Chapter 4

And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers, and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny, however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds something more.

While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions, conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power—for all these accumulated associations with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers when a ship is skirting the coast—all these things gain an element of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or 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?”