A Real Moby Dick Shows Up Off Jamaica
By Mark J. Palmer
Albinism is uncommon, but occurs in many mammals (including humans).
The white whale was made famous in Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby Dick”, but a real honest-to-goodness white sperm whale recently showed up off the coast of Jamaica, filmed by Leo van Toly while he was aboard a merchant ship and featured in an article in The Guardian newspaper.
It is easy from the video to identify this white Caribbean whale as a sperm whale – it has a blunt head, with a single spout that shoots off at an angle from its head (whale spouts of other species go straight up in the air), and it has no dorsal fin.
Sperm whales are usually black to brown in color, although they can have patches of white on their bellies. But this sperm whale looks like it might be an albino – a key characteristic of albinos is pink eyes, which are not visible in the video.
Melville based Moby Dick on a real whale, although while Moby Dick was snow white in the novel, his real counterpart was piebald, showing patches of gray and white coloring, not a true albino.
The whale was called Mocha Dick, because he hung out around Mocha Island off the southern coast of Chile. Mocha Dick was a large male sperm whale. Reportedly, Mocha Dick was well known to whalers, as he repeatedly eluded capture and destroyed the small whale boats sent out to harpoon him. Whalers reported run-ins with him for at least twenty years before he was finally killed.
The novel “Moby Dick” ends with the white whale charging and crashing into the Pequod, Melville’s fictional whaling ship. Melville based this episode on a true incident that involved another large, bull sperm whale (black, not white) who attacked the whaling ship Essex near the Galapagos Islands and sank it after striking the Essex twice. The whalers had to take to the small boats and try to make land in Peru, hundreds of miles away.
A sperm whale drifts with a diver. Sperm whales are usually black or brown in color. Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Nathaniel Philbrick tells the harrowing story of the Essex and the dangerous journey of the small whaling boats in his book “In the Heart of the Sea,” which was made into a movie in 2015 by director Ron Howard starring Chris Hemsworth and Brendan Gleeson. Howard took the liberty of turning the whale from black to grayish white. He also has the whale following the small boats as a nemesis, reflecting the Moby Dick novel, which did not happen in real life, but makes a good story.
We now know that sperm whales have the largest brain of all animals and that they are usually peaceful. Divers can swim with wild sperm whales without incident. Many of the whales show curiosity towards human swimmers.
Whalers turned sperm whales into killers by harpooning them. It is hard to imagine the pain these giants went through when harpooned. Even in modern times with exploding harpoon heads, whales do not die easily or humanely.
While Yankee whaling for sperm whales was mostly finished at the end of the 1800s, due to the discovery of petroleum on land as a cheap substitute for whale oil and economic turmoil in the US, people are surprised to hear that whaling still continued in the US. The last US whaling station, in Richmond, California, was closed down in 1972. I was just beginning my career in wildlife and wilderness protection, and the closure was to auger the widespread ending of whaling around the world.
Today, only three nations continue commercial whaling, and none are currently killing sperm whales. Japan’s government has reduced its whaling activities to their own 200-mile exclusive economic zone, while Norwegian hunters now kill the most whales from shore stations in the North Atlantic. Iceland’s whalers have not gone whaling for the past three summers due to a variety of economic factors (including COVID), and one of the two remaining whaling companies in that country announced it will close permanently.
It remains to be seen if the second Icelandic whaling company also folds, or instead will the slaughter continue, turning the green and blue seas a bright red with the blood of these gentle and intelligent beings?
What You Can Do:
There are still so many mysteries about whales and dolphins in the ocean. But in order to answer those mysteries, we need to stop the slaughter of these wonderful marine mammals. Can you donate to help the International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute put an end to cruel dolphin drive hunts and commercial whaling once and for all? We appreciate your support and wish you and your family a happy New Year.
