Unsupplied

Table of Contents - Scenes and Adventures in the Army

 CHAPTER XVIII.

Romantic Cheyenne Village — Adventures There  — Our Few Wants Unsupplied in the Wilderness — March Without Water....  --Contents, part 2 chapter 18 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857).

The word unsupplied occurs once in Redburn, once in Israel Potter; and thrice in Moby-Dick:

The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis.--Chapter 87, The Grand Armada

But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.  --Chapter 100, Leg and Arm

What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? --Chapter 68, The Blanket