Polar citadels

Polar citadels is Ishmael’s image of the remote, supposedly impregnable polar refuges where whale populations could escape human hunting. Its force comes from the contrast between a geography imagined as eternal sanctuary and the book’s account of a world in which neither ice nor the animals that depend on it can be assumed to endure.

Ishmael’s Fortresses

In a chapter asking whether the whale’s magnitude diminishes and whether it will perish, Ishmael rejects the idea that whale populations, especially those of the great baleen species, are declining. He places his confidence in two firm fortresses: the polar regions, which he imagines sealed within an everlasting winter. The image turns distance and cold into defenses against human reach, as though the remoteness of the poles could make the whale’s future secure.

Ishmael’s claim expands beyond a refuge from whalers into a vision of the whale’s near-immortality as a species. In the book’s cosmic history, whales swim before the continents rise, pass over the future sites of human capitals and monuments, and survive the Flood without needing Noah’s ark. If the world were flooded again, the whale would still rise above the waters. The polar citadels thus belong to a larger myth of continuity: individual whales may die, but the species seems older and more enduring than human civilization.

A Sanctuary That Moves

The expression acquires a different meaning against the book’s account of the Anthropocene, said to have begun around 1800 with the Industrial Revolution. An old mural of a whale in a cathedral has survived successive human empires, but the polar refuge itself is changing. As ice locked into the poles melts, the North-West Passage opens and northern nations prepare to exploit newly accessible resources. The image of an enclosed, permanent fortress is replaced by a newly exposed route for commerce and extraction.

The consequences for whales remain uncertain rather than reassuring. Krill that feed on algae beneath the ice may diminish, while warming oceans already push food sources at lower latitudes farther north. Whales may move toward the very regions whose icebound protection is disappearing. Nutrients released by melting in Antarctica might, conversely, benefit the food chain and cetaceans. The passage leaves these outcomes unresolved: the polar regions are no longer a guaranteed defense but part of a vast experiment whose effects are not yet known.

The Limits of Permanence

The plight of the right whale makes Ishmael’s confidence especially difficult to sustain. The North Atlantic right whale was once hunted for its buoyancy, abundant blubber, and long baleen, and fewer than four hundred remain. Although it became the first cetacean protected from hunting in 1935, its numbers have remained static. The shipping lane was moved north and vessels were instructed to remain five hundred yards from whales, yet collisions and the species’ restricted gene pool continue to threaten its survival; the book judges that it may not survive the century.

This vulnerability is not confined to one species. Fishing-line entanglement and ship strikes kill right whales, including females of breeding age, while the slow-breeding sperm whale population is reported to be recovering at only one per cent a year. The book also notes that, between its beginning and completion, the Yangtze River dolphin was declared extinct, and warns that many other species could follow. Such evidence does not simply reverse Ishmael’s image by declaring the whale doomed. It exposes the conditions his vision leaves out: refuge depends on living habitat, sufficient food, and populations large and connected enough to persist.

From Prophecy to Warning

Melville’s vision of a flooded world inherited by whales preserves the awe of the eternal whale, but it also sharpens the irony of the polar citadels. The imagined survivor may outlast human greed in a speculative future, while actual whales face losses already under way. The poles are no longer outside history; warming, changing food supplies, and renewed resource-seeking draw them into it.

The expression therefore holds two incompatible prospects together: the whale as an ancient presence capable of surviving human empires, and the whale as a vulnerable animal whose future depends on conditions humans are altering. Its lasting significance lies in that tension. What Ishmael treats as an impregnable natural boundary becomes, in the later account, a warning that even the most remote refuge can recede.