.. < chapter xlii 6  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, 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

.. <p 186 >

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

.. <p 187 >

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.  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.

.. <p 188 >

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

.. <p 189 >

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

.. <p 190 >

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

.. <p 191 >

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

.. <p 192 >

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

.. <p 193 >

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

.. <p 194 >

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?

.. <p 187n. >

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.  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

.. <p 188n. >

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!

.. <p 194 >

