"Lateen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reef at night in shallow-draft lateen-sail boats without having him on board; and though he was never ostensibly paid for his services, it was understood that he performed pilot service in return for certain other opportunities that sometimes came his way. When things happened on the high sea that were not discussed in public, it ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... seems as though a puff of the Khamsin might dissolve them away. Near at hand is a noisy, naked crowd of men and boys, plunging and swimming in the water, or sitting and standing along the bank. They are watching and discussing the slow approach up stream of a large boat with a broad lateen-sail, and a strange flag fluttering from the mast-head. Rumor says that this boat contains a company of strangers from beyond the sea; men who do not wear turbans, whose dress is close-fitting, and covers them from head to foot,—even the legs. They come to learn wisdom and civilization from the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the topmast, to the yardarm of the main topsail-yard. Up above it, on a bending light pole, fluttered the great colours, a George's cross of scarlet on a ground of white. Abaft the main-mast were the mizzen, carrying one sail, on a lateen yard, one arm of which nearly touched the deck; and the bonaventure mizzen (which we now call the jigger) rigged in exactly the same way. Right aft, was a banner pole for the display of colours. These ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... colored dawn which always comes through the mists of that bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen sails, for the fishermen of San Francisco Bay were all Neapolitans who brought their customers and their customs and sail with lateen rigs shaped like the ear of a horse when the wind fills them ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the lighthouse of Tarifa, and turning the head of the bark towards the west, we made directly for the coast of Africa. The wind was now blowing very fresh, and as we had it almost in our poop, we sprang along at a tremendous rate, the huge lateen sails threatening every moment to drive us beneath the billows, which an adverse tide raised up against us. Whilst scudding along in this manner, we passed close under the stern of a large vessel bearing American ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... adjacent wharf seemed to accent the loneliness. Beyond, the open channel between him and Verba Buena Island was racing with white-maned seas and sparkling in the shifting sunbeams. The scudding clouds above him drove down the steel-blue sky. The lateen sails of the Italian fishing boats were like shreds of cloud, too, blown over the blue and distant bay. His ears sang, his eyes blinked, his pulses throbbed, with the untiring, fierce activity of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... had brought the two travellers, and which was to be their dwelling during their stay, was moored on the other side of the Nile in front of the village of Luxor. Its sweeps were shipped, its great lateen sails furled on the yards. After having devoted a few days to visiting and studying the amazing ruins of Thebes, gigantic remains of a mighty world, they had crossed the river on a sandal, a light native boat, and were ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the rising poop of the local mehala, but a tall incurving beak, not unlike those of certain Mesopotamian sculptures, with a windowed and curtained deck-house at the stern. Forward she carried a short mast. The lateen sail was furled, however, and the galley was propelled at a fairly good gait by seven pairs of long sweeps. They flashed none too rhythmically, it must be added, at the sun which had just risen above the Persian mountains. And although the slit sleeves of the fourteen ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... time Marseilles was the market, but now Italy is the great center of the trade, the greater number of boats hailing from Torre del Greco, while outside persons are forced to pay a heavy tax. The vessels are schooners, lateen-rigged, from three to fourteen tons. Large nets are used, which, during the months between March and October, are dragged, dredge-like, over the rocks. A large crew will haul in a season from 600 to 900 pounds. To prevent the destruction ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... On the dark side of the street, to the quay, are moored hundreds of sailing vessels. Except that they are painted and gilded differently, they look like sisters. They are fat, squat sisters with the lines of half a cantaloupe. Each has a single mast and a lateen-sail, like the Italian felucca and the sailing boats of the Nile. When they are moored to the quay and the sail is furled, each yard-arm, in a graceful, sweeping curve, slants downward. Against the ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... "square rig" of her time—when apparently no use was made of the "fore-and-aft" sails which have so wholly banished the former from all vessels of her size—goes without saying. She was too large for the lateen rig, so prevalent in the Mediterranean, except upon her mizzenmast, where it was ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... crutches.... And though none might be in the chapel, yet it was full of life, so much did the pathetic ex-votos tell.... And he would come out of the chapel, and again the Midi sun would flash in a shower of gold, and he could see the blue Mediterranean, pricked with minute lateen-sails, and the grayish town beneath him, so old and yet so vital, and the calm harbor, with the forest of spars, and Monte Cristo, white as ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... on the Nile? Come, then, and imagine yourselves, on a clear warm January day, afloat on the river of which you have so often heard. What a sensation we should create if we could go sailing up the Hudson some sunny morning, our broad lateen-sail swelling in the breeze, and ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... throw a flashing line upon the azure waters, a few fishermen in one of the country boats happened to come in, about to dry a net upon a sunny bank. The boat was what is called a speronaro; an open boat worked with oars, but with a lateen sail at the same time when ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... under the great wall of the mountains, the lakatoi consisting of a raft composed of six or more canoes lashed together side by side, and covered by a platform which bears a thatched hut serving to house the sailors and their wares. The craft is propelled by graceful crescent-shaped lateen sails of pandanus matting and steered by sweeps from the stern. Trading voyages of hundreds of miles are often undertaken, the lakatois starting from the east at the waning of the southeast trade wind in early November and returning a month or two ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... on the east bank, and to them came presently numbers of strange vessels, broad in the beam like a barge, and with monstrous lateen sails that looked too unwieldy to be furled or set; and on their bows they bore the painted letters "I.W.T., R.E." and a numeral. They were native feluccas, garnered from every canal and waterway in Egypt. They brought grain and fodder for the horses, ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... The white lateen sails of the gun-boat in advance were now plainly distinguishable from the rest, which were all huddled together in her wake. Down she came like a beautiful swan in the water, her sails just filled with the wind, and running ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... Nature with all that could be desired for crop-raising, only rain is lacking to bring the fields to fruition, and from the earliest times a great system of irrigation has existed in Egypt. It is curious to see in many directions the white lateen sails of boats which appear to be sailing over the fields. In reality they are sailing on the canals which intersect the country in all directions, and by means of thousands of water-wheels and pumps supply the land with water. Though the Nile overflows its banks, its inundation does ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... parao (a name of Malay origin) was a large, flat boat with two masts, and lateen sails; used for carrying freight, and employed in the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little picaroon, with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly ransacked the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little that they wanted ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the voyage were soon made; and waiting only to secure a copy of the treaty with Badur, and plans of the fort which had been commenced, he ordered the short mast, with its tapering lateen yard, to be raised, and the sail trimmed close to the breeze blowing into the roadstead of Diu. But instead of turning up along the northern coast of the Gulf of Cambaya, he directed the bow of his little ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... with lateen sails! The craft was long and low. In it were more than fifty men, twenty or thirty of whom were at oars with which the craft was being propelled from the lee of the land. I ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fierce and haughty fashion, cleaving the foam around it, the lateen-yard quite square and the sail bulging down the whole length of the mast; its gigantic oars kept time as they beat the water; every now and then the extremity of the keel, which was shaped like a plough-share, would appear, and the ivory-headed horse, rearing both its feet ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... tailed on to the halyards, and the strange, outlandish sail, lateen in rig and dyed a warm brown, rose in the air. We were sailing on the wind, and when Yellow Handkerchief flattened down the sheet the junk forged ahead and the tow-line went slack. Fast as the Reindeer ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... Yet to go back might be more dangerous than to go on. The expedition had already been delayed a fortnight with making a rudder for the Pinta, stopping her leaks, and replacing the lateen sails of the Nina with square ones, that she might be able to keep up with the others. Another week must pass before they could sail. If they returned to Palos it was doubtful whether they could get ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... St. Gothard, where the smells of two continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Venice on warm April mornings. But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail—that shark's fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a suggestion of menace, a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... 'that is a botherer. What can you make of death? There are those poor fishermen now; there will be a white squall some day, and they will go down with those lateen sails of theirs, and be food for the very prey they were going to catch; and if you continue living here, you may eat one of your neighbours in the shape of a shoal of red mullets, when it is the season. The great secret, we cannot penetrate that with all our philosophy, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli |
