Word: topsail
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...tiny topsail schooner Pickle leaked and bucked her way past Spanish Finisterre, through Biscay's Bay, past French Finistere, and English Land's End, to Falmouth. The "telegraph" (semaphore) to London was unfinished. So Pickle's skipper, Lieut. John Richards Lapenotiere, jounced for 37 hours in a post chaise to Whitehall. It was 16 days after the fleet's guns fell silent that Lapenotiere rode through Admiralty Arch, strode into the secretary's office and announced baldly: "Sir, we have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson...
...nature. The dawn light of Cadaques, where Dali spends six months of the year, shines through every part of the vast canvas, and the Santa Maria floats on a mother-of-pearl sea precisely like a Cadaques fishing boat at dawn. Her sails, however, are inventions. The transparent topsail shows the silhouette of a combined crow's-nest and Holy Grail...
...fine afternoon in December 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was picked up heading westward in the South Atlantic under jib and fore-topsail, her galley table set for dinner, and not one soul aboard. Why her master, Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his crew and his passengers-ten in all-should have deserted their ship in midocean is still the sea's most taunting mystery...
...agent who described Miss Coplon's arrest, he snatched up her handbag, minced up & down before the jury. "Now comes this great eclipse," he bawled, "this marvelous piece of FBI ideology!" When searching her, he said, the FBI had "stripped her from pillar to post" and from "topsail to feet...
...that was beginning to rise. Night was falling, so he switched on the compass light. He thought of the skipper lying in his bunk below, staring up at his compass. He certainly couldn't growl about the course this time. An even breeze was blowing the number one jib-topsail gracefully to leeward while the moon made diagonal shadows on the curved sails...