Chapter 32 of “Moby-Dick” (1851) is called “Cetology”. It is where Herman Melville lays out his classification of whales. It has two drawbacks:
- No pictures.
- Out-of-date names.
This post provides a cheat sheet. His classification is in bold, the quoted text is his. The rest was added by me based on the Wikipedia of 2022 and a picture (the next one) from WIRED.
Definition:
- “a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.”
Melville divides his whales by size into Folio whales (huge), Octavo whales (large) and Duodecimo whales (small) – naming them after book sizes! Scientists divide cetaceans by anatomy, not size.
1. Folio whales (huge whales):
Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), pictured above and at top, is what most people this side of 1851 think of when they think of a whale, thanks in part to Melville. Moby-Dick was a sperm whale. So was Monstro in Disney’s “Pinocchio” (1940). And the whale in VeggieTale’s “Jonah” (2002) and the one on Twitter. They were the largest known whales in Melville’s time, the most dangerous but also the most sought after by whalers because of their huge quantities of high-quality oil. The oil, thought to be sperm, was mainly used in lamps and made into candles.
Right whale (genus Eubalaena) – what the Greeks and Romans knew as a whale and probably what is meant by “whale” in the King James Bible (and thus is the whale of Jonah). Sperm whales were rare in the Mediterranean. “Right” means it is a whale in the right or true sense. It is what the Basques hunted. It is where whale bone (aka baleen) and “whale oil” originally came from. In Melville’s time, the British and Dutch mainly hunted right whales in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans while US Americans mainly hunted sperm whales in the South Seas (South Pacific).
Fin-back whale (Balaenoptera physalus) – now known as a fin whale. Melville says it “is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks.” – the sort of whale New Yorkers would be familiar with.
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Razor-back whale – “eludes both hunters and philosophers”. Probably a fin-back whale. See above.
Suphur-bottom whale (Balaenoptera musculus) – now known as the blue whale. The largest whale, but they were so little known in Melville’s day that people thought sperm whales were larger.
2. Octavo whales (small whales):
Grampus (Orcinus orca) – now known as an orca or a killer whale.
Black Fish (genus Globicephala) – now known as a pilot whale.
Narwhal (Monodon monoceros) – a unicorn whale!
Killer – probably the orca. See above.
Thrasher – probably also the orca. See above.
3. Duodecimo whales (dolphins):
Huzza porpoise (genus Tursiops) – now known as the bottlenose dolphin. What most people think of when they think of a dolphin because they are the most common worldwide. Despite their small size, their body is designed like a whale.
Algerine porpoise – unclear what Melville had in mind. Maybe a pygmy killer whale (Feresa attenuata) or (pictured above) a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens).
Mealy-mouthed porpoise (Lissodelphis peronii) – now known as a southern right whale dolphin.
– Abagond, 2022.
See also:
- B-52’s: Rock Lobster – also mentions narwhals
- Basque whalers
- Linnaeus
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Abagond 
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