In chapter 78, Tashtego suffers an accident while harvesting from the whale’s head. He falls inside it and almost drowns as the head drops into the sea. Our (or should I say Ishmael’s, for he has claimed him as his own) Queequeg bravely jumps in the water and “delivers” Tashtego, both like in birth and from death. At the end of the chapter, Melville explains what would have happened were it not for these heroics. He says, “Had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale” (377). In this passage, Melville is offering a critique of the American view that, sometimes, death and suffering can be seen as necessary and even sacred, mostly when it involves minorities. Death is the end all be all of human existence, the destiny we will all reach. But Melville uses language like “precious” and “sanctum sanctorum” which glorifies this specific type of death. It is also not coincidental that Tashtego, the only Native American out of the harpooneers, was the one who almost died “smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti.” These details are meant to represent Native American suffering at the hands of imperialist white Americans and how this imperialism that leads to death is represented as sweet and even holy. Expansionism and Manifest Destiny where prominent at the time and anything horrific committed in the name of these beliefs was thought to be good and even guided by God. People who suffered from it should have considered themselves lucky to play a part in this great fulfillment of God’s will, even if their part only consisted of pain and death. The reality was that Native Americans, like many minorities, were considered to be sub-human so their lives never mattered enough to be protected. A parallel could also be drawn to war propaganda, as in America it has long been considered heroic to die for your country, when it is true that many times people do not really have a choice. White American society prided itself in its morality but they failed to recognize that they would also accept human suffering and literal death so long as it was the right kind of it, and they would do this by dehumanizing whatever group stood between them and their greed. Further, in this case, Tashtego’s death by suffocation in the spermaceti would have been the right kind of death for white Americans, because society had decided that a man’s life is worth less than the money that they would make with this prized substance. Finally, as Melville does in the last sentence of the chapter, we should ask ourselves how many people in our time have “likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?” And how many of these deaths are we currently benefitting from? And why are we okay with that?