Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, señor?
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, businesslike Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est!
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?
Post mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.