The Jungle Book

“The White Seal” shifts from the Indian setting of the previous stories to tell a similar narrative of an exceptional individual rejected from his culture for his superior leadership and ingenuity. However, unlike Mowgli, the story of Kotick more directly parallels a biblical narrative: the story of Moses and the exodus of the Hebrew people from their enslavement in Egypt to the Promised Land. Kotick, like Moses, is the subject of prophecy. A dying seal tells him that “in the days when men killed us by the hundred thousand there was a story on the beaches that someday a white seal would come out of the north and lead the seal people to a quiet place” (159). The exceptional trait with which Kotick was born, his white coat, suggests his natural authority over the other seals, while his physical strength and fierceness allows him to actually take command over the seals of Novastoshnah.

As with every story in The Jungle Book, setting is deeply attached to identity. This becomes one of the major obstacles that Kotick faces since it manifests in the resistance of other seals to exploring and shifting their territory from one place to another. Even though the beaches of Novastoshnah are overcrowded and dangerous to young seals, Sea Catch feels that they cannot move to a less crowded beach without sacrificing their pride. The other seals mock Kotick’s quest to find a better place, thinking that, if he would just fight for territory, he would not have to worry about finding a better island. Kotick’s friends accept the status quo and prefer to ignore the violence being done against the baby seals, telling him the following:

[M]en had always driven the holluschickie—it was part of the day’s work—and that if he did not like to see ugly things he should not have gone to the killing-grounds. But none of the other seals had seen the killing, and that made the difference between him and his friends (156).

Kotick’s first-hand experience with the killing of the young seals means that he cannot so easily ignore or turn away from the cruelty, and his desire to alter his environment reflects this character development.

The message of this story has both environmentalist and colonialist aspects. Kipling creates sympathy for the animals being hunted by humans through his use of anthropomorphic perspective. The ending of the story affiliates biblical paradise with a lack of human intervention, describing how the seals find refuge on “the quiet, sheltered beaches where Kotick sits all the summer through, getting bigger and fatter and stronger each year, while the holluschickie play round him, in that sea where no man comes” (170). By affiliating the Promised Land with nature untouched by humans, the story engages with environmental concerns over the cruelty of human hunting practices.

However, Kotick’s drive to explore and seek out better territory also reflects a colonial ethos, since it parallels the expansive, imperialist policies of European countries in modern history. Furthermore, the Indigenous human hunters who serve as the villains in this story are described using racist language that affiliates them with uncleanliness and foolish superstition:

Kerick Booterin turned nearly white under his oil and smoke, for he was an Aleut, and Aleuts are not clean people. Then he began to mutter a prayer. ‘Don’t touch him, Patalamon. There has never been a white seal since—since I was born. Perhaps it is old Zaharrof’s ghost. He was lost last year in the big gale’ (149).

By constructing a binary wherein the heroic seal is white and the human villains are darkened with oil and smoke, Kipling draws upon racist stereotypes that equate white skin with moral superiority. The story therefore suggests that whiteness, implying goodness and holiness, is a prerequisite for leadership.