"Ebb tide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has reported to the Emperor the conversation which he had with you this morning. His Majesty will proceed on board your ship with the ebb tide to-morrow morning, between four and ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... electric bell in the engine-room as he put the telegraph lever successively to "Stand By," and "Slow Ahead." Gradually the ship crept north, gaining way as the engines increased their stroke and the full body of the ebb tide made its volume felt. Round swung the Kansas to the west, just as the sun cleared the highest peak of the unknown mountains. Courtenay had not forgotten his bearings. Although he had men using the lead constantly, he did not need ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... marked the channel twinkled dimly in the gloom of the summer evening. 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
... us when we landed in England. The day passed quietly. No one was allowed ashore. The ship's gig went down to see some of the other ships of the White Star fleet and we got some of our belated mail. On Saturday we were to sail with the ebb tide. All the transports had come in and there was assembled in Gaspe Basin the greatest Armada that ever set sail for British shores. We were going in this great Armada to assist the Mother Country to maintain the Pax Britannicum. There were over twenty-five thousand ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... 25 May.—Ebb tide in appetite today. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty feeling. Nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing. As I knew that the only cure for this sort ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... of the yawl, I proceeded with Mr. Helpman to trace the river, immediately after daylight. Against the last of the ebb tide, and with the thermometer at 80 degrees, we contrived to reach a spot two miles beyond Point Escape before noon. From Point Escape upwards, there appeared to be, at low-water, no regular channel; the bed of the river assumed the aspect of an extensive flat of mud, intersected ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... pulled down I observed that a lighter had broken adrift from her moorings, and was sweeping down the river with the ebb tide. ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... ground swell. Three miles away could be seen the flash-light marking the entrance to the harbor. But though slowly gathering clouds told that wind was coming, the yacht now lay becalmed, drifting with the ebb tide. The pleasure-seekers had been together all day, and were decidedly talked out. For the last hour they had been singing songs—always omitting Mr. Pierce, who never so trifled with his vocal organs. During this time he had been restless. At one point he had ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... on my way to the North Sandhead lightship, which, however, we failed to reach by reason of the strong ebb tide against us and the wind dropping to a calm, we revisited this sternpost of the Terpsichore. We got down mast and sails and took to our oars. The light air from the north-east blew golden feathery cloud-films across the great blue arch above our heads, ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... cold and very dark, and there was some ice afloat in small masses, amidst which my boat, turning with no guidance, moved on the full of the ebb tide toward the great river. For about two hundred yards I drifted, lying flat on my back. At the outlet of the creek was a sudden turn where the current almost fetched me ashore on the south bank. There from the slip nearly overhead, as the boat whirled around, I heard a sentinel call ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... correspondingly below their normal fullness and rapidity, and the exhausted nerves demanded repose. It was at such times as these that Mrs. Frankland's constitutional buoyancy of spirit sank down on an ebb tide; it was at such times that her usually sunny temper chafed under the irritations of domestic affairs. On this evening, when the period of depression set in, Mrs. Frankland's view of Phillida's case suffered a change. She no longer saw it through the iridescent haze of excited ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... trenches for the burial of the almost innumerable dead, a task which, gigantic as it was, was made light by the work of hundreds of thousands of willing hands. Those of the invaders who had fallen in London itself were taken down the Thames on the ebb tide in fleets of lighters, towed by steamers, and were buried at sea. Happily it was midwinter, and the temperature remained some degrees below freezing point, and so the great city was saved from what in summer would ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... ebb tide, and we rowed late, in order, if possible, to get out of this branch before we stopt for the night. About six o'clock in the evening we entered the southern branch, and very soon after encamped for the night. The ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... say that if he turns up anywhere, he'll come ashore somewhere about Grinidge to-morrow, at ebb tide, eh, mate?' ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the westward with the ebb tide, so as to give Great Orme's Head a wide berth, and then making a short board south when she had cleared Anglesey; what with the currents and the thick fog, accompanied with driving rain, that she met on nearing ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... when Mrs. Keith sat on the saloon deck of a river boat steaming with the ebb tide down the St. Lawrence. The terraced heights of Quebec had faded astern; ahead a blaze of sunshine rested on the river, up which a big liner with crowded decks and her smoke-trail staining the clear blue sky moved majestically. To starboard dark pinewoods, with here and there a ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... the love of brothers so plain between us 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
... they clung to the branches, but when the tide went out the boats were all high and dry. At last the day dawned bright and fair, enabling them to see what had happened, and when the tide once more returned, they got the canoes out of the trap. They now proceeded with the ebb tide, stopping with the beginning of the flood, constantly on the lookout for the Spanish settlements, and not till the 28th, when they saw before them such a commotion of waters that their small craft would be instantly engulfed, and ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... quaint lilac-colored beach-flower, whose clustering heads dotted the sand like bits of blown spume, took the place of that smell of the sea which the odorless Pacific lacked. A few rocks, half a mile away, lifted themselves above the ebb tide at varying heights as they lay on the trough of the swell, were crested with foam by a striking surge, or cleanly erased in the full sweep of the sea. Beside, and partly upon one of the higher rocks, a singular ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... It was ebb tide, and as they gained the opposite side of the narrow island and came out upon the long reaches of white sand, the wild delight of the boys was unrestrained. They were in a new world. Even the trees were crimson, there was no lack of wonderful but ill-smelling flowers, ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... Their mode of fishing is singular and ingenious. At low water, they inclose a large extent of the flat shore with stakes interwoven with boughs of trees, forming a kind of basket-work; which pens or corrales are covered by every flood and left dry by the ebb tide, at which time they generally find abundance of fish. They likewise employ as food a species of sea-weed, called luche, which they form into a kind of loaves or cakes which are greatly esteemed even by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... so, the creek was a shining, slippery, red 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 what a river ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... intended to write you a nice letter, but it won't come, and the letter must go as it is. Please read into the remaining blank sheet all the feelings and good wishes I should express and do feel, and next time I write you, may it not be in the ebb tide, at ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... blood-sucking bats. The far-away volcanoes occasionally sent up sheets of flame, which in the distance were like summer lightning; the torrents of lava and crashes that had sounded so thunderous when near, were now like the murmur of the ocean's ebb tide, lulling the terrestrials to deeper sleep. The pale moons were at intervals momentarily obscured by the rushing clouds in the upper air, only to reappear soon afterwards as serene as before. All Nature seemed at rest. Shortly before dawn there was an unusually ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... 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 ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... Titan; and, perusing it after the lapse of forty years, the philosophic and impartial critic will conclude which got the better of it, Lincoln or Douglas, much according to his sympathy with the one or the other. Douglas, as I have said, had the disadvantage of riding an ebb tide. But Lincoln encountered a disadvantage in riding a flood tide, which was flowing too fast for a man so conservative and so honest as he was. Thus there was not a little equivocation on both sides foreign to the ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... on its way beneath the Atlantic it was the early morning of the ebb tide of the fever, and the patient was resting almost doubled over with his head on pillows before him, either slumber or exhaustion, so still, that his mother had yielded to urgent persuasion, and lain down in the next room to sleep in the dreamless ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... made a pathetic little joke. He said, "You once gave me shelter. Maybe I'll have to get one of the many mansions ready for you." Soon after that the ebb tide began to run out, and the preacher died in the ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... The ebb tide after noon was against us, and the wind being light, we were making no progress. As sunset approached, we began to look for anchorage; but the suspicious nature of the bottom and the great depth of the water prevented our being successful ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... and the pirates, the planters, and all the rollicking high spirits of that splendid book. Then there is Dana's "Two Years before the Mast." I should find room also for Stevenson's "Wrecker" and "Ebb Tide." Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself, but anyhow you could not miss out "The Wreck of the Grosvenor." Marryat, of course, must be represented, and I should pick "Midshipman Easy" and "Peter Simple" as his samples. Then throw ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... other, causing a whirlpool which would engulf a large boat and greatly endanger even a small vessel. Of course it was out of the question to attempt the passage of such a vortex in canoes, except at half flood or half ebb tide, at which periods the waters became quiet. On arriving at the mouth of the gulf, the travellers found the tide out and the entrance to it curling and rolling in massive volumes, as if all the evil water-spirits of the north were holding their orgies there. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 old;—shake ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... extensive and thickly Covered with wood. river here about 21/2 miles wide. Seven Indians in a Canoe on their way down to trade with the nativs below, encamp with us, those we left at the portage passed us this evening and proceeded on down The ebb tide rose here about 9 Inches, the flood tide must rise here much higher- we made 29 miles to day from ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... on the boy's part they might even have trusted to this breeze to carry them the rest of the way, had it not been for the ebb tide. This too had steadily increased in strength, and now, unless a miracle happened, would sweep them far to the westward of their goal. Hitherto they had been working their oars one on each side of the boat. Now Tilda shifted ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... signal the anchor was lowered, but its chain barely ran because the bottom lay no more than a meter down, and this locality was one of the shallowest spots near the bank of shellfish. Instantly the skiff wheeled around under the ebb tide's ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... stepped into 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
... kind heart and could not bear the sight of his brother's distress. He at once put back the Jewel of the Flood Tide and took out the Jewel of the Ebb Tide. No sooner did he hold it up as high as his forehead than the sea ran back and back, and ere long the tossing rolling floods had vanished, and the farms and fields and ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... hidden valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the sea; and still I ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... high land. On the left-hand side was a lighthouse, and the light was still burning. On my right hand was the outer telegraph building. When they see us they telegraph to another place, from which they telegraph all over San Francisco. When we were going in there was a strong ebb tide. We arrived at the wharf a little after five o'clock. The first thing which I did was to look for my father. Him I did ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... did was to pull him out by the seat of the trousers. The fat old thing had gone out in the dark to the end of the yacht's boat- boom, and was trying to worry in the dinghy with his toe, when plump he dropped into a six-knot ebb tide. Of course, if I hadn't happened along in a launch, he might have drowned, but, as for anything heroic on my part—why, the very notion is preposterous. The whole affair only lasted half a minute, and ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... his well-being he rose and moved to the secretary, where he got a fresh cheroot, and lighted it with slightly trembling fingers. He grumbled inarticulately, remembering his own exploits in the carrying of sail and record runs under the bluff bows of the Honorable John Company itself. The ebb tide, he thought, returning to William's figure and its amplification by himself. So much that had been good sweeping out to sea never ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to 11 a.m., when it moderated; the tide being full at about noon. Got underweigh at 1 p.m., and stood to the south-west, under topsails, stemming a strong ebb tide to 3.30, when we came to anchor in five fathoms (sand and shells), about three miles from the western shore of the bay, Sloping Head bearing north by east five miles. The water of the bay is much discoloured, being ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... tasks ran his strength to ebb tide, and then it was seen that the tide was running out. As he lay in the sick chamber a minister called, whose ministry had touched large numbers of the men in the railroad of which the sick man was head, and in the course ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... on the 14th 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 frigates or barks came to anchor near us, which we discovered by their lights, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... ships had become charnel-houses. Two men only, besides Munck, had survived the winter. When the ice went out with a rush and a grinding, and the ebb tide left the flats bare, wolves came nightly, sniffing the air and prowling round the ships' exposed keels. 'As I have no more hope of life in this world,' wrote Jens Munck, 'herewith good-night to all the world and my soul to God.' His two companions ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... plentiful. There are so many shell oysters that almost every Saturday my host craved them. He had only to send one of his servants in one of the small boats and two hours after ebb tide he brought it back full. These boats, made of a single tree hollowed in the middle, can hold as many as fourteen people and twenty-five ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... 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 broke ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... they now? Where had they slept last night? Where breakfasted this morning? Had there even been any breakfast this morning? Had there even been any bed last night? Lost, and forgotten in the plexus of the city's life, what had befallen them? Towards what fate was the ebb tide of the ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... and sandy, and is of shoal approach. A small clump of mangrove-trees on the beach was the first sign of vegetation that we had seen; and, from the absence of verdure hereabout, is a conspicuous object. The thermometer stood at 89 degrees. The ebb tide then commenced and drifted us out near our last night's anchoring ground, and the evening was spent, without success, in searching for our lost anchor. At sunset a fresh breeze set in from the South-West, and fearing a repetition of our loss, we continued under sail during ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... essays were unsuccessful, but by Saturday night we had a bark one completed, which we hoped would answer our purpose; though I think if the natives saw it they would ridicule our rude attempts. This morning, the ebb tide answering, we commenced transporting our luggage, and in three hours every thing was safe over. A very serious misfortune however occurred in swimming the horses across: two of them were seized with the cramp near the middle of the channel, ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... grew more and more troubled by the sea that swept across the atoll. Hundreds of leagues of ocean was being backed up by the hurricane, which more than overcame the lowering effect of the ebb tide. Immediately the tide began to rise the increase in the size of the seas was noticeable. Moon and wind were heaping the South ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... editions of this Diary were printed no note was required here. Before the erection of the present London Bridge the fall of water at the ebb tide was great, and to pass at that time was called "Shooting the bridge". It was very hazardous for small boats. The ancient mode, even in Henry VIII.'s time, of going to the Tower and Greenwich, was to land at the Three Cranes, in Upper Thames Street, suffer the barges to shoot the bridge, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... bar would keep the kegs on the sandy bottom and prevent them from disclosing their identity by floating. At low water the smugglers could have gone to get them up again, for they would not move far even with the ebb tide. Unfortunately, however, the Revenue Tide Surveyor at this port preceded the smugglers, and by creeping for the bar and tubs with grapnels succeeded in ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... door, took the key out, and carried it to the house on the other side of the woodyard. It was a low house, with smooth grey thatch and buff walls, looking pleasant and mellow in the evening light. The leaded windows were bright and speckless, and the door-stone was as clean as a white boulder at ebb tide. On the door-stone stood a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen gown, a red kerchief, and a linen cap, talking to some speckled fowls which appeared to have been drawn towards her by an illusory expectation of cold potatoes or barley. The old woman's sight seemed to be dim, for she ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... who had the watch on deck was comfortably seated on a coil of rope beneath the main deck awning, and probably dozing, while sheltered from a heavy and protracted shower of rain. The night was dark and gloomy; the ebb tide made a moaning, monotonous noise under the bows, and rushed swiftly by the sides of the vessel, leaving a broad wake astern. The sailor was roused from his comfortable position by a sound resembling the cry of a person ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... where the river enters the Highlands, he saw a faint light, evidently that of the lantern carried in the boat. Familiar with the river, the whole state of things flashed upon him. In the last of the ebb tide their boat had become entangled in the ice, but had been carried down no very great distance. Now that the tide had turned, it was coming back, with the mass of ice in which it ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the signal in ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... only under a promise of making a speedy return, and remaining longer with them, that our savage friends would suffer us to leave them. We expected to reach the Kerikeri River before night; but in this we were disappointed. It at length became quite dark; and the ebb tide making against us, rendered further advance impossible. We had to seek some place of shelter for the night, and not a hut was visible. While we were debating on what was best to be done, we observed a light from the shore, and made for it; but, it being ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... unusual current over thirty miles in the course of twelve hours, an event altogether unlooked for, and which would have baffled the skill of the most experienced navigator; our chart, upon examination, also proving to be incorrect. Luckily it was ebb tide when she went on, and after getting out all the boats, and lightening the ship by throwing overboard shot and starting water, she was got off, after having been aground about ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... reached its maximum height; but the violence with which it rushed from the south to north proved that the equilibrium of the Argentine rivers was not restored. Before getting lower the liquid mass must remain stationary, as in the case with the ocean before the ebb tide commences. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... doctor started from Churchill on the 5th of July, 1846, and reached the most southerly opening of Wager River on the 22nd, where they were detained all day by immense quantities of heavy ice driving in with the flood and out again with the ebb tide, which ran at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour, forcing up the ice and grinding it against the rocks, causing a noise resembling thunder. On the 24th the party succeeded in making Repulse Bay, and cast anchor within eight miles of the head of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which the tidal waves from the two different directions meet, one arriving approximately twelve hours later than the other, thus forming tides which are a result of the amalgamation of the two waves. On the ebb tide the direction of ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... fog should lift, ebb tide would only duplicate Roger's predicament of the morning. Toward four he saw that the mist was gradually growing lighter; saw water visible fifty feet from the island. Presently a breeze sprang into being, the most welcome wind Roger had ever known. Before it the fog thinned, grew ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... entertained of an expeditious and pleasant voyage. Before six o'clock,—a check to these delusive expectations was experienced, by the boat being run aground on the Romer Shoal, near Sandy Hook. It being ebb tide, it was found impossible to get off before the next flood; consequently, the fires were allowed to burn out, and the boat remained until the flood tide took her off, which was between ten and eleven o'clock at night, making the time of detention about four or five hours. ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat) |
