of myriads, splashed with ruby, or flecked with amethyst, reflect the colours of the gorgeously-frilled ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... sea upon the beach, I could see the pebbles on the sands shining as the foam left them. And then, suddenly, the lugger drove ashore upon a bank, stern first. In a moment she had swung round, broadside on to the shoal, heaving over on her side. Every wave which struck her lifted her further in, tossing her over on her starboard side. I could see that the tide was now very nearly fully in, and I knew that the lugger would lie there, high and dry, as ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... starboard bow, edged by lines of breaking surf, sand-dunes topped with green merged gradually southward, into strange jade-green hills, low and soft as brushed velvet in the distance. To the North the dunes tapered to a long, narrow shoal over which, as far as the eye could reach, swells of clearest emerald broke into a ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... outside the fort. But Sergeant Jasper rushed out, seized the broken staff, and again set it up on the rampart. Meantime, General Clinton had landed on an island and was trying to cross with his soldiers to the further end of Sullivan's Island. But the water was at first too shoal for the boats. The soldiers jumped overboard to wade. Suddenly the water deepened, and they had to jump aboard to save themselves from drowning. All this time Americans were firing at them from the beach. General Clinton ordered a retreat. The fleet also sailed out—all that ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... nation, commerce or trust with all nations, peace at home, grounded upon our enemies' fear or love of us abroad, and attended with plenty of all things necessary either for the preservation of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal conceit) then next to God and thy King give thy thanks for the same to the Navy. As for honour, who knows not (that knows anything) that in all records of late times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame and renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread that runs through ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... boards of Debrett. He absolutely declined to execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain favoured States. His "water-colour-line," as a New York paper phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were the things that Quentock ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... when upwards of a dozen out of a large shoal leaped, or flew rather, right in among us, while as many more passed clean over the boat. It was a curious coincidence, and at all events afforded us not only a substantial, but a very delicious meal, cooked by the skilful hands of Monsieur Jacotot. It put us all in good ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... that inexpressible sense of brotherhood. Science has given us the steamship,—it has destroyed the sailor. The age of discovery is closing with this century. Up to the limits of the ice-fields, every shore is mapped out, every shoal sounded. Not only does Science give the fixed, but she is even transferring to her charts the variable features of the deep,—the sliding current, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... boundary of a river, in looking from its source towards the sea, and the immediate margin or border of a lake. Also, a thwart, banco, or bench, for the rowers in a galley. Also, a rising ground in the sea, differing from a shoal, because not rocky but composed of sand, mud, or gravel. Also, mural elevations constructed of clay, stones, or any materials at ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... and the waves on the open Pacific were growing each moment higher and loppier. But the huge mountain of water that washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker. The Australasian had passed at that instant over a submerged coral-bar, quite deep enough, indeed, to let her cross its top without the slightest danger of grazing, but still raised so high toward the surface as to produce a considerable constant ground-swell, ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... Vaigats shore, but now crossed over towards the south side of the strait. When about the middle of the channel I was startled by all at once seeing the bottom grow light under us, and had nearly run the boat on a shoal of which no one knew anything. There was scarcely more than two or three feet of water, and the current ran over it like a rapid river. Shoals and sunken rocks abound there on every hand, especially on the south side of the strait, and it required great care to navigate ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... against the wind, we gave up, and were borne along. [27:16]And running a little under the island called Clauda, we with difficulty became masters of the boat, [27:17]and taking it out they used helps, under-girding the ship; and fearing lest they should fall on the shoal, letting down the mast they were driven in that condition. [27:18]And we being exceedingly pressed with the storm, on the next day they cast the cargo overboard, [27:19]and on the third day with our own ...
— The New Testament • Various
... and seem very happy. Poor Mr. Porter is very sick, and so are the two or three coloured passengers, who won't 'make an effort' at all. Mrs. H- (the captain's wife), a young Cape lady, and I are the only 'female ladies' of the party. The other day we saw a shoal of porpoises, amounting to many hundreds, if not some thousands, who came frisking round the ship. When we first saw them they looked like a line of breakers; they made such a splash, and they jumped right out of the water three feet in height, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... 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
... direction that the Indians had taken. The savages were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards the village whither the captive had been taken. Just as they entered its precincts and looked upon its ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... a shoal of barramundi had been bombed with dynamite. Immediately after the explosion the white onlookers as well as the blacks dived off-hand into the stream to secure the helpless fish. One of the party seized a weighty ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... a line of foam appears on the Lagoon, which is supposed at first to be a shoal of fish, but turns out to be a troop of naked island beauties, swimming out to the ship. The decent missionaries were certainly guiltless of putting that into my head, whether they ever saw it or not—a great many things happening in ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... shoal of inquiries, and maybe a scandal," I answered thoughtfully. "If Jack has intentionally disappeared for a day or two and all at once finds himself ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... veiled in its pall of fog, lay the coast. Ahead, and to the right, was a large area of shoal water, portions of which uncovered at low tide. It had already proved the graveyard of many fine ships whose bones still showed when the water fell, and Langdon had no wish to leave his ship there as an everlasting ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This termination wich is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... out of the open sea into the Port Jackson River. They were now in a harbor fifteen miles long, land-locked on both sides, and not a shoal or a rock in it. This wonderful haven, in which all the navies that float or ever will float might maneuver all day and ride at anchor all night without jostling, was the sea avenue by which they approached a land ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success: that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all; here, But here upon this bank and shoal of time We'd jump the life to come. . . ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the "Delaware," Capt. Alexander, had failed to reckon on the swift outflowing of the tide; and just as the sailors on that ship were becoming jubilant over the prospect of a victory, a mighty quiver throughout the ship told that she had been left on a shoal by the ebb tide. The enemy was not long in discovering the helpless condition of the "Delaware;" and field-pieces and siege-guns were brought down to the river-bank, until the luckless Americans saw themselves commanded by a heavy battery. In this unhappy predicament there was no course ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... was, how like a lily, with a purity and an innocence to disarm any villainy. Thirty families had halted at the mill the day before, the mob checking their advance at that point. All was quiet until about four in the afternoon. We were camped on either side of Shoal Creek. Children were playing freely about while their mothers and fathers worked at the little affairs of a pilgrimage like that. Most of them had then been three months on the road, enduring incredible ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... joint; so, as I never carry string, I splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches. When a boy, I was—once or twice—a bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in box or bag. I found them under big stones, or in the fields, wherever I had the luck. I never tie nor otherwise fasten the joints of my rod; ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Wears its accustomed aspect, with foul wrecks And blood disfigured; floating carcasses Roll on the rocky shores; the poor remains Of the barbaric armament to flight Ply every oar inglorious: onward rush The Greeks amid the ruins of the fleet, As through a shoal of fish caught in the net, Spreading destruction; the wide ocean o'er Wailings are heard, and loud laments, till night, With darkness on her brow, brought grateful truce. Should I recount each circumstance of woe, Ten times on my unfinished tale ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... they are dissolved, or uncrystallized, they are really separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of fish in the sea;—generally at about equal distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of them as equidistant, like the spots in the print ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Some came triumphantly to land, dragging huge fish, many pounds in weight, by the gills; several received severe bites from the sharp teeth of the fish, into whose mouths they had incautiously thrust their hands. Not a few scampered out, declaring that there were sharks or other monsters among the shoal, which had attacked their legs. Among the most eager were Gilbert, Fenton, and Oliver Dane. The three youths on all occasions bore each other company, and after each of them had secured a fish large enough to feed a dozen hungry men or more, Fenton and Oliver were seen coming out with ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... plan of operations was immediately adopted. And, accordingly, the designated numbers were told off to man the river, and at once set in motion to perform the duty; while the rest retraced their way to the village, except the hunter, who, seeking a shoal place, waded the river, and was soon out of sight among the thickets of ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... place and manner; and that it was not our design and expectation to have done this, but only to have landed on the Fly and burned some of their stores; but being come in, we spied those ships, and with our long boats, one by one, fired them, our ships running all a-ground, it being so shoal water. We were led to this by it seems, a renegado captain of the Hollanders, who found himself ill used by De Ruyter for his good service, and so come over to us, and hath done us good service; so that now we trust him, and he himself did go on this expedition. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... A shoal of flying-fish got up out of the warm, shining water and ran away over the ripples like so many silver rats; yellow tangles of Gulf-weed swam in close squadron on the emerald sea; and on the western horizon screw-pile lighthouses stood up out of the water, marking the nearness ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... character of the region or the distance to be traversed might render best, followed along the windings of the stream till he came to a beaver dam. He would examine the water carefully to find some shallow which the beavers must pass in crossing from shoal to deep water. Here he would plant his trap, always under water, and carefully adjust the bait. He would then follow on to another dam, and thus proceed till six traps were set, which was the usual number taken on such ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... woods, the she-bear bereaved of her whelps: but there is in man a hatred crueller than that. Dumb, out of suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble confusedly seaward along the Loire stream; the tide rolling them back: clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the shoal-places: Carrier writes, 'Quel torrent revolutionnaire, What a torrent of Revolution!' For the man is rabid; and the Time is rabid. These are the Noyades of Carrier; twenty-five by the tale, for what ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... beguiled from that Arcadia by wily persons who took advantage of his innocent youth, who initiated him into the metropolitan mysteries which sadden the soul and deplete the pocket, who finally abandoned him upon the shoal of a youngest brother's allowance when his father passed away from the place in Lincolnshire, and young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet's stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all. Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite's ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... hardly moving before, stopped dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The Olaf was anchored at the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below the horizon now. Only the three-legged beacon ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... coming seldom to Papeete, on the produce of the land. There was a little stream that ran not far away, in which he bathed, and down this on occasion would come a shoal of fish. Then the natives would assemble with spears, and with much shouting would transfix the great startled things as they hurried down to the sea. Sometimes Strickland would go down to the reef, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... receive donations for charitable purposes, and annually relieve great numbers of poor seamen and seamen's widows and orphans; and as they alone supply outward-bound ships with ballast, on notice of any shoal or obstruction arising in the river Thames, they immediately direct their men and lighters to work on it till it is removed. The profits arising to the Corporation by this useful regulation is ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... 23rd.—A shoal of porpoises passed us. A sailor struck one with a harpoon, but it got off again. They are of a salmon colour, no more like pigs than horses, just the shape of salmon, only much larger. In swimming they ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... 12th they again set sail, being now among the Celebes, where they found the water shoal and coasting very dangerous. The wind, too, was high and contrary, and their difficulties greater than anything they had found. On January the 9th the wind, however, came aft, and they appeared to have found a passage out of these dangers, ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... The pilot, with all his energy, is telegraphing to the steersman. This is a very close and complicated piece of navigation, I should think, this running up the Mersey, for every moment we are passing some kind of a signal token, which warns off from some shoal. Here is a bell buoy, where the waves keep the bell always tolling; here, a buoyant lighthouse; and "See there, those shoals, how pokerish they look!" says one of the passengers, pointing to the foam on our starboard bow. All is bustle, animation, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. "What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... folk had long lamented the superiority which these historians had acquired; and as national prejudices are kept up at a small expense, they have eagerly raised their unworthy countrymen by their acclamations to a level with these great men. Besides, I have had the good fortune to avoid the shoal which is the most dangerous in this country. A historian is always to a certain degree a political character, and every reader according to his private opinion seeks in the most remote ages the sentiments ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... appear to cease even when the young are fully developed, but he allows them to swim in and out, and try their powers, if not to search for food; and when danger appears, opens his mouth, when they all swim back again in a shoal, for safety. The natives assert that some species, at all events, are not actually developed in the parent's head, but are laid and hatched in the sand, the male and female watching carefully over them; and that ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... served by senses unable to perceive things otherwise than through the succession of time, it is as though it were not. Let us be still more precise; let us take the case of a shipwreck. The ship that must perish has not yet left the port; the rock or the shoal that shall rend it sleeps peacefully beneath the waves; the storm that shall burst forth at the end of the month is slumbering, far beyond our gaze, in the secret of the skies. Normally, were nothing written, had the catastrophe[3] not already taken ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... about equal in consistency to the softest material found in the Pontchartrain route. A sounding pole with a 4-inch disc on the end can be easily pushed three or four feet into the mud and pulled out again. Wave and current action cause the channel to shoal at the rate of 78,000 to 132,000 cubic yards per mile per year, depending on the softness of the bottom and the depth. Where the highest rate obtains, the surrounding material consists of soft mud, without a trace ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... say that many many more fish are found dead since the thaw melted the banks of swept snow off the sides of the ice. It is most piteous; the poor things seem to have come to the edge where the water is shallowest—there is a shoal where we generally feed ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... out over the smooth waters of the Solent, where one or two yachts and a heavy black schooner were creeping up on the tide before the morning breeze. She drummed reflectively with her fingers on the low stone wall. Beneath them a few gulls whirled and screamed over a shoal of little fish. One of the birds had a singular cry, as if it were laughing ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Winnipeg has not always been happy in the matter of its water supply, and the day and the Prince came together to inaugurate a new era. It was accomplished in the modern manner. The Prince pressed a button on the platform and water-gates on Shoal Lake outside the city swung open. In a minute or two a dry fountain in the gardens before the Prince threw up a jet of water. The new water ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... that was all about it. They had grown accustomed to better food, finer bread, store-bought clothes and higher wages, general extravagance—ay, folk had learned to reckon with money more, that was the matter. And now the money was gone again, had slipped away like a shoal of herring out to sea—'twas dire distress for them all, and ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the white beach, evidently in shoal and dangerous waters. She too had encountered a hurricane, and had not come forth victorious. Foremast and forecastle were gone, and her bowsprit was broken. She lay heavily, her ports but a few inches above the water. ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... escaped across the ice which covered the Bay of St. Charles....This was a dangerous and desperate adventure, but worth while the undertaking, in avoidance of our subsequent sufferings. Its desperateness consisted in running two miles across shoal ice, thrown up by the high tides of this latitude; and its danger, in the meeting with air-holes, deceptively covered by ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... heart of a lion; and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was "'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, Did the English fight the French—woe to France! And the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue, Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance, With the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the minefields could not constitute a danger to our own submarines. False buoyed channels with mined areas round them could also be laid in which to catch the submarine. Another device was that of altering the position of light vessels and buoys with the object of putting a submarine on to a shoal. ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... his great scheme—just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will winnow out the true from the false; it makes an upright man a hundred times more certain and more proud of his honor: ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... time to raise her hands and eyes in mute appeal to heaven, before a shoal of new arrivals—"flower girls," "strawberry girls," "match girls," "morning stars," "evening stars," "springs," "summers," "nuns," "bacchantes," etc., claimed her attention; while a troupe of "brigands," "monks," "troubadours," "clowns," "harlequin," "kings," "crusaders," ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... so few minutes that all his calculations as to his location were upset—the Montana plowed herself to a shuddering halt on a shoal, her bow lifting slightly. And when the engines were stopped she rested there, sturdily upright, steady as an island. But in her saloon the men and women who fought and screamed and cursed, beating to and fro in windrows of humanity ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... a considerable time in the Thames, opposite Whitehall. Years had rolled on, but the Quaker mate who had so materially assisted the flying prince—by keeping the secret—arranging the escape with the crew, and when, in fear of danger from a privateer, rowing the prince ashore, and in shoal water carrying him on his shoulders to the land, near the village of Fecamp, in Normandy, yet he had not been with the king to claim any reward. This escape took place in 1651, and nearly twenty years had elapsed, ten of which were after the Restoration; so that in all probability the king, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... west of Santiago, to Cape Frances, where the foul ground west of the Isle of Pines terminates. The Isle of Pines itself was to be seized, in order to establish there a secure base, for coal and against hurricanes, for the small vessels which alone could operate in the surrounding shoal water; and an expedition, composed mainly of the battalion of marines, was actually on the way for that purpose when the protocol was signed. During the three weeks occupied by the preparation and passage of the Santiago expedition, the blockade ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... nor shore was in sight! Ay, my fine captain, stranger things have been done. For on board that very craft, the old Arcturion, were four tall fellows, whom two years previous our skipper himself had picked up in an open boat, far from the farthest shoal. To be sure, they spun a long yarn about being the only survivors of an Indiaman burnt down to the water's edge. But who credited their tale? Like many others, they were keepers of a secret: had doubtless contracted a disgust for ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... steamer built of light draft especially, to profit by any outlet offering least danger from the vigilant patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... me, Over life's tempestuous sea; Unknown waves before me roll, Hiding rock and treach'rous shoal; Chart and compass come from thee; Jesus, ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... hurricanes and driven far from her right course. After three months of exertion and suffering the captain was obliged to make for the port of Lisbon. There the ship was revictualled; but, having sailed again, she struck upon a rocky shoal at a distance of three leagues from Lisbon and was totally wrecked. Talon and his companions were fortunately saved, and found themselves back in France at the ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... you so because otherwise you would not understand. He would not express himself to me in that way. The Mahdi is worse than a whole shoal of crocodiles. Do you understand? That is a nice expression for me. 'Naughty!' They talk ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... miscellany, collectanea[obs3]; museum, menagerie &c. (store) 636; museology[obs3]. crowd, throng, group,; flood, rush, deluge; rabble, mob, press, crush, cohue[obs3], horde, body, tribe; crew, gang, knot, squad, band, party; swarm, shoal, school, covey, flock, herd, drove; atajo[obs3]; bunch, drive, force, mulada [obs3][U.S.]; remuda[obs3]; roundup [U.S.]; array, bevy, galaxy; corps, company, troop, troupe, task force; army, regiment &c. (combatants) 726; host &c. (multitude) 102; populousness. clan, brotherhood, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Orion had a quick run to the rendezvous off the Sha-la-tung shoal, about twenty miles from Pehtang. On their way, near the entrance to the gulf, they came up with the fleet conveying the troops intended to be disembarked near the mouth of the Peiho. It was a magnificent sight, as the clouds of canvas appeared covering the blue ocean, ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... local colour. Books which have a strong sense of place, and are born out of particular streets—and especially streets of an odd, rich, and well-worn flavour—are not any too frequent. Mr. Holliday's Gissingesque appreciation of the humours of landladies and all the queer fish that shoal through the backwaters of New York lodging houses makes this Broome Street neighbourhood exceedingly pleasant for the pilgrim to examine. It was in Mr. Holliday's honour that we sallied into a Hudson Street haberdashery, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of weaving. The eternal harmony of warp and woof, of all manner of knotting, knitting, and reticulation, the art which makes garment possible, woven from the top throughout, draughts of fishes possible, miraculous enough in any pilchard or herring shoal, gathered into companionable catchableness;—which makes, in fine, so many Nations possible, and Saxon ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... leave of any body. She was a free woman; and when my children were purchased, Mr. Sands preferred to have the bill of sale drawn up in her name. It was conjectured that he advanced the money, but it was not known. At the south, a gentleman may have a shoal of colored children without any disgrace; but if he is known to purchase them, with the view of setting them free, the example is thought to be dangerous to their "peculiar institution," and ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... did not long remain unpunished, for Gilling's brother, Suttung, quickly went in search of the dwarfs, determined to avenge him. Seizing them in his mighty grasp, the giant conveyed them to a shoal far out at sea, where they would surely have perished at the next high tide had they not succeeded in redeeming their lives by promising to deliver to the giant their recently brewed mead. As soon as Suttung ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... shoal of simple terms express in Bēowulf the earliest sea-thoughts of the English.... The simplest term is Sǣ.... To this they added Wǣter, Flod, Stream, Lagu, Mere, Holm, Grund, Heathu, Sund, Brim, Garsecg, ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... Narrator arrived at Anguilla in the West-Indies and sent his Boat on Shore, where his men had the News That he and his People were proclaimed Pirates, which put them into such a Consternation that they sought all Opportunitys to run the Ship on shore upon some reef or Shoal, fearing the Narrator should carry ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... Nantucket as a whaling port were passed before the Revolution wiped out her ships and killed or scattered her sailors. It was later discovered that larger ships were more economical, and Nantucket harbor bar was too shoal to admit their passage. For this reason New Bedford became the scene of the foremost activity, and Nantucket thereafter played a minor part, although her barks went cruising on to the end of the chapter and her ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... handed it to the other, who thrust it with his own beneath his arm. Then once more the Friar bent his back, and, Robin having mounted upon it, he stepped sturdily into the water and so strode onward, splashing in the shoal, and breaking all the smooth surface into ever- widening rings. At last he reached the other side and Robin ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... dotted line is very shallow, and is left almost bare at low water; the part north of the line is choked up with irregular reefs. The annular reef on the north-west side is broken, and blends into a shoal sandbank, on which the ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... his veins; the water which we have gradually introduced by a slow endosmose has saturated the albumen and fibrin of the serum, which is returned to the liquid state. The red globules which desiccation had agglutinated, had become motionless like ships stranded in shoal water. Now behold them afloat again: they thicken, swell, round out their edges, detach themselves from each other and prepare to circulate in their proper channels at the first impulse which shall be given them by ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... rose two or three feet above the surface of the water, which not unfrequently had a depth of several feet. Notwithstanding, however, that this was the general character of the country there were often portages, or shoal and dry places, over which it was necessary to carry their boats by main force. In this kind of country the Indians had the manifest advantage, being acquainted with sinuous pathways, which, it is said, enabled them to thread all the intricacies of the hamac ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... party had completed all preparations and Bivens's big steamer, the Buccaneer, slipped quietly through the Narrows and headed for the Virginia coast, towing a trim little schooner built for cruising in the shoal waters ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... proportions of land and water. The whole surface of the globe is supposed to have an area of about two hundred million square miles. Of these only about fifty millions are dry land. Within the harbor of Nassau the divisions of shoal and deep water presented most singular and clearly defined lines of color, azure, purple, and orange-leaf green,—so marked as to be visible half a mile away. All was beneath a sky so deeply and serenely ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... a spermaceti whale, which would occasionally show itself at the top, casting up thin jets of brine. The principal bay, that of Finisterra, as far as the entrance, was beautifully variegated by an immense shoal of sardinhas, on whose extreme skirts the monster was probably feasting. From the northern side of the cape we looked down upon a smaller bay, the shore of which was overhung by rocks of various and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... miles, and to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of Aetna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, had they ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... jasper light Greet jejune souls within this shoal, Where witches lure each helot's eye, Each gyving hoodlum, seer and sage. In blazing tankards gleams a sight As o'er their heads giant rocks roll, Of skinless nudes that gasp and die As poisoned lizards vent ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... his horse, lashed his rifle to his back, filled his powder-horn and bullet-pouch, and journeying westward nearly a hundred miles, through pathless wilds whose solitudes had a peculiar charm for him, came to a romantic spot, called Shoal Creek, in what is now Giles County, in the extreme southern part of Tennessee. He found other adventurers pressing into the new country, where land was abundant and fertile, and could be had ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... running past him? Do the particles of water, as they brush his sides and fins, cause a sound, as the wind by us? While he lurks beneath a weed in the still pool, suddenly a shoal of roach rush by with a sound like a flock of birds whose wings beat the air. The smooth surface of the still water appears to cover an utter silence, but probably to the fish there are ceaseless sounds. Water-fowl feeding in the weedy corners, whose legs depend down into the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... this time a shoal of jolly porpoises came rolling and tumbling by, turning up their sleek sides to the sun, and spouting up the briny element in sparkling showers. No sooner did the sage Oloffe mark this than he was greatly ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far worse than the sorrow itself has been. It is a change in the inner man, which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I've been lookin' for," observed Bluenose, spitting his quid over the lee bulwarks, and replacing it with a fresh one. "I've never got no confidence in a skipper as don't keep his lead a-goin' in shoal water. Specially in sich waters as them 'ere, wot shifts more or less with ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to her eyes like a, string of bubbles in ascent. 'Victor, Victor, it seems only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back—was it?—and in May, and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view. Dear French people! I share your ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... did not check her. We then let go the sheet anchor and gave her two cables on that also, but she would not look at it. By this time we had shoaled our water from ten to eight fathoms, and the fury of the gale increasing, we continued to shoal into seven and six fathoms, when the pilots and officers advised the cutting away the masts as the only means of saving the ship and the lives of the people. I resisted their advice for some time, in hopes ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... among those sweeping treetrunks and come within casting distance of the rope? Even if he did, would the rope catch around that head of which only the nose and eyes were showing? Even if it caught could the stallion be drawn to shoal water without being strangled by the slip-knot? Had Perris been a calm man he would have discarded the thousandth chance which remained after all of these possibilities. He would have looked, instead, to his cowpony which was now cantering away ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... a long while he could do nothing. The owl went off in search of food, promising to return at nightfall. The day wore on. Arthur, weak with hunger, tried to devour some of the sea-weed. It was too bitter and salty. Leaning over the edge of the rock, he saw a shoal of tiny fishes playing hide-and-seek in the eddies of the stream. He clutched at one of them and devoured it. Never had he tasted a sweeter morsel. He caught another, and another, until his hunger ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... flung it from her, and like weed Its wrecks were washed from scornful shoal to shoal, From rock to rock reverberate; and the whole Sea laughed and lightened with a deathless deed That sowed our enemies in her field for seed And made her shores fit ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... back against the tide with the fyke. I then untied it, and it went downstream, stake and all. I got it into the boat, rowed up, and set the stake again. Then I tied one end to the stake and got out of the boat myself in shoal water. Then the boat got away in deep water; then I had to swim for the boat. Then I rowed back and untied the fyke. Then the fyke got away. Then I jumped out of the boat to save the fyke, and the boat got away. Then I had to swim again after the boat and row after the fyke, and finally ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... mistaken, and liable easily to be mistaken, and such as no Ruthyn, under the circumstances, ought to exhibit. I told him what he ought to do, and offered to open my purse for the purpose; but he would not, or did not; indeed, he never took my advice; he followed his own, and a foul and dismal shoal he has drifted on. It is not for his sake—why should I?-that I have longed and laboured to remove the disgraceful slur under which his ill-fortune has thrown us. He troubles himself little about it, I believe—he's meek, meeker ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... toil and on the secret purposes of their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in derision of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... with worm and minnow, came down to inform S. that he had already landed four perch, and that the shoal was still unfrightened. With a recommendation to his friend to do likewise, he returned to his station, and his basketed perch might soon have recited, "Master, we are seven." Thereabouts a shout from S. made the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... buy; but I am not so sure that we can get through as shoal a place as that seems to be, for it is only the spreading out of the river. The greater the expanse, the less the depth. How is ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... than the first, and over quite a steep hill, where, in spite of its diminishing character, I found my load almost more than I could carry, and gladly gave the pork to Frank. It was noon when we reached the mouth of a creek in Shoal Lake. Sitting down comfortably upon a quantity of mown hay on the shore, we had our lunch, the first man over the portage having made a fire, and rested for an hour. The unfortunate Mr. M——, reaching from a log for water, and stumbling in again, afforded us some entertainment, ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon |
