I drove my weight on it from above and bored it home
as a shipwright bores his beam with a shipwright’s drill
that men below, whipping the strap back and forth, whirl
and the drill keeps twisting faster, never stopping –
So we seized our stake with its fiery tip
and bored it round and round in the giant’s eye.
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 9, lines 429-434. We get a descriptive account of how Odysseus defeats Polyphemus by stabbing the Cyclops’ in the eye with a burning stake. An epic simile compares the action to that of a shipwright using a drill.