Word: armada
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Shamrock was a pleasure boat which, like scores of the other craft, had not been designed for the Dunkirk job (the armada even included three Thames flak ships). "I was [soon] numb to [danger]," says Shamrock Skipper Barrell. "It was hot bravery but just a will to snatch those boys." Barrell squeezed his way into the beaches among upturned boats and floating torpedoes. "Soldiers in the water trying to be sailors for the first time . . . paddled their collapsible little boats out to me with the butts of their rifles, and many shouted that they were sinking, we could not help...
Loco Knight. In 1587 Cervantes got a job as a government agent, collecting wheat and oil for the Invincible Armada. Collections were slow, and he was excommunicated for seizing wheat belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Seville Cathedral (the Church later took him back). His debtors failed him; his accounts were snarled; in 1592, 1597 and perhaps again in 1602, he was clapped in jail for indebtedness to the State. Later he applied for a job in the New World-possibly as paymaster of galleys in Cartagena, Colombia. He was turned down. Even after Don Quixote appeared (1605), Cervantes...
...Four of Britain's five reigning queens have been married. Mary Tudor's husband, King Philip of Spain, was styled both King Consort and King of England. He left Mary after a year and after her death sent the Armada to make war on her half-sister Elizabeth. The second Mary's husband, Prince William of Orange, was an heir to the British throne in his own right and ruled equally with his wife. Prince George of Denmark, who married Queen Anne, had no British status, except as the Queen's husband. Victoria's Albert...
...passengers the Jewish Assembly, heaved in the lashing seas. In its stinking coffinlike holds, along the rusted decks and companionways, deep in the engine rooms and even in the ancient, rotting lifeboats high in the davits, 3,854 refugees, 591 of them children, struggled for life. In a small armada of launches, caïques, fishing smacks and rowing boats, they had left tiny coves in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece, to be picked up by the ship...
...thousands in the Strait. Captain Nels Floe in his 71-ft. Bligh Island reported a record catch of 15,225 fish in one haul; in one day 160 other seiners took 600,000 - worth about $1 apiece. As the sockeyes reached the river's mouth, an armada of 3,500 gillnet boats was waiting. Some novice fishermen were war veterans out for a quick stake. In other boats, the whole family lent a hand; enthusiastic moppets helped parents pay out cork floats and nets over creaking wooden rollers...