Perhaps, in some instances, a whale is able to pass the ambergris. In others, the growing boulder of ambergris is fatal. It occludes the gut completely, Clarke explained, and the whale suffers a fatal intestinal rupture. In a process that takes years, one stratum too many has been laid over the top of the others. The ambergris has grown too large for the gut. The dead whale, now adrift on the open seas, slowly begins to swell. Within hours, the stinking carcass will be surrounded by sharks, drawn to the blood in the water like iron filings to a magnet — makos and blues, mostly. From the air, gulls, storm petrels, and shearwaters will arrive in a noisy tangle and settle in the water around the bloated corpse, which has begun to trail a greasy slick of oil behind it through the waves. The smaller fish will feed on it from below, tearing the flesh into strips and fighting over it among themselves. At some point, the ruptured intestines will be torn open by scavengers, and the ambergris will fall into the ocean. The whale carcass will become a floating bounty of food in a challenging and competitive place. The feeding frenzy lasts for weeks, before the remains take one last dive down through the mesopelagic zone and into darkness. In a reversal of fortunes, the benthic crabs and the octopuses will take their turn with whatever is left, picking any remaining flesh from the sturdy white bones on the seafloor.
And kilometres above, set upon the lurching swell, the ambergris has begun its journey.
Freshly expelled, the black and viscous ambergris — which is slightly less dense than seawater — rises slowly, ascending through the frigid ocean currents. Eventually, it reaches the surface, where it floats in the chop, forgotten and mostly submerged, sometimes for years. It can ride the swell of the southern oceans for decades. It bobs and rolls through cyclones and equatorial heat, from the tropics to the stillness of the doldrums, where it might be stalled for months. It picks up speed in the horse latitudes, 30 to 35 degrees north and south of the equator. It turns poleward and then back again. It gets trapped in ocean gyres — large rotating oceanic current systems that pieces of flotsam can spend years navigating. This journey cannot be substituted. Like wine in a bottle, ambergris slowly matures at sea. Gradually, a molecule at a time, it reacts with its surroundings until — oxidized by salt water, degraded by sunlight, and eroded by wave action — it is beached somewhere along a remote and windswept coastline much like Long Beach; or dumped by a storm onto a busy and populated stretch of sand like Breaker Bay, in sight of a large metropolitan city like Wellington; or it washes up somewhere on the Somali coastline, or in the Chatham Islands, or the Philippines, or northern California, or on a wet little bay in Wales.
“Ambergrease is also found on the Scots Coasts,” wrote Guy Miege in 1715, in The Present State of Great-Britain and Ireland: In Three Parts, “particularly on that of the Island Bernera, one of the Harris Isles, where a Weaver finding a Lump of it, and not knowing what it was, burnt it to shew him light, when the strong Scent discover’d it, and made his Head ake. It is also found on the Coasts of Southvist, Kintyre and Orkney.”
In fact, ambergris can wash ashore anywhere there are sperm whales — which is almost everywhere, in all the world’s oceans. Sperm whales are considered a “cosmopolitan” species. Unlike some other whale species, which are restricted to specific environmental bands of ocean — bowhead whales in the Arctic; Bryde’s whales in the tropics — sperm whales can be found in all the oceans at almost all but the very coldest latitudes. A sperm whale will slowly plough its way through any water, constantly diving deeply for squid, provided it is deeper than about 1000 metres and not covered in ice. In other words, sperm whales roam almost everywhere, and some of them produce ambergris as they navigate the world’s seas and oceans. The churning oceanic currents then carry the ambergris everywhere else, even to those few isolated places where sperm whales might physically be absent.
There is a randomness and unpredictability to a journey like this. It is unknowable. At various times, ambergris has been found in some strange and surprising places. In September 1908, the Hartford Courant reported a lucky find by a Noank, Connecticut, fisherman: while hauling up lobster pots from the bottom of Long Island Sound, John Carrington, captain of the Ella May, discovered that one of his traps contained a one-pound (450-gram) piece of ambergris. A year later the Washington Post described the moment that the crew of the Hockomock, on its return to Boston, opened up one of several swordfish taken on the Georges Bank and discovered a large piece of ambergris inside it. “The piece brought in today,” the article read, “is estimated to be worth $20,000.”
A fresh, fragrant lump of ambergris could wash ashore just a handful of kilometres from where it was expelled. It could arrive a day or so later with the tide on Long Beach, black and sticky and smelling of fresh dung. A large valuable piece of ambergris could be there now, drying in the wind, waiting for me to find it. Or it could be carried for years instead, taken by strong currents across remote and unvisited parts of the ocean, slowly eroding until no part of it is left. And once found, there is no way to discern the slightest information about a piece of ambergris, either when or where it was made and expelled into the ocean, or which route it took to arrive where it was found. It is simply a mystery: an artifact, a totem, a relic. Was it once part of a larger piece? Is it a year old, or has it been floating for twenty winters or more, travelling in a huge circuitous arc across the world’s oceans? All but the most immediate information is unknown and cannot be discovered.
By the time an aged and well-traveled piece of ambergris arrives on the shore, though, it is different. It has been worked on by the ocean, tossed around on the waves for years like a single grain of wheat in a vast combine. Depending on how long it has been at sea, its colour and texture will have evolved from a black tar-like substance to a pale, smooth, waxy ball, rolling in the surf. Over the years, it loses most of its water content. It becomes smaller and denser. Its exterior hardens and takes on a tough rind-like appearance. More than anything else, it now resembles a light grey stone — a little like pumice stone, chalk, or dried clay. Its surface might have a shiny patina to it; its interior will be flecked with embedded squid beaks, like burnt black seeds. It smells pungently and, as it evolves, it undergoes another transformation: the faecal smell that characterizes freshly expelled ambergris gradually softens at sea and is replaced by a rich complex odour described variously as sweet, woody, earthy, and marine.
“Unique, elusive of precise description,” wrote Robert Clarke, “the odour of ambergris has been said to suggest fine tobacco, the wood in old churches, sandalwood, the smell of the tide, fresh earth, and fresh seaweed in the sun. I myself am reminded of Brazil nuts.” In an 1844 article in the American Journal of Pharmacy, it was said to have a “smell somewhat resembling old cowdung”. An article in the New York Times from 1895, titled “Ambergris, the Whale Fisher’s Prize”, described its odour as being “like the blending of new-mown hay, the damp woodsy fragrance of a fern-copse, and the faintest possible perfume of the violet”.
Whether it smells of churches, Brazil nuts, a fern copse, or all of these, it is a sought-after component of perfumes and is sold by the gram in little pebble-size pieces to independent perfumers or in bulk to those who can afford it. It is peddled in the dusty souks by herbalists in Morocco and Cairo, where it is an aphrodisiac and stirred by the teaspoon into cups of sweetened tea. Across the Middle East, it is used as incense in religious ceremonies. In China, it is eaten. Throughout history, it has been used as a medicine, as an ingredient in cooking, a component in fragrances, an adornment, a sign of wealth, an acknowledgment and celebration of the great dark unseen mystery of the ocean.
Weathered from its years spent adrift at sea, ambergris is one of the few physical manifestations of the sperm whale, an implausibly large mammal that spends most of its time kilometres beneath the ocean surface in complete darkness. Both literally and figuratively, any meaningful details of the journey a piece of ambergris has made are simply lost to the vastness of the deep ocean, which does not readily g
ive up many of its secrets. The journey — which is physical, geographic, chemical, and transformative — cannot be replicated, and neither can its product. Ambergris has been synthesized, but its synthetic versions are not convincing. They lack an indefinable something that is gained only after years spent at sea. On completing its long journey, this nondescript sun-whitened pebble has been transformed into a prized commodity.
Back on Long Beach, I bend over to pick up another unidentified object from the sand. I examine it, smell it, and then pitch it over my shoulder, where it lands with the other rejected pieces of driftwood, seaweed, and lightweight volcanic rock. The rain is still falling. A screen of dark, low thunderheads slides gracefully landward from the open sea and settles on top of the cliffs like a mantle. The tide is oceangoing. The water level drops quickly, leaving behind a fresh wet belt of flotsam that extends the length of the beach. I had read somewhere that the best time to find ambergris is immediately following a high tide — dumped by the receding waves, it sits proudly on the high-tide line, making it easily visible to anyone trying to find it. This is the time. I make sure my plastic bags are still in the pocket of my raincoat. Picking through the seaweed and driftwood, I make my way farther north, squinting into the rain. Half an hour later, I arrive at the northern end of the beach, wet and tired and empty-handed.
For several weeks, I have been calling Robert Anderson, hoping to find out more about the ambergris his son, Robbie, found on Long Beach in 2006. I leave messages on his answer machine, asking him to call me back. He never does. After a while, I am reminded of an unsuccessful few months I had spent telemarketing. Stubbornness sets in. I call three times a week. I want to know what happened to the ambergris Robbie Anderson had found. Did the Andersons sell it? Do they still have it? And how much is it worth?
Robbie Anderson was lucky. But not unique. I have begun to collect accounts from the news archives of beach walkers stumbling over unusual-looking objects on beaches, taking them home, and then discovering they are ambergris. Some of the more recent of these articles carry headlines like “‘MOBY SICK’ FIND LANDS FRAGRANT FORTUNE” (Reuters, January 25, 2006); “GIRL IN WALES FINDS LUCKY WHALE VOMIT” (UPI, August 13, 2006); “MAN BIDS TO STRIKE RICH WITH WHALE VOMIT” (Brisbane Times, March 13, 2008); and “BEN STRIKES IT LUCKY WITH SMELLY FIND” (Taranaki Daily News, March 12, 2009).
Every time I find another account, it fills me with fresh hope that perhaps I will one day find my own ambergris. I have begun to think of it as the oddest and most intriguing substance in the world. With each new report, I drive to another local beach and walk for kilometres, picking up any object that I think might be ambergris and smelling it. It is the only way I know to distinguish ambergris from random debris. A couple of times a week, I walk along the tide line after a high tide, collecting all the objects that seem incongruous among the rounded pebbles and the seashells. And then, standing in the wind, I hold each one of them close to my nose and inhale, sampling the odours that cling to its still-wet surface. I have smelled several thousand rocks. I have scrutinized soft, decomposing gelatinous pieces of kelp stalk, brightly coloured fragments of plastic, black weathered pieces of coal, baskets of driftwood, lengths of twine, bleached bits of bone, pieces of beach glass, and broken oyster shells, eroded by the waves into unusual non-oyster-like shapes. One day in the rain, I almost smelled a dead wet seagull, matted and dark in the sand. But mostly I have smelled rocks, which don’t smell much of anything at all.
Once, I had walked breathlessly along the shoreline after spotting a large, unusual object in the distance. It was a shoe: an old running shoe, encased in sand, unlaced by the sea. For some reason, it was a lonely and melancholy sight. At other times, I might have sat and considered the imponderable series of events that had brought this lone shoe to shore. But not now. Clearly, this waterlogged and weather-beaten shoe was not ambergris.
For numerous reasons, smelling random objects is an imperfect technique. On several occasions, I had attracted unwelcome stares from strangers on the beach. At the rocky northern end of Long Beach one sunny afternoon, a group of climbers had watched me suspiciously until I passed out of sight behind an outcrop of rocks. More than once, I had taken my infant son with me, wearing him in a sling and fastening a rain jacket around him to shield him from the wind. To anyone else, I was a strange rotund figure who moved slowly along the beach, stooping to pick up stones from the surf, smelling them, and throwing them away. This was not normal behaviour. And it was hard on the knees. Overburdened, I had fumbled several large flat rocks, almost dropping one of them on my son’s head.
Clearly, another approach is needed.
2 THERE IS A PIECE AT ROME
AS BIG AS A MAN’S HEAD
The best that is in the World comes from the island Mauritius; And is commonly found after a Storm. The Hogs can smell it at a great distance; who run like mad to it, and devour it commonly before the people come to it.
* SIR PHILIBERTO VERNATTI, responding from Batavia, in Java, to questions put to him by members of the Royal Society of London (1667)
It is a very fruitful island, and well peopled, it produces abundance of Amber-grease, which the Inhabitants mix with their Tobacco, when they Smoak, besides that, they Sell a considerable quantity to the French.
* GABRIEL DELLON, describing an island called St Mary that lay two leagues distant from Madagascar, in A Voyage to the East-Indies (1698)
Inching forward in the darkness, Louis Smith has lost his bearings somewhere inside the cold and convoluted intestines of a sperm whale. In the last few minutes, he has begun to have some reservations. He has been assessing his current situation. Outside in the wet air, with the gulls racing overhead, it had seemed like a reasonable thing to do. You see a dead whale, you climb inside. Should be plenty of room in an “eight tunner,” he had thought. But inside it’s different. Inside, it’s dark. And it’s difficult to breathe. Smith rests for a second or two, takes another shallow breath, and pushes his boot heels against the thick muscular wall. But after so many days, it has grown spongy and slippery. One of his boots sinks into the tissue, and he has to shift his body, twisting awkwardly in the confined space, to tug it back out again. His ears are clogged with something. He’s a little light-headed now. Reaching his arm over his head with his fingers outstretched, Louis Smith gains a few more inches. He thinks he might be upside down. Perhaps, Smith tells himself, this is like being born.
And so it came to pass: on July 29, 1891, Louis Smith carefully guided his boat toward the wharf at Hobart, on the island of Tasmania, carrying a strange and precious cargo. Within a couple of minutes of his arrival, Smith had caused an uproar among those gathered on the quay. According to an article in the Hobart Mercury newspaper, he was a fisherman —“a man of colour, from Recherche”, a small town on the southern coast of Tasmania. He was a simple man. But that was about to change. Sitting in the stern of Smith’s boat, covered with sacking and tarpaulin, was an enormous boulder of ambergris. It weighed an estimated 180 pounds (81.6 kilograms). Smith obliged the onlookers, pulling aside the tarpaulin so that they could see the ambergris wrapped within its folds.
“The piece is, roughly speaking, about 22 in square,” read the Mercury article, “smells somewhat like guano, and resembles sepia in colour.” A loud murmur ran the length of the wharf as those present speculated on its value. There were disagreements. Among those in the crowd, some said it wasn’t even ambergris. Others shouted out offers to buy it on the spot. “Old whalers, and those who professed to know, estimated it as worth ten thousand pounds, and some thought it as many shillings.”
Smith was known locally as Black Louis. He had been looking for ambergris for a long time, he told reporters, but had rarely found much of it, and never a piece as large as the boulder that sat in the back of his boat. So far, Smith’s story was unusual but not unique. Not yet. It only became unique — and odd, and unsettling, and stomach-churning — when he began to tell the crowd where he had found the ambergr
is. It came, he told them, from a sperm whale that had been captured and killed ten days earlier by a ship called the Waterwitch. “It was about an ‘eight tunner,’” Smith said. Its blubber had been cut away and “tried out”, or boiled down to oil, in a large iron try pot. Afterward, the whale had been unceremoniously dumped in the ocean, and Smith had seen it floating there. Without thinking, he hitched the carcass, stripped of its blubber, to his boat and towed it home to Recherche. There, with the gulls wheeling overhead, Smith had stood on the shore next to the cold dead whale and wondered if there might still be some ambergris inside it.
Working quickly, he took out his knife and cut a large hole in the throat of the ten-day-old carcass. And then he peered inside. Blackness. Nothing. He inserted his outstretched arms and his head into the hole, and then began slowly rolling his shoulders around until he’d worked those in too. And then he crawled inside. He crawled inside the whale. Once inside, Smith pushed and corkscrewed and slipped his way through its slowly disintegrating intestines until he found the boulder of ambergris that was stuck there.
If Louis Smith’s story tells us anything, it’s that at one time in history, and not so very long ago, people were willing to go to great lengths to obtain ambergris. But what is ambergris, and what does it do? The answers to these questions are both simple and not simple at all. Much about it remains a mystery. It is still not known, for instance, whether whales die passing ambergris or expel it and swim on, relieved to be lighter. It is so rare that it can be found almost anywhere, but is hardly ever found anywhere at all. In fact, for a long period in human history, no one even knew where ambergris came from, what it was, or how it was made. But when made into a tincture — ground into a fine powder and dissolved in alcohol — and added to perfume, ambergris acts as a powerful fixative, slowing the breakdown of a fragrance on the skin and making the scent last longer on the wearer. It is impossible to know when this strange and esoteric discovery was made, who made it, or how.
Floating Gold Page 3
