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Bilge

noun
1.
Water accumulated in the bilge of a ship.  Synonym: bilge water.
2.
Where the sides of the vessel curve in to form the bottom.



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"Bilge" Quotes from Famous Books



... odors of the ship may be combatted by the use of aromatic electuaries, "which comfort the heart, the brain and the stomach." The patient should be removed to some quiet portion of the ship, as distant as possible from the channels for the discharge of the bilge-water, and short walks upon the upper deck will contribute to convalescence. Frequent changes of clothing will palliate the annoyance of fleas and pediculi. Drinking water may be purified by aeration, or by straining, boiling ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... who seemed to pity my miserable condition, gravely assured me that exercise was a capital thing as a preventive or cure for seasickness, and advised me to try the pump. I followed his advice: a few strokes brought up the bilge water, than which nothing at that time could have been more insufferably nauseous! I left the pump in disgust, and retiring to the after part of the quarter-deck, threw myself down on a coil of rope, unable longer to struggle with my fate. There I remained unnoticed and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... I struck my watch at three in the morning. And the air was so unworthy of that name,—it was such a thick paste, seeming to me more like a mixture of tar and oil and fresh fish and decayed fish and bilge-water than air itself,—that I voted three morning, and crawled up into the clear starlight,—how wonderful it was, and the fresh wet breeze that washed my face so cheerily!—and I bade Battista take his turn below, while I would lie ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... Campbell went to Thee, Lord, thirty years ago. (The year the Sarah Sands was burned. Oh roads we used to tread, Fra' Maryhill to Pollokshaws—fra' Govan to Parkhead!) Not but they're ceevil on the Board. Ye'll hear Sir Kenneth say: "Good morrn, McAndrews! Back again? An' how's your bilge to-day?" Miscallin' technicalities but handin' me my chair To drink Madeira wi' three Earls—the auld Fleet Engineer, That started as a boiler-whelp—when steam and he were low. I mind the time we used to serve a broken pipe wi' tow. Ten pound ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling

... his companion were sufficiently miserable. Their boat constantly shipped water, and they had to use the hand force pump, which, fortunately, was in the craft. A pump was connected with the cylinder cooling apparatus, designed to free the cockpit of bilge water, but the pump would ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope

... weather or lee, as occasioned by a sea suddenly striking or receding from the weather-bilge of the vessel.—To be left in the lurch is to be left behind in a case ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... Martin," says he, "but then bilge-water never is, you'll mind. But you'll grow used to it in time, shipmate, unless, instead o' swallowing this unholy reek you'll swallow your pride and ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... schooling was the clammy air of street and close; in Germanie it was worse, a moist weakening windiness full of foreign smells, and I've seen me that I could gaily march a handful of leagues to get a sniff of the salt sea. Not that I was one who craved for wrack and bilge at my nose all the time. What I think best is a stance inland from the salt water, where the mountain air, brushing over gall and heather, takes the sting from the sea air, and the two blended give a notion of the fine variousness ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... Fill Up Main Engine Feed Pump and Bilge Rams Open and Scale After Port Boiler Main Circulator Impeller to Examine Hydrokineter Valve on Centre Boiler ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... the blasphemy man meant? Oh, I don't know; some bilge, just as he used to about the masters. You know the man talked some rubbish about how the State couldn't have it both ways—couldn't blaspheme against God by flatly denying that all men were equal and basing all its ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... completed was 883 feet long, 92 1/2 feet broad; her height from keel to bridge was 104 feet. She had 8 steel decks, a cellular double bottom, 5 1/4 feet through (the inner and outer "skins" so-called), and with bilge keels projecting 2 feet for 300 feet of her length amidships. These latter were intended to lessen the tendency to roll in a sea; they no doubt did so very well, but, as it happened, they proved to be a weakness, for this was the ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley

... not yet been ascertained. Adair and his lieutenant, as well as the carpenter and boatswain, had made repeated efforts to discover the exact spot. The only way to do this was to creep under the bunkers among the bilge water, an unpleasant and dangerous task. It was evident that the water must be reduced before ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston

... smelly interior, amply large enough, but ill ventilated, and inexpressibly dirty. Every stench under heaven seemed to assail my nostrils, so compounded together, as to be separately indistinguishable, although that of stale bilge water strongly predominated. The only semblance of fresh air found entrance through the small, square scuttle hole, attainable by means of a short ladder, and staring up at this, I was able to perceive the light of day, although so little penetrated below, the swaying ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish

... Her bilge abaft under the mizzen-chains was just awash; and, the water, deepening from here, as the shore shelved somewhat abruptly, was about the depth of four fathoms or thereabouts by the rudder post, where the bottom could be seen, of soft, shining white sand, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... signal book he always carried, he continued to those around him, "Now, gentlemen, no more book, no more signals. I look to you to do the duty of the Queen Charlotte in engaging the flag-ship. I don't want the ships to be bilge to bilge, but if you can lock the yardarms, so much the better; the battle will be the quicker decided." His purpose was to go through the French line, and fight the Montagne on the far side. Some doubted their succeeding, but Howe overbore them. "That's right, my ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water—all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail. In spite of self-control, jail had been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... over on her bilge, with her deck partly turned towards the shore, the sea, after she struck, ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston

... doing what will, I fear, give pain to our cousin Montferrat. I have been breaking the back of the Count of Saint-Pol.' At this the Marquess, suffused with dark blood till he was colour of lead, broke out, pointing his finger as well as his words. As the bilge-water jets from a ketch when the hold is surcharged, so did the ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... singularly corroborated his views as to the strength of wrought-iron beams of large dimensions. When this vessel was being launched, the cleet on the bow gave way, in consequence of the bolts breaking, and let the vessel down so that the bilge came in contact with the wharf, and she remained suspended between the water and the wharf for a length of about 110 feet, but without any injury to the plates of the ship; satisfactorily proving the great strength of this form of construction. Thus, Mr. Stephenson became gradually ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... and the least you can do is to come and have a good time here. I can't think why Irish people want to be Irish. It seems so damn silly. Gilbert's writing a play. He has done about a page and a half of it, and it's most awful bilge. He keeps on reading it out to me. He read some of it to me last night when I was brushing my teeth which is a damn dangerous thing to do, and I had to clout his head severely for him. He is a chap. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... bells we saw them getting a boat out by Pita's house, and lo and behold! it was Tweedie, with the native pastor and a divinity student named Henry to pull him. When they were close enough to talk, he fell on his knees in the boat, though it was half full of bilge and slopped all over him; and he besought Captain Coe, by all that was holy, to stop murdering the innocent, and rattled on fast and scolding like he was in the pulpit. We was to leave it to God, he said, and went on like we was worse nor Afiola, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... spaces under the guns which no art could dry, and subtle leaks in the topsides that none could stop. The hold accumulated filth, for in many ships the ship's refuse was swept on to the ballast, where it bred pestilence, typhus fever and the like. The bilge-water reeked and rotted in the bilges, filling the whole ship with its indescribable stench. Beetles, rats and cockroaches bred and multiplied in the crannies, until (as in Captain Cook's case two centuries later), ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield

... adopted by the National Apple Shippers' Association and made law in New York State has a length of stave of twenty-eight and one-half inches and a diameter of head of seventeen and one-eighth inches. The outside circumference of the bilge is sixty-four inches and the distance between the heads is twenty-six inches. It contains one hundred quarts dry measure. The staves are mostly made of elm, pine, and red gum, and the heads principally of pine with some beech and maple. In most apple growing sections barrels ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt

... steward drew a brace, and to it fitted a half- inch bit from his hip-pocket. On his knees, he bored through the head of the first cask until the water rushed out upon the deck and flowed down into the bilge. He worked quickly, boring cask after cask down the alleyway that led to deeper twilight. When he had reached the end of the first row of casks he paused a moment to listen to the gurglings of the many half-inch streams running to waste. His quick ears caught a similar gurgling ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... admitted on deck at a time, after sunset, which occasioned much filth to run into the hold, and mingle with the bilge water, which was not pumped out while he was aboard, notwithstanding the decks were leaky, and the prisoners begged permission to let in water ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... that drains (you can hear it trickle) from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous, one had almost written sagacious, state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge-tank, upper tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum, main-return (as a liquid), and bilge-tank once more is the ordained cycle. Fleury's Ray sees to that; and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury's Ray. If a speck of oil, if ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... long, similar to the one described at Blomfield's Rivulet (volume 1) was also seen; and, like it, was not more than nine inches wide at the bilge. A small kangaroo was seen by Mr. Cunningham feeding upon the grass, but fled the moment that it saw ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... wide-awake, and so were the washer-women, whose turn it had been to sleep last night for the labors of the morning. These were plying hand and tongue in a little field by the three cross-roads, where gaffers and gammers of by-gone time had set up troughs of proven wood, and the bilge of a long storm-beaten boat, near a pool of softish water. Stout brown arms were roped with curd, and wedding rings looked slippery things, and thumb-nails bordered with inveterate black, like broad beans ripe for planting, shone through ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... "Bilge, my eye! You sniff the banquet I fetched ye. Here's a prime cheese that was hatched when Trimble Rogers ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... He knows now to take care of himself. If he is ever deceived, it is by treachery. He is seized sometimes at the hospitable board, and assassinated, or perhaps cruelly poisoned. But what skill can ensure safety, where confidence is so shamefully abused? He is a capital sailor, even bilge-water don't make him squeamish, and he is so good a judge of the sea-worthiness of a ship, that he leaves her at the first port if he finds she is leaky or weak. Few architects, on the other hand, have ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... the lunch basket with a firm hand. In the struggle Frenchy came near going overboard, but he fell into the bilge in the bottom ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson

... thick pieces of wood, lodged under the quarters of casks containing any liquid, and stowed in a ship's hold, in order to keep them bilge-free; being steadied upon the beds by means of wedges called quoins. The impression made by a ship's bottom on the mud on having been left by an ebb-tide. The bite made in the ground by the fluke of an anchor. A kind of false deck, or platform, placed on those decks ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... up one of the boards under his feet in the cockpit. A man with half an eye could have seen the scum of gasoline on the bilge ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe

... heaving of ropes, winding of cables, shouts, curses, the rattling of carts on the piers, the tinkle of bells on the cars, the roar of escaping steam, the scream of whistles, and the foul smells of garbage and bilge-water. He watched the men at their work, he saw the passengers come out, with sleepy eyes and sodden faces, and take their departure. He too must go—but where? He wandered off the pier in a maze. Where should ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... being sent for!" and she opened a second, and out came a second flock, with a "Chick, chick, chick!" and another, and another, till she pulled them all out. The cabin floor was chockful of them; for the heat and confined bilge air had hatched all the eggs that were in the ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee

... this after him and found himself alone on this unwholesome fortress. He could hear the rats scuttle and flop in the abhorred interior; the key cried among the wards like a thing in pain; the sitting-room was deep in dust, and smelt strong of bilge-water. It could not be called a cheerful spot, even for a composer absorbed in beloved toil; how much less for a young gentleman haunted by alarms and awaiting the arrival ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... an enraged Cape Horn sea, her jibboom and fore top-gallant mast gone, her ballast shifted, so that her posture even in a calm would have exhibited her with her starboard channels under, and her decks swept by enormous surges, which, fetching her larboard bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... had been his slumber that he could not recall for a moment where he was. The tiller was unmanned, the stars shone in the cabin hatchway, a cold bilge-water draft blew through the old hulk, and, as he dragged himself up the steps, he saw tall woods near by, and heard the voice ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... the hose led from the bilge-cock, the cock turned, and, if the forcing-pump or engine is worked below the gun-deck, will see it manned and worked by some of ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... the new block that was to be. In the hold of this forgotten bark was discovered a forgotten case of champagne. It had been sunk in mud and ooze for years. When the bottles were opened the corks refused to pop, and nobody dared to touch the "bilge" that was within. All this was on the happy hem of Happy Valley—and still ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... up all the loose snow an' ice crystals an' drives 'em in a whirlwind. Presently the wind starts the ice to buckin' an' tremblin' like a jelly under you, splitting inter lanes. You lose yore direction even when you got eyes. I'm left in it by that bilge-blooded skunk, blind on the rockin', breakin' floe, while he scuds back to the schooner with his men. That's Honest Simms! Jim Lund's left behind but Honest Simms has the position ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... him the dark aspiring bulwarks of the little but brave adventurers, their seams gazing to the heat, their carvel timbers striped by the ooze and brine of many oceans and the scum of ports. Upon their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek; the iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red; the companions are portals to smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of no roaming and remembering ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... Only once she turned her head and looked back. Perhaps Loloku would try again. Then, as they came to the boat, a young girl, at a sign from O'Shea, took off the loose blouse, and they placed her, face downwards, across the bilge of the boat, and two pair of small, eager, brown hands each seized one of hers and dragged the white, rounded arms well over the keel of the boat. O'Shea walked round to that side, drawing through his hands the long, heavy, ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke

... ain't passin' on it,—but one thing is certain, when a ship's made as many voyages as Lucy has and ain't been home for repairs nigh on to seven years—ain't it?" and he looked at Jane for confirmation—"she gits foul and sometimes a little mite worm-eaten—especially her bilge timbers, unless they're copper-fastened or pretty good stuff. I've been thinkin' for some time that you ain't got Lucy straight, and this last kick-up of hers makes me sure of it. Some timber is growed right and some timber is growed crooked; and when it's growed crooked it gits leaky, ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it, intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes, without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene, with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with smoke haze; with the heave and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... she must be lifted slightly by the sliding ways and cradle from the keel blocks and bilge blocks, and this was done by oak wedges, hundreds of which we could see jammed between the upper and lower courses of sliding ways. Next he pointed out the rib-bands which were to keep the sliding ways on the ground ways, and at the bow the points ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... great clouds into the air, filling the small den with an odour suggestive of bilge water ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... foot of Broadway. To reach the car on East Street (now the Embarcadero), we very likely skirt gaping holes in the planked wharf, exposing the dark water lapping the supporting piles, and are assailed by bilge-like odors that escape. Two dejected horses await us. Entering the car we find two lengthwise seats upholstered in red plush. If it be winter, the floor is liberally covered by straw, to mitigate the mud. If it be summer, the trade winds ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... for when the ship in her course by night sends a ripple back alongside of the whale, the creature seeing the foam fancies there is something to eat afloat, and makes a rush forward, whereby it often shall stave in some part of the ship). In such case the water that enters the leak flows to the bilge, which is always kept clear; and the mariners having ascertained where the damage is, empty the cargo from that compartment into those adjoining, for the planking is so well fitted that the water cannot pass from one compartment to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... it was now found that there were holes in all the three boilers. Two men were set to work the pumps, one or two of the passengers also assisting, but as fast as the water was pumped into the boilers it poured out again. The bilge was so full of steam and boiling water that the firemen could not get to the fires. Still the steamer struggled on, laboring heavily, for the sea was running very high. At midnight they were off St. Abbs Head, when the engineers reported that the case was hopeless; the engines had entirely ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of the bilge- water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his breast. He needed ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... against the tide toward what should be but an hour's sail: the sea is high and the spray cold; there are sunken rocks, and food there is none; chill gray evening draws dangerously near, and there is a foot of water in the bilge. You have swallowed your tongue twenty times on the alkali; and the sun is melting hot, and the dust dry and pervasive, and there is no water, and for all your effort the relative distances seem to remain the same for days. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... which now takes six or seven days, then took fourteen. The Cunard steamer, whose successor, with its bilge keel and its vastly greater size, is as comfortable, even in very rough weather, as the first class city hotel, was as disagreeable in rough weather, to a man unaccustomed to the ocean, as a fishing smack. But the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... reckless old fool, but was tipsy, and in no temper to reason with. The situation of the brig was safe enough as far as ocean and weather went; nothing could hurt her as she lay mud-cradled on her fat bilge. We clewed up and let the canvas hang by its rigging, and then dropped the anchor; after which old Bunk and the others cleaned themselves up and got the boat over, and went away in her, singing songs, leaving me and William to look after ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... then, the massy weight of earth stood firm With now concreted body, when (as 'twere) All of the slime of the world, heavy and gross, Had run together and settled at the bottom, Like lees or bilge. Then ocean, then the air, Then ether herself, the fraught-with-fire, were all Left with their liquid bodies pure and free, And each more lighter than the next below; And ether, most light and liquid of the three, Floats on above the long aerial winds, Nor with the brawling of the winds of air ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... the British flag. Two new ships are, however, being completed for this line in American shipyards, the "Minnetonka" and "Minnewaska," of 13,401 tons each. This line, started by Americans in 1887, was the first to use the so-called bilge keels, or parallel keels along each side of the hull to prevent rolling. It now has a fleet of twenty-three vessels, with a total tonnage of about 90,000, and does a heavy passenger business despite the fact that its ships were ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... straight sheer, 27-inch bulwarks, a moderately full but easy entrance, a fine, long run, and little drag to the keel. The midsection was formed with moderately short and rising floor, round and easy bilge, and some tumble-home in the topside. The stem raked a good deal for a ship-rigged vessel; the post raked slightly. There was a distance of 6 feet between upper and lower deck planks. The stern was of ...
— The Pioneer Steamship Savannah: A Study for a Scale Model - United States National Museum Bulletin 228, 1961, pages 61-80 • Howard I. Chapelle

... Christian man, gave the Free Traders many a word to make their ears sing. They were in his place, and every man had the right to speak as he chose in his own house. But when Israel led them back to the old Tabernacle, with its pleasant smell of tar obscuring the more ancient bilge, and had told them that they were all "a lot of hell-deserving sinners who, if they missed eternal damnation, it would be with their rags badly singed," they sighed a blissful sigh and felt themselves once more at home, sitting under a man who understood them ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... tufted thick with parsley fern, he noticed Mabel stooping over an object which lay among the heather where a rough cartroad approached a wooden bridge. On joining her he saw that she was examining a finely-built canoe with a hole in one bilge. She looked up ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... about 4 A.M., the engine-room became the centre of interest. The water gained in spite of every effort. Lashley, to his neck in rushing water, stuck gamely to the work of clearing suctions. For a time, with donkey engine and bilge pump sucking, it looked as though the water would be got under; but the hope was short-lived: five minutes of pumping invariably led to the same result—a general ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... at work; California was calling—the land of miracle—and printer's ink began to pall. Henry George was a sailor; every part of a sailing ship was to him familiar—from bilge- water to pennant, from bowsprit to sternpost. He could swab the mainmast, reef the topsail in a squall, preside in the cook's-galley, or if the mate were drunk and the captain ashore he could take charge of the ship, put for open sea and ride ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... state, and before we could adjust our ideas, we had the most confused notions of what was the matter. Most thought that the shores under the ship's bottom had carried away, and that we had fallen over on our bilge; and, strange to say, in our imaginary terror our eyes seemed to convey that impression. The ominous word "fire!" followed by the maddening unmusical efforts of a crazed bell, reduced all this din and uncertainty to a logical something. But where was it? What was on fire, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... to us at 5 a.m. that I must proceed to Bilge Trench to be temporarily attached to D Company in Wood's place. At present C Company (Captain Mordecai) are in the front line, with their headquarters in the Estaminet (the deep tunnel dug-out beneath Wieltje). D Company (Captain Bodington) are in ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd

... the tube plates being 9 ft. There is also in each compartment one centrifugal circulating pump driven by a small independent engine, of the diameter of 3 ft. 9 in., and capable of pumping from the bilge as well as the sea. The screw propellers are 18 ft. 3 in. in diameter with a mean pitch of 24 ft. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various

... one saw the long stretch of black mud bank left bare by the tide, which was far out, nearly half a mile. Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs; close in an old sailboat lay canted on her bilge. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... sea cometh sometimes with so great a violence, that it drencheth [causes to sink] the ship: and the same harm do sometimes the small drops, of water that enter through a little crevice in the thurrok [hold, bilge], and in the bottom of the ship, if men be so negligent that they discharge them not betimes. And therefore, although there be difference betwixt these two causes of drenching, algates [in any case] the ship is dreint [sunk]. Right so fareth ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... from the marsh. We did the same to make the wine go further, and at last we drank. It was the vilest wine the chemists of Hamburg ever made, though German education favours chemistry; and the water tasted like the bilge of Charon's boat. But it was liquid, and when we had drained the tins—I will not say to the dregs, for Hamburg wine has no dregs—M. Jacques lay back with a sigh and said, "Drink fine ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... peopled this with golden fish; whilst on the bason's brim were placed stands for exotics, whose fragrance charmed our sea-worn traveller, so lately emancipated from those sad drawbacks to a voyage, the odours of tar and bilge water. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... listening to this snoring for four hours, when a hatchway above him was lifted, and a lantern shone down into the lazarette. It was carried by a corporal, who came cautiously down the ladder, lighting the footsteps of an officer who followed and held a handkerchief to his nose, for the smell of the bilge was overpowering. ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of the inlet several huts were noticed, and near them Mr. Bedwell found a canoe; which, being hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, was of very different construction to any we had before seen; its length was twenty-one feet, but its greatest breadth in the bilge did not exceed fifteen inches, whilst at the gunwale the opening was only from six to eight and a half inches wide; an outrigger, projecting about two feet, was neatly attached to one side, which prevented its liability ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... the extraterrestrial was so much bilge. The Russians were infiltrating the country with synthetic men. This meant—oh, God—it meant that in a short time Russia would be able to create an army of these monsters and overwhelm ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman

... if she had not some little kindness for me, would she be so pleased with these thundering yarns I keep spinning her, as old as Adam, and as stale as bilge-water? You that are so keen, how comes it you don't notice her eyes at these times? I feel them shine on me like a couple of suns. They would make a statue pay the yarn out. Who ever fancied my ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... courteously. "For, speaking as man to man, I must confess that for sheer, concentrated bilge she gets away with the biscuit with almost insolent ease. Luella Granville ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... &c adj.; debasement, depression, prostration &c (horizontal) 213; depression &c (concave) 252. molehill; lowlands; basement floor, ground floor; rez de chaussee [Fr.]; cellar; hold, bilge; feet, heels. low water; low tide, ebb tide, neap tide, spring tide. V. be low &c adj.; lie low, lie flat; underlie; crouch, slouch, wallow, grovel; lower &c (depress) 308. Adj. low, neap, debased; nether, nether most; flat, level with the ground; lying low ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... stern, which was almost hidden in heavy clouds of smoke, to the enemy, who immediately raked and tore it with shells. The Minnesota was drifting in a helpless condition with her starboard-railing deep under water, while thick streams of water poured from her bilge-pumps on the port side. She gradually fell behind, whereupon the last ship of the line, the New Hampshire, passed her on the fire side, covering her riddled hull for a moment, but then steamed on to join the only two ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... and his two classes the next morning, one at nine and the other at ten o'clock; in fact, it was nearly eleven when he awoke. His head was splitting with pain, his tongue was furry, and his mouth tasted like bilge-water. He made wry faces, passed his thick tongue around his dry mouth—oh, so damnably dry!—and pressed the palms of his hands to his pounding temples. He craved a drink of cold water, but he was afraid to get out of bed. He felt pathetically weak ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks

... broke, with the exception of two vessels, the whole French fleet was lying helplessly aground on the Palles shoal. Some were lying on their bilge with the keel exposed, others were frantically casting their guns overboard and trying to get afloat again. Meanwhile Gambier and the British fleet were lying fourteen miles distant in the Basque Roads, and Cochrane in the Imperieuse was watching, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... water, lad, I said bilge—a fathom o' bilge water," interrupted the captain, who, although secretly rejoiced at the fact of his son having fallen over head and ears in love with the pretty little Cocos-Keeling islander, deemed it his duty, nevertheless, ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne

... the voice of doom, 'in the starboard sofa-locker; beer under the floor in the bilge. I'll see her round that buoy, if you wouldn't mind beginning.' I obeyed with a bad grace, but the close air and cramped posture must have benumbed my faculties, for I opened the port-side locker, reached down, and grasped a ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... eyes, caught sight of a smoky lamp that reeled to and fro, in very erratic fashion. Moisture dripped from the beams above him, and there was a sickly smell which seemed familiar. Black, who had been to sea before, decided that he caught the aroma of bilge water. Rows of wooden shelves tenanted by recumbent figures, became discernible, and he started with dismay to the full recognition of the fact that he ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... Pele-honua-mea o'ermounts them; The god rides the waves, sails about the island; The host of little gods ride the billows; 15 Malau takes his seat; One bales out the bilge of the craft. Who shall sit astern, be steersman, O, princes? Pele of the yellow earth. The splash of the paddles dashes o'er ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... this like the Pocahontas, only a good deal more so, representing somebody's fad. I cannot vouch for the details of her construction; but, as I heard, she was not only extremely broad in the beam, giving great battery space,—which was plain to see,—but the bilge on each side was reported to come lower than the keel, making, as it were, two hulls, side by side, so that a sarcastic critic remarked, "One good point about her is, that if she takes the ground, her keel at least is protected." ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... invitingly furnished room of cushioned couches, paintings, tapestries, soft chairs, warmly toned rugs. The desk at which Merle toiled was ornate and shining. Ex-Private Cowan felt a sudden revulsion. He was back, knee-deep in trench bilge, tortured in all his being, looking at death from behind a sandbag. Vividly he recalled why ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... without having the trouble of going there. "Take the first nasty-looking water you can find. Mix salt with it until it tastes as nasty as it looks, then impregnate it with gas from a London street lamp, and add a little bilge-water, shake vigorously and it is ready for use." Major McMahon also testifies to the accuracy of the above receipt, but, he adds, "it was not nearly so bad ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... in the bilge. These fellows never clean out their boats from one year's end to another," said Mr. Smellie, positively. Yet he, too, eyed the cask with momentary suspicion. In shape, in colour, it resembled the tubs in which Guernsey ordinarily exported its eau-de-vie. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... admire 'em. I give one look around. Nobody was in sight. Then I ran down the pier and jumped aboard. Almost the first thing I put my hand on was what I was looking for—the bilge-pump. 'Twas a small affair, that you could lug around in one hand, but mighty handy for keeping a boat of ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln

... slung in its place, the cylinders containing the gun cotton being attached to the jackstay immediately in front of the battered sides, and 30 feet from the hulk, and sunk to a distance of 20 feet below the water line, which would bring it about opposite the bend of the bilge. By 3 p.m. everything was ready for the explosion of the charge—everybody had cleared out of the ship while the surrounding small craft drew off to a distance of 300 feet. The charge was electrically fired from a pinnace. The burst was terrific and the reverberation was heard and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... my new associates were absent on duty; the 'tween-decks was crammed with casks and cases, and chests, and bags, and hammocks; the noise of the caulkers was resumed over my head and all around me; the stench of bilge-water, combining with the smoke of tobacco, the effluvia of gin and beer, the frying of beef-steaks and onions, and red herrings—the pressure of a dark atmosphere and a heavy shower of rain, all conspired to oppress my spirits, and render ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... the winde comming at the Northeast, and the Confidence being troubled with bilge water, and stocked, we thought it good to seeke harbour for her redresse: then we bare roome the 18 day Southsoutheast, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt

... of twenty-eight knots and have a cruising radius exceeding 1200 miles. The design of the hull is the concave bottom, square bilge type, developed for this particular service. It furnishes a steady gun platform, which, with the necessary speed, is the most vital ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... cabin the young man sat, holding his patient with strong, kind hands. The vessel flung herself about, sometimes combining the motions of pitching and rolling with the utmost virulence; the bilge water went slosh, slosh, and the hot, choking odours came forth on the night. Coffee, fish, cheese, foul clothing, vermin of miscellaneous sorts, paraffin oil, sulphurous coke, steaming leather, engine oil—all combined their various scents into one marvellous ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... the rattling of the cables weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to howl ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... revolver. I carried a belaying pin. But, although we searched every foot of space, we found nothing. The formaldehyde with which Turner had fumigated the ship clung here tenaciously, and, mixed with the odors of bilge water and the indescribable heavy smells left by tropical cargoes, made me ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... her, it would be impossible to get her afloat again without lightening. So long as the wind did not blow, and the sea did not rise, she was safe enough; but a swell that should force the hull to rise and fall would inevitably cause her to bilge. These facts were learned in five minutes after the yawl was in the water, and much did Raoul rejoice at having so promptly sent Ithuel in quest of the felucca. The rocks were next reconnoitred, in order to ascertain ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... done on wagons or motor trucks equipped with a rack that permits the barrels being carried lying down, but supported at each end of the barrel so that the weight of the barrel does not come upon the bilge. They can be so racked up that one wagon will carry fifty-five barrels. A three-ton truck will carry forty barrels of apples and haul forty more on trailer. Such an outfit in one of my orchards makes five trips in one day a distance of four miles, traversing forty miles and carrying 400 barrels of ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... and so rapid in its movements. The ship, however, must float; and to hit upon the happy medium of velocity and stability seems to me the art and mystery of shipbuilding. In order to give large carrying capacity, we gave flatness of bottom and squareness of bilge. This became known in Liverpool as the "Belfast bottom;" and it has been generally adopted. This form not only serves to give stability, but also increases the carrying ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... down deep in the grease-pot ever since you struck Annapolis!" cried Farley angrily. "I hope you bilge, Darrin; with all my heart I hope you bilge soon. We don't need a mollycoddle like you ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock

... But was what I read the style of Adrian Boldero? This vivid, virile opening? This scene of the two derelicts who hated one another, fortuitously meeting on the old tramp steamer? This cunning, evocation of smells, jute, bilge water, the warm oils of the engine room? This expert knowledge so carelessly displayed of the various parts of a ship? How had Adrian, man of luxury, who had never been on a tramp steamer in his life, gained the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... set to work and cleared away the penthouse, stowing its heavy timbers beneath the deck along the keel, for they would in some degree take the place of the ballast which the little ship needed. There was some water in her bilge from the great wave, and that we baled out easily, but she was well framed and almost new. It was good to see the run of the decks clear again from ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler

... "Bilge," he interrupted sharply. "I didn't fetch boundaries back in the Two Capes, did I?" He thrust the offending volume into a crevice of his chair. "Laurel," he added, "what is ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... should trail over an old, lichened and weather-stained stone wall, dropping their fruit into the highway for thirsty pedestrians. There should be a little path running athwart it, down toward the lake and the old flat-bottomed boat, whose bilge is scattered with the black and shriveled remains of angleworms used for bait. In warm August afternoons the sweet savor of ripening drifts warmly on the air, and there rises the drowsy hum of wasps exploring the windfalls that are already rotting on the grass. There you may lie watching ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... rise. There's going to be trouble if we find it shoaler than we expect and I had plenty trouble coming along. Finlay could hardly drive her four knots in last night's breeze and the current put us on Tortillas reef. She stopped there twenty minutes, jambed down on her bilge while the ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... inroads on the inner, breaking up the margins of both, until the channel was so nearly closed as to bring the field from which the danger was most apprehended in absolute contact with the side of the schooner. When the margin of the outer floe first touched the bilge of the schooner, it was at the precise spot where the vessel had just been fortified within. Fenders had also been provided without, and there was just a quarter of a minute, during which the two captains hoped that these united means of defence might enable the craft to withstand the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... the gunwale to the keel, Rat riddled, bilge bestank, Slime-slobbered, horrible, I saw her reel And drag her oozy flank, And sprawl among the deft young waves, that laughed And leapt, and turned in many a sportive wheel As she thumped onward ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... nations and their rulers;—and now, Sir, there is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water, shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope float on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... prevailed as long as there was any thing left to drink or pick up; however, a considerable part of the cargo was safely stowed, though there were few of the rum casks that did not afterwards turn out impregnated with bilge water. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various

... the ship must have been well cleaned out before the cargo was taken on board; and as she was as tight as a bottle, there was no bilge-water in her. Had there been, I could not have existed so long far down in the depths of ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... canoe affords, seems a difficulty almost insurmountable. Still it is effected. I litter down amidships, with my bedding spread on reeds, in so short a compass that my legs keep slipping off and dangling in the bilge-water. The cook and bailsman sit on the first bar, facing me; and behind them, to the stern, one-half the sailors sit in couples; whilst on the first bar behind me are Bombay and one Beluch, and beyond them to the bow, also in couples, the remaining crew. The captain ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... the south. We are evidently in a cyclone, having taken it in its northern quarter, the gale travelling north. On the starboard tack, its centre has passed to the west of us. Ordered the donkey engine to be got ready for use last night, in case the ship should make more water than the small bilge pumps could throw out. Carried away the flying jibboom at 7.30 A.M.—saved the sail. As the gale progressed the wind hauled to the south and west; and at 4 P.M., judging that the strength of the gale had passed us, I kept the ship on her course, ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... over a couple and gets away up the beach and safe among rocks, but the revenue people got the keg. By that time the cutter was alongside us, and so they wouldn't get the little Christmas keg I had tucked away for John Rose I pulled the plug out of it in no time and let it drain into her bilge. And that was an awful waste of good liquor, and I knew John Rose would ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly

... the light leaning figure of the pretty schooner, which seemed to skate along upon her bilge and make white shavings of all the sea that touched her. She at first imagined that this might be the yacht Neigh had arrived in at the end of the previous week, for she knew that he came as one of a yachting party, and she had noticed no other ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... now that there was a chalk-line, as true as the needle, from somewhere above us in the darkness, drawn along the skin of the hold perpendicular to the keelson, and that the man from Boston had begun to cut at the bilge ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... forecastle had been smoked out, to extirpate the vermin overrunning her. At midnight, the larboard watch, to which I belonged, turned out; and instantly as every man waked, he exclaimed at the now intolerable smell, supposed to be heightened by the shaking up the bilge-water, from the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... of philosophy is that it starts off with an appeal to justice and logic (I'm quoting myself), but it quickly gets dangerous. Start knocking off the bilge-scum. Then when the lowest strata of society is gone, start on the next. Carry this line of reasoning out to straight Aristotelian Logic and you come up with parties like you and me, who may have been quite acceptable when compared to the whole cross-section of humanity, but who now have no one ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith



Words linked to "Bilge" :   take in water, H2O, water, damage, bilge keel, underside, leak, bilgy, vessel, watercraft, bottom, undersurface



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