Instead, the Wrights were lucky. Two weeks later, they returned to the beach. Between visits, they had carefully researched the pungent-smelling lump, and they now suspected it was ambergris. When they made their way back to the beach, the lump was still there where they had left it. “We were sort of dancing and clapping and cheering on the beach,” Loralee Wright told National Public Radio in January 2006. “We were very excited.”
If they had waited for another two weeks, it might have no longer been there. Perhaps the shifting sands would have buried and hidden it from sight. This time they took no chances. Loralee Wright convinced her husband to load the strange object into their car and take it home. Describing the object in an interview with NPR, Leon Wright said it looked like “either a grey rock or a burnt-out stump. Very solid on the outside and very dry, but inside it’s like a black sticky tar with squid beaks and stuff inside it. It actually smells like very sweet cow dung.” Soon after hauling it away, the Wrights arranged to store the ambergris in the vault of a local bank, sealed in a plastic container. It was worth approximately $250,000.
“Lucky for us,” said Wright, “the high tide didn’t pick it up and the wind carry it back to sea.”
A few weeks later, I found a photograph online of Loralee Wright, posing on the sand with her ambergris. She is crouched on Streaky Bay in South Australia, behind a large misshapen black-and-grey boulder — an attractive woman, squinting into the sun with a forgotten pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. The ambergris is so large that it almost hides one of her legs and casts a dark shadow across the lower half of her body. It is enormous.
“All these masses,” Clarke had written in “The Origin of Ambergris” in 2006, “are thicker at one end than at the other. The thick end has a depression, a kind of concavity, except the thick end of the largest haul”— the largest piece of ambergris that Clarke personally inspected in 1953—“which is flat. The thinner end of each mass may taper, or be like a thick bobbin stuck out from the main mass, and its face is somewhat rounded or convex.”
Wright’s piece of ambergris is exactly as Clarke had described it: a dark grey boulder with a thinner tapered end that points toward the cloudless blue sky like a stubby bobbin, and its flattened, thicker end, resting solidly in the sand.
When I contact Loralee Wright to learn more about her find, she kindly agrees to tell me something.
Back in January 2006, she says, after they had finished celebrating their find on Streaky Bay, the Wrights took their ambergris home and carefully stored it away. A month passed and the ambergris began to lose weight — just tens of grams at first, but then more than 200 grams. A few months later, when it had lost about half a kilo, the Wrights began to worry. They monitored it like nurses caring for a sick patient. In an attempt to prevent further weight loss, they swaddled the ambergris in cloth. But it continued: some grams a week, every week. Gone. Evaporated. Ambergris is sold by weight, and lost weight means lost revenue. Finally, eight months after the Wrights found it on the tide line, their ambergris had lost more than a kilogram, or several thousand dollars in value. Every day longer that they held on to it, the ambergris became less valuable. Presumably, that was the moment they decided to sell it, before it lost more weight.
I ask Loralee if this is what had happened: no comment.
There was a reason for Loralee Wright’s taciturnity: the legality, or otherwise, of importing and exporting ambergris between various countries. The regulations concerning international trade of ambergris are a tangled web of restrictions and treaties, with conditions and clauses that differ from country to country. It is almost impossible to find out what the regulations are, who decides them, which agencies enforce them, and how they propose to do so. In Australia, a particularly strict classification of sperm whales under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) prohibits the importation and exportation of ambergris, which is why Loralee Wright had declined to comment on the sale of her ambergris. Commercial trade in ambergris is allowed under the CITES treaty in the United States, where sperm whales are classified slightly differently from in Australia, but prohibited by the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972.
This might sound like a simple-enough declaration, but it took several weeks to confirm even these regulations. In one Kafkaesque turn after another, I was referred from agency to institution, to agency. First, I contacted Charley Potter, the marine mammals collection manager for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, who referred me to Monica Farris, a biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service Division of Management Authority, who then referred me to Jennifer Skidmore in the Office of Protected Resources, part of the National Marine Fisheries Service. In every situation and in all locations, there were always exemptions, conditions, and loopholes to exploit. “In order to sell ambergris internationally from Australia,” I was told by Michelle Scott, the assistant director of the CITES Management Authority of Australia, “the product would need to be classified as an eligible ‘non-commercial’ purpose. Under our legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), permits may be granted for specimens of a non-commercial nature.”
If loopholes cannot be found, more extreme measures are taken. I had heard a rumour of a very large piece of ambergris that had made landfall several years ago in Australia, where exportation of ambergris is illegal. It was broken into manageable pieces, loaded into five bulging suitcases, and then taken to the Middle East by Arabian diplomats.
When cold weather and driving rain kept me away from the shoreline, I stayed at home and studied Robert Clarke’s scientific papers on ambergris: “A Great Haul of Ambergris”, from 1954, and “The Origin of Ambergris”, from 2006. The first is a short communication, barely one page long, published in the well-respected scientific journal Nature. It details the harvesting of a boulder of ambergris weighing 926 pounds (420 kilograms) from a large bull sperm whale in the Antarctic, in December 1953, by the Southern Harvester. A photograph of the ambergris appears beneath the first paragraph: a large black boulder with squared-off ends, like a solid cement block, suspended above the deck of the ship on a block and tackle. By coincidence, it has the same blunted shape as the head of a sperm whale. Thick coils of rope are wrapped around it, forming a makeshift sling. In the background is the curved, sunlit prow of a ship. A man stands to one side, frozen in profile, eyes hidden in shadow, arms cautiously held out to steady the ambergris. It is enormous. In fact, it was the largest single piece of ambergris ever harvested. It dwarfed both the king of Tidore’s ambergris in 1693, which weighed 182 pounds (82.5 kilograms), and the boulder weighing 180 pounds (81.6 kilograms) that Louis Smith crawled through a whale to harvest, on the beach in Recherche in 1891. The more recent article is definitive. It is fifteen pages long and includes tabulated results of chemical analyses of ambergris samples and magnified photographs of the stratified interior core of a piece of ambergris. There are more photographs too: one taken in November 1947 of a misshapen boulder weighing 342 pounds (155 kilograms), resting on the deck of a ship, surrounded by a ring of curious whalers.
Together, these two articles represent some of the most careful scientific writing on ambergris. In fact, they represent some of the only scientific writing on ambergris. My attempts to acquire information elsewhere had been mostly unsuccessful. I was left with only two scientific articles — two odd but appealing academic papers, written in Clarke’s formal tone, with more than fifty years between them. They were like nothing else in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, they were all I had.
Ambergris weighing 926 pounds (420 kilograms), taken from a sperm whale in the Antarctic on December 21, 1953, on board the floating factory the Southern Harvester. Credit: Norbert Dentressangle.
Boulder of ambergris weighing 342 pounds (155 kilograms), taken from a sperm whale on November 21, 1947, and inspected by Dr Robert Clarke. Credit: Robert Clarke.
It is now almost sixty years since astonis
hed whalers removed the enormous 926-pound (420-kilogram) boulder of ambergris from a single bull sperm whale in the Antarctic. The era of industrialized whaling has thankfully ended. Sold to the Japanese, the Southern Harvester was finally broken up for scrap in 1971. But Robert Clarke lives on. From the ancient coastal city of Pisco, Peru, near the abundant marine life of the Paracas National Reservation, Clarke continues his research and still occasionally publishes his findings in scientific journals.
Across the decades he has seen more, and significantly larger, pieces of ambergris than anyone else alive: on the deck of the factory ship the Southern Harvester (a 342-pound [155-kilogram] boulder, inspected in November 1947); at a whaling station on the island of San Miguel, in the Azores (a 42-pound [19-kilogram] lump, examined in June 1949); at another whaling station farther west, on the island of Faial, also in the Azores (a 9-pound [4-kilogram] piece, inspected in July 1949); and the 926-pound [420-kilogram] boulder in 1953. And so, finally, I nervously moved aside Clarke’s two papers and wrote via email to ask him for a brief interview. Later that day, I received the following response, which for some reason, I found full of accidental poetry:
Dear Mr. Kemp,
I am answering your last email on behalf of my husband, Dr Robert Clarke, who is at the moment ill in bed. So, he will not be able to talk to you on the telephone. He is ninety years old and has a more or less serious disease.
With our best wishes,
Mrs. Obla Clarke
4 IT LOOKED LIKE ROQUEFORT
AND IT SMELLED LIKE
LIMBURGER
I’ve always been poor. Now I can build a home and educate my children.
* RALPH KENYON, unemployed father of newborn twins, speaking to Time magazine in Bolinas, California (1934)
I admit this is a smelly business, but it is my feeling right now that if a ton of ambergris came floating by my ship, I would just spit on it and sail on.
* ROBERT E. DURKIN, captain of the William Schirmer, in 1946 after the smelly mass his crew hauled from the ocean and brought to Baltimore proved to be worthless
Early in the afternoon on March 2, 1934, radio operator Alf Harrodon was taking a walk along Bolinas Beach, about 50 kilometres north of San Francisco, when he found something in the sand. It was a large grey object with a mottled surface. It smelled, Harrodon later told Time magazine, like Limburger cheese. Although it was cumbersome and soft — and weighed around 60 pounds (27 kilograms)— Harrodon picked it up and took it home. A sample of the object was quickly dispatched for analysis. The verdict, when it came back the next day, was what everyone in Bolinas had started to cautiously hope for: 70 percent ambergris. At the market prices for ambergris — then $28 an ounce (around $1 per gram)— Harrodon’s cheesy lump was worth almost $27,000. For context: when Ford began selling its Model 40A motor car that same year, it sold for around $500. If Alf Harrodon’s lump was genuine ambergris, he’d be able to buy a fleet of more than fifty of them. Thus began the Ambergris Rush of ’34.
As word of Harrodon’s find began to spread through the poverty-stricken Bolinas community, people stopped what they were doing and rushed through the potholed streets toward the breaking surf. Doors slammed across town. Workplaces closed early. Food burned in the ovens. Before long, the entire town — all 250 residents — was on the beach, shouting to one another. Workmen ran along the shoreline still clutching their tools, and housewives stood together on the wet sand, tidewater darkening their house slippers. Coast Guard boats patrolled the choppy waters. Even the schoolchildren were there — the school board had called an emergency meeting and announced an impromptu school holiday, so that everyone could join the search party quickly beginning to gather on the beach. The arrival of the ambergris was reported by newspapers across the country. A March 3 headline in the New York Times read: “FIND ‘AMBERGRIS’ ON COAST; THREE CALIFORNIANS MAY GET $38,000 FOR DISCOVERY”.
Times were hard in Bolinas. That night, the beach was lit with bonfires. In the distance, burning torches bounced about strangely in the darkness. Empty-handed residents searched through the night for their own ambergris. And many of them found some. Eventually, a total of 300 pounds (135 kilograms) or so of the substance was found along the Bolinas coastline. An unemployed man named Louis Pepper made his way to the beach, leaving his foreclosed home with his nine children trailing behind him, and found 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of it scattered on the sand. Local mailman Harold Henry found another piece of it and took it home to his pregnant wife. “Ronald Gandee, 24 years of age,” reported the Los Angeles Times on March 8, 1934, “plans to marry Frances Longley, 20, if the seventeen-pound lump he found is genuine.”
Elsewhere, in San Francisco, chemist Emory Evans Smith was in a tight spot that was quickly getting tighter. As the manager of the laboratory that first analyzed Alf Harrodon’s object, Smith’s verdict had sent 250 desperately poor people onto the beach, propelled there by the hope that they might be able to escape Bolinas. A few days before, the community had been so poor it was unable to raise $15 to pay for the chemical analysis of the cheesy lumps that had washed up on its beach. The San Francisco Examiner had paid the fee instead. Since releasing the initial confirmation of ambergris, Smith had begun to get more nervous about the pronouncement. And Bolinas residents had been arriving with other items for him to test: pieces of soap, potatoes, sponges, sewage, and a dead rat. “There is potential tragedy in this situation,” he warned Time magazine.
Things were about to get worse. The Ambergris Rush began to spread farther along the Marin County coastline. And people were following it. More objects were washing ashore at Point Reyes to the north and also farther south, on Stinson Beach. “That stuff people are finding is not ambergris,” Stinson Beach mayor Newmon L. Fitzhenry told the Berkeley Daily Gazette. “It is, in fact, the crust that forms inside sewers and is dislodged in cleaning. We know, because we had some analyzed several years ago.” In total, the lumps found at Point Reyes weighed almost 500 pounds (225 kilograms). News of their arrival brought a steady stream of hopeful ambergris hunters to the coast: “Seven hundred persons were reported sifting the sands at Fort Baker,” reported the San Jose News, on March 9, 1934. “Other hundreds invaded Bolinas Bay and Drake’s Bay estuary, near Point Reyes, where the latest discovery was made.”
Under the headline “AMBERGRIS HUNTERS HAVE HIGH HOPES OF WEALTH” in the March 8 issue of the Berkeley Daily Gazette is a photograph taken on Bolinas Beach. In it, teacher Loa Forsythe is surrounded by four schoolchildren on the beach, each holding aloft a white rounded lump of what they think is ambergris. In the background, people are bending over and elbows are pointed skyward in the search for ambergris. The sun is bouncing off the excited cheeks of the children. They believe they are leaving Bolinas for a better life. Representatives of the Bouquet Perfume Company provided encouragement when they arrived in Bolinas willing to pay local residents the market price for samples of the substance.
The following week, it was all over: a case of mistaken identity. The residents of Bolinas were, in fact, the proud owners of approximately 300 pounds (135 kilograms) of chemicals that had been used to clean San Francisco’s sewers. Mayor Fitzhenry had been right. For a week, the iceboxes of Marin County had been used to store cheesy lumps of encrusted sewer cleaner. Evidently, it had been discharged into the ocean around San Francisco, and currents had then carried it north, depositing it at various locations along the sweeping coastline: at Stinson Beach, in Bolinas Bay, and farther north at Point Reyes. People were angry. For a moment, they had been given hope, and then, just as quickly, it had been stripped away again. In desperation, they refused to believe the new findings. From the March 13 issue of the Berkeley Daily Gazette: “The ‘ambergris rush,’ at its height akin to the gold rush of 1849, brought hundreds of hopeful searchers to the beaches to pick up pieces of the stuff which looked like Roquefort and smelled like Limburger. Health officials warned of the danger of contagion in the substance the searchers found but the warnings were disregar
ded.”
The people of Bolinas were poor and desperate. They had been fooled by sewer cleaner. And in Bolinas they all would stay.
The short-lived elation that spread through the streets of Bolinas in 1934 is an integral part of searching for ambergris. By now, I had experienced it several times myself. It begins with a quick survey of the tide line, perhaps too quick, followed by a careless misidentification of an object — a piece of sun-bleached driftwood or a rounded pebble of chalkstone — that has come to rest on the gentle camber of the beach. It looks like ambergris. It is a heart-stopping moment. I bend quickly to retrieve it, hurrying to hold it up to the coastal light for closer inspection. Realizing my error, the familiar disappointment returns and, along with it, the tidal chill to the bones.
Moments like these are inevitable. They happen every week. As often as possible I consult the tide tables and arrive on the coast just after high tide has peaked, when my chances of finding ambergris are the greatest. It might sound like reductive logic, but to find something like ambergris, which washes ashore with the tide, one must simply spend a lot of time on the beach. The search is no more or less sophisticated than that. But the moment I finally realize this, standing on Long Beach late one afternoon, waiting for another golden wave, is filled with Zen. I grow to appreciate the moments between waves — savouring the handful of half-silent seconds, when the possibility of still finding ambergris outweighs the disappointment of not yet finding it.
During the early months, I must have logged several hundred kilometres, trudging along the coastline in sometimes difficult conditions. Searching for ambergris became an absurd but irresistible impulse. Every moment that I was not out there I felt certain that I was missing the one perfect wave — an otherwise unremarkable surge in the tides that would deliver an enormous boulder of ambergris onto the sand. If I was not there, I would miss it. At home, I sorted through flotsam: a seemingly endless supply of burnt wood, shards of bone, beach glass, and little fragments of plastic. Occasionally, I kept a few unidentified items — especially those that most resembled the strange, grainy photographs of ambergris I had found in scientific journals and textbooks.
Floating Gold Page 7
