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Mainsail   Listen
noun
Mainsail  n.  (Naut.) The principal sail in a ship or other vessel. "(They) hoised up the mainsail to the wind." Note: The mainsail of a ship is extended upon a yard attached to the mainmast, and that of a sloop or schooner upon the boom.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mainsail" Quotes from Famous Books



... point, and drove in within half-a-mile of the rocks. Then, while I waited to see the end of her, she suddenly wore round, and after staggering a moment while the sea broke over her, hauled up to the wind, and careening over, with her mainsail sweeping the water, started gaily on the ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... and went in amongst them, firing a broadside within half musket shot at one of the frigates with evident effect, as, from the damage caused, they did not return our fire. Whilst tacking to give them the other broadside, our mainsail split in two, and night setting in, we relinquished the pursuit in 5 degrees ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... illustrious cavalier, the friend of liberty. Hearing a noise in front, I looked up and discerned the light spar of a mast peeping over an intervening barrier of rock; we wound round it, and on the other side found a cutter-rigged boat of about eighteen tons hauled close to the natural quay, with her mainsail set and flapping heavily in the night wind. Here we met another seaman. In ten minutes we were under way; the smooth groundswell running free and silent from our quarter, and the boat laying herself out with an easy speed, as she caught the breeze freshening ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... up to the wind at all, we couldn't run out of the storm. The gale drove us in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to. The ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... a pilot," by burning a blue light on the bridge, and bears down on the pilot schooner. The moon reveals enormous figures, with a heavy dot beneath, on the mainsail of the schooner. Over the rail goes the yawl, followed by the oarsman and pilot, whose turn it is to go ashore. The pilot carries a lantern, which in the egg-shaped yawl dances on the white wave crests up and down like a fire-fly. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton


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