bow-foremost

Updated: May 25, 2025

Gone, gone sixteen years of vanity and vexation. But from a practical point of view, what is a worst calamity of all is that the Speranza now lies high-and-dry in the village: for she was bodily picked up from the quay by the tidal wave, and driven bow-foremost into a street not half her width, and there now lies, looking huge enough in the little village, wedged for ever, smashed in at the nip like a frail match-box, a most astonishing spectacle: her bows forty feet up the street, ten feet above the ground at the stem, rudder resting on the inner edge of the quay, foremast tilted forward, the other two masts all right, and that bottom, which has passed through seas so far, buried in every sort of green and brown seaweed, the old Speranza.

M. P. (Matthew Phipps) Shiel - The Purple Cloud