"It was the whiteness of the whale that appalled me." The appearance of an all-white orca, or killer whale, off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, would have delighted Herman Melville (and not just for the coincidence that his own uncle, the wonderfully named Captain John D'Wolf II, "a fine handsome man with white hair", had been sailing in the same seas when a whale surfaced underneath his boat). In Moby-Dick, Melville dwells at great length, for an entire chapter, on the wickedness of whiteness, as opposed to blackness. He sees evil in albinism, in the polar bear and the shark – an eerie, uncanny pallor that "so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye".

The Kamchatka whale, nicknamed "Iceberg", was spotted by Dr Eric Hoyt, a well known whale scientist and consultant to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Dr Hoyt said the animal has a two-metre high dorsal fin, which indicates that it is a mature male, at least 16 years old, and it appears to be entirely socialised with its pod. "As far as we can see he's right behind his mother with presumably his brothers next to him." The image is a splendid one. But to anyone attuned to the greater reverberations of this mutant cetacean, there may be a darker message to its whiteness – which perhaps explains the great interest in this story.

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. (Not for nothing is Moby-Dick, published in 1851, itself a subtle critique of a United States about to lurch into internecine war over the issue of slavery and the colour of a person's skin). Of course, killer whales such as Iceberg have no predators – apart from us.

In Australia the now-famous white humpback whale, Migaloo (an Aboriginal word meaning "white fella") has had an exclusion zone imposed around it. The state of Queensland has declared him a "special-interest whale" and banned anyone from approaching within 500 metres – offenders being threatened with a £8,000 fine. Pursued for its rarity, this ghostly animal recalls nothing so much as the first westerners to arrive on antipodean shores, whom the Aborigines took to be the spirits of their dead ancestors, "all jumped up in white".

We'd have to agree with Melville that there is something unnatural about something so lacking in colour. Whiteness has connotations of disease and pathology, of bloodlessness and mutation. One might imagine such an animal to be the product of experimentation or genetic mutation – more especially if it happened to swim in the irradiated seas off Japan, newly contaminated after the Fukushima disaster and where radioactive caesium has been detected in minke whales. Critics writing in the 1940s saw Melville's White Whale reflected in the white mushroom cloud, and nuclear experiments in the same Pacific Ocean where Iceberg and Migaloo swim.

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. Interestingly, the true story on which Coleridge based his epic poem was that of a sailor, Simon Hatley who, in 1720, had actually shot a black albatross in the Pacific on account of its unusual colour, which he took as an ill omen.

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?"

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