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?
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
“HIST!Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon,extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail.In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part,on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet.From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon,whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
“Hist!did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy?what noise d’ye mean?”
“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it sounded like a cough.”
“Cough be damned!Pass along that return bucket.”
“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!”
“Caramba!have done, shipmate, will ye?It’s the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”
“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”
“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco,there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck;and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch,that there was something of that sort in the wind.”
“Tish!the bucket!”
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew,you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom,and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts,spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it,you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye;and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank.At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him,wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head,continually rocked with the motion of the ship,and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow,till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts,some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin,Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out;almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.For with the charts of all four oceans before him,Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies,with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents;and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also,calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties,concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale’s resorting to given waters,that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular,issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851.By that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion;and portions of it are presented in the circular.“This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months;and horizontally through each of which districts are three lines;one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district,and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”
Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales,guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather,secret intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in _veins_, as they are called;continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude,that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision.Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel,and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake,yet the arbitrary _vein_ in which at these times he is said to swim,generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less,as the vein is presumed to expand or contract);but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads,when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is,that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path,migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds,could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could,by his art, so place and time himself on his way,as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme.But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds,yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding season;though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true.In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit,applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales.So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example,on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds,where he had at times revealed himself.But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak,not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of,allusion has only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,ere a particular set time or place were attained,when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought,every possibility the next thing to a certainty.That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line.For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too,that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;there the waves were storied with his deeds;there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance.But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt,he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned,however flattering it might be to those hopes;nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line.No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab,with a view to this very complexion of things. Because,an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which,instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds,should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas,or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans,Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon,might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this;that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople?Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump,could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape?His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear!And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him;and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God!what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.