cockle-shell

I had been through on the Ghost; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this cockle-shell.

Chapter 27 2010

Rushing up a maddening mountain, she would poise like a cockle-shell on the giddy summit, breathless and rolling, leap outward and down into the yawning chasm beneath, and bury herself in the smother of foam at the bottom.

Chris Farrington, Able Seaman 2010

Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling cockle-shell, when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove to.

Chapter 19 2010

But the spoon, which may have begun with a cockle-shell, dates from the remotest antiquity.

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

Triton, roaring through a conch, brought forward a cockle-shell full of salt-water, and delivered it solemnly to Amyas, who, of course, put a noble into it, and returned it after Grenville had done the same.

Westward Ho! 2007

The old port at Boulogne stretched out its two long lean arms to our cockle-shell of a steamer, as though anxious to embrace it.

The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton 2006

Next day I sat steering my cockle-shell — my first command — with nothing but water and sky around me.

Youth, by Joseph Conrad 2004

The time-serving water made the best of this, forsook its ancient bed (as classic nymphs and fountains used to do), and left poor Bruntsea with a dry bank, and no haven for a cockle-shell.

Erema Richard Doddridge 2004

The Resolute looked like a mere cockle-shell, and the African coast could be distinctly seen in the west marked out by a fringe of foam.

Five Weeks in a Balloon 2003

'I thought I knew that shaven sconce of yours,' he said heartily, and hoisted his cockle-shell of withies and hide on to his shoulder to heft it ashore.

The Sanctuary Sparrow Peters, Ellis, 1913-1995 1983