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verb
Shoal  v. i.  To become shallow; as, the color of the water shows where it shoals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shoal" Quotes from Famous Books



... always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely; we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters. ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... the opinion that this is not the best position for the main body of our troops, at least so long as we are inferior in strength to the enemy. If Hood advances, whether his design be to strike this place or Columbia, he must move via Lawrenceburg on account of the difficulty of crossing Shoal Creek. Under cover of his cavalry, he can probably reach Lawrenceburg without our knowledge, and move his forces a day's march from that point toward Columbia before we could learn his designs, and thus reach that point ahead of us; or he might move upon ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... through the strait formed by it and the mainland,—and a very beautiful scene it affords,—I was informed by those on board, that a shoal is marked down upon the ship's chart as being in the centre. Having never before heard the slightest allusion to this fact, I intend to ascertain its accuracy, by actual inspection, at some more ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... risk, avoided the danger, and clutched the prey. Following the French as rapidly as wind and canvas could take him, he caught their rearmost vessels, smashed them up, battered the whole fleet successively into flight or splinters, and himself lost only two vessels, which ran upon a shoal. Plodding prose does scant justice to the extraordinary brilliancy of Hawke's victory, described by Admiral Mahan as "the Trafalgar of this war." We cannot pass on without quoting one of ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott

... taken. The savages were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards the village whither the captive had been taken. Just as they ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... their memorials might be removed to some cloister without loss of respect for the dead, perhaps even with the silent approval of their own day and generation could it awake from its endless sleep and review the strange and eventful course of human life since they left "this bank and shoal of time." But may it not be safely prophesied that of all the names on the starry scroll of national fame that of Charles Darwin will, surely, remain unquestioned? And entwined with his enduring memory, by right of worth ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... tack'd and Stood to the North-East. Extream of the Land to the southward, which we took for Cape St. Thomas, South-West 1/2 South; distance 5 or 6 leagues; Depth of Water 13 fathoms, Grey sand. At 11 a.m. tack'd in 14 fathoms and Stood to the South-South-East, and at 3 a.m. Stood over a Shoal or Bank of 6 fathoms, afterwards the Depth increased to 30 fathoms, at Noon in 36 fathoms. Latitude Observed 22 degrees 37 minutes South, which is 10 miles to the Southward of the Log. No Land in sight. Wind South-East to East; ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... sailing up a wide inlet or creek that pierced the land, cork-screw fashion, until it vanished from sight amidst innumerable green marshes. The channel, indicated by a deeper blue in the midst of an expanse of shoal water, was narrow, and wound like a gleaming snake in and out among the interminable succession of marsh islets. The vessel, following its curves, tacked continually, its great sail intensely white ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... Methinks I hear the music in the boats, And the loud echo which returns the notes; While overhead a flock of new-sprung fowl Hangs in the air, and does the sun control, Dark'ning the sky; they hover o'er, and shroud 29 The wanton sailors with a feather'd cloud. Beneath, a shoal of silver fishes glides, And plays about the gilded barges' sides; The ladies, angling in the crystal lake, Feast on the waters with the prey they take; At once victorious with their lines, and eyes, They make the fishes, and the men, their prize. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... Pat had lost his way, but he kept on without stopping or turning to one side or the other. The water got deeper and deeper, indeed there seemed to be nothing but water around; then once more it began to shoal, and at last I found that we were walking on dry ground, but still of a very boggy nature. At last we were in something like a path, with peat-holes on either side. It was quite dark before we reached the heath or dry ground I was looking for. Pat even then, I found, kept away from the road I ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston

... the Egyptian, the spectre to the feast? And, after all, if death come while we thus love, it is better than change and time—better than custom which palls—better than age which chills. Oh!" continued Godolphin, passionately, "oh! if this narrow shoal and sand of time be but a breathing-spot in the great heritage of immortality, why cheat ourselves with words so vague as life and death? What is the difference? At most, the entrance in and the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... for him to do, on making sail again, would be to stand southward along the west side of the island looking for an anchorage. The first few miles of the shore have rocky exposed points, and the bank where there is shoal water only extends half a mile from the shore. Immediately beyond that the bottom shelves rapidly down to a depth of 2000 fathoms, so that if Columbus was sounding as he came south he would find no bottom there. Below ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... its varied forms and characteristics. The northern coast has no sheltered waters of any considerable extent, and the shore slopes abruptly to a great depth, which gives it a marine life of no special importance. In the shoal waters about Juan Fernandez are found a species of codfish (possibly Gadus macrocephalus), differing in some particulars from the Newfoundland cod, and a large crayfish, both of which are caught for the Valparaiso market. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... the deepening and cleansing of the river; they have power to receive donations for charitable purposes, and annually relieve great numbers of poor seamen and seamen's widows and orphans; and as they alone supply outward-bound ships with ballast, on notice of any shoal or obstruction arising in the river Thames, they immediately direct their men and lighters to work on it till it is removed. The profits arising to the Corporation by this useful regulation is ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... deadly encounter, when suddenly the four natives who had accompanied them appeared running at full speed, and, through their assistance, though not without some difficulty, bloodshed was prevented. Very shortly after this adventure, when the men had just pushed their boat off from a shoal, upon which it had struck, they noticed a new and considerable stream coming from the north, and uniting its waters with those of the Murray. Upon landing on the right bank of the newly-discovered stream, the natives came swimming over from motives of curiosity; and there were not less than ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... he had known her soul! Discouraged on disaster's changeful shoal Wrecking, he rested; starved on selfish pride Long years; nor would obey love's homeward tide. And the moon ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... flames had gained terribly, and it was a race for life or death. There was no time do more than run her aground if life was to be saved at all. The captain, who in the gaps of the smoke could be seen upon the bridge, knew his work well. As he came near the shoal he ran a little north, and then turned sharply so as to throw the boat's head to the south of the shoal. Thus the wind would drive fire and smoke forward and leave the after part of the vessel free for ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... risk of damage, blame, inroad, and confiscation. The only course on which he could determine, was to stand by the helm like a resolute pilot, watch every contingence, do his best to weather each reef and shoal, and commit the rest ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... counties of Devon and Hereford, the cities of Exeter and Worcester, urged their respective Members to make all possible resistance to the tax. Lord Bute's personal unpopularity increased enormously, and a shoal of squibs, caricatures, and pamphlets appeared, in which he was held up to ridicule and contempt. One caricature represented him as 'hung on the gallows over a fire, on which a jack-boot fed the flames, and a farmer was throwing ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote

... the seashore, the trawlers lay before thee these gifts by the grace of thine aid from the promontory, having imprisoned a tunny shoal in their nets of spun hemp in the green sea-entrances: a beechen cup and a rude stool of heath and a glass cup holding wine, that thou mayest rest thy foot weary and cramped with dancing while thou chasest away ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... and the continent, whose waters were deep and rough, we got aground in the Shallows, off Zarzees. This place is a round tower (burge) on the continent, with a few houses and plantations of olives and dates. Here commences the shoal-water, or bassa-fondo, as our semi-Italian boatmen called it, which continues east along the coast for eighty miles, as far as Rais-el-Makhbes. When we got off again, at the flow of the tide, we passed Biban ("two doors"), the frontier place of the Tunisian dominions. Biban ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... to the fishermen that an immense shoal was upon the coast; and, regardless of its being Sabbath morning, they began to prepare their thousand boats, and to go out to set their nets. The Rev. Andrew Simpson, a man possessed of the piety and boldness of an apostle, was then minister of Dunbar; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... relative proportions of land and water. The whole surface of the globe is supposed to have an area of about two hundred million square miles. Of these only about fifty millions are dry land. Within the harbor of Nassau the divisions of shoal and deep water presented most singular and clearly defined lines of color, azure, purple, and orange-leaf green,—so marked as to be visible half a mile away. All was beneath a sky so deeply and serenely blue as constantly to recall the ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... ship shook again, this time strongly. It was something more than a shudder; the sensation was for all the world as though she had scraped over a shoal of rock or shingle. There was a little clatter below, a noise of broken glass. The watch, who had been dozing on deck, sprang to their feet, and their ejaculations of surprise and fear rolled in a growl among them. The captain ran out ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... chilled to the bone but with his mind cleared by the sharp plunge, Bucks felt his companion's arm drawing him toward the farther shore where, in the slack water of an elbow of the stream, Dancing led the way across a shoal of gravel and Bucks waded after him ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman

... age, and the doors, too, had shrunk before their united malignity. How such a house had drifted to such a locality is unaccountable, unless—as is often the case—some navigator of real estate had thought he descried a port, where was only a shoal that left his venture high and dry ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... the shark evidently getting worsted. Possibly the bottom, which was clear, was favourable for his enemy; whose blow, if he succeeds in striking while the shark is descending, is fatal. I think he had struck him, for the blue shark is seldom seen in shoal or discoloured water; yet now he floundered on towards the bottom of the bay, madly lashing the water into foam, and rolling and pitching like a vessel dismasted. For a few minutes his conqueror ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various

... glad to quit such a pack of female dogs. But before I had passed on many steps, I was surprised to see another shoal of imprisoned wenches, twice more detestable than they. Some had been changed into toads, some into dragons, some into serpents who were swimming and hissing, glavering and butting in a fetid, stagnant pool, much larger than Llyn Tegid. {84} "In the name of wonder," said I, "what ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... slow its wending; But winning is sweet, but right is fine; And shoal of trout, or willowy bending— Though Law be ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... 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 later history is ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle

... of the Arctic Circle, the diggings are about seventy-five miles above the head of light-draught steamboat navigation, and more than six hundred miles above the confluence of the Koyukuk with the Yukon. Transshipped at Nulato to the shoal-water steamboats that make three or four trips a season up the Koyukuk, transshipped again at Bettles, the head of any steamboat navigation, freight must be hauled on horse scows the remaining seventy-five miles of the journey; and all that handling and hauling means high rates. The cost ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... me Over life's tempestuous sea; Unknown waves before me roll Hiding rock and treacherous shoal; Chart and compass came from Thee; Jesus, Saviour, ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger

... two islands at its extremity, and passed between them; that on the north side is named Bolyna, and that on the south Bamdym. Sailing to the west-southwest a matter of fourteen leagues, they fell in with a white bottom, which was a shoal below the water; and the black men they carried with them told them to draw near to the coast of the island, as it was deeper there, and that was more in the direction of Borneo, for from that neighborhood the island of Borneo could already ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... are dissolved, or uncrystallized, they are really separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of fish in the sea;—generally at about equal distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of them as ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... He was back and forth about the lakes, mostly about the upper one, for a week or two after that. He turned up in all sorts of places, fished in deep water and shoal, rowed and shot and climbed the mountains. He fell in with the Wanita and her people very often. One evening—it was Thursday, the twentieth—he was in the village of Ti, and walked out with his cigar, alone. He strolled up the road to the high levels and walked on. The moon was high and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... the grace, for me the prize, And what to Love the glory,—when the whole Of the deep stair thou tread'st to the dim shoal And weary water of the place of sighs, And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes Draw up my ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... ever forgit 'er?" granted Stump, "I wish them Romans had looted her. W'en I was goin' down the Hooghly, she was comin' up, in tow. Her rope snapped at the wrong moment, an' she ran me on top of the James an' Mary shoal. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... attempting to cut across the bends, she followed the current round the broadest sweep; but, with the best she could do, it was occasionally necessary for Ethan and Rattleshag to resort to the poles to push her over the shoal places. ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic

... landed were running about like ants, every one acting as if his life again depended upon his getting away immediately. The landing place was covered with baggage which had been dumped ashore. A number of canoes were lying in the shoal water, and a number of others had been hauled out while their owners repaired them. Amidst the baggage, and over the canoes, swarmed the Georgia's passengers, in their flannel shirts or broadcloth or muddy white, shouting and pleading and ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin

... closed behind him than a shoal of clerks come tripping down on tip-toe, and others appear from the back of the house. They make use of the opportunity for a little gossip. Voices are heard in the passage, and an aged and infirm labouring man ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... was full of business all this time, with parties out exploring the country, and so did not see what was going on in and about the camp. Then, one day, news was brought him that a whale had come into the creek and was stranded in shoal water. The men, short as they were of food, were eager to get at it. Karlsefne went out to see it—a huge beast, greyish and arched in the back. He did not know what sort of a whale it was, but the ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett

... There I obtained, at fabulous expense, a train of pure Esquimaux dogs, and started on January 31 through a region of frozen swamp for fully 100 miles. On February 7 we reached Cedar Lake, thence sped on to Lake Winnipegoosis and Shoal Lake, across a belt of forest to Waterhen River, which carries the surplus floods of Lake Winnipegoosis to Lake Manitoba, the whole length of which we traversed, camping at night on the wooded shore, and on February 19 arrived at a mission-house fifty miles from Fort Garry. Not without ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... Then follows a direction, which they obey, to cast the net on the right side of the boat. Perhaps they thought the stranger—for it is clear that as yet they had no suspicion of his identity—had seen some sign of a moving shoal which had escaped them. They secure a great haul of fish. Then John has an inkling of the truth; and I know no words which thrill me more strangely than the simple expression that bursts from his lips: It is the Lord! ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... an hour of this kind of sailing they were close to the group of islands, and sighting a passage to the northward, swung over on the other tack. A rough beat to starboard brought them into the gap. Though they crossed a grim, black shoal at the narrowest part, Job did not shorten sail, but steered straight on as fast as the wind would take him. And at length they came clear of the headland and saw a great stretch of open sea to the southwestward with a faint, white dot of sail at ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... gulls, turned over huge star-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or so from the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in to the shore, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half submerged. It was a fleet ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... I have waited until now to sound that shoal water with a cautious plummet? Your mother is as ignorant of the propinquity as Greta herself. Lowther was dead before your family settled in Newlands. The families never once came together while the widow lived. And now not a relative survives ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... carcass stranded on the beach. On the other hand we are gravely told that the hero Gliding-Tide having dropped an axe overboard off the shore, muttered an incantation so powerful that the bottom of the sea rose up, the waters divided, and the axe returned to his hand. The shoal at any rate is there, and is pointed out to this day. And what are we to say to the tale of another leader, whose canoe was upset in the South Seas, and who swam all the way to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... was, whether rock or sand, whether steep or shoal, we knew not; the only hope that could rationally give us the least shadow of expectation, was if we might happen into some bay or gulf, or the mouth of some river, where by great chance we might have run our boat ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... minutes—in so few minutes that all his calculations as to his location were upset—the Montana plowed herself to a shuddering halt on a shoal, her bow lifting slightly. And when the engines were stopped she rested there, sturdily upright, steady as an island. But in her saloon the men and women who fought and screamed and cursed, beating to and fro in windrows of humanity like waves ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... mark the boundary between the Adriatic and Tuscan Seas. There a strong east wind arose for them, and on the following day it carried the ships to the point of Libya, at the place which the Romans call in their own tongue "Shoal's Head." For its name is "Caputvada," and it is five days' journey from ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius

... patch and tree-covered shoal in the China Sea was an impossible task. All the Orient could do was to visit the principal islands and institute inquiries among the fishermen and small traders. At last, the previous night, a Malay, tempted by hope of reward, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... voyage, on the second of July they found shoal water, where they say[K]: 'We smelled so sweet and strange a smell, as if we had been in the midst of a delicate garden, abounding with all kinds of odoriferous herbs and flowers, so we were assured that the land could not be far distant; and keeping good watch, and bearing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... precedent. We lay our souls to pawn to the devil for a little pleasure, and a woman makes the bill of sale. That ever man should marry! For one Hypermnestra that saved her lord and husband, forty-nine of her sisters cut their husbands' throats all in one night. There was a shoal of virtuous horse leeches! Here are ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... its depths. The American flag on the fort rippled, a thing of living light, the stripes transparent. High pink clouds were riding down from the north, their flush dying as they piled aloft. There were shadings of peacock colors in the shoal water. Jenieve enjoyed this sunset beauty of the island, as she ran over the rolling pebbles, carrying some leather shoes by their leather strings. Her face was eager. She lifted the shoes to show them to three little boys playing on ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... have said slaves, for we certainly are in the most abject slavery, our very lives being within the power and at the very nod of a most capricious tyrant), let me refer you to statements which I presume you will already have seen before the receipt of this. Suffice it to say, that the shoal we run upon was never laid down on any chart yet published, nor ever before discovered by any of our vessels cruising off this coast; consequently, the charts and soundings justifying as near an approach to the land as we made, not the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... along the brink Of wild brook-ways of shoal and deep, Where killdees dip, and cattle drink, And glinting little minnows leap! Sing! slimpsy lass who trips above And sets the foot-log quivering! Sing! bittern, bumble-bee, and ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley

... on centuries, since first the hallowed tree Was launched by the lone mariner on some primeval sea, No stouter stuff than the heart of oak, or tough elastic pine, Had floated beyond the shallow shoal ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... a silver shoal of clouds; already its slender tentacles of light were probing the shadows behind the lattice where Jacqueline ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... aggravating to the people on the steamer to see that cockle-shell of a yacht dancing safely along over the shoal on which their "leviathan" had struck, and to hear Ford Foster sing out: "If we'd known you meant to run in here, we'd have followed ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... empire, falls, gulf, hall, high school, hospital, hotel, house, island, isthmus, kindergarten, lake, mountain, ocean, orchestra, park, pass, peak, peninsula, point, range, republic, river, square, school, state, strait, shoal, sea, slip, theatre, university, valley, etc.: South Hall, Park Hotel, Hayes Block, Singer Building, Dewey School, South Division High School, Superior Court, New York Theatre, Beloit College, ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... afterwards sailed through a shoal of islands, more than a thousand in number. We sailed in this sea nearly two hundred leagues, directly north, until our people had become worn with fatigue, through having been already nearly a year at sea. Their allowance per ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... quarter of a mile ahead, rolling lazily in the trough of the sea. Towards this the starboard boat now pulled with incredible speed, leaving the other two gradually astern. A number of whales rose in various directions. They had got into the midst of a shoal, or school of them, as the whale-men term it; and as several of these were nearer the other boats than the first whale was, they ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... the Mortimers featured him between two fashionable bishops at a dinner. Mrs. Vendenning, who adored bishops, immediately remembered him among those asked to her famous annual bal poudre; a celebrated yacht club admitted him to membership; a whole shoal of excellent minor clubs which really needed new members followed suit, and even the rock-ribbed Lenox, wearied of its own time-honoured immobility, displayed the preliminary fidgets which boded well for the stolid candidate. The Mountain was preparing to take the first stiff step toward Mohammed. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... it. Well, every day showed my new friend in an improved light. Who was it took all the children, not only his own but actually the entire troop on board up to the bow and down to the stern in a laughing crowd to see this or that or the other? Now a shoal of porpoises, now a distant sail or an iceberg, now the beautiful phosphorescence or the red light of a passing ship—the Bishop. Who divined the innate cliquism of life on board ship and cunningly got together in intercourse the very people ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... 'There was a shoal of fish,' he says, 'which pursued our vessel and followed her strangely, and along close by our rudder.' The master mariner's eye had evidently been following the movements of the fish throughout the day, as he asked himself: 'What are those fish? I never saw ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... arose behind, and next moment they were caught up in the toils of a net constructed of towels knotted together, stretching across the path, and held at each end by two swift runners who swept them along at a headlong pace, catching up a shoal of stray fish on the way until even the stalwart dredgers were compelled, from the very weight of ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... the noses of the boats up on the shore side of a big shoal, and all hands, with sacks, spread out and began picking. Every now and again the clouds thinned before the face of the moon, and we could see the big oysters quite distinctly. In almost no time sacks were filled and carried back to the boats, where fresh ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London

... would better take the tiller this time!" he said. "The bottom seems to be shoal all about here. And if you and Miss Everton will sit a little forward, Hilda, you will be more comfortable; I fear I cannot help dripping like hoary Nereus all over ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... shoal work of those mangroves, Yeo," said Amyas; "I doubt whether we shall do aught now, unless we find a ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... handle, a parcel of oatmeal, and a two-quart tin pail. Mr. Bigglethorpe had fastened a handle cut out of the bush to the dish cover, thus converting it into a scoop-net. Barefooted, Marjorie stood in the shallow water, scattering a little oatmeal, when up came a shoal of minnows eager for the food thus provided. At one fell swoop, the young fisherwoman netted a dozen of the shiny little creatures, and transferred them all alive to the tin pail. Mr. Errol had a great mind to join her in this exciting sport, but was not sure what Mrs. Carmichael would ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... how long and had done nothin' but pay taxes on it, so they were glad enough to sell for somethin' down to bind what Raish and Jethro called 'options.' Anyhow, when the Eagle people finally started in to put their grand plan into workin', they bumped bows on into a shoal, at least that's the way father used to tell about it. They found that all that Skoonic Creek land was in the hands of Raish Pulcifer and Cap'n Jeth Hallett; those two either owned it outright or had options where they ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... pair of them. To hear those two fellows separately tell what she was like, you couldn't have believed them speaking of the same person. The second one thought the first had—sort o'—charted her harbor for him; but when he came to sail in, 'pon my soul, if every shoal on the chart wasn't deep water, and every deep water a fortified ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... intention to anchor there, if I should find it might be done with safety, and to land on the Cape, to examine what the low land within it produced. After running in one league, we sounded again, and found thirteen fathoms; and immediately after, saw a shoal right before us, that seemed to extend off from the shore, from which we were distant about two miles. This discovery obliged us to haul off, E. by S., one league, where our depth of water increased to twenty-five fathoms. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... had sprung up, and Billy had observed that the admiral's smack was heading to windward in an easterly direction. As the breeze came down on the various vessels of the fleet, they all steered the same course, so that in a few minutes nearly two hundred smacks were following him like a shoal of herring. The glassy surface of the sea was effectually broken, and a field of rippling indigo took the place of the ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... on the Trojans this way and that he turned, As mid long forest-glens a lion turns On hounds, and Trojans many and Lycians slew That came for honour hungry, till he stood Mid a wide ring of flinchers; like a shoal Of darting fish when sails into their midst Dolphin or shark, a huge sea-fosterling; So shrank they from the might of Telamon's son, As aye he charged amidst the rout. But still Swarmed fighters up, till round ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... north-by-east. At noon we were in 29 deg. 32' S. Lat.; at night about three hours before daybreak, we again unexpectedly came upon a low-lying coast, a level, broken country with reefs all round it. We saw no high land or mainland, so that this shoal is to be carefully avoided as very dangerous to ships that wish to touch at this coast. It is fully ten miles in length, lying in 28 ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres

... the Junon, 38, Captain Sanders, and Martin, 18, Captain Senhouse, were in Delaware Bay, the latter grounded on the outside of Crow's Shoal; the frigate anchored within supporting distance, and while in this position the two ships were attacked by the American flotilla in those waters, consisting of eight gun-boats, carrying each 25 men and one long 32, and two heavier block-sloops, [Footnote: Letter of Lieutenant Angus, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... bearings when the accident occurred. The owner and his friend Chater were in their berths asleep, when suddenly he discovered that the vessel was making no headway. They had, in fact, run upon the dangerous shoal without being aware of it. A strong sea was running with a stiff breeze, and although his seamanship was poor, he was capable enough to recognize at once that they were in a ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... July we found shoal water, where we smelt so sweet and so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kind of odoriferous flowers; by which we were assured that the land could not be far distant. And keeping good watch and bearing but slack sail, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... did Phoebe herself perceive the shoal past which her self-respect had just safely ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... waiting for the boat to take us round to La Brea, and drank in dreamily with our eyes the beauty of that strange lonely place. The only living things, save ourselves, which were visible were a few pelicans sleeping on a skerry, and a shoal of dolphins rolling silently in threes—husband, wife, and little child—as they fished their way along the tide mark between the yellow water and the green. The sky blazed overhead, the sea below; the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in the Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on either side of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were soldiers, stood about It, moving no more than the still flame of the ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... of Heaven, when the man at the head sung out, 'Rocks ahead!' 'Port the helm,' cried the mate. 'Ay, ay, sir,' was the answer; the ship obeyed, and stood upon a tack. But in two minutes more, the lead indicated a shoal. The man on the out-look sung out, 'Sandbreaks and breakers ahead!' The captain was now called, and the mate gave his opinion; but sail where they could, the lead and the eye showed nothing but dangers all around,—sand banks, coral reefs, sunken ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... 1836, our observer noticed salmon fry descending seawards, and he took occasion to capture a considerable number by admitting them into the salmon cruive. On examination, he found about one-fifth of each shoal to be what he considered sea-trout. Wisely regarding this as a favourable opportunity of ascertaining to what extent they would afterwards "suffer a sea change," he marked all the smolts of that species (about ninety in number) by cutting off the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... now," said Noddy philosophically, "but although the Curlew's stuck on the shoal I'm ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton

... trader on the sea to riches grew; Freight after freight the winds in favour blew; Fate steer'd him clear; gulf, rock, nor shoal Of all his bales exacted toll. Of other men the powers of chance and storm Their dues collected in substantial form; While smiling Fortune, in her kindest sport, Took care to waft his vessels to their port. His partners, factors, agents, faithful proved; His goods—tobacco, sugar, spice— ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... fish then of seven or eight pounds weight, different to the others, and Mr Ebony caught seven or eight quickly one after the other, I suppose out of a shoal, and then, laughing and chattering once again, the anchor, which proved to be a curious elbow, evidently the root of a tree, sharped at its points and weighted with a lump of coral, was hauled up, placed in the stern of the canoe, and we turned ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn

... empty space that formed its banks. But presently, as I looked more closely, I saw, rising from its surface, dipping, rising, and dipping again, in a regular rhythm, without change or pause, what I can only compare to a shoal of flying fish. Not that they looked like fish, or indeed like anything I had ever seen, but that was the image suggested by their motion. As soon as I saw them I knew what they were: they were souls; and the river down which they passed was ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... to make up his mind. He sat, involuntarily. I pushed with all my might and, slowly and jerkily, the dingy slid off the shoal. But there were others all about. With one hand on the bow I guided her between them and to the edge of the channel. Then, wading along the slippery bank, I brought her to the skiff. My passenger had been making remarks in transit, but ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... includes every rock, reef, and shoal that lifts its head above the water. Some call it twelve hundred. We will not stay to count them; but there are many of them big enough to have quite a number of towns on them. I wish to announce that it will not be possible for us to go to any of them except Manila, ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... doth toll, And the Furies, in a shoal, Come to fright a parting soul, Sweet Spirit, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... swimmer, the Matutina crossed the dangerous Shambles shoal. This bank, a hidden obstruction at the entrance of Portland roads, is not a barrier; it is an amphitheatre—a circus of sand under the sea, its benches cut out by the circling of the waves—an arena, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... corner was ringing his plates together to prove them indestructible; old Madge Campion, who sold gooseberry-tarts and hot mutton-pies on her board under an awning supported by clothes-props, was surrounded by a shoal of children, as happy as the sunshine; the man with the panorama was exhibiting, at one halfpenny a head, the murder of Lord William Russell to a string of boys and girls who mounted the stool in turn to look through ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... Providence. This channel is a continuation of what is called "The Tongue of the Ocean," which extends over a hundred miles south of New Providence, a hundred and fifty fathoms in depth, and bordered by innumerable cays, reefs, and very shoal water. ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic

... for shoal water, Mr. Wharton, and we shall have to cut her out, sir. She's a footy little brig, but I should have thought a fore-and-after ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Credibility, is by a happy Invention of the Poet; as in particular, when he introduces Agents of a superior Nature, who are capable of effecting what is wonderful, and what is not to be met with in the ordinary course of things. Ulysses's Ship being turned into a Rock, and AEneas's Fleet into a Shoal of Water Nymphs; though they are very surprising Accidents, are nevertheless probable, when we are told that they were the Gods who thus transformed them. It is this kind of Machinery which fills the Poems both of Homer and Virgil with such Circumstances ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... great discouragement to a Caserta party, to view the whole town buried in a mist; and the Belvidere alone, like a buoy, to point out the shoal. ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... lay-over at Ilwaco all night, and returning to Portland next day, and sleeping on board the boat. A railway runs from the town to the outside beach, a mile and a half distant. There is a drive twenty-five miles long up this long beach to Shoal Water Bay, which is beautiful beyond description. This district is the great supply point for oysters, heavy shipments being made as far south as San Francisco. Sea bathing, both here and at ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax

... within catapult shot. I heard the wash of the sea upon the beach, I could see the pebbles on the sands shining as the foam left them. And then, suddenly, the lugger drove ashore upon a bank, stern first. In a moment she had swung round, broadside on to the shoal, heaving over on her side. Every wave which struck her lifted her further in, tossing her over on her starboard side. I could see that the tide was now very nearly fully in, and I knew that the lugger would lie there, high and dry, ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... The shoal I wish to point out is the habitual use made by some stupid people of acids, the bad effects ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... the human soul, and it was made to dwell there forever, after the threescore and ten years of its residence in the body are over, yet it shrinks back from an entrance into this untried world, and clings with the desperate force of a drowning man to this "bank and shoal of time." There are moments in the life of a guilty man when the very idea of eternal existence exerts a preternatural power, and fills him with a dread that paralyzes him. Never is the human being stirred to so great depths, and roused to such intensity of action, as when ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... startling to abandon entirely the supposition that the ring is in any sense a continuous body, but there remains no alternative. Look at it how we will, we seem to be conducted to the conclusion that the ring is really an enormous shoal of extremely minute bodies; each of these little bodies pursues an orbit of its own around the planet, and is, in fact, merely a satellite. These bodies are so numerous and so close together that they seem to us to be continuous, and they may be very minute—perhaps not larger than the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... three miles, and to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of Aetna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... from the canoe, but turned when Dick called to him. The canoe was half full of water, and as it would have been difficult for Ned to get aboard without capsizing it, he swam to the nearest key, while Dick paddled the canoe to the shoal water beside it. As the boys stood in the water bailing out the canoe and examining its cargo, Dick ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock

... five-and-twenty, he had been beguiled from that Arcadia by wily persons who took advantage of his innocent youth, who initiated him into the metropolitan mysteries which sadden the soul and deplete the pocket, who finally abandoned him upon the shoal of a youngest brother's allowance when his father passed away from the place in Lincolnshire, and young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet's stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all. Yet such were the outlines ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... count fish implies that all of a certain size are to count as twelve to the dozen, the shoal or school-fish eighteen or twenty-four to the dozen, and the squire, thirty or thirty-six to the dozen—the latter just according to their size, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... Besides dolphins in the water, frigate birds in the air are characteristic of this lower part of the Tocantins. Flocks of them were seen the last two or three days of our journey, hovering above at an immense height. Towards night, we were obliged to cast anchor over a shoal in the middle of the river to await the ebb tide. The wind blew very strongly, and this, together with the incoming flow, caused such a heavy sea that it was impossible to sleep. The vessel rolled and pitched ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... rocky, precipitous, and extremely dangerous character of the coast in the vicinity of Gizhiga, the captain of the bark had not deemed it prudent to run into the mouth of the Gizhiga River at the point of the long A-shaped gulf, but had anchored on a shoal off the eastern coast, at a distance from the beacon-tower of nearly twenty miles. From our point of view on land, the vessel was entirely out of sight; but I knew where she lay, and did not anticipate any difficulty in getting on board as soon as I ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back reflections of the starbeams ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... glided out of the open sea into the Port Jackson River. They were now in a harbor fifteen miles long, land-locked on both sides, and not a shoal or a rock in it. This wonderful haven, in which all the navies that float or ever will float might maneuver all day and ride at anchor all night without jostling, was the sea avenue by which they approached ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... circumstances, ought to exhibit. I told him what he ought to do, and offered to open my purse for the purpose; but he would not, or did not; indeed, he never took my advice; he followed his own, and a foul and dismal shoal he has drifted on. It is not for his sake—why should I?-that I have longed and laboured to remove the disgraceful slur under which his ill-fortune has thrown us. He troubles himself little about it, I believe—he's meek, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... his feet touched gravel. He stumbled forward in the shadow of overhanging trees and saw her wading shoreward, a dripping, silvery shape on the shoal. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... it must of necessity have required to obtain air frequently, we may conclude "that it swam upon or near the surface, arching back its long neck like a swan, and occasionally darting it down at the fish which happened to float within its reach. It may perhaps have lurked in shoal water along the coast, concealed amongst the sea-weed; and raising its nostrils to a level with the surface from a considerable depth, may have found a secure retreat from the assaults of powerful enemies; while the length and flexibility ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... that day; but towards evening there arose a tempestuous wind which made the waves run mountains high and parted the two carracks one from the other. Moreover, from stress of wind it befell that that wherein was the wretched and unfortunate Landolfo smote with great violence upon a shoal over against the island of Cephalonia and parting amidships, broke all in sunder no otherwise than a glass dashed against a wall. The sea was in a moment all full of bales of merchandise and chests and planks, that floated on the surface, as is wont ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... purposes there were two tanks, the division between them lying about eighteen inches under water. But the division was neither straight nor exactly level. It zig-zagged this and that way like the key-track in a maze, and was more beset with slippery pitfalls than a mussel-shoal at ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. "What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... shoal of porpoises, rolling as they went—papas, and mammas, and little children—and all quite smooth and shiny, because the fairies French-polish them every morning; and they sighed so softly as they came by, that Tom took courage to speak to them: but ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... shrunk, so that it should receive The ocean flood; nor firm enough to stand Against its buffets — all the pathless coast Lies in uncertain shape; the land by earth Is parted from the deep; on sandy banks The seas are broken, and from shoal to shoal The waves advance to sound upon the shore. Nature, in spite, thus left her work undone, Unfashioned to men's use — Or else of old A foaming ocean filled the wide expanse, But Titan feeding from the briny depths His burning fires (near to the zone of heat) Reduced the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... presently went up, and the Agamemnon was seen gliding on at more rapid speed than heretofore towards the shore, some little distance to the north of Fort Constantine, the nearest point which a shoal running off from the land would allow her to reach. A gallant little steamer, the Circassian, was observed leading the way, fearless of the shot which the guns of the fort threw at her. As the Agamemnon passed the Sanspareil, which had been ahead of her, hearty cheers ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... another,) escaped across the ice, which covered the Bay of St. Charles, before the arrival of Captain Laws. This was a dangerous and desperate adventure, but worth while the undertaking, in avoidance of our subsequent sufferings. Its desperateness consisted in running two miles across shoal ice, thrown up by the high tides of this latitude— and its danger, in the meeting with air holes, deceptively covered by the bed of snow. Speaking circumspectly, yet it must be admitted conjecturally, it seems to me, that ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... with its Neighbouring Keys. Green Turtle. Ruins of a Spanish Fort. The Westermost point of Mindanao. Two Proes of the Sologues laden from Manila. An Isle to the West of Sebo. Walking Canes. Isle of Batts, very large; and numerous Turtles and Manatee. A dangerous Shoal. They sail by Panay belonging to the Spaniards, and others of the Philippine Islands. Isle of Mindora. Two Barks taken. A further account of the Isle Luconia, and the City and Harbour of Manila. They go off Pulo Condore to lye there. The Shoals of Pracel, &c. Pulo Condore. The Tar-tree. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various

... armies were at first successful and captured several border towns, but that which entered in the south was repulsed at Estrelleta, while that which invaded the north was defeated at Beler. A small Haitian fleet which set out to attack Puerto Plata blundered on a shoal where it was left high and dry and captured by ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... occurs," he declares, "but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after which the 'Lords' may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary 'damned,' as it were a whale among the shoal." As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression "Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. His primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. We discover this even in the story of his relations with women. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... the blue sky, when, descending suddenly towards the ship like a falling star, it checked its course, and hovering for a while over our masts, darted away with its two long projecting tail-feathers streaming in the air towards a shoal of flying-fish, which had just then risen from the water. It caught one, and again ascended in the most graceful way towards the blue heavens, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... A shoal of flying-fish got up out of the warm, shining water and ran away over the ripples like so many silver rats; yellow tangles of Gulf-weed swam in close squadron on the emerald sea; and on the western horizon screw-pile lighthouses stood ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... flounces in the waves. Thus all my crew transformed around the ship, Or dive below, or on the surface leap, And spout the waves, and wanton in the deep. 130 Full nineteen sailors did the ship convey, A shoal of nineteen dolphins round her play. I only in my proper shape appear, Speechless with wonder, and half dead with fear, Till Bacchus kindly bid me fear no more. With him I landed on the Chian shore, And him shall ever gratefully adore.' 'This forging slave,' says Pentheus, 'would prevail ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... hardly moving before, stopped dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The Olaf was anchored at the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below the horizon now. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... be the end, if the life of Burnes terminated upon "this bank and shoal of time," if no morning is to dawn upon the night in which he sleeps, then sorrow has no consolation, and this impressive and solemn ceremony which we observe to-day has no more significance than the painted pageant of the stage. If the existence of Burnes ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... until eight o'clock, P.M., when all the guns having been thrown overboard (except one, retained for signals), and all means taken to lighten her, she began to heave, and in about an hour after she swung off the shoal,—not, however, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... these smooth waters, waiting for the laggard wind, up came a shoal of dolphin, ready as at all times to attach themselves for awhile to the ship. Nothing is more singular than the manner in which deep-sea fish will accompany a vessel that is not going too fast—sometimes for days at a time. Most convenient too, and providing hungry Jack with many a fresh ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... viscount, steward, and hounds, to the horror of a shoal of par, the only visible tenants of a pool, which, after a shower of rain, would be alive with trout. Where those trout are in the meanwhile is a mystery ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... the description of new gowns and a list of the guests of each entertainment. Oh, it was dreadful. Fortunately Clara had a good reputation with her mother, and was able to carry conviction, whereas I had a very hard time. I kept getting into shoal water." ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... by Bligh, and is coloured dark blue. In the space between Australia and New Caledonia, called by Flinders the Corallian Sea, there are numerous reefs. Of these, some are represented in Krusenstern's "Atlas" as having an atoll-like structure; namely, BAMPTON shoal, FREDERIC, VINE or Horse-shoe, and ALERT reefs; these have been ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... Miss Gwynne is a lady,—Mrs Rowland Prothero, I am meaning. She was coming to see me the other day, and says she, "I know you have been unfortunate Mrs Jenkins, fach! and no fault of yours." And she was giving me this new white shoal. And, seure, if it wasn't for Rowland Prothero and she, I 'oudn't be in that tidy cottage by there, with Mrs Owen and my grandoater coming to see me and reading to me; and Mrs Prothero too, is seure, and bringing me something ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... rubbed his nose against the canoe, and nibbled a lily root before he noticed me. A shoal of minnows were playing among the grasses near by. A dragon-fly stood on his head against a reed—a most difficult feat, I should think. He was trying some contortion that I couldn't make out, when a deer stepped down the bank and never saw me. Doing nothing pays one ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long

... from the shore or from my canoe at twilight. Just outside the lily pads a shoal of minnows would be playing at the surface, or small trout would be rising freely for the night insects. Then, if you watched sharply, you would see gleaming points of light, the eyes of Chigwooltz, stealing out, with barely a ripple, to the edge of ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long

... then the hard one, and he with his hand-shoal, Himself over the sand the sea-plain a-treading, The warths wide away; shone the world's candle, The sun slop'd from the southward; so dreed they their journey, And went their ways stoutly unto where the earls' refuge, The banesman of Ongentheow all in his burgs there, The young ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous

... length—as it inevitably must—to women, and the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft curve of ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... the seines, as the place appeared a likely one for salmon. Immediately on opening the inlet we encountered a rapid current setting outward, and, after rowing a mile and a half to the N.W.b.W., the breadth of the stream varying from one third of a mile to four or five hundred yards, came to some shoal water extending quite across. Landing on the south shore and hauling the boats up above high-water mark, we rambled up the banks of the stream, which are low next the water, but rise almost immediately to the height of about two ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... deem'd that Death had freed my soul From Love's tormenting, overwhelming thought, To crush its aching burthen I had sought, My wearied life had hasten'd to its goal; My shivering bark yet fear'd another shoal, To find one tempest with another bought, Thus poised 'twixt earth and heaven I dwell as naught, Not daring to assume my life's control. But sure 'tis time that Death's relentless bow Had wing'd that ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... shoal of small fry Attempt to draw nigh, With a flap of his tail, Th' imperial whale Makes them pay for ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... which rewarded the white men for their faith in their disreputable henchman. Charley played with the light craft in the great volume of stream as a feather might yield to a gentle breeze. The canoe sidled in to the shore through a threatening shoal of rocky outcrop, and the first stage of the journey ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... accurate calculation of the depth. In such a contest, the hopes of all were already weak, besides which they were entering amid the breakers. The ship sailed a long distance without meeting accident, and later they found themselves in the deep sea, free from so dangerous a fright. That shoal was marked down accurately on the charts, and was noted on other voyages. It was a rocky islet surrounded with many covered reefs. They considered it a marvelous occurrence that they should pass over them without ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various

... storm. The vessel was driven out of her course, so that neither Behram nor his pilot knew where they were. They were afraid of being wrecked on the rocks, for in the violence of the storm they discovered land, and a dangerous shoal before them. Behram perceived that he was driven into the port and capital of queen Margiana, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.

... the Hudson River Railroad, crossing the Peekskill River. It is said that an old skipper, Jans Peek, ran up this stream, years before the railroad was built, and did not know that he had left the Hudson, or rather that the Hudson was "left" until he ran aground in the shoal water of the bay. The next morning he discovered that it was a goodly land, and the place bears his ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... impressed him most, as a mark of engineering skill and sound calculation on the part of the pond-people, was the direction in which the dam was laid. At either end, where the water was shoal, and comparatively dead even in time of freshet, the dam ran straight, taking the shortest way. But where it crossed the main channel of the brook, and required the greatest strength, it had a pronounced upward curve to help it resist the thrust of the current. He contemplated this strong ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... projects a long handle. This is used only when there are floods; the fisher draws it up the rivulets, and every now and then pulls it up to look for his success. Sometimes he nets a great many at a time, and especially if he wait the arrival of the flood, because a large shoal mostly comes down with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various

... runaways were out on the gravel-bar, Euonymus behind Robelia and Robelia splashing ludicrously across the shoal, tearing off and kicking off—in preparation for deep water—sunbonnet, skirt, waist, petticoat, and howling in the self-concern ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable

... thus committed did not long remain unpunished, for Gilling's brother, Suttung, quickly went in search of the dwarfs, determined to avenge him. Seizing them in his mighty grasp, the giant conveyed them to a shoal far out at sea, where they would surely have perished at the next high tide had they not succeeded in redeeming their lives by promising to deliver to the giant their recently brewed mead. As soon as Suttung set them ashore, they therefore gave him the precious compound, which he ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... like, my lady: it is all the same. You have read of panic-stricken people, when a church or a theatre is on fire, rushing to the door all in a heap and crowding each other to death? It is something like that with the fish. They are swimming along in a great shoal, yards thick; and when the first can get no farther, that does not at once stop the rest, any more than it would in a crowd of people: those that are behind come pressing up into every corner where there is room till they are one dense mass. Then they push ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... as one who knew that it is not the deep sea that must be paid its toll, but the shoal water where the rocks and quicksands and crabs and gulls are waiting. They made their way back in silence, and slowly a new grey day crept into life. At last they could see the horizon and read the face ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... Montcalm's side, and unless Wolfe could draw him from his impregnable entrenchments and compel him to fight, the game was lost. When the tide fell, a stretch of shoal a few score yards wide was left bare on the French side of the Montmorenci. The slope that covered this was steep, slippery with grass, crowned by a great battery, and swept by the cross-fire of entrenchments on either flank. Montcalm, too, holding the interior ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... miracles, a man came running up to the encampment with the unexpected and joyful tidings that "millions of sea-cows had come on shore." The crew climbed over the ledge of rocks that flanked their tents, and the sight of a shoal of manatees immediately beneath them gladdened their hearts. These came in with the flood, and were left in the puddles between the broken rocks of the cove. This supply continued for two or three weeks. The flesh was mere blubber, and quite unfit for food, for not a man could ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park

... profile of the prairie. The Canadians, however, began to apprehend an ambush in every thicket, and to regard the broad, tranquil plain as a sailor eyes some shallow and perfidious sea, which, though smooth and safe to the eye, conceals the lurking rock or treacherous shoal. The very name of a Sioux became a watchword of terror. Not an elk, a wolf, or any other animal, could appear on the hills, but the boats resounded with exclamations from stem to stern, "voila les Sioux! voila ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving



Words linked to "Shoal" :   water, shoaly, animal group, sandbank, alter, school, fish



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