"Flying fish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horse, as to render it what the sailors call lopsided. Again he attacked it, and continued to take piece after piece off my steed, until I was afraid that he would come to the rider at last, when fortunately a boat full of black people, who were catching flying fish, perceived me and pulled to my assistance. They took me on shore and carried me to the governor, to whom I gave a history of my adventures; but Englishmen suppose that nobody can meet with wondrous adventures except themselves. He called me a liar, and put me in the Clink, and a pirate schooner ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... whales; sometimes great black masses rolling on the water, looking like a ship bottom upward, which some said were black-fish. Some fish seemed to be at play, and would jump ten feet or more out of the water. The flying fish would skim over the waves as the ship's wheels seemed to frighten them; and we went through a hundred acres of porpoises, all going the same way. The ship plowed right through them, but none seemed to get hurt by the wheels. Perhaps they were ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... stopped by where I was watching the flying fish fizz out of the blue-ink-like water, skim along for some distance, and drop in again, often, I believe, to be snapped up by some bigger fish; and he gave me a poke in the shoulder with one finger, so hard, ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... day close about the ship clouds of flying fish skimmed the sea, and great schools of porpoises leaped from it and raced us, as if, even to them, their native element had become hateful, or as if they sensed something ominous and fearsome abroad from which they sought shelter in our company. ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... right, beyond a heat mist through which flying fish were darting, loomed a new coastline. Yellow beaches appeared, interrupted by lagoons where the slow waves abruptly spouted high into the air—white geysers against somber forests and jungles. From these dark green fastnesses, ascending ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... stagger Mary. She had heard of mermaids as signs of inns and as sea-wonders, but never of flying fish. Not so Job. He put down his pipe, and nodding his head as a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... epithet to a dolphin doth not give one so clear an idea as were to be wished; a smiling fish seeming a little more difficult to be imagined than a flying fish. Mr Dryden is of opinion that smiling is the property of reason, and that no irrational creature ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... calm, and an endless summer. Far off, for many an azure league, rims of rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle still lagoons, and are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myriads of flying fish and a few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the scarcely undulating water. But we look in vain for the "sails of silk and ropes of sendal," which are alone appropriate to this dream-world. The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue expanse, pure and lonely, an ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... are rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only Blackbird in the dish; And then you overstrain yourself, or so, And tumble downward like the flying fish Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, And fall, for lack of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... overscrupulous merchants of Port of Spain, it was not thought worth while to incur the expense and delay of a chase. The Sumter was now terribly in need of an excitement. Not a living thing was in sight, but the glittering schools of flying fish which ever and anon darted into view, and skimming rapidly over their surface sank again beneath the waves, only to be once more driven for a brief refuge to the upper air by their unseen but relentless ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help; now to the sound of slatting sails and stamping sheet blocks, staggering in the turmoil of that business falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of squalls burying her lee-rail in the sea.... Flying fish, a skimming silver rain on the blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung thwart the forerigging like the frame of a wrecked kite—the pole star and the familiar plough dropping ever lower in the wake; these build up thus far the history of our ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... way to the Westward, and by noon had run since yesterday upon a South 86 degrees 15 minutes West Course, 79 Miles. Latitude in, by Observation, 39 degrees 30 minutes South, and Longitude made from Cape Farewell 20 degrees 2 minutes West. Some flying fish seen this day. ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... the men's minds from the dangerous brooding in which they had indulged. A dark line appeared on the horizon, which at first we took for a breeze, but which, as it swept down upon us, proved to be a prodigious number of flying fish. These delicate creatures rose out of the water like silver clouds, and as they passed over our Vessel numbers fell upon our decks. These fish are excellent eating, and of those that fell aboard of us we soon had an ample supply. ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... and ridiculous kinds: these became the sole objects of his hope, and the creatures of his fear: he was unhappy, he trembled under these visionary deities; under the supposed influence of visionary beings created by himself; under the terror inspired by blocks of stone; by logs of wood; by flying fish; or the frowns of men, mortal as himself, whom his disturbed fancy had elevated above that Nature of which alone he is capable of forming any idea. His very posterity laughs at his folly, because experience has convinced them of the absurdity of his groundless fears—of his misplaced ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... visible when I came on deck at daybreak. We had a light fair wind in the morning, accompanied by a heavy swell, which caused us to roll so much that I found it very difficult to do anything. Several shoals of flying fish skimmed past us along the surface of the water, occasionally rising to a considerable height above it. Their beautiful wings, glittering in the bright sunlight, looked like delicate silver filigree-work. In the night one flew on board, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... raptures about a "vast expanse" of dirty salt water, which must, in the nature of things, be associated in every one's mind with sick stomachs and lost dinners. The same people get so tired of their interminable view of poetry, that they will nearly crowd each other overboard, to get sight of a stray flying fish, or porpoise, or the back fin of a shark sticking out of the water. This trip to Hilton Head came near taking the poetry ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... to be reckoned by the maximum performance of a ship under the most favorable conditions, then the British tea clippers were certainly no match for the larger American ships such as the Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Hurricane, Trade Wind, Typhoon, Flying Fish, Challenge, and Red Jacket. The greater breadth of the American ships in proportion to their length meant power to carry canvas and increased buoyancy which enabled them, with their sharper ends, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... out on the bow where every dash of warm salt water wet his brown skin, and where he could watch the flying fish ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... been full of the petty events which make up life on shipboard. The trail of smoke from a passing steamer, the first shoal of flying fish, the inevitable dance, the equally inevitable concert and, most inevitable of all, the Sabbatic contest between the captain and the fresh-water clergyman who insists upon reading service: all these are old details, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... the fish, here called pilchards were of one of the kinds of flying fish, which is of the same genus with the herring and pilchard. Voyagers ignorant of natural history are extremely apt to name new objects after corresponding resemblances in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... very poor swimmers and do not dive, so are forced to procure their food by preying upon the Gulls and Cormorants, forcing them to drop their fish, which the pirates catch before it reaches the water. They also feed upon flying fish, catching them in the air, whither they have been driven by their enemies in their natural element. They nest in large colonies on some of the Bahama Islands and on some of the small Florida Keys. Their nests are small frail platforms of sticks ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... not be thus explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians. For men ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... bewrayeth them to the Balker: so are they likewise persecuted by the Tonny, and he (though not verie often) taken with them damage faisant. And that they may no lesse in fortune, then in fashion, resemble the Flying fish, certaine birds called Gannets, soare ouer, and stoup to prey vpon them. Lastly, they are persecuted by the Hakes, who (not long sithence) haunted the coast in great abundance; but now being depriued of their wonted ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... Coquille, driven by a favourable breeze, passed immense shoals of whales and dolphins, flocks of gulls and numerous flying fish, the ordinary tenants of those tempestuous regions. The Falkland Isles were reached, and Duperrey with a few of his fellow-travellers felt a lively pleasure at revisiting the land which had been to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne |
