[WHALES] Några blad om hvaldjur i allmänhet och Balænoptera Carolinæ i synnerhet.

Göteborg : Handelstidningens bolags tryckeri (the author’s own company), 1866. Cover: MALMSKA HVALEN. Från Göteborgs Zool. Zoot. Museum. Octavo (200 x 130 mm), publisher’s illustrated yellow wrappers, pp. 20; text in Swedish; a very good copy.

On October 29 1865 a 16-meter-long and 25-ton blue whale (Balænoptera Sibbaldii Gray) beached at Backa in Askimsfjärden, near Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden. It soon became popularly known as ‘Malmska the whale’; but it was also given the scientific name Balænoptera Carolinæ by August Wilhelm Malm (1821-1882), a zoologist and first superintendent at the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, who mistakenly believed he had found a new species of whale, and promptly named it after his wife Carolina (!). The carcass was purchased for Gothenburg’s zoological museum by local merchant James Dickson, and was displayed during the industrial exhibition in Stockholm in 1866.

This booklet about Carolina the whale, proudly published by Malm at the time, presents us with a curious side chapter in the history of cetology!