by Skye Moody
Around 3 p.m., as Alpo gradually disintegrated into his glass, Anttii, a grandson of Sibelius, joined us. Anttii is a filmmaker, so gorgeous he wears permanent clutch marks from the women he constantly fends off. Anttii, too, was enthralled with the subject of flotsam. And so the wake for summer turned into a flotsam fest, each of us swapping our best flotsam stories, much like fishermen swap tales. It was nearing midnight when we were startled out of our pseudo-philosophical doldrums by a certain Finnish rock star, who shall go without a name because I’ve forgotten it. A tall drink of water, livelier on his feet than most Finns in winter, he announced that he was shortly departing for an African tour. Alpo mumbled something sacastic like, “I hope you get malaria.” The rock star slid up to my side. “All the snow got you down?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “There’s something very spiritually cleansing about snow.” I was drunk.
The rock star sucked his cheeks. “Oh yeah? Why don’t we go outside and you can show me what’s so holy about snow.”
Never one to reject a challenge, especially after a few drinks, I second-lined out into the dark mews where a single lantern cast our shadows across the small park. I scoured the scene for a clean patch of snow. “Over there,” I said. “I’ll make an angel appear in the snow.”
String Bean howled. “You remind me of that Afro-Brazilian touching cult,” he said. “You know the one. They believe if you touch something a spirit will appear.”
He was confusing the Umbandan flotsam cults with the Bugis from Sulawesi, but I didn’t contradict him. I lay down on my back in the snow. Spread my arms and legs. I’d show him how to make an angel appear. I flapped my limbs. And then I started sinking. Two, three inches at first, and as the ice cracked and separated, my feather down coat and sheepskin boots took in water and suddenly, I was floating—yes, floating on water.
“Oh God,” the rock star cried. “You are—how do you say it?”
“Drowning ...”
But no. I floated, until a gentle wave stirred up by breaking ice pushed me ashore. There is, after all, a god of flotsam in city ponds.
Within the Arctic Circle, thirteen distinct groups known collectively as the Inuit, scattered across Russia, Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, have for five thousand years worshiped sea spirits, as well they should, living in such a split-personality climate. I don’t know why anyone would want to live four months a year in total darkness with plunging temperatures. And I suspect if the ancient Inuit had known about Hawaii, they would have risked death on grueling seas to get there. Forget whale blubber and reindeer aortal blood; anyone can live on coconuts and sunshine. As it was, the Inuit depended upon their honored spirits for the strength to endure such harsh conditions. Animism played a role in their belief systems: The offer of a drink to a dead seal pleased its spirit. Drink, because the seal’s soul lived in its bladder; the drink would expedite the soul’s return to the seas from which most of the Inuits’ material possessions came. An important Inuit goddess was Sedna, who lived at the bottom of the sea and controlled whales, seals, and other sea life critical to survival. Coastal Native Americans, too, worshipped sea spirits and believed they sent the things that washed up on their beaches. Everything that washed up from the oceans was flotsam from the gods. But I’ll bet that didn’t include hula-hula girls.
Tides, currents, and waves are as old as the oceans they travel. Riding them, all manner of organic materials have ventured forth to foreign lands. Tree limbs from Oceania have traveled the Pacific Ocean’s encircling currents some eleven thousand miles to beach in North America and Canada. According to legend and the Vancouver Maritime Museum, the earliest recorded human-made flotsam, a carved totem pole, washed up on North America’s Pacific Coast several thousand years ago, stranding on a beach in Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands. Cultural anthropologists cite carbon dating and carving patterns as evidence that the Polynesian log inspired the Haidas’ totem-carving culture, arguably an early form of trademark infringement.
In any case, the first Native American beachcomber to stumble upon that carved Polynesian log must surely have been awed and perhaps spiritually stirred, if not terrified, by the strange and wonderful thing.
Even today some beachcombers find personally relevant signs or mystical messages in the whorls of a seashell, or in the shape of a piece of driftwood, or even in the swirling of seaweed in the intertidal zone; like reading tea leaves, seaweed patterns speak to them; they go home filled with a sense of having received new insights into their lives and their raison d’etre. I recently met a woman in Garibaldi, Oregon, who was traveling America’s coastlines on her personal “vision quest” in a belief that the ocean would deliver a critical message providing her with spiritual guidance, said message arriving on the tides and intended specifically for her.
My encounter with the vision-questing lady occurred near the ocean shore, inside a small shop crammed behind hundreds of gnarled and silvery lengths of driftwood flotsam. The shop owner handcrafted birdhouses and sold them, along with driftwood. I had noticed the shop owner’s eyes held a special glint, which at first I attributed to smoking a blunt. Then the vision-questing lady floated into the shop, her eyes equally twinkling, her countenance aglow. She fished a small object from her pocket and held it clasped in her fisted hand. As the shop owner’s eyes met the woman’s eyes, the electricity got too woo-woo for me, so I ducked outside to make pictures of the driftwood.
Moments later the vision-questing lady swept out of the shop and into her vehicle, a dull, dust-sheathed car, and peeled rubber down Highway 101. Then the shop owner came out to show me what the woman had given him: a tiny crystal pyramid. It seems she had been on the beach near his shop the day before and had found some personal insight or spiritual message washed up especially for her. During her receipt of spiritual flotsam, she had encountered the birdhouse man, whom she immediately linked to her tide-line epiphany. And so the following day she tracked him down at his shop to present her new god with this little crystal offering.
Moments this charged with woo-woo occur all over the world, all the time, yet they seem to occur with frightening frequency in coastal communities where all those negative ions flow in off the spindrift and heighten the senses. By now the vision-questing lady may have reached the Florida Keys. You will know her by her dull, forgettable car, and the unbearable lightness of her gait.
I have often wondered what America’s earliest beachcombers thought when they first tripped over a dead pilgrim washed up on their beach, or a one-hundred-liter jug of Spanish wine impossibly intact lodged between beached driftwood. Imagine, if you will, the French fisherman whose boat drifted into the wrong current, at long last sighting land and bringing his tired vessel ashore only to be met by terrified and perhaps indignant natives. Thus was born Acadia. But even before the newcomers sloshed ashore, beachcombers along the world’s coastlines were discovering amazing natural flotsam; some they used for food, some for decorative jewelry, some for medicine, and some for construction of homes and boats. The abundance of native references to whaling and other nautical pastimes, and to weather conditions over the ocean, indicate the natives, however they interpreted their experiences, knew about shifting currents, tides, and winds, often taking advantage of a particular current to travel to fishing grounds or to explore potential campsites. Early natives intuitively understood the nature of the great ocean and the winds that blew across it, and depicted its varied temperaments as god spirits. Thus the god Thunderbird, for example, might travel a current’s path straight to shore, embracing in its waves amazing gifts from the sea. Thunderbird beached whales for the sake of the Inuit. Thunderbird brought fallen trees for building shelter, and seals for making oil and clothing, great rafts of seaweed for food and medicine. (Personally, I’ll take the powder-blue convertible with whitewall tires.)
Returning to the cargo cult phenomenon: Among philosophical archaeologists—this hot new subspecialty has recently chipped off from archaeology’s My
cenaean roots—the tired joke about cargo cults is that all coastal natives want a refrigerator to wash up on their beach. The improbable event actually occurred on September 21, 2004, along the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, where several dozen refrigerators crashed onto the rocks at Precipe Bay. Alas, the rocks smashed the refrigerators to smithereens. It’s believed a storm in the Bristol Channel ejected the cargo off the MV Ryfgell as it sailed from Dublin bound for Avonmouth. Besides refrigerators, the accidentally jettisoned cargo included some crates of raisins. The raisins washed up at Caldey Island where beachcombers from nearby Tenby reported “sea grapes” appearing on their beaches.
Dragon Spittle Fragrance
All along the shore were planks and fragments of many vessels that had been wrecked on this inhospitable coast. And this was not all, for when we proceeded through the island, we found a spring of pure ambergris overflowing into the sea; and by this the whales are attracted, but when they have swallowed it and dived to the depths of the sea it turns in their stomachs and they eject it, so that it rises to the surface in solid lumps such as are found by sailors. But the ambergris that is cast about the opening of the spring melts in the heat of the sun, and its perfume is blown about the island, wafted sweet upon the breeze like fragrant musk.
SINBAD THE SAILOR
THE SIXTH VOYAGE
One Thousand and One Nights
When Sinbad discovered ambergris flowing from a spring into the sea, Scheherazade’s sailor almost got it right. Sinbad describes ambergris as a substance that attracts whales, who ingest the stuff and then, finding it disagrees with them, eject it into the ocean, where the malodorous material “rises to the surface in solid lumps.”
In Africa, ambergris was traded as far back as 1000 BC, the mysterious substance coveted for its fragrance. Still, no one seemed quite certain exactly what the substance was, only that it came from the ocean and floated on its surface, sometimes beaching along the African coastline, at other times harvested straight from the sea in great lumps the size of a rich man’s hut. In Egypt, ambergris was burned as incense, but its origin remained unknown. The Japanese also possessed and traded in ambergris, calling it kunsurano fuu, or “whale feces,” indicating they had at least partly figured out where it came from. But ancient India held that ambergris was derived from whale vomit, coming closest to the true explanation. The Chinese had the most inventive theory on ambergris, calling it lung sien hiang, meaning “dragon spittle fragrance,” because it was believed that the waxy substance drooled into the ocean from the mouths of dragons sleeping on sea rocks. Dragon drool is still sold in Chinese apothecaries as an aphrodisiac, as incense, and as a spice.
The baffling properties of ambergris must have seemed like the ancient version of the magic bullet. Arabs used it to treat diseases of the brain and heart. The Arab trader Ibn Haukal in the tenth century lauded its aphrodisiac quality, suggesting its worth was roughly equal to the price of gold, or the price of African slaves. Meanwhile, the Greeks thought ambergris enhanced the soothing effects of wine, often slipping a little into their guests’ cups. Turkish Muslims carried ambergris along on their pilgrimages to Mecca as the ultimate offering to Allah. During Iran’s Satiric period, Goshtasb “ordered that fires should be lighted and myrrh and ambergris be ignited.” Persians ate ambergris along with hashish “without guilt,” according to the chronicler Ibn Battuta.
In The Travels of Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century explorer refers to the collecting of ambergris on island beaches off the coast of India and Madagascar. By then ambergris enjoyed the distinction of being the world’s most prized and desired flotsam.
Perfumers, herbalists, and shamans through the centuries have claimed that the scent of properly aged ambergris directly interacts with human sexual appetites (pheromones) and have often touted the substance as an aphrodisiac. Europeans once generally agreed that bees living in hives near the seashore produced ambergris, but some argued that it was a form of seabird or sperm whale guano. Louis XV reputedly flavored his favorite meals with ambergris, and Queen Elizabeth I used ambergris to perfume her gloves. In Elizabethan times, ambergris rivaled gold in value.
The word ambergris derives from the Arabic anbar, for a kind of tree, which may have produced resin. Also owing its name to this Arabic word is amber jaune, the yellow fossil resin of 40-million-year-old trees, found along Baltic seashores and prized as jewelry even in ancient times. The equivalent to the word anbar in Greek is elektron, the root of the word electricity. When liquefied into a tincture, ambergris gives off the same warm and energetic light that the fossilized resin—amber—radiates. Interestingly, though fossilized amber and ambergris come from two entirely different sources, both are found on beaches, both float in seawater, and both appear rather innocuous until human hands get hold of them. Still, no one could fully explain the existence of ambergris until some startled sailor apparently witnessed an actual event at sea, and eventually the mystery was solved.
Imagine a seasick Moby Dick.
Ambergris is a waxy substance related to cholesterol, produced in the lower intestinal tract of the sperm whale, forming around accumulated indigestible matter such as octopus remains, cuttlefish bones, and squid beaks. When too many squid beaks and cuttle bones accumulate in a sperm whale’s digestive tract, a curious chemical process takes place in which the irritating refuse forms into a waxy blob. Eventually the whale’s stomach rumbles and it belches—or retches—a sound often heard far across the ocean. That signals the colicky whale is preparing to reject what cannot be digested, and gift it to the sea. Not whale feces, not dragon spittle, but a lump of vomited-up intestinal refuse.
When first expelled, ambergris has a flabby consistency and a nauseating odor as it floats on the ocean surface. The lump often weighs three hundred to five hundred pounds, and lumps as heavy as a thousand pounds have been recorded. Newly ejected ambergris is a dark blackish color, but interaction with seawater and the atmosphere transforms it gradually to amber, silver-gray, golden yellow, and finally, in its sweetest stage, to a grayish white. At the same time, the stuff’s clarity improves as its texture changes from waxy to pasty.
Over many years of floating on the sea, ambergris acquires a unique fragrance strangely tolerable to the human olfactory senses. Not only tolerable, the fragrance of aged ambergris has seduced millions of unsuspecting men and women whose partners have applied an ambergris-fixed perfume to strategic anatomical pulse points.
As a fixative, especially for flower-based essences, ambergris is said to have no match, its stability preserving fragrances for centuries without evaporation or change in translucence. Today, in Arab nations, ambergris is sold not only as a perfume fixative but also as an aphrodisiac and fertility booster. Some herbalists claim that inhaling the scent of ambergris offers an “estrogen cure,” presumably intended for menopausal maladies.
In 1883, the New Zealand barque Splendid of Dunedin came across a 938-pound floating glob of ambergris, the single piece of flotsam valued at the time at about $250,000. In 1908, Norwegian whalers whose business was headed into bankruptcy discovered a glob of ambergris weighing 1,003 pounds, reportedly the largest single chunk of ambergris ever found. The whalers sold the ambergris for 23,000 British pounds and rescued their business. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the value of ambergris outdistanced that of gold; in the mid-twentieth century, it was at one point ounce-for-ounce worth eight times the price of gold.
Ambergris has been recovered from beaches and found floating in the ocean, but it is usually taken from the stomach of dead sperm whales. Once removed from the carcass and exposed to air, the stuff develops a waxlike quality, but it can also develop a pitchlike consistency or even become brittle. Scoundrels have tried passing off other substances as genuine ambergris, so buyers usually test the substance before swiping their credit cards.
The quickest test involves dissolving a small specimen in methyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol won’t work) and then allowing it to cool. If the specimen crystall
izes, it’s ambergris. A more complicated test requires a needle or small piece of wire, and a flame. The needle is heated in the flame and then touched to the specimen, pressed into it about an eighth of an inch. A dark resinous liquid should form around the needle and the liquid should bubble as if boiling. Touching the liquid with a finger and pulling the finger away before the stuff cools should cause stringy bits to stick to the finger. When the needle, now coated with the melted substance, is heated a second time over a flame, the pitch should emit a smoky fume the same odor as the solid stuff, and then burn out with a clean flame. Finally, when the flame is extinguished, the smoke’s odor should turn to that of burning rubber. This second test rarely fails to separate the genuine specimen from the fake. However, the most discerning buyers conduct additional testing, performed in chemical laboratories, looking for cholesterol and benzoic acids. If all goes well, the buyer may be confident it’s the real thing.
John Singer Sargent’s best-known Orientalist painting, Fume’e d Ambre G, 1880, depicts a woman, either ecstatic or astonished, I’m not certain which, standing over a pot of ambergris, inhaling its fumes. The painting was made during the height of the whaling industry, when every whaler hoped his knife would expose a pot of gold inside the big Moby Dick. Yet ambergris occurs in only about 1 percent of the sperm whale population.
Why, in this age of Swiss-made synthetic ambergris, would anyone covet whale yack?
Simply, because synthesized versions lack unique properties of the genuine article. When a synthetic version was introduced, the price of ambergris plunged, and yet certain perfumers, insisting that genuine ambergris imparts an unmatchable velvetiness to fine and expensive perfumes, still pay top dollar for the best-quality genuine article. Furthermore, perfumers say, its complex olfactory qualities—“amber, musk, animal, sea” and “a tobacco note”—cannot be reproduced. And ambergris as a fixative, preserving the fragrances of floral-based perfumes, cannot be matched. In fact, ambergris has preserved certain fragrances for centuries. Famous perfumes containing ambergris include Ambre Royale aux Fleurs No. 1114, Shocking by Schiaparelli, Arpege by Lanvin, Clandestine by Laroche, and numerous perfumes created by Chanel, Patou, and Guerlain.
