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Someone is going to rain on your parade and it's not me. It's the whale. Literally. More on that later.

If you wish to calculate how many people you need to move a whale, don't bother calculating lifting power. You won't fit three thousand seven hundred villagers under a whale.

But don't go calculating static friction either. Whale skin is thick but it is not indestructible. Tim's got an excellent answer on the reason already, but let me add some gorier details.

Dead animals have gases in their bellies just like we do, but a mix of internal decomposition and clogged... bodily exits makes them bloat. Over time, they may explode. No, really, there is even a name for it: exploding casket syndrome. It is very usual with poorly handled human remains. In Brazil vertical cemeteries are a thing now (think columbarium walls, but with enough space for whole bodies rather than just cremated remains) and I've heard more cases of people hearing the bodies pop than I can count. One that I visited even had marks of the blood that dripped out of a drawer.

Anyway, whales have really large intestines, and the square-cube law dictates that they have more gas and less outlests per body weight than we do. The baleen ones are the worst, for they are really stretchy so they bloat like baloons before the blast. This is one of them critters in Newfoundland, lying topside down and growing like bread dough:

When sane people find them in that state, the intelligent thing to do is to stab them repeatedly to let the gas out. That is very unpleasant for everybody's noses, but it's less unpleasant than having the carcass going off like a bomb on your beach.

In 2004 some folks in Taiwan found a dead sperm whale bull on the beach. They decided to bring it into town because they wanted to experience its huge penis - no I could not make this up if I tried, sober or high. You can see the full story backing up what I just said in the following link but be warned that it may be considered gross: Thar she blows! More pictures of the damage here.

So if your villagers are so desperate for the experience that they are going to be dragging a whole 40 tons bloating carcass over the streets, it's going to take a lot of time. That herculean task is going to blow up on their faces long before they reach their mark and that won't be fun for anybody.

-Hey guys remember how the friar excommunicated us because of that time when we had found that dead whale and we told everybody to come to the town square to see its huge d...

-What happens at the bay stays in the bay, Jimmy.

While Tim_B has covered the fact that you can't just drag a dead whale through the streets, there are alternative methods you can use. You will probably only need a team of 10 people, and a separate crew of at least 2 people to perform the feat.

The solution is to put the whale on top of some logs, which roll when you drag the whale. This way you reduce the friction cause by the whale sliding over your cobblestone surface. As your team of 10 people drag the whale, a separate crew need to move logs from the back of the whale to the front to ensure you can continue to roll it.

The only tricky bit is getting the whale onto the logs...but that's a different question.

Frame challenge.

The whale might not fit in your streets. It is too wide. People have signs, clotheslines, flagpoles, and stuff hanging out from the doors and walls. While they are tall enough so vehicles and people moving through won't snag, the whale will. Moving the animal whole is a bad idea. The other answers do a good job of showing why. It will be a slow process and the meat will spoil.

Don't carry the whale, butcher the whale. If it is for its meat and blubber, butchering where it is is the best choice. Chunks can be big enough to fit in wagons or wheelbarrows. It is what people do with large game anyway.

What you need is a stretcher. This could be just a large piece of strong canvas. Sailcloth might do in a pinch (possibly several layers thick), and is something your fishing villagers would be very likely to have on hand. Get a suitably large piece, attach it to wooden spars on two sides, and roll the whale onto it. Then you can attach ropes to the spars to pull the whole thing up the street. This gets around the problem of the carcass falling apart from trying to pull it with meat-hooks. (Though you'd still want to ventilate it as @Renan suggested in his answer.) Combine this with some of the other suggestions, such as @Shadowzee's log rollers, maybe add some beasts of burden to the pulling team. Oxen or mules could be useful for pulling large heavy loads, and will be much more efficient than trying to get enough weakling humans around to move that much weight.

It'll be easier in winter.

Insofar as:

• Now the corpse is refrigerated, so it won't be quite so explodey.




• And the corpse is rigid, which will make it easier to manhandle around.




• And the streets are, or can be, covered in ice, which is nicely slippery and non-gratery.




• The oxen won't be as busy as during plowing season, so you can draft those animals into service as draft animals.

Humans are analog machines that seek the path of least resistance. So, they'd start dragging the whale and stop after breaking their backs for a few minutes and think up a better solution.

If you look at how the Egyptians made the pyramids, it was assumed for a long time they just had tons of slave labor dragging stones on ground. But, they actually would wrap some to make wheels they could roll, and others they wuold place logs under to roll along much easier on the ground.

Basically.. humans are not idiots.

If you're writing a story where humans are just dragging a whale on the street, readers are going to think about why they'd do that themslves and feel like their intelligence is being insulted. Because they themselves would be thinking of more ways to do that better then spending time believing the folks in your story are not doing it themselves.

If the whale will survive the trip, and the path is wide enough, and you can securely anchor enough ropes for everyone to have room to pull it.... (Yes, there are a lot of very good points here on 'why' this is a very bad idea) I estimate that the average person here (assuming a relatively active lifestyle from sailing/fishing etc...) could start 50kg of resistant mass (guestimate from personal experience doing weight training) adding up to at least 800 people for a 40ton whale.