By Gayne C. Young
What do you do when a blue whale gives you the stink eye?
Spoiler Alert: It ain’t pleasant.
Our story began on a cold, windy Sunday morning in October 1865 when fisherman Olof Larsson was hunting small game on the outskirts of Näset, Sweden. He spotted something he took for s shipwreck in the waves just offshore shortly after nine. As he drew closer to the object, he realized the out-of-place wasn’t ship debris; it was a whale.
Olof ran back to town and returned with his brother-in-law Carl Hansson and a boat. The two made their way to within 80 feet of the beast only to spot something shiny just above the water. As Olof would later declare in the massive book, “Illustrated Monograph on the Balænoptera Whale Found on the West Coast of Sweden on 29 October 1865,” “the whale moved this shiny thing, in the same way a human would. It was obvious that it was the eye. The whale was blinking its eye, and we decided to poke it out so it would not be able to see us.”
I told you it wasn’t pleasant. And it gets worse from there.
“After that we reckoned we would succeed in killing it. The knife was stuck in and the boat hook [to which the knife was attached] sank in two feet. The blood was gushing a couple of inches above the surface of the water…in the same way as when one punches a hole in a barrel of beer…I then climbed up on its enormous head, and with an axe I cut a gash behind the two holes it was breathing through. … The whale was very slippery to hold on to, and since it was twitching violently, … I had to get back into the boat again on several occasions. … I cut it like this with the axe from ten o’clock until half past three in the afternoon.” Unfortunately, these actions didn’t kill the whale.
Weird Science & the Malm Whale
Olof and Carl retired for the day then returned the day after to continue, what in 2025 could only be described as, outright animal torture. The whale finally succumbed to its many, many wounds, and the two men began looking for a buyer. The men found one in the form of August Wilhelm Malm, a taxidermist and the curator of the Gothenburg Museum.
August examined the whale and, believing it to be a new species named it Balænoptera carolinæ after his wife. Because nothing declares your love like seeing a whale and being reminded of your wife. August decided the whale would make a fantastic display at his museum, so he employed three steamboats and two coal barges to tow the whale to the shore. There, as August detailed in the aforementioned book, he and a crew of “ten strong butcher’s assistants and more than twice as many other workers cut up the magnificent beast before the decomposition progresses further.”
The dissected whale was sent to the museum, and August took care to see that everything was prepared for what would become the largest taxidermy mount of all time. The animal’s skeleton was boiled and cleaned, its baleen salted and hung, the organs preserved, and the skin tanned. August then employed a team to make a frame for the animal that included a hinged jaw that would allow visitors to climb inside the whale to see just how large it actually was.
This interior was outfitted with carpeting, benches, and wall-hangings. The whale was put on display in this manner until sometime in the 1930s when a couple was caught having sex inside the whale. The jaws were shut at that point and are only opened for special events such as on the whale’s 100th birthday in 1965 when an estimated 11,000 people literally ventured into the belly of the whale during the ten-day celebration. By that time the whale was properly identified as a juvenile blue whale, Balænoptera musculus.
Today, the 52-foot-long whale remains a popular display at the museum and stands as the only actual —not a replica — taxidermy mount of a blue whale in existence.
