"Ebb tide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking at the daisies, and Malcolm stood a few yards off watching for the first of the red sails, which must soon show themselves, creeping out on the ebb tide. Nor had he waited long before a boat appeared, then another and another—six huge oars, ponderous to toil withal, urging each from the shelter of the harbour out into the wide weltering plain. The fishing boat of that time was not decked ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Sally shipped some shingle ballast, got under weigh on the first of the ebb tide, and safely threading her way past the shallows and through the narrow channels of the harbor, emerged into the open sea, and turned ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... "Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Shafts of brighter light swept across and across the water from occulting beacons set at long intervals among buoys. Above the steamer lay a large Norwegian barque waiting for her pilot to take her down on the ebb tide. Below The McMunn Brothers was an ocean-going tramp steamer. One of her crew sat on the forecastle playing the "Swanee River" on ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... the boat with Dwining and Ramorny, and, waiting for no other attendance, Eviot pushed off the vessel, which descended the Tay rapidly by the assistance of sail and oar and of the ebb tide. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the magazines destroyed. The steamer then taking the Royalist and gunboats in tow, passed two other batteries and anchored half-a-mile below the city, when all hands went to dinner. At half-past one the expedition was again in motion, working up against an ebb tide of three knots. As the Phlegethon opened round the point, the city battery and hill forts mounting 18 guns, commenced firing, and two men were killed and several wounded on board the Phlegethon. She, however, opened a hot fire, and Captain Mundy shoving off in the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... vessel up and down in such a frightful manner, that they expected every moment to see the chain cable break. As soon as they dropped their anchor, the tide rushed past the vessel at the rate of eight miles an hour. After the ebb tide had ceased running, the swell gradually subsided, and the vessel ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... September, we got sight of the Deccan coast near Dabul on the 2d October, where we found great hindrance to our navigation, till we learnt by experience to anchor during the ebb tide, and continue our course with the tide of flood. Continuing this procedure, we anchored in the evening of the 14th, two and a half miles short of the bar of Surat; when presently a fleet of fourteen ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... commodities, are 100 miles, to which place they row up the river along with the flood tide in eighteen hours. This river ebbs and flows as it does in the Thames, and when the ebb begins, although their barks are light and propelled with oars like foists, they cannot row against the ebb tide, but must make fast to one of the banks of the river and wait for next flood. These boats are called bazaras and patuas, and row as well as a galliot or any vessel I have ever seen. At the distance of a good tide rowing before reaching ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... attract him. He might see sword-playing at Hockley, or cocking at Shoe Lane, or baiting at Southwark, or shooting at Tothill Fields. Again, he might walk in the physic gardens of St. James's, or go down the river with the ebb tide to the cherry orchards at Rotherhithe, or drive to Islington to drink the cream, or, above all, walk in the Park, which is most modish for a gentleman who dresses in the fashion. You see, Clarke, that we were active in our idleness, and that there was ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more like a large ball falling than a human being, and it didn't occur to me that it was the latter until I heard the cry of "Man overboard!" Hastening up again, I sprang into the mizzen rigging, from which, just before I got there, Tom Pim had plunged off into the water. It was ebb tide, and a strong current was running out of the river Lee past the ship. The man who had fallen had not sunk, but was fast drifting astern, and seemed unconscious, for he was not struggling, lying like a log on the water. Tom Pim, with rapid strokes, was swimming after ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... called, a fleet of thirty-two smaller vessels was prepared. Covered with tar, turpentine, rosin, and filled with inflammable and combustible materials, these barks were to be sent from Antwerp down the river in detachments of eight every half hour with the ebb tide. The object was to clear the way, if possible, of the raft, and to occupy the attention of the Spaniards, until the 'Fortune' and the 'Hope' should come ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to drive clear to Great Harbor for one, but he got back with all hands about seven o'clock. Everybody in town was at supper, an' didn't see us when we clumb aboard the Lass. When it was pitch-black we cast off the lines, an' she drifted out on the ebb tide, which just there runs easy a knot an' a half. Then we got up our headsails so as to get steerage-way on her, and bless my soul if the blocks made a creak! Might have been pullin' silk thread through a fur mitten, for ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... people were close to us, and a rope was laid across the spot to designate the danger. I did not hesitate—I loved Mr Turnbull, and my love and my feelings of resentment were equally potent. I seized the bight of the rope, twisted it round my arm, and plunged in after, recollecting it was ebb tide: fortunate for Mr Turnbull it was that he had accidentally put the question. I sank under the ice, and pushed down the stream, and in a few seconds felt myself grappled by him I sought, and at almost the same time, the rope hauling in from above. As soon as they found there was resistance, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... o'clock, the ebb tide was running with such violence, that although the schooner was going one knot and a half through the water, yet by the land we were evidently going retrograde almost as much, and towards the land withal: but the light air that remained enabled ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... after bed of oysters, many of which were uncovered at ebb tide, when a hungry man might stand and eat his fill of shellfish, never one of them less than six inches long, and many twice that size. It is little wonder that the gold crazed men refused to listen while my master warned them that the day might come when they would be hungry ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... favor comes in waves like the flowing of the sea; and a wise man, if he fails to catch one flood, will wait for another. Dic was unconsciously wise, for Rita's favor was at its ebb when she walked down to the river bank. Ebb tide was indicated by the fact that she sat as far as possible from him on the log. The first evidence of a returning flood-tide would be an unconscious movement on her part toward him. Should the movement come from him there might be ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... it needed not a word. Our souls went out to one another in stark good faith; never before had I had anything but a guarded watchfulness for any fellow-man. Still I see him, upon that wild desolate beach of the ebb tide, I see him leaning against the shelly buttress of a groin, looking down at the poor drowned sailor whose body we presently found. For we found a newly drowned man who had just chanced to miss this great dawn in which we rejoiced. We found ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... round turret topped with battlements. On this tower the flag of France hung down its staff against the evening sky, for there was scarcely any motion of the air. That coast lay silent like a pictured land, except a hint of falls above in the river. It was ebb tide; the current of the St. John set out toward the sea instead of rushing back on its own channel; and rocks swallowed at flood now ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... gash, twisting hither and thither through stretches of red-brown, sun-cracked flats, whitened here and there with deposited salt. Where the creek joined the Tantramar, its parent stream, the abyss of coppery and gleaming ooze revealed at ebb tide made a picture never to be forgotten; for the tidal Tantramar does not conform to conventional ideas of ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... time I was in a motor boat that had left Mahommerah to take me for a run and it had broken down and seemed unlikely to start again in spite of all the coxswain's efforts. Consequently we were drifting about on the stream and likely to be swept down by the ebb tide. We were unfortunately on the far side of the river from Abadan, and consequently our plight would not be observed from the works. The situation was not a pleasant one because we stood a very good chance of being run ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... reply. "All I'm tryin' to do is keep her afore it. If this no'theast wind would hold, we'd be all right, but it's dyin' fast. And the tide must be at flood, if not startin' to go out. With no wind, and no anchor, and the kind of ebb tide there'll be pretty soon—well, if we don't drift out to sea we'll be lucky. . . . Pump! pump! you son of a roustabout. If I hear you stoppin' for a second I'll come for'ard ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... told Zenobia all about him if there'd been time; but there wa'n't. Another flash of the lights, and we was watchin' the last act, where this gutter-bred Pygmalion sprouts a soul. And when it's all over of course we're swept out with the ebb tide, make a scramble for our taxi, and are off for home. Then as we gets to the door I has ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... forelegs (theoretically described as modified pectoral fins), and with two goggle eyes, which he can protrude at pleasure right outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever direction he chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his head to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide this singular peripatetic goby literally walks straight out of the water, and promenades the bare beach erect on two legs, in search of small crabs and other stray marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If you try to catch him, he ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... later, when making up to a dock at San Pedro, a strong ebb tide and a mistake in judgment swung the bow of the Quickstep into the end of the dock and a dolphin was torn out. In the fullness of time the Blue Star Navigation Company was in receipt of a bill for $112 dock repairs, whereupon Mr. Skinner wrote Matt, prefacing his letter with the query: ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... that these accidents occur in the night-time, in very hazy weather, or at ebb tide. In the latter case it is necessary for boats to be taken in carts over the sands down to low-water mark, before ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby |
