Leviathan or The Whale

meant death for any living thing unaccustomed to it; yet its temperatures produced the most abundant seas on earth. Delicate snow crystals could freeze a man’s blood; but they also preserved an icy paradise ruled over by the land’s greatest predators, whose fur looked white but was in fact translucent and coal-black beneath. Meanwhile, in its limpid waters swam creatures stranger than any invented by Poe.
    And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

    The Arctic whales–bowheads, beluga and narwhals–are the most tantalizing of all cetaceans. Rising and falling with the changing seasons of ice, they are barometers of an invisible world, spectrally floating within their bounded sea, locked into its cycle. They are philopatrous animals, loyal to the site of their birth, and the only whales to live in the Arctic throughout the year. One hundred thousand belugas swim in polar seas; the geographical remoteness of the less populous bowheads and their outriders, the narwhals, is such that they are seldom seen.
    The beluga and the narwhal are a family unto themselves, the only two species of the
Monodontidæ
. Belugas, or belukhas,
Delphinapterus leuca
, owe their common name to the Russian for white,
belyy
. Their whiteness is not that of an albino as Moby Dick was supposed to be, an animal made unearthly by being devoid of colour; rather, they are born grey, and only achieve pure white in late adulthood, becoming sinless with old age. Their malleable melons (which one observer describes as feeling like warm lard) and their articulated necks allow the beluga to change the shape of their heads, holding them at right-angles and lending them a quizzical, human expression. Sailors called them canaries of the sea on account of their songs–and William Scoresby depicted his white whale perched on rocks like a seal basking in the sun–but to me they look like labradors, snow puppies in search of a master.

    The narwhal, too, shares the beluga’s sad beauty, a mortality suggested by its name–from the Old Norse,
nar
and
hvalr
, meaning ‘corpse whale’, because its smudges resemble the livid blemishes on a dead body. (It is not the only cetacean with such morbid overtones: the Latin name of another Arctic visitor, the killer whale–or, more correctly, whale-killer,
Orcinus orca
, has its root in
orcus
, meaning ‘belonging to the kingdom of the dead’, a reflection of its reputation as the only non-human enemy of the great whales.) However, it is the narwhal’s most obvious feature–implicit in its binomial,
Monodon monoceros
–that is its own emblem of melancholy.
    The narwhal’s tusk is actually an overgrown, living tooth which erupts to pierce its owner’s lip on the left-hand side and spirals up to nine feet long, sometimes even longer, but for centuries it was identified as the horn of a unicorn, invested with magical powers. A medieval conspiracy grew up between its Arctic hunters and the apothecaries who passed this natural wonder off as something truly legendary. Worth twenty times their weight in gold, the tusks were prized booty in the Middle Ages, stolen by Crusaders and traded across Europe as talismans of state. Only fifty were known to exist during the mid-1500s, and on his return from an expedition in 1577 to find the fabled North-West Passage, Sir Martin Frobisher presented Elizabeth I with a ‘sea-unicorne’s horn’ valued at £10,000, more than the cost of a new castle. Evidently the Virgin Queen saw royal potency in the tribute, for she used it as a sceptre.

    The powdered tusk was prized, too, as an antidote for poison and for melancholy, ‘the English malady’ whose anatomy, documented by the reclusive clergyman, Robert Burton, Melville had studied. Likewise, Albrecht Dürer’s enigmatic
Melencolia
of 1514, with its brooding angel and a comet soaring over a distant sea provides
Moby-Dick
with its secret code according to one modern writer, Viola Sachs: a hidden structure based on the magic square of four. Through this cipher, says Sachs, Melville unites his melancholy theme with the story of the biblical outcast Ishmael and in so doing, ‘expresses his vision of the terrestrial origin of creation’.
    Freighted with such symbols and conspiracies, the narwhal became a fantastical beast, redolent with its own melancholy, as if bowed down by its onerous extension. To hold a narwhal tusk requires two hands, and the great ivory spike feels