Definition of "roadstead"

The shores of Protection island form on its south side, which is about two miles long, a most excellent roadstead, and a channel into port Discovery, near 2 miles wide on either side […]

1798, George Vancouver, chapter V, in A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World‎, volume I, London: G.G. and J. Robinson, page 248

[…] I found we were lying in a roadstead among many low and rocky islets, hovered about by an innumerable cloud of sea-fowl.

1885, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, “Story of the Fair Cuban”, in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., page 171

[…] that was the time when at the mast-heads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours moored in her own roadstead […] the blue-jackets, to be numbered by thousands, ran up with huzzas the British colors with the union and cross wiped out […]

1888–1891, Herman Melville, “[Billy Budd, Foretopman.] Chapter III.”, in Billy Budd and Other Stories, London: John Lehmann, published 1951

Clusters of strong flowers rose everywhere above the coarse tussocks of bent. It was like a roadstead crowded with tall fairy-shipping.

1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […]

In 1620 junks began to arrive from China depositing hundreds of migrants, and with the resumption of China's official trade to Southeast Asia in 1683, the numbers of junks arriving annually in Batavia's roadstead grew from an average of three or four to about twenty.

1992, Leonard Y. Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast Asian Society, 1500-1800”, in Nicholas Tarling, editor, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, volume 1, Cambridge University Press, page 349