Chapter 44.00: CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.

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CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
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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, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the
imperial colour 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 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, 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 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 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 colour as the
visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full
of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour 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 coloured and colouring 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?