"Topgallant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evening of the 10th, there was a dreadful storm of thunder, lightning, and rain, during which the mainmast of one of the Dutch East Indiamen was split, and carried away by the deck; and the maintop-mast and topgallant-mast were shivered to pieces. The stroke was probably directed by an iron spindle, which was at the maintop gallantmast head. As this ship lay very near the Endeavour, she could scarcely have avoided sharing the same fate, had it not been for the conducting chain, which fortunately had been ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... moulded beam, 8-foot 6-inch depth in hold, and about 152 feet 9 inches on deck. She was to carry a battery of 22 long guns (32-pdr.), on the main deck 12 carronades (42-pdr.), on forecastle and quarter decks. She was to have been rigged to rather lofty and very square topgallant sails, and would have been capable of sailing fairly well, though of rather shoal draft, drawing only about 8 feet 6 inches when ready for service. She was sold on the stocks at the end of the war and her ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle
... 8.—63 deg. 20'. 177 deg. 22'. S. 31 E. 138'; to Circle 191'. The wind increased in the first watch last night to a moderate gale. The ship close hauled held within two points of her course. Topgallant sails and mainsail were furled, and later in the night the wind gradually crept ahead. At 6 A.M. we were obliged to furl everything, and throughout the day we have been plunging against a stiff breeze and moderate sea. This afternoon by keeping a little to eastward of the course, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... numerous dangers to which they had been exposed. Night was now coming on, and it was evident that the ship was in the midst of a regular West Indian hurricane. The French officer was evidently a good seaman, and did all that could be done under the circumstances for the safety of the ship. The topgallant-masts were struck, and every sail was furled except a closely reefed fore-topsail, with which the ship ran before the gale. Night had now come on; the wind, as is generally the case during a hurricane, shifted so much that it was difficult to ascertain in what direction ...
— Adrift in a Boat • W.H.G. Kingston
... roar of the rising sea. I noted the growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded professionally to it with the thought that at eight o'clock, in another half hour or so at the farthest, the topgallant sails would have ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... brave," cried the captain, slapping his favorite boy on the shoulder, "you are worth a dozen such girl-boys as your brother. Let him be a kitten and cry mew, if he will, while you climb the topgallant-mast and make ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... in the Docks, when I had gone down to inspect her and choose my cabin; but she was then less than half loaded; her decks were dirty and lumbered up with bales and cases of cargo; her jib-booms were rigged in, and her topgallant-masts down on deck; and altogether she was looking her worst; while now, lying well out toward the middle of the stream as she was, she looked a perfect picture, as she lay with her bows pointing down-stream, straining lightly at her cable upon the last of ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... topgallant foc'sle, the port and starboard sides divided by a partition that reached not quite to the deck above, and which contained a connecting door. Newman and I had stumbled into the port foc'sle the previous night, and as I sat up, I discovered ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... few minutes the schooner, under her mizen, brigantine, topsail, and topgallant sail, loosed from her moorings and made full sail through the straits. In an hour the capital of Denmark seemed to sink below the distant waves, and the Valkyria was skirting the coast by Elsinore. In my nervous frame of mind I expected to see the ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... as we drew into fine weather; and in one week after leaving Cape Horn, the long topgallant masts were got up, topgallant and royal yards crossed, and the ship ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... and a little to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope, when suddenly one night, when running before a strong gale, she came crushing into ice. The shock was so severe that her fore and main topmasts and mizzen-topgallant masts went by the board, and the foremast-head sprung. The hull was considerably shattered, and the main covering-board split up from forward as far aft ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... all the steam she would carry. There was a light breeze from the westward, but not enough to help the speed of the steamer, and we did not put on any sail. I took my place at the wheel while Hop Tossford was the lookout on the topgallant forecastle. ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... remember when I was with Milburn's, running to Hamburg? The old gentleman asked me to take a few overmen a trip. They belonged to some mine he was interested in. By the time we got outside, and got the decks cleared up, it was dark, and the watch was set. The look-out man went on to the topgallant forecastle, and I was walking from side to side of the bridge when one of the miners came running up, and ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... crowd collecting on the dock to watch the ship clear, and as it was still too dark to see objects distinctly, I couldn't tell what was taking place in the waist, for I had to attend sharply to the work on the topgallant forecastle. Mr. Trunnell bawled for the tug to pull away, and the ship started to ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... something new to admire in the ship, and the way in which she was handled: as, for instance, to see the topgallant sails hauled down when the wind freshened, or a staysail set as the wind went round to the east. The taking in of the mainsail on a stormy night was a thing to be remembered for life: twenty-four men on the ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... tail of Ichi's words. A heavy, ominous rumbling came out of the black depths. Martin recalled hearing the same sound the day before, when he was on the topgallant-yard. And suddenly the hard, packed sand began to crawl beneath his feet, things swayed dizzily before his eyes, and a sharp nausea attacked the pit ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... this kind will take away the giddiness felt on first mounting to a high elevation, and thus a boy may safely be denied the use of the lubber's hole, and may be sent up the futtock shrouds, and after that the topgallant shrouds, and so on to the royals,—if there be any on the ship,—and by thus gradually inducting him into the art of climbing, he will get over the difficulty without dread and without peril—for both of these may ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... his personal holdings in the vessel. He sailed for Ombay Pass; after a period of magnificent sailorizing and superhuman effort he floated the ship and patched her so that she would stay afloat. When he appeared off Batavia roadstead with the 'Speedwell' under topgallant-sails, it was the sensation of the port; and when it transpired what he intended to do with her, the news flew like wildfire about the China Sea. For he proposed to hold the ship as salvage; and nothing, apparently, could ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Before breakfast-time he was shaking his sides at the sight of seven hundred-odd Johnnies vainly spreading and trimming more canvas to catch up their lee-way (for at first the lazy dogs had barely unreefed courses after the gale, and still had their topgallant masts housed). Likely enough they had work on hand more important than chasing a small lugger all day; for at seven o'clock they gave up and stood away to the south-east, and left the Unity free to head back homeward on her ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Mountain and through the Golden Gate came from. I have discovered the laboratory. For the past two weeks we have been sailing continually in a dense, wet, grey cloud of mist, so thick at times as almost to hide the topgallant yards, and so penetrating as to find its way even into our little after-cabin, and condense in minute drops upon our clothes. It rises, I presume, from the warm water of the great Pacific Gulf Stream across which we are passing, and whose vapour is condensed into fog ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... recognized as the Lydia. She was struggling slowly onward against the rapids of Hoy Sound, with the wind on her starboard quarter, and as we got nearer her I could see the extent of the damage she had sustained in the late storm. She had lost her fore and main topgallant masts, and her port bulwarks were stove in. The quarter boat was missing and ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... had paid his executive the high compliment of allowing him to pilot the vessel, and Perkins took position in the eyes of her, on the topgallant forecastle, while Lieutenant-Commanding Harrison and Captain Bailey stood aft, near the wheel, and all the men except the helmsmen were made to lie flat on the deck until the time came for them to serve the battery. ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... fire grew hotter, and their aim truer—down came our mizzen-topgallant-mast, and hung down over our quarter; away went our bowsprit—but we held on till we struck their line 'twixt the 'Santissima Trinidado' and the 'Beaucenture,' and, as we crossed the Spanisher's wake, so close that our yard-arms grazed her gilded ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... it. I leave any man that is a sailor, or understands anything of a ship, to judge what a figure this ship made when we first saw her, and what we could imagine was the matter with her. Her maintop-mast was come by the board about six foot above the cap, and fell forward, the head of the topgallant-mast hanging in the fore-shrouds by the stay; at the same time the parrel of the mizzen-topsail-yard by some accident giving way, the mizzen-topsail-braces (the standing part of which being fast to the main-topsail shrouds) ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe |
