Whalekind

It was a leading question, and its hidden meaning was not lost on any of them, for Triton was a big and powerful Sperm Whale and they knew that he would gladly fight Poseidon for the future of whalekind, even unto death.

("A nation of armless Buddhas" was one Greenpeace cofounder's description of whalekind.)

He displaces the violence emblemized by the whaling industry away from whales and onto humankind's fate while transcoding Ahab's defiance as the whale's defiance. Thus he projects humanlike consciousness into the deep, whalekind chronology that, Ishmael says, will outlast humankind's fated time.