Quotes About Seafaring

The ships slowly picked their way through, guided from patch to patch of open water by the shouts from the crow's nest. Tern, cape pigeon and white petrel flew around the ship. Seals on the ice were so slow to take fright that they were easily bludgeoned on the head and brought on board for food. In the stomach of one of them they found 9 lb of granite stones, which puzzled Ross, as they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.

The Seaman's Practice

I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.

It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

Brendan, as you know, is called "Brendan the Navigator.

I haven't the gift of the gab, my sons—because I'm bred to the sea.

I ploughed the land with horses, But my heart was ill at ease, For the old seafaring men Came to me now and then, With their sagas of the seas.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent.

In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of corsairs.

Behind him were three Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. Before him were two books of seamanship and six fatal cuts of a Japanese pirate's sword.

Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces.

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub.

you speak a world's language, jovially jabbering in the Lingua-Franca of the forecastle.

As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, Good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.

Be it determined, however, that each one this records is given by means of a man who, in line with his personal assertion, become only at one of the islands, and remained there however two weeks, slumbering every night on board his ship, and taking little child-glove excursions ashore within the sunlight hours, attended by an armed birthday celebration.

King, Dean. Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian. New York: Owl Books, 2000.

We had taken him for a Norwegian ship's captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe.

The pirates had it right from the beginning.