“A find of ambergris,” Timaru Herald 53, no. 5212 (August 11, 1891), downloaded from Papers Past, with permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
But, for this most important reason, ambergris was a singular and valuable substance throughout history. It was worth as much as gold. At different times, depending on the global supplies of ambergris, it was worth more than gold — twice as much, or three times. Indeed at one time, it was known in many places as “floating gold”. In the twentieth century, chemists synthesized ambergris. The chemical analogue is not convincing, and ambergris is still traded and used around the world. It was prized by monarchs and came from remote and far-flung places: the Nicobar Islands and the Molucca Islands; Sumatra, Japan, and the Andaman Islands; and Somalia and Ethiopia.
“Ambergris,” wrote Caspar Neumann in 1729, in the Philosophical Transactions and Collections of the Royal Society of London, “is mostly brought from the East-Indies, from and about the islands of Madagascar, Molucca, St. Maurice, Sumatra, Borneo, Cape Commorin at Malabar, and from the Ethiopian shoars, which are said to produce Ambergris from Sofala quite to Brana. Besides as Ambergris is carried to great Distances by the Sea, there are a hundred other Places in the World, where it may be found.”
In many of these places, ambergris became an important commodity. In the Nicobar Islands, beginning as early as the ninth century, ambergris was harvested from the coastline and traded with passing ships for iron. In the early months of 1688, William Dampier was aboard the Cygnet, a ship filled with violent and sea-hardened criminals. Dampier was an English navigator and a buccaneer. A seafaring man, he had spent his entire career on various different ships and was the first man to circumnavigate the world three times. But in 1688, on board the Cygnet, the crew had grown restless. A year earlier, it had enjoyed what the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910) called “six months’ drunkenness and debauchery in the Philippines”. After that, the crew had mutinied, leaving behind their captain, a man they had, in harder times, planned to kill and eat. He was, Dampier had already noted in his Journals, “lusty and fleshy”. Since mutineering, they had meandered across the ocean, tracing an irregular route: first west, from the Philippines to the Chinese coast, and then back again to make another circuit of the Philippines, then changing course yet again and passing quickly through the Spice Islands, before stopping briefly in Australia and turning toward Sumatra.
Eventually, from Sumatra, they sailed to the Nicobar Islands. On May 5, 1688, at ten o’clock in the morning, the Cygnet was finally anchored at the northwest end of Nicobar Island “in a small Bay, in 8 Fathom Water, not half a mile from the Shore”.
In Dampier’s published Journals— his portrait, with his doleful downcast black eyes, on the frontispiece — he wrote:
Ambergrease is often found by the Native Indians of these Islands, who know it very well; as also know how to cheat ignorant Strangers with a certain mixture like it. Several of our Men bought such of them for a small Purchase. Captain Weldon also about this time touched at some of these Islands, to the North of the Island where we lay; and I saw a great deal of such Ambergrease, that one of his Men bought there; but it was not good, having no smell at all. Yet I saw some there very good and fragrant.
By this time, Dampier had lost his appetite for plunder. He had been at sea for most of the previous ten years — buccaneering in the South Seas, West Indies, and the American colonies. He asked to be let off the ship, along with two other Englishmen, a Portuguese man, and some Malay sailors. Dampier explained:
Indeed one reason that put me on the thoughts of staying at this particular place, besides the present opportunity of leaving Captain Read, which I did always intend to do, as soon as I could, was that I had here a prospect of advancing a profitable Trade for Ambergrease with these People, and of gaining a considerable Fortune to my self; For in a short time I might have learned their Language, and by accustoming myself to row with them in the Proes or Canoas, especially by conforming myself to their Customs and Manners of Living, I should have seen how they got their Ambergrease, and have known what quantities they get, and the time of the Year when most is found.
He was unsuccessful. The Nicobarese maintained control of their local ambergris trade. And two hundred years later, they still had control of it. The following is taken from an 1870 report written for the India Home Office, titled Papers Relating to the Nicobar Islands:
Ambergris is found in all the group of the Nicobars; and some years in such quantities that this article is scarcely of any value in these islands. In the various islands I visited, the natives brought me ambergris for sale; but its having been mixed with the wax of a small bee, which establishes itself in the trunk of decayed trees, it was of a very inferior quality. The genuine ambergris is sold very dear at Penang. The Chinese and Burmese use it for medicinal purposes.
Included in the Papers Relating to the Nicobar Islands is a limited vocabulary of Nancowry, a dialect of the Nicobarese language. The reproduced list is fewer than forty words long — and most of them are commonly used nouns like man, woman, eyes, and house. Nevertheless, the Nancowry word for ambergris is listed. If you’re ever in the Nicobar Islands and someone tries to offer you inferior ambergris, which has been mixed with the wax of a small bee, you’ll need to know what that word is. And so this is it: Kampei.
A Dictionary, Hindoostanee and English from 1820 has several entries for ambergris, called umbur, and the following is a term for hair perfumed with ambergris: zoolfi umbureen. From 1884, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English included the term ambar-ca: an ornament for the neck, full of ambergris. And the entry for cowd: an unguent or fragrant paste of four ingredients (ambergris, saffron, mush, and the juice of the flowers of the Arbor-tristis). A quick look at A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary from 1992 proves how important ambergris was to the Persians. There are numerous ambergris-related entries. For instance, the term sara means “pure” when used to describe gold, ambergris, or musk. Sara is also “the name of a place on the coast of Oman, celebrated for its ambergris”. The words ambar-shamim are used to describe a rose as fragrant as ambergris; and a perfume compounded of ambergris, musk, and wood of aloes is known as ambarina. Stranger still, the Persian word for cow is gawi, and a manatee (sea cow) is a gawi-ambar— or ambergris cow — a name that stemmed from the misguided belief that manatees produced ambergris.
The Chinese believed ambergris was dragon’s spittle that had fallen into the sea and solidified. By the sixteenth century, they were calling it lung sien hiang, which in Chinese means “dragon’s spittle fragrance”. In Japan it was known as kujira no fu, or whale dung. Across much of the Middle East, it was known as anbar. In Europe, its resemblance to Baltic amber — or fossilized tree sap — earned it the name ambergris, a contraction of the French for grey amber. Elsewhere, and at other times, it was referred to as ambergreen, ambergreece, ambergrease, or simply amber.
In 1671, when John Milton mentioned ambergris in Paradise Regained, he called it grisamber, describing a meal that included “fowl of game, in pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, grisamber steamed”. An annotated edition of Paradise Regained from 1753 has the following footnote:
A curious lady communicated the following remarks upon this passage to Mr. Peck, which we will here transcribe: “Grey amber is the amber our author here speaks of, and it melts like butter. It was formerly a main ingredient in every concert for a banquet; viz. to fume the meat with, and that whether boiled, roasted, or baked; laid often on the top of a baked pudding; which last I have eat of at an old courtier’s table. And I remember, in an old chronicle there is much complaint of the nobilities being made sick at Cardinal Wolsey’s banquets, with rich scented cates and dishes most costly dressed with ambergris. I also recollect I once saw a little book writ by a gentlewoman of Queen Elizabeth’s court, where ambergris is mention’d as the haut-gout of that age.”
Some of the earliest written references to ambergris date b
ack to 700 AD. In approximately 947 AD or so, the Arab geographer al-Masudi completed his monumental work Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, a recounting of his travel to places like India, Zanzibar, Oman, the Caspian Sea, and elsewhere. Al-Masudi was known as the Herodotus of the Arabs. In his writings, he mentioned ambergris numerous times: it was found on the Syrian coastline; and ambergris that washed ashore along the Spanish coastline was exported to Egypt. While travelling though a region of southern Arabia, al-Masudi wrote:
They are a poor and needy people: they have a sort of camel called Mahri camel: it goes as fast as the Bejawi camel, or even faster, as some think. On these they ride along their coast; and when the camel comes to ambergris, which has been thrown out by the sea, it kneels down; for it is trained and taught to do so: thus the rider can pick it up. The ambergris, which is found on this coast, and on the islands and coast of el-Zanj, is the best: it is round, of a blue colour, and is the size of an ostrich’s egg, or smaller.
By the time Louis Smith harvested his ambergris, people had been risking their lives to collect and trade it for more than a thousand years. In fact, by the ninth century, Persian merchants were travelling as far afield as Somalia and Kenya, on the east coast of Africa, to trade with natives for the ambergris that washed ashore there. It was Persian merchants, too, who later traded iron for ambergris in the Nicobar Islands. By the thirteenth century, the Chinese had clearly entered the ambergris trade. Between 1405 and 1433, the ships of the Ming Dynasty treasure fleet traveled as far afield as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, the Persian Gulf, and Africa, collecting precious stones, spices, and other trade goods, including ambergris.
From the bustling ports of Persia and China, ambergris was transported along the trade routes. Fragrant mottled pieces of ambergris, gathered from places like Borneo, Somalia, and the Nicobar Islands, slowly moved west toward Venice and western Europe, alongside ginger from Malabar, rhubarb from Persia, and syruped fruits from Palermo.
When we had the time, my wife and I visited local beaches, strapping our son into a stroller and bouncing him across the wet sand at low tide. We sifted through tangled plaits of kelp for the smallest nugget of ambergris, filling plastic bags with pinecones, eroded bars of soap, and oyster shells. I walked to the local grocery store and pinned a handwritten note to the communal notice board: “Have You Found Ambergris?” For a week, it sat between a sign that read, in sloppy handwriting, “For Sale: 2-yr-old goat. Good eating!! $150”, and another with the stark headline: “Oar Found — At Deborah Bay.” I heard nothing.
In the evenings, I worked through dozens of impenetrable texts, mostly written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which contained obscure references to ambergris. The following passage from Caspar Neumann’s 1729 dissertation in Philosophical Transactions is so enjoyable, I’m reproducing it in full:
It is worthy of our Consideration, that this precious Bitumen is frequently found in very large Masses. I will not insist on what Faber Lyncaeus relates from Gregory de Bolivar, that there are Pieces of Ambergris found, weighing 100,000 lb. much less what is extant in Gracias ab Horto, that there are whole Islands full of Ambergris, much less shall I regard what is told by one Isaac Vigny, a Frenchman, who had traveled, that he knows a Country, so rich in Ambergris, that a hundred ships might be laden with it. These I say are mere hyperbolic Fictions; but the following are credible, or may serve at least to prove the Certainty of great Masses of Ambergris being found. In 1555, at Cape Commorin, a Piece of Ambergris of about 3000 lb. was found, and sold at that Time for Asphaltus, or common Bitumen. Joh. Hugo Lindotsch says, there was a Piece formerly found about this Cape weighing 30 Quintals. Monardes and Hernandez mention Pieces of 100 lb. Gracias ab Horto mentions one that was of the bigness of a Man, and another that was 90 Hands breadth in Length, and 18 in Breadth. Montanus speaks of a Piece of 130 lb. which was kept by the King in Satsuma, in 1659. In 1666, a Piece was thrown up at the River Gambia near Cape Verde, that weighed 80 lb. and was brought into Holland. In 1691 there was a Mass of 42 lb. at Amsterdam. Daniel de Bruel affirms, that a Piece was found about Malacca of 33 lb. There is a Piece at Rome as big as a Man’s head. Both at Rome and at Loretto, and in many other places of Italy, there are many Curiosities artificially made of Ambergris, which evidently appear to have been made out of very large Pieces. The above-mentioned Vigny brought a considerable Piece from the East-Indies, for he sold it for 1300 l. Sterling. Kaempfer also testifies, that in his Time a Piece was found in Japan, weighing 100 Catti, or about 130 Dutch Pounds. The two Brothers Joh. Andreas and Marcus Matsperger, in 1613 bought a Piece of Robert Struzzi at Venice, weighing 48 lb. 8 oz. But to mention no more, we have a late and most convincing Example in that great Piece of Ambergris, which the Dutch East-India Company bought of the King of Tidore for 11,000 dollars. It was at first of the Shape of a Tortoise, weighed 182 lb. was 5 Feet 8 Inches thick, and 2 Feet 2 Inches long. Chevalier has given a prolix Description of it in a little Treatise printed in Amsterdam in 1700, and had added various Figures representing it in different views. It was kept many Years at Amsterdam, and after it had been shewn as a great Rarity to several hundred, perhaps thousands, Persons; was at last broken to Pieces, and sold by Auction, so that many Persons now alive have been witnesses to it, and consequently it can no longer be doubted that Ambergris is found in very large Masses.
I’m not sure what I find so appealing about this passage. It seems like such an odd combination of erudition, gossip, and plain strangeness: the fact, for example, that the king of Tidore had a tortoise-shaped piece of ambergris measuring more than 5 feet long is something I never knew I needed to know. But, somehow, I feel better for knowing it. The discovery that there were numerous curiosities — in Rome and Loretto, and elsewhere in Italy — that were painstakingly whittled from larger pieces of ambergris is also a revelation. Where are these curiosities now? What happened to them? Is there still a statue hidden in a dusty attic somewhere in Rome? Perhaps a little fragrant statue of Romulus and Remus, fashioned from 300-year-old ambergris?
After sailing through oceans crowded with whales, early settlers to North America understood immediately that they had found a source of whale oil and baleen, or whalebone. By the first half of the eighteenth century, the American whaling era had begun. Ambergris was just another lucrative product to be harvested from sperm whales.
“In Asia, and part of Africa,” wrote Henry William Dewhurst in The Natural History of the Order Cetacea, and the Oceanic Inhabitants of the Arctic Regions in 1834, “ambergrease is not only used in medicine, and as a perfume, but considerable use is also made of it in cookery, by adding it to several dishes as a spice. A great quantity of it is constantly bought by the pilgrims who travel to Mecca, who probably offer it there for the purpose of incense; in the same way that frankincense is used by the clergy in the performance of the sacred ceremonies of the Roman Catholic church.”
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick remains the finest literary representation of the American whaling era. Published in 1851, Melville devoted an entire chapter of Moby-Dick— and one of the most memorable scenes in the book — to ambergris. One day, while sailing on calm seas, the Pequod draws up alongside another ship called the Rose-Bud, which is towing behind it two decaying whale carcasses. Stubb, the first mate of the Pequod, convinces the French captain of the Rose-Bud to unhitch the whales from his ship, claiming that several crew members of another ship had recently died, killed by a cloud of poisonous gases escaping from whale carcasses.
The captain follows his suggestion, and once he is gone, Stubb clambers on top of the smaller and thinner of the two whales: “Seizing his sharp boat-spade,” wrote Melville, “he commenced an evacuation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would have almost thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam.”
Stubb was searching for ambergris, digging into the carcass at precisely th
e point that he knew it would be found.
“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!” Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them goodbye.
A whaler as seasoned as Stubb would have known exactly where to look for ambergris and how to recognize it. A whaling cruise could last as long as five years — five gruelling winters spent at sea, often in the challenging conditions of the frigid Antarctic oceans. If a large greasy boulder was harvested on the flensing deck, hauled from the slippery innards of a dead sperm whale, it could be worth as much as all the whale oil collected during the rest of the voyage. Such was the case in 1858, when the Watchman returned to Nantucket after a year-long voyage: stowed away with the other cargo were four casks filled with a total of more than 800 pounds (360 kilograms) of ambergris.
Floating Gold Page 4
