I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide.
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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We were now close in; thirty or forty strokes and we should beach her, for the ebb had already disclosed a narrow belt of sand below the clustering trees.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island (1882)
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"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man."