The appearance of an all-white orca, or killer whale, off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, would have delighted Herman Melville. In Moby-Dick, Melville dwells at great length, for an entire chapter, on the wickedness of whiteness, as opposed to blackness.The irony is that that which we see as beautiful is an aberration of nature and the natural order – a discrimination in which even animals are complicit. Albino animals are often the most vulnerable, precisely because they are so evident. Of course, killer whales such as Iceberg have no predators – apart from us.
Whiteness is a burden, too. In The Whiteness of the Whale, Melville makes reference to Coleridge's albatross, an emblem of "spiritual wonderment and pale dread" and the Ancient Mariner's curse for defying nature. In art or in reality, we cannot resist the anomalous, because it reassures us of our normality. It is little wonder that Ahab's demonic pursuit of the White Whale has become an arch metaphor for our distrust of the other, from racial purity to global terrorism. "Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper," as Melville concludes, "and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured 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?"