Mocha Dick

Mocha Dick was not, apparently, the only white whale in the sea. A Swedish whaler claimed to have taken a very old white whale off the coast of Brazil in 1859. In 1902, the New Bedford whaling barque Platina, captained by Thomas McKenzie, harpooned and killed an albino sperm whale near the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean, using a harpoon tipped with an explosive device. Amos Smalley harpooned the white whale and recounted his experience to Reader's Digest. He remembers Captain McKenzie estimating by the wear on the whale's teeth that it was "at least a hundred years old, maybe two hundred". Smalley was a guest at the premiere of John Huston's film Moby Dick, 1956, where he was introduced as "the man who killed Moby Dick". In 1952, Time magazine reported the harpooning of a white whale off the coast of Peru. Since 1991, there have been sightings reported of a white humpback whale near Australia, nicknamed Migaloo. In 2012, a white humpback, nicknamed Willow the White Whale, was filmed off the coast of Norway. Sightings of white sperm whales have also been recorded off Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea in 2006 and 2015. More recently, a white sperm whale was filmed in Caribbean waters offshore from Jamaica in 2021, by crew of a Dutch merchant ship. Noted explorer Tim Severin wrote (in his 1999 book In Search of Moby Dick: Quest for the White Whale) of traveling about the Pacific, inquiring among indigenous fishermen and watermen about white whales, in personal experience or local folklore. In 2010, Williams College Museum of Art presented a whale-sized work titled "Mocha Dick" — a, ghostly white sperm whale sculptured from industrial felt, created by artist Tristin Lowe. The art show was sponsored by the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, an interdisciplinary ocean and coastal studies program created by Williams College and the Mystic Seaport maritime museum. In an interview with The Berkshire Eagle, Lowe said, "This is the archetypical whale... It's so symbolic: 'Moby Dick,' the white whale, and to have it all based on a real whale 'as white as wool,' it was all too perfect. There's a majestic quality to the whale, a calling, almost like the sea/ocean itself."