Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "life-boat".
She has too many batteries of accumulators, too many life-boats, too many bulkheads and airbreaks, too many and too much of everything.
The maximum provision contained in the German statutes refers to vessels with the capacity of 50,000 cubic metres, which must carry sixteen life-boats.
In his place is coming a class of men miscalled sailors, who never reefed a sail or coiled a cable, who do not know how to launch a life-boat or pull an oar, and in whose career we meet the ridiculous episode of the life-boats of the Titanic, where women were obliged to take the oars from their hands and row the boats.
Even the legislation by which the United States permitted English vessels reaching American ports to avoid the legal requirements of American statute law (which requires a seat in the life-boats for every passenger and every member of the crew) attracted no public attention, and occasional references to the subject by those better informed did nothing to awake action.