CHAPTER 42

  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 preeminence 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,

Caesarian, 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

being 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.*

  *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 rises 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

funeral 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.*

  *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! 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-browed 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 analyze 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 import 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, down-cast 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

unrustlingly 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 and 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

snowhowdahed 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 solitude. 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 churchyard

grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

  But thou sayest, methinks that 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?