Mastless

As the cacophony of sound raged around him he fell silent, breathing deeply, and stood there for a short while longer, turning this way and that, like a once great ship lashed by a terrible storm, mastless and twisting at anchor, until something in him seemed to give way. ❋ ROBERT HARRIS (2010)

Lined up alongside a pontoon on the landward side of the marina is a cluster of strange, mastless boats. ❋ Roz Savage (2009)

He laughed at their gunnery training on a mastless ship and demanded to know just how they could be of service on an expedition sailing ship which carried only small arms. ❋ Simmons, Dan (2007)

The ship had been mastless and permanently moored in Portsmouth, Crozier knew, for more than fifteen years, serving as a training vessel for the Royal Navy's most promising gunners. ❋ Simmons, Dan (2007)

It gave one a sickening sensation to see it, for, mastless and useless as she was, she seemed to be a link with the outer world. ❋ Unknown (2006)

After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents.2 I am sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat with the paint rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, ‘It is further away than it used to be’, and while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is further away. ❋ W.B. Yeats (1965)

Now, slender and curved thou glidest through space like a mastless galley; and then, amid the stars, thou art like a shepherd keeping his flock. ❋ Unknown (2003)

From November 7, 1765, to January 29, 1766, the sloop Peggy drifted mastless in the North Atlantic until all food ran out and the crew killed and ate a black slave. ❋ JOE JACKSON (2003)

A mastless hulk, its guns silent, drifted away from the melee. ❋ Cornwell, Bernard, 1944- (2000)

Smaller ships still, mastless like the boat she was on, with a high sharp peak at the front and a low flat house at the back, spidered across the water on oars, one pair or two, or sometimes three. ❋ Jordan, Robert, 1948- (1996)

The sands are scoured clean by the mast-high wave that has ripped men, weapons, and vegetation alike off the low hill that protects Land's End from the stones and the waves-and that has driven one nearly mastless hull hard upon the sand. ❋ Modesitt, L. E. (1992)

A shimmer of distorted air caught the corner of my eye, and I turned my head to see one of the long and mastless black boats of the Brotherhood trailing the Eidolon. ❋ Modesitt, L. E. (1991)

With the fishing fleet out plying their nets, the waters spread grey, empty except for one derelict dory left at anchor, and the mastless hulk of a sloop. ❋ Wurts, Janny (1988)

The towers, he believed, would outlast everything else on either shore, and he asked his readers to imagine some future archaeologist surveying the ruins of New York, “a mastless river and a dispeopled land.” ❋ David McCullough (1972)