I’m going to paint you a clear, honest picture of a real whale soon. No actual canvas needed. I’ll describe exactly what a whaler sees when a full-grown whale floats right next to the ship, close enough for us to step right onto its body.
But first, we need to fix a huge, long-lasting mistake. To this day, regular land folks blindly believe all kinds of fake drawings and paintings of whales. It’s high time I prove every single one of those popular whale portraits completely wrong.
All these messed-up whale illustrations trace back to the earliest ancient art. Old Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek carvings started this terrible trend.
Back in those creative but unregulated ancient times, artists carved dolphins on temple walls, statue bases, shields, medals, cups and coins. But they gave those dolphins armored scales like a medieval warrior and helmeted heads like a saint.
That careless, made-up style stuck around. Even now, most casual whale art and plenty of supposedly scientific whale drawings still follow that same silly, inaccurate rule.
The oldest “whale portrait” still in existence sits in the famous cave temples of Elephanta in India.
Brahmin scholars claim the endless carvings in that ancient temple predict every human job and trade imaginable—all created centuries before those jobs even existed. So it’s no surprise whaling, our noble profession, shows up in those stone carvings too.
The Hindu whale carving appears on a separate wall panel. It depicts the god Vishnu turning into a giant sea beast, a myth known as the Matsya Avatar.
But even this ancient holy artwork gets it wrong. The carving blends human and whale features, only showing the whale’s tail portion. Instead of a whale’s wide, powerful tail flukes, it has a thin, tapering tail like a giant snake. Nothing like a real whale at all.
Jump forward to classic European art, and things don’t get any better.
Take the famous Christian painting by Guido Reni, showing Perseus saving Andromeda from a giant sea monster—supposedly a whale. Where on earth did Guido find his model for that bizarre creature? No real whale looks even close.
Hogarth’s version of the same scene, Perseus Descending, is just as ridiculous.
Hogarth’s monster is bloated and bulky, floating on the water’s surface without sinking more than an inch. It has what looks like a throne on its back. Its huge, gaping, tusk-filled mouth swallows entire waves, resembling a grim castle gate on the River Thames.
Old printed books are just as flawed.
There are the outdated whale sketches from Scottish writer Sibbald’s old research, plus the cartoonish whale that swallowed Jonah in antique Bible prints and old school textbooks. None of these hold up to real whaler experience.
Even the decorative “bookbinder’s whale” is total fiction. You’ve seen it: the twisting, vine-like whale wrapped around ship anchors on old and new book spines and title pages.
Artists copied this design from ancient vase paintings. People call it a dolphin now, but it was originally meant to be a whale. An Italian publisher invented the symbol in the 1400s during the Renaissance. Back then, everyone thought dolphins were a type of giant sea leviathan.
Ancient book illustrations are full of silly whale details too.
You’ll spot old sketches where whales spout all kinds of fake water jets—hot springs, cold geysers, fancy resort-style fountains bubbling straight out of their heads. The original title page of The Advancement of Learning has several of these absurd made-up whales.
Forget these amateur art fails for a second. Let’s look at the so-called professional, scientific whale drawings made by people who claim to know marine life.
Take the old 1671 Dutch voyage collection, titled A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale. It’s reprinted in Harris’s famous voyage compilations.
One plate shows whales lying on ice floes like floating logs, with polar bears walking across their living backs. Another ridiculous sketch draws whale tails standing straight up and down—completely impossible for real whales.
Even official naval research books make laughable mistakes.
Captain Colnett, a British navy officer, wrote a detailed book on sperm whale fishing in the South Seas. Inside, he includes a “to-scale drawing” of a sperm whale killed off Mexico in 1793.
According to his own scale measurements, the whale’s eye is five feet wide—big enough for a man to stand inside like a bay window.
I can’t help but joke: Captain, why didn’t you draw Jonah peering out of that giant eye?
Popular nature books for kids are just as wrong.
Take Goldsmith’s classic Animated Nature, the 1807 London abridged version. Its “whale” illustration looks like a mangled, amputated sow. Its “narwhale” drawing is so bizarre, it’s basically a mythical monster. It’s shocking schools ever taught kids this fake art as fact.
Top-tier scientists didn’t fix the problem either.
In 1825, famous naturalist Count de Lacépède published a comprehensive scientific guide to whale species. Every single illustration is inaccurate. Even seasoned whaling expert Scoresby confirmed Lacépède’s drawing of a right whale doesn’t match any real whale on Earth.
The worst mistake of all comes from scientist Frederick Cuvier, younger brother of the famous Baron Cuvier.
In 1836, he released a complete natural history of whales, featuring his official “sperm whale illustration.”
Show that picture to any Nantucket whaler, and you’d better run for your life. It doesn’t look like a whale at all—it looks exactly like a squashed pumpkin.
Cuvier never went on a whaling voyage, like most armchair scientists. No one knows where he got his terrible reference. He probably copied it from old Chinese drawings, just like his predecessor Desmarest did for his own ridiculous animal sketches. Anyone who’s seen quirky Chinese porcelain art knows how wildly imaginative their creature drawings can be.
Even street shop signs butcher whale designs.
Oil merchants hang whale signs above their storefronts that look like deformed monsters. They’ve got camel-style humps, fierce snarling faces, and they’re drawn eating whole whaleboats full of sailors. They flop around in fake blood-red and bright blue painted seas—pure cartoon chaos, zero accuracy.
You might wonder: how did everyone get whales so wrong for so long?
It’s actually easy to explain.
Nearly all scientific whale drawings are based on stranded, dead whales washed up on beaches. Drawing a dead, beached whale is like sketching a wrecked, broken ship and calling it a perfect portrait of a fully functional sailing vessel.
Elephants stand still and intact for artists to paint. But no one has ever seen a full, healthy living whale posed perfectly for a portrait.
Whales live in deep, open ocean. Their massive bodies float half-submerged, just like a huge warship at sea—most of their size hidden underwater. No human can ever lift a full-grown whale into the air to capture its true shape, curves, and proportions.
To make it worse, baby whales look completely different from mature adult whales. Even if you haul a young calf onto a ship’s deck, its floppy, eel-like, flexible body shifts shape constantly. No artist on earth could capture its exact form, not even the devil himself.
You might think whale skeletons would give us the correct shape, right?
Wrong again.
A whale’s skeleton tells you almost nothing about what it looks like alive and whole.
A human skeleton still lets you picture what a person looks like. For example, Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton clearly reflects his stout, stern personality. But a whale’s bare bones give zero clue to its real living shape.
Famous naturalist Hunter put it best: a whale’s skeleton is to its living, fleshy body what a plain insect shell is to a full caterpillar—hollow, incomplete, and nothing like the real creature.
This difference is obvious in a whale’s head and fins.
A whale’s side fin has bones that perfectly match a human hand—four fingers: index, middle, ring, and pinky. The only difference is no thumb. But all these bones are completely buried under thick layers of flesh and blubber, hidden from sight, like a gloved human hand.
The sailor Stubb once joked about this: “No matter how roughly a whale handles us, it never touches us without mittens.”
So when you stop and think about it, the giant sea leviathan is truly the one creature on Earth that can never be accurately painted.
Some drawings are closer than others, but none are truly precise. There’s no possible way for land-dwelling humans to capture a whale’s exact true appearance.
The only way to get even a decent idea of what a living whale looks like is to go whaling yourself.
But that comes with a huge risk: the whale might smash your boat and sink you to the bottom of the ocean forever.
So in my opinion, we shouldn’t be too picky or judgmental about bad whale art. When it comes to the great leviathan, a little guesswork is all anyone can manage.