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This is from the novel Tales of War, about German Navy at the time of Great War.

There was he, who should have been breasting the blue, or at any rate doing something salty and nautical, far out in the storms of that sea that the Germans call an Ocean, with the hurricane raging angrily in his whiskers and now and then wafting tufts of them aloft to white the halyards; there was he constrained to a command the duties of which however nobly he did them could be equally.

I do not understand the meaning of part in bold:

and now and then wafting tufts of them aloft to white the halyards;

Is that wafting tufts of whiskers? What does "aloft to white the halyards" mean?

I am glad if some one kindly give me some advice.

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    My first bit of advice would be to look up the word halyard in a dictionary, and edit your question to tell us what you discovered there. (To answer your first question, though, I do think the 'them' refers to his whiskers.)
    – J.R. ♦
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 9:37
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    white is being used as a verb here, to cause something to become white. Normally (in non-literary mode) we would say whiten. The hurricane wafts his whiskers aloft, that is, blows them up into the air. It is blowing so hard, that his whiskers are being pulled off his face.
    – TimR
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 11:59
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    Also, I think the excerpt has been truncated.
    – TimR
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 12:00

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the hurricane raging angrily in his whiskers and now and then wafting tufts of them aloft to white the halyards;

The subject of the phrase is "the hurricane", and I'm pretty sure the antecedent of "them" is "whiskers".

A "halyard" is a line of rope used to hoist a ladder, sail, flag, etc., coming from the phrase, "to haul yards": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halyard

So the hurricane is "raging angrily in his whiskers" and "wafting tufts of them [the whiskers] aloft to white [whiten] the halyards" ... I'm guessing he's saying that the whiskers are being pulled off his face by the wind, pulled so high that he feels like his (presumably white) facial hairs are whitening the high rigging of the ship.

I'm guessing he must be an older person, which is why his whiskers would "whiten" things. : )

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