BACKSTAY • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Backstay

"Backstay" Quotes from Famous Books

... What the "backstay" is to the inhabitant of the district around Lydd, the stilts are to the lonely dwellers in the Landes. The peasants of the department are not exactly born on stilts, but a child learns to walk on them about the age that his British brother ...

— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... tropic city sweats and roars, I have sailed with Young Ulysses from the quay Till the anchor rumbled down on stranger shores. He is blooded to the open and the sky, He is taken in a snare that shall not fail, He shall hear me singing strongly, till he die, Like the shouting of a backstay in a gale. ...

— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling

... ship's companies, because they could not beat us—no, not even hold a candle to us. In both fore and main-top we had eight-and-twenty as smart chaps as ever put their foot to a rattling, or slid down by an a'ter backstay. Now, the two captains of the foretop were both prime young men, active as monkeys, and bold as lions. One was named Tom Herbert, from North Shields, a dark, good-looking chap, with teeth as white as a nigger's, and a merry chap he was, always a-showing them. ...

— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... rash suggestion, but it was too late now to turn back, and some desperate expedient was necessary. I found myself on deck, gripping a backstay and looking giddily down and then up at the dinghy, as it bobbed like a cork in the trough of the sea alongside, while Davies settled ...

— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... see, must be the topmast backstay; and this the forestay; and that the topmast stay. Is it not so?" ...

— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston