MOBY DICK: WHALE AVENGER (GOD)

 I was watching the movie “Moby Dick” starring Gregory Peck the other day. And of course, I rooted for the whale. I kept thinking, “This whale is mad as Hell, and he’s not taking it anymore. Enough with the whale killing. This White Whale is the Whale Avenger for all the murdered whales.”

 

One of the most famous of Whales is Moby Dick of Herman Melville’s novel, “Moby Dick”. Besides being white, Moby Dick has a wrinkled forehead, large hump on his back, and a curved jaw with crooked teeth. This giant white Sperm Whale took revenge on the whalers, who hunted him.

 

Harpoons did not seem to hurt him. One of Moby Dick’s favorite tricks was to swim away as if he was fleeing, then suddenly turn on the whalers, and smash their boats. Moby Dick was based on an actual white Sperm Whale who lived near the island of Mocha off of Chile. Mocha Dick, the White Whale of the Pacific, had become known in the 1800s for his violent attacks on whaling ships. When He was finally killed in the 1850s, sixty-year-old Mocha Dick was toothless, blind, and had eighteen harpoons sticking out of his body.

 

“Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else.” (“Moby Dick”, Herman Melville.)

 

In his writing of “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville sensed the Avenger of the Whales. Moby Dick is called upon to help the whales fight those who would destroy them. He is one of the few known Gods of the Whales. When writing Moby Dick, Melville, a former whaler, apparently channeled this. The whales wanted the humans to know about their Avenger and to take heed.