








CHAPTER XLII. THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE


What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest;
and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost
despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of
the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I
must, else all these chapters might be naught.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty,
as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way
recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric,
grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants"
above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the
modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the
royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a
snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Csarian, heir to
overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue;
and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and
though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is
made the emblem of many touching, noble things--the innocence of brides,
the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of
the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in
many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of
the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn
by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame
being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,
Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to
the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great
Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive
the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn
beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish
faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to
the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white
before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there
white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with
whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an
elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the
tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which
imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded
bear or shark.[5]

 [5] With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him
 who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the
 whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
 hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
 it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the
 irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
 fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing
 together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear
 frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this
 to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
 that intensified terror.
    As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in
    that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies
    with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is
    most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that
    fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam"
    (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and
    any other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent
    stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his
    habits, the French call him Requin.

Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.[6]

 [6] I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
 prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my
 forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there,
 dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of
 unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At
 intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace
 some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though
 bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in
 supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,
 methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
 before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its
 wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the
 miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at
 that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that
 darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a
 sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! I never had
 heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is
 utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned
 that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no
 possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with
 those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon
 our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to
 be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a
 little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
    I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
    chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in
    this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
    albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
    emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
    But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I
    will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on
    the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a
    lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and
    place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern
    tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl
    flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!

Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the
White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to
the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.
Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this
noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it
which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
nameless terror.

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
Albatross.

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is
that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he
bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--has no substantive
deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be
so?

Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not
the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this
crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!

Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the
shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail
to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in
a milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that
even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on
his pallid horse.

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.

But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by
the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;--can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
to the hidden cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able
to recall them now.

Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare
mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary,
speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded
with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of
the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White
Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?

Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower
of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an
untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar
moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare
mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all
latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with
mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves,
followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a
wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in
reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does the tall pale man
of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides
through the green of the groves--why is this phantom more terrible than
all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas: nor the
tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--it
is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there
aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind
almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when
exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be
respectively elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if
by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels
just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under
precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to
view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if
from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded
phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in
vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm
they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much
the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me?"

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding
the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal
trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his
misery, views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with
its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is
but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a
hypo, Ishmael.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the
sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness--why
will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in
phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of
wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange
muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the
experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt,
of the black bisons of distant Oregon?

No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring
bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of
the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in
fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the most
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as
the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all
colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colorless, all-color of
atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of
the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or
lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and
the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in
substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider
that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the
great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in
itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all
objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all
this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses
upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the
monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of
all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the
fiery hunt?





