Winter is the busiest time for professional ambergris collectors. Persistent westerlies dump an astonishing array of flotsam onto the shore, and hidden among it are lumps of ambergris. If the weather conditions are right, Vodanovich will spend a lot of time on the beach, walking the shoreline after each high tide to scour the sand for ambergris.
“Up here, I was one of the first that really got looking for it, hard out like that,” he says. “When I used to go to, say, Ninety Mile Beach, there was no one looking. Now you go up there and everyone is looking. Ten years ago, I had probably half a dozen people working with me. They basically all shat on me, everyone that’s done it. They all just go out and do it on their own once I’ve shown them how to do it. Most of them didn’t even know what it looked like, you know? My brother buys it off us now and sells it for us. Every day he gets odd-looking things, pictures sent to him, you know. He used to get bits sent to him that were horrible-looking bits of stuff, you know, and ninety-nine percent of it isn’t ambergris.”
A week earlier, the weather conditions in Northland had begun to change. The wind turned and started to come out of the west, across open water. Heavy seas pounded the coastline. The tide levels were particularly high. Before too long, Vodanovich began to enjoy the benefits, finding a piece of ambergris on the beach near his home that was, he says, “probably about the size of a tennis ball, or a bit more. It’s probably worth about a thousand dollars.”
And then, without warning, the winds changed direction again. The seas were calmer. I ask Vodanovich if he will be on the beach again later that day, to sort through the kelp and other flotsam on the shore.
“No,” he replies. “The winds are wrong. And we’ve sort of milked this beach pretty good.”
John Vodanovich’s knowledge of the local beaches, and of the tidal and seasonal changes that take place on them, meant he knew precisely when to look for ambergris and exactly where to find it. In short, he had the sort of experiential knowledge that I would only gain by searching for ambergris for decades. Not everyone is as fortunate, or as experienced, as Vodanovich.
Anton van Helden, the marine mammals collection manager for the Museum of New Zealand, a modernistic six-story building on Wellington’s harbour, is frequently contacted by beachcombers who hope he can identify objects they have found on the shoreline, which they believe are ambergris.
“People bring in a huge array of different things,” he explains. “One of the most common things is glass sponges, but other things: lumps of tallow, lumps of microcrystalline wax that have come from industry.” It happens several times a year, especially after heavy storms have passed across the Kapiti coastline, resulting in rough seas and higher tides than usual. People who think they have found a piece of valuable ambergris are, in most cases, carefully cradling dog faeces, coal, vegetables, rotting seagull, soap, industrial waste, old whale blubber, eroded rubber, seaweed, pieces of tallow, or part of a greasy, decomposed sheep carcass. Filled with expectation, they wrap the object in tissue and store it in the dark, where they think it will be protected from further degradation and loss of potential value. Once in a while, perhaps, they unwrap it and show it reverently, nestled in their cupped hands, to their friends. They whisper around it. They weigh it. They smell it. And then, finally, they bring it to van Helden so that he can assess it for them.
On average, he gets five such calls each year. But none of the objects brought in for appraisal has actually been ambergris. “In the twenty years that I’ve been here and people have been coming in with lumps of stuff that they’ve found on the beach presuming it to be ambergris, not a single piece has been,” van Helden says. “Not a single piece. And it’s interesting because I look at other people around the world who do similar things, and they’ve had exactly the same response, you know, in the time that they’ve been doing it — not a single piece found on a beach has been ambergris.”
In March 2006, on a remote beach near Criccieth, in North Wales, dog walkers Sean Kane and Ian Foster found two large mysterious lumps, which together weighed 50 kilograms. Their discovery was reported in the local Daily Post newspaper on March 4, 2006, under the headline “WALKERS HOPE AMBERGRIS WILL NET THEM A FORTUNE”. In a small photograph that accompanied the article, the objects look like large misshapen bales of hay. Two days later another article appeared, with a less hopeful headline: “BEACHCOMBERS TOLD DISCOVERY IS NOT VALUABLE AMBERGRIS”. Analysis carried out by chemists at Bangor University School of Chemistry indicated that the objects were man-made. They were two partly eroded boulders of paraffin wax. After originating from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, most likely a container ship, they had been brought to the windswept North Wales coastline by Gulf Steam currents.
“The common way of trying whether Ambergris is genuine or not,” wrote Caspar Neumann in 1729, “is to run a hot Needle into it, when something like melted Resin ought to stick to the Needle; or to throw it upon burning Coals, or to melt a little bit of it in a Silver Spoon over a Candle.” This method of evaluating suspected ambergris is known, by those individuals who move in ambergris-related circles, as the hot needle test. Ambergris vendors like Adrienne and Frans Beuse still instruct potential sellers — people who think they have found ambergris — to perform it on the material they have found on the beach. Genuine ambergris will melt into a thick, oily fluid the colour of dark chocolate, releasing a complex spectrum of odours trapped by the slow years it spent maturing at sea. More complex chemical analyses can be used to identify ambergris, but if an object fails this initial test, it is not ambergris. It is something else instead: a piece of kelp stalk or the by-product of an industrial process that has spent decades in the ocean, slowly becoming unrecognizable.
“This Proof indeed has its use,” wrote Neumann, “but if you are not exactly acquainted with the Smell, and observe many other Circumstances, but only attend to this melting, you may be deceived; for the factitious Ambergris may answer this Trial.” Many other substances, in other words, also melt on contact with a hot needle into a thick, oily fluid the colour of dark chocolate. “The most convincing bit I had,” van Helden tells me, “was a bit of dark rubber that had obviously been washing around and had become quite eroded. And it burned, you know? And it liquefied, yeah. And then you go: ‘Oh, but it smells like petroleum.’”
Once an object has passed the hot needle test, it is time for a thorough appraisal. An ambergris vendor might take a small sample of the material and roll it between her thumb and index finger, hoping to feel the tackiness that the waxy outer covering of ambergris should impart on the skin. Here, experience is everything. Decomposing tallow almost certainly will impart a tackiness to the skin. And so will a dead fish. The vendor might ask: does it float? Are there inclusions of squid beaks and clearly stratified layers? She will measure and weigh it, cradling it like a midwife handling a newborn baby. Each piece of ambergris is unique, and the specific characteristics of each sample must be evaluated. These properties reflect its particular journey, its years in the ocean. She might spend a while with it, thoughtfully smelling its dark pitted surface, savouring its specific odour profile in the same way that a viticulturist might savour wine.
Ewan Fordyce’s office is located in a creaking Victorian-era academic building on the University of Otago campus, just down the hall from a small and cluttered geology museum. Inside the museum, rows of tall wooden cabinets are filled with pieces of petrified wood and dark little knuckles of shiny fossilized shell.
Arriving early for a prearranged meeting with Fordyce, I walk between the museum aisles, bending to read the handwritten collection notes carefully placed beside each specimen. Outside, the sun is shining. It is a bright and windy day. In one of the rooms farther down the hall, someone is playing what sounds like the soundtrack to a TV show or a Broadway musical. Snippets of dialogue and sound effects boom and echo discordantly through the empty corridors. But in here, it’s as peaceful as a chapel. The display cabinets stand silently, like neglected reliquaries.
The walls are decorated with maps: a large-scale geological map of Dunedin and the peninsula, divided and demarcated into dozens of shaded wedges and segments, each representing a different rock type; next to it hangs a brightly coloured bathymetric map of New Zealand and the vast unbroken southern seas around it.
In the corridor outside the museum, a glass-topped display case stretches along the wall to Fordyce’s office door and contains the fossilized fragments of a prehistoric species of giant penguin. Fordyce is talking with a couple of graduate students. They laugh. I wait and fidget by the giant prehistoric penguin. The sea-worn objects in my bag grate audibly against one another. I slowly begin to suspect I am a fool, holding a bagful of rocks.
During the previous months, I had continued to pick up and take home various objects gathered from the shoreline. To do otherwise seemed like a failure of the spirit. A little grey cairn of them sat on a cabinet in my living room. Another neat row of them was lined up along the windowsill above my kitchen sink. Others weighed down the pockets of my jacket. If I drove too fast around a bend, more of them rolled noisily around the trunk of my car.
Once, while crossing a busy street in downtown Dunedin, I had been unable to resist picking up a smooth pale stone from the gutter, and then carefully smelling it, while cautious shoppers watched me and placed themselves between me and their children. All the evidence indicated that I was looking for something that resembled, exactly and in almost all ways, a rock. In some instances, ambergris looked like smooth grey egg-shaped stones. In other cases, it was dark, jagged, and misshapen, like a broken piece of volcanic rock, with the curved points of squid beaks clearly visible on its surface. On the beaches, I had been collecting all the objects I could find that most resembled the images of ambergris I had seen. Now I stood in the corridor, holding a plastic bag filled with them.
A few minutes later, in the peaceful twilight of his book-lined office, Fordyce is patient and soft-spoken. He sits impassively at his desk as I unload my plastic bag onto his desk. Sand scatters across the desk like spilled salt. Grey-bearded and in his fifties, Fordyce is an associate professor and head of the University of Otago Geology Department and a research associate of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
“Seven specimens,” he says, organizing them into two unequal rows in front of him. A graduate student knocks and enters, then leaves again. She might have concluded that we were constructing a Zen garden together, so intently were we contemplating the irregular grey shapes arranged before us. “Number one,” Fordyce says to himself, picking up the first object and weighing it in his hand like someone preparing to roll a die. He pauses to gather his thoughts. “It actually feels relatively heavy,” he notes, “and if you look at it, you can see little glinting crystal faces. Just straight off, that’s a sure sign you’ve got a rock, and it’s probably a volcanic rock, with the crystals having formed from a melt.”
He gently places it back on his desk. “So, originally melted rock,” he concludes. He picks up the object next to it and brings it close to his face and squints at it, as if he has mistaken it momentarily for a telescope. It is the same as the first object, he says quickly, before picking up the next in line. “Number three, for sure, is a piece of mudstone with streaks of sand-size green mineral.” He holds it toward me and asks, “See the little streaks running through here?” I nod. “The mudstone is originally a marine mudstone,” he says, “probably very ancient, and the green mineral is a type of seafloor precipitate.”
He replaces it and picks up another, identifying it with a cursory glance at its pitted surface: another piece of local volcanic rock. Moving quickly now, he picks up another. “Your number five is a very typical piece of basalt from the Dunedin region,” he says, blinking at me from behind his wire-framed eyeglasses. “Dark-coloured,” he continues, running a stubby, thick-knuckled finger over its surface, “lots of iron minerals in it.” He places it back on his desk with a clatter, spilling more sand, loosening the last remaining grains from the pores that pit its rough surface.
Picking up the next object, Fordyce turns it over in his hand. More than any other piece I had brought with me, it resembles the ambergris in photographs I have seen during my research. It looks like a small, worn-down, and rounded piece of chalk. “Number six is encrusted with precipitate of carbonate, lime, formed by marine organisms,” he says, “just in the same way that we can see little bits of lime on some of these other chunks. I think it almost looks like it’s sitting on a very weathered piece of volcanic rock. I just saw a little glint of a crystal there — crystals like sugar-size.”
I am deflated. Another piece of volcanic rock. And far too heavy for ambergris. “Number seven is a piece of schist,” Fordyce says, picking up the final object in front of him. “We can see it’s actually got two layers in it, and this darker, resistant layer is very typical of schist, which tends to form stacks of alternating light and dark mineral colours. This would have come from Central Otago way, down the Taieri River, just washed out on the beach.”
He reclines in his chair and makes a pink tent of his fingers. We sit together for a moment longer, the two orderly rows of rocks in front of us. “Numbers one, two, four, and five are from local volcanic sequences,” Fordyce tells me. “Number three is ancient sedimentary rock, and number six I’m not sure about.” With slightly less care than I had unpacked them with fifteen minutes earlier, I drop each rock back into my plastic bag. Mudstone follows volcanic rock and schist, becoming a multicoloured pile of rubble at the bottom. I think of the little stone ziggurats that sit on my windowsill at home, and the makeshift levee of pebbles that meanders across the top of my bookshelf. Outside, the sun is still shining, bright and buttery on the flagstones. A few kilometres to the east, the tide will be returning to the shore, rearranging the weathered driftwood into new shapes. Gulls will be patrolling the sand for anything edible. I should be out there too, overturning the flotsam on the shoulder of the beach and peering underneath it for ambergris, while sand fleas squirm and flip in the sudden sunlight.
I slowly swing a bagful of ordinary rocks from my arm, feeling its weight. I thank Fordyce, and I wonder whether, on my bookshelf at home, gathering dust among the little pebbles of schist and the green-streaked mudstone, a fossilized and gently tapering fragment of giant penguin beak sits, unidentified, in the sun.
5 A MOLECULE HERE AND
A MOLECULE THERE
A modern compiler, speaking of ambergris, says, “It smells like dried cow-dung.”
* G. W. SEPTIMUS PIESSE, The Art of Perfumery and the Methods of Obtaining the Odours of Plants (1862)
Its essence, with or without the addition of musk, is mixed with powders, pastes, skin-softeners, and other of those toilet mysteries which men folk are not permitted to inquire about too minutely.
* From an article about ambergris in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine (1871)
French ambergris trader Bernard Perrin is driving through Normandy when I call him on his cell phone. In the background, combining sometimes to make him completely inaudible, are the sounds of French traffic, the car radio, and Perrin’s wife, who talks incessantly.
The Perrins are on vacation. The quiet green fields of northern France flash past in their car window, punctuated occasionally by a village and a volley of cheerful-sounding car horns. But if a call suddenly comes in — informing Perrin that a boulder of ambergris has been found on the Maldivian coastline or somewhere in Southeast Asia — their vacation will abruptly terminate. If the size and quality of the ambergris demands it, Perrin will fly across the world to retrieve it, first buying it from its finder, and then bringing it back to his headquarters on the Côte d’Azur, in the South of France.
On matters such as these, Perrin is politely evasive, and with good reason. “In the past,” he tells me, in a thick French accent, “I told somebody that I found ambergris in Maldives and the following day the guy was in Maldives.” Within the past year, he finally
tells me, he has traveled to the Philippines and the Maldives to collect ambergris. “I travel generally for a quantity of fifteen to twenty kilos,” he says matter-of-factly.
Almost a year earlier, I had contacted Chandler Burr with a few perfume-related questions. Burr was then the full-time perfume critic for the New York Times, and the author of The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses (2003) and The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York (2008).
For his most recent book, Burr had spent a year embedded in the perfume industry, watching as master perfumers built brand-new fragrances for large dynastic perfume houses like Hermès and Coty.
I knew that the highest-quality white ambergris sold for astonishing prices — up to $8,000 per pound (450 grams) in Europe — but I was not sure who was buying it at those prices and what they were using it for. The perfume world is a secretive and impenetrable place, but I hoped Burr would be able to tell me if perfumers were still using ambergris as a component in modern perfumes.
“The scent makers (Firmenich, IFF, et cetera) used to use it,” he replied, “and they used to have experts who could assess it, and indeed these were people who had a big responsibility, but no one uses it today (one) because the supply is completely aleatory, up to chance, and you can’t build a perfume on a material you may or may not have around and (two) it’s an ‘animal product,’ although this is completely stupid because the whale has already puked this stuff up and gone about its business.”
I reminded Burr that ambergris is worth more now than it ever has been, and that perfume manufacturers are rumoured to be its biggest users. His response was abrupt but definitive: “No,” he wrote, “they only use synthetic ambergris today. Only.”
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