We’ve already sailed boldly out into the open ocean. But soon, we’ll be surrounded by endless, shoreless waters with no harbor in sight.
Before our ship the Pequod, its hull crusted with seaweed, drifts side by side with the giant barnacle-covered bodies of great whales, we need to settle one crucial matter first.
If you want to truly understand all the unique traits, secrets, and references about whales that I’ll share later, this basic foundation is absolutely necessary.
I want to lay out a clear, organized breakdown of the main types of whales for you. But this is no simple job.
Trying to sort and categorize these chaotic sea creatures is an enormous challenge. Just listen to what the most respected experts of past centuries have said.
In 1820, Captain Scoresby famously wrote that no field in zoology is as confusing and complicated as the study of whales.
Then in 1839, Doctor Beale stated flat out that no one has ever figured out a proper way to group and classify whale species. He added that every historian who’s studied the sperm whale has gotten everything muddled and mixed up.
The greatest zoologists and anatomists in history—Cuvier, John Hunter, and Lesson—all said the same thing.
They complained that the deep ocean hides whales from our full understanding, that a thick, unbreakable veil covers everything we try to learn about them.
They described whale research as a thorny, frustrating field, where every incomplete clue only leaves naturalists more confused and unsatisfied.
So there’s very little real, solid knowledge about whales in the world. Yet there are countless books written about them.
Whale studies are filled with more opinions than facts. All kinds of people—famous and ordinary, old and new, land dwellers and seasoned sailors—have written about whales in long essays and short notes alike.
The list of authors goes on and on: biblical writers, Aristotle, Pliny, Aldrovandi, Thomas Browne, Gesner, Ray, Linnaeus, and dozens more up to modern writers like Owen, Scoresby, Beale, and Cheever.
But as you can tell from the expert quotes I shared earlier, almost none of these writers agreed on a clear, unified way to classify whales.
Here’s the biggest problem: only the writers who came after Owen ever saw a living whale with their own eyes.
And out of every single whale expert on that long list, only one was a real, professional harpooner and whaler—Captain Scoresby.
Scoresby was the world’s top authority on the Greenland right whale. But he knew nothing at all about the massive sperm whale, a creature that makes the Greenland whale look almost insignificant by comparison.
For hundreds of years, the Greenland whale was wrongly crowned the king of the sea.
It’s not even the largest whale species. But until roughly seventy years ago, almost no one knew anything about sperm whales. They were mysterious, mythical creatures no one had properly observed.
Even today, most people outside of scientific circles and whaling ports still know almost nothing about sperm whales.
All the great poets of the past wrote about the Greenland whale as the unrivaled ruler of the ocean. But that outdated reputation is finally coming to an end.
Let me make this clear to everyone: the Greenland whale is no longer the sea’s true monarch. The great sperm whale has taken its rightful place on the ocean’s throne.
There are only two books in existence that accurately describe living sperm whales: one by Beale and one by Bennett.
Both men served as ship’s surgeons on British South Sea whaling vessels. They were careful, precise, and completely reliable observers.
Their books hold valuable original information about sperm whales, but their research is limited mostly to dry scientific descriptions. The content is excellent as far as it goes, but far from complete.
To this day, no piece of writing—scientific or poetic—captures the full, true nature of the sperm whale. Of all hunted whale species, its life and story remain almost entirely unrecorded.
We need a simple, clear, popular classification system for all whale species. It doesn’t have to be perfect or fully detailed right now. Future researchers can expand and refine it later.
Since no one else has stepped forward to do this work, I’ll take on the task myself.
I don’t claim my system is perfect. In fact, nothing created by humans can ever be completely flawless. Perfection always comes with hidden flaws.
I won’t dive into tiny anatomical details of each whale species here, nor will I overload you with endless technical descriptions.
My only goal is to build a basic, organized framework for the study of whales. I’m just the architect drawing the blueprint, not the builder constructing every last detail.
This is a heavy, difficult task—far harder than any simple sorting job at a post office.
To dive into the deepest parts of the sea, to grasp the hidden foundations, massive ribs, and enormous frames of these ocean giants… it’s a terrifying undertaking.
Who am I to try to understand and define such a mighty creature as the leviathan whale?
The daunting words from the Book of Job easily could scare me off. Can such a great beast ever make peace with humans? Is there any true hope of fully understanding it?
But I have spent my life pouring over countless books and sailing across endless oceans.
I have touched and encountered whales with my own two hands. I’m not speaking from theory—I’m speaking from experience. And I’m determined to try.
First, though, there are a few key basics we need to sort out.