Leviathan or The Whale

close to where I grew up, forever fascinated me with its ghoulish epitaph:
Though he slay me yet will I trust in him
.
    But Poe’s story has other resonances, too, in the lands and creatures that young Pym encounters on his subsequent adventures in the Antarctic, where he sees ice bears with blood-red eyes and murderous Indians with black teeth. Drawing on notes made by his friend, Jeremiah Reynolds, who had undertaken his ultimately disastrous expedition to the Antarctic in 1829 (Reynolds’s crew mutinied on the way back, forcing him off the ship at Chile thus providing the setting for his own story of Mocha Dick), Poe presented his book as non-fiction. He even told friends he had been a whaler himself. Newspapers ran excerpts as factual accounts, convincing readers of a new and unknown land where the waters grew warmer rather than colder as one travelled towards the pole and where superstitious natives regarded anything white as taboo, fearful of ‘the carcass of the
white
animal picked up at sea’, and ‘the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which issued from the vapoury
white
curtain of the South’.
    As its adventurers sail into the furthest unknown, they encounter a ‘shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men’, its skin ‘of the perfect whiteness of the snow’. This eerie otherworld, teetering between travelogue and science fiction, was the birthing-ground for Melville’s monster. It is the source of the whiteness that appals Ishmael and on which he expands compendiously, if erratically, like a nineteenth-century search engine: from albino humans, ‘more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion’, to ‘the tall pale man’ seen in the forests of the ‘fairy tales of Central Europe…whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glided through the green of the groves’. Whiteness for Ishmael is as much the colour of evil as of good; it is an intimidating absence: ‘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?’
    But that whiteness was also an invitation. Before the last of the wild lands were mapped, it was left to storytellers to fill in the fictional spaces on the map–from men such as Poe who had never travelled further than New England, to the mulatto boat-steerer Harry Hinton of
Nimrod of the Sea
, who imagined a shining wall of ice beyond which was an open sea, home of mermen and krakens with golden antennæ; a sanctuary where ‘worried whales find peace, and grow in blubber on the crimson carpets of medusæ’, safe from hunters who sought ‘to harpoon and lance, to mangle, tear, and boil’.

    Such imaginings crept into what claimed to be reality, too. In a remarkable frontispiece created for Oliver Goldsmith’s encyclopædic
Animated Nature
(‘with numerous notes from the works of the most distinguished British and foreign naturalists’), first published in 1774, but subsequently reissued ‘for the young and tender’, as Ishmael observes, the artist assembled the known denizens of the frozen world, drawing freely on William Scoresby’s
An Account of the Arctic Regions
, to the extent that its decorously beached narwhal and bucking whale busy throwing its assailants in the air are direct imitations of Scoresby’s pictures.
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    Yet among these seals and sea lions–themselves assailed by a ferocious polar bear–sea eagles and auks and walruses, a sea serpent swims blithely through the scene. It is perfectly at home among water spouts and icebergs, all the while observed by another narwhal, as if there were nothing extraordinary about its appearance at all; as if its existence were, by virtue of the many reports of its dalliances in other seas, established as a biological fact, to be represented alongside the other fauna of the polar ocean–even though further inspection reveals that this too is a crib of a creature, copied from the maned monster depicted in Pontippidan’s
Natural History of Norway
.
    The myth and romance of the Arctic was implicit in its alternative names: the Barren Grounds, Ultima Thule, the North Pole. As white as it was, this was one of the world’s dark places, spending six months in perpetual night, a land so inhospitable it might as well be another planet altogether. Its axial emptiness, both on the page and in the mind, made it a site of sublime extremes. Its virginal whiteness