This presents an interesting paradox: some of the perfumers who use synthetic ambergris have noses that are so discerning — able to detect the infinitesimal differences between Moroccan or Italian jasmine — that they must be fully aware of its inferiority. And yet, in order to reduce manufacturing costs, they use it anyway.
If replicating a molecule in the laboratory that takes decades to form in the natural world sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. First, although ambrein is the active ingredient of ambergris, it only makes up between a quarter and a half of ambergris that washes ashore on remote beaches across the world. Another third or so is made of a compound called coprosterol; and there are a range of other organic compounds present, including ketones, free acids and esterified acids, and pristane. Perhaps these other compounds also contribute to the complex odour that characterizes ambergris. Second, ambrein degrades slowly. Before finally forming the naphthofuran, it first forms a compound that smells like tobacco, which degrades to form another compound with a strong seawater odour, and then another, which smells like mould, animals, and faeces.
A substance that requires decades to slowly degrade, changing from one thing into another — from odourless ambrein to indefinably fragrant naphthofuran — is never fully one thing or the other. Instead, it is a combination of both starting point and end product, along with a dynamic and constantly evolving range of all the fragrant by-products created along the way. This is what gives ambergris its power and its complexity. It is indefinable because it is many things. And it is always changing and becoming something new. The journey takes decades and is unique for each piece of ambergris — none are quite the same. Ambergris cannot be recreated simply by processing several tonnes of clary sage in an industrial silo. But something that is similar enough — a simulation, a spectre, a suggestion of the real thing — can be made.
“The synthetic versions have nothing to do with the real ambergris,” Bernard Perrin says indignantly from his car, above a sudden chorus of Norman car horns. “Of course, the Americans: ecology, Green Party, blah, blah, blah. They don’t want to use any animals products [yet] they eat a lot of meat. Some of them are against having animal in the perfume. The traditional perfumery, the French, old French, they will use ambergris. They will never change. You cannot change a perfume like Chanel Five. The success is nearly one hundred years. It was launched in 1925. They will never change the formulation.”
In some quarters, Perrin says, it is a matter of French pride to use ambergris.
Chanel Five or Guerlain perfume like Shalimar, they will have ambergris. French perfumery is more traditional. They will buy for the quality, and they’re used to use such product. They will never change. American perfumery, they are only thinking about making profits, so they will use synthetic ambergris. Ambroxan. They will use Ambroxan because they are thinking about the price. It’s a different style.
It’s like in food, eh? If you compare a good French restaurant, the cook will know what to buy, how to cook it; and if you go to a lousy restaurant, maybe he will serve you a steak, but he will serve you in a lousy preparation. You can substitute butter by margarine, but it’s not the same. Ambergris, it’s like your wine, you have different wine, you cannot compare all Bordeaux to cheap wines from … I don’t know.
Not long after speaking with Bernard Perrin, on a cold and flinty day on Long Beach, I trudge along the margins thinking again about the structure of naphthofuran: a cluster of three aromatic rings. Compared to the other molecules, with their long carbon chains and their dangling oxygen atoms, it looks somehow more complete, more reasonable. This is what the brew of other organic compounds are destined to become after silent years of degradation. Time snips away the excess parts atom by atom, refining and trimming the structure, slowly turning carbon chains into rings.
It is one of the only uncomplicated things about ambergris. When I email Charles Sell to ask him precisely how ambergris stabilizes fragrances, he replies: “The ‘fixation’ effect is probably due to affinity between the ambergris molecules and the molecules of more volatile ingredients, thus producing a deviation from Raoult’s law. In other words, non-bonded interactions between the two sets of molecules result in the more volatile molecules sticking to the ambergris and thus to the surface longer than they would if no fixative was present.”
With noisy gulls clamouring above me in the wet air, I crouch close to the sand and try to look past every little rounded pebble and empty crab shell to find the single piece of ambergris that I’m sure must be here somewhere, hidden in plain view among the tidal drifts of shingle. I move slowly across the multicoloured scree, pebbles crunching beneath my feet. The week before, I had walked along Tomahawk Beach in the wind, feet sinking into the fine white sand, smelling the briny wind that blew on my face. I had found nothing there either. Making my way along the beach, I had picked up any stone that looked unusual or had strange striations on it, or a surface marked with black or yellow flecks. I had rubbed a fingertip over its wet and pockmarked surface, brought it to my nose and inhaled, and then stored it carefully in my pockets, like a fruit picker.
As the tide recedes, I think again of the files Perrin sent me — photographs of massive blocks of ambergris collected from across the world and transported to his storeroom on the sun-drenched Côte d’Azur. There, on the other side of the world, wrapped in their cotton shrouds, they wait for a buyer, like ghosts in the darkness.
6 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF
THE AMBERGRIS KIND
It is possible! Only some gramme. I can send to you by simple mail, to inlay an ambergris in a souvenir. But if you want to purchase everything, then will be to arrive you on Ukraine and take away. To me from the Arabic Emirates arrived and took away.
* Personal email from VALENTYN, an ambergris trader based in Odessa, Ukraine (April 2010)
I am finally, after these long months, holding a small rounded piece of ambergris in my gloved hand. Its black surface glitters under fluorescent light. Sitting in the hollow formed by my cupped hand, it looks like a bituminous little pebble, of the sort scattered over a resurfaced road by a retreating road crew.
Outside, it is early autumn. The sky is grey and leaden. Half an hour earlier, I had walked across a large well-kept apron of lawn in front of the Otago Museum, beneath tall trees that are beginning to lose their leaves. At the museum’s busy reception desk, I am met by Cody Fraser, the friendly natural sciences registrar, and together we walk down a short corridor toward an unmarked swipe-entry door. Fraser swipes us in. I am now, she says quietly, “behind the scenes”. On the other side of the door — in cabinets, drawers, and shelves, and arranged haphazardly on tables and elsewhere — are all the items in the museum collection currently not on display: stored in the dark and protected from fluctuations in temperature and humidity. At any time, Fraser tells me, only 1 or 2 percent of the items in the collection are being displayed. The rest are waiting here, in darkness, packed snugly in camphor to ward off the destructive attention of insects.
When Fraser switches on the lights, I discover that I am standing next to a large blue plastic model fish, surrounded by fossils and scattered pieces of rock. A stuffed possum is lying stiff-legged on its side on a nearby work surface. A stag’s head, complete with antlers, stares down from the wall, like an indignant coat rack. Fraser apologizes for the smell of camphor. “Some people start to gag when they come in here,” she says matter-of-factly.
We walk past banks of wheel-mounted beige storage units that stretch from floor to ceiling, their wheels running along metal tracks in the floor. As Fraser carefully pushes shelves aside in search of ambergris, I catch quick glimpses of butterflies, bones, and large polished pieces of quartz. I see a display of stuffed birds, frozen in flight and perched attentively on branches. Pushing aside another shelf unit, Fraser stops. Her search for ambergris is over. It has been significantly more successful than mine. She points to a shelf at hip height: two small brown cardboard boxes sit on it. Inside e
ach one is a small piece of ambergris. “If you want to hold it, you can,” Fraser says, “but you have to wear gloves.”
The first piece I examine is the smallest, nothing more than a fragment. It is mostly black, its surface marbled with thin grey seams that resemble a network of veins. The box is lidless. The ambergris sits inside it like a strange dark egg. A little strip of paper like a fortune cookie informs me in a black spidery script, written more than a hundred years ago, that the ambergris was presented to the museum in 1899. On my request, Fraser places it on a digital scale she has retrieved from among the scattered taxidermy. It weighs a little over 2 grams. It resembles one of the several hundred little black fragments of volcanic rock I have collected from local beaches in previous months. I marvel at the journey it has completed so that I can hold it now, between my finger and thumb, like a charred almond shell. Museums are orderly places, but ambergris is the product of a long chain of random and unpredictable events, the result of a series of improbabilities. It is simply an unlikelihood. Nevertheless, I am holding a piece of it.
Standing next to me, Fraser watches closely. I can feel her reading my notes as I write them. She’s watching my hands as I bring the ambergris to my nose and breathe deeply in. It is the moment I have been waiting for. The months of searching have come to this. Eyes closed, I anticipate the complex array of odours I have read about. But it smells of camphor. In fact, everything in the room smells of camphor. The butterflies in the stacks smell of camphor. The stuffed birds frozen mid-flight smell of camphor, as do the model fish, the polished shells, and the stuffed possum. The mounted deer head, high on the wall above us, smells of camphor, and so do its antlers. I am willing to guess that Fraser smells of camphor too.
I ask her how often people contact the museum with objects they think are ambergris. “Not very often,” she says with a shrug. “It’s happened about three or four times since I’ve been here, which is five years.” In most cases, Fraser can correctly identify the object for its finder. In every instance, it has been a disappointment, something else that has been mistaken for ambergris. “It’s usually a piece of rotten flesh or a stone,” she says. The museum has honorary curators in geology and marine sciences who can help if she’s unable to identify an item. “Material that comes from whales all tends to smell the same,” she explains, “a mixture of fattiness and blood. It’s not pleasant but not too horrible either.” I smell the ambergris again while Fraser watches, surreptitiously trying to detect either fattiness or blood, or anything else for that matter, beneath the layers of camphor. “New bones,” she says cryptically, “smell the same as old bones.”
The second piece of ambergris is larger: rounded and golf ball-size. It is black and shiny; its surface has a satisfying patina to it. Gifted to the museum in 1915, its entry in the museum’s digital database simply reads: “Register entry: Dec. 31. Ambergris Catlins District,” referring to a picturesque, and particularly wild and rocky, stretch of coastline to the south.
At some point in the distant past, a small fragment of this larger piece of ambergris was sheared cleanly away, leaving a flat surface that provides a glimpse into its interior, which also smells, incidentally, of camphor. Where it is broken, the ambergris is lighter in colour, like ash. It is sandy in texture, with clearly defined strata running through it like mysterious growth rings. Tiny squid beaks embedded in the ambergris during its formation appear now in cross section as little round bubbles frozen in the strata. This piece weighs 11.5 grams and is worth several hundred dollars. I smell it halfheartedly but detect only eye-watering amounts of camphor.
I place it back in its box. This visit has not been reassuring at all. I had been hoping that, once I had finally seen ambergris firsthand, I would somehow be armed with vital new information that would allow me to glance at the unsorted till scattered on the beach and sort through it from a distance, visually, without even taking another step. But these two pieces of ambergris are unremarkable. And their prized scent has been lost. Had they ever been typical? Fraser doesn’t know, and neither did I. Had a century in storage changed and transformed them in unexpected ways? It is impossible to know. One thing is certain: I had walked past millions of objects that look just like these in the last few months. Millions and millions of little black stones that had been carried onto the sand by a high tide and stranded there in the rain among the seashells and the rubbery green folds of kelp.
By this time, I am willing to take any advice, no matter how obscure and questionable its source. One day, almost hidden in the British history archives of the Institute for Historical Research, I find a set of 400-year-old instructions for finding ambergris, issued by Sir Francis Godolphin, an English Member of Parliament. Among his numerous other stations, Godolphin was the high sheriff of Cornwall. According to historian Richard Carew, writing in The Survey of Cornwall in 1602, Godolphin’s “zeal in religion, uprightness in justice, providence in government, and plentiful housekeeping, have won him a very great and reverent reputation in this country”.
In 1604, at the end of winter, Godolphin had acquired a small piece of ambergris from the rugged Cornwall coastline of his constituency. The land on which it was found was the estate of his neighbour, Viscount Cranborne. For a punctilious English gentleman, this could be a problem. It was a matter of no small propriety to resolve the issue.
“In my last I signified unto your lordship the answer of Walter Dan-iell of Truroe,” Godolphin wrote to Cranborne on Valentine’s Day, 1604, “how he once had a small quantity of ambergris found within your manor of Ellinglase and how he refused to confirm with his voluntary oath that he had therein set down his full knowledge.”
What Godolphin wrote next interests me even more:
I have now attained a piece found to the westward of your land, weighing scarce two ounces. The party from whom I had it, alleging his skill to be small in the manner to find it, says that such as are skilful covet the wind between them and the places they search and soonest discover it by the scent, as it is said the foxes by the smell find it. Such as are not perfect in the knowledge of it make their proof by casting a little on the coals, whereon it will fume as frankincense.
There was more, as Godolphin then proceeded to wax lyrical, observing that ambergris was “richer in value than the finest gold being thrown out of that great glassy meadow of the sea”. But the lines that stay with me are those that came before. For months after I first read them, every time I walk the high-tide line, I will think of them again: Such as are skilful covet the wind between them and the places they search and soonest discover it by the scent, as it is said the foxes by the smell find it.
I am struck not by the analogy in particular, but more by the thought of Godolphin, the high sheriff of Cornwall and lord of a considerable estate, crouching over the sand on the wild English coast, breathing in the cold tidal air as it bends the tussocky grass, trying to discern whether the smallest piece of ambergris is hidden nearby in a sandy hollow. I had thought myself a strange sight — waddling, raincoat-wrapped, child-wearing — as I walked through the endless rain on Long Beach. Now I know I am not so strange — or, at least, I am still strange, but I am now at least in better company.
This is how it happens. A man has managed somehow to clamber atop the whale. He sits in the morning sun, proudly astride its slippery silver flank. It is early, but the air is already steamy with the tropical heat. Below the man, on the sandy beach, a crowd watches impassively. The surf breaks against the dead whale’s long box-like head. The man surveys his kingly domain. There are more than a hundred people assembled on the beach. They stand in the surf and push against the 15-metre-long whale carcass, milling around hopefully on the sand. With every passing minute, the crowd grows larger. The sweet, nauseating smell of decay hangs over it all.
The man atop the whale is not Louis Smith. This is not July 1891. It is July 2010. In fact, the self-appointed leader of operations — who now points and issues instructions to the crowd — is a Sri Lankan
villager. He’s sitting astride the lean carcass of a dead sperm whale, which has finally come to rest, perpendicular to the shore, on Manpuriya beach in Mundalama, in the North Western Province of Sri Lanka.
The whale had washed ashore a day earlier, near the small fishing village of Puttalam on the island’s west coast, 100 kilometres north of Colombo, the capital city. The tide had brought it in from the ocean and rolled it unceremoniously up the sloping beach. Its arrival on the shoreline filled the modest village with excitement. Inevitably, people soon began to wonder if the carcass held some ambergris.
The crowd presses closer. A bright-yellow mechanical backhoe is manoeuvred inexpertly across the sand, cleaving the crowd into two watchful camps. The bucket is raised into the steamy air. The crowd waits. The surf breaks. And the bucket is finally lowered, through the whale carcass, separating the pale stiffened flukes from the rest of it.
Out it comes: little black-brown boulders of ambergris, rounded like eggs, delicately marbled with tea-coloured irregular seams. Photographs of the haul accompany a report of the incident in the Daily Mirror, an English-language Sri Lankan newspaper, under the headline “PEOPLE CUT UP WHALE SEEKING AMBERGRIS”. In one, a long-fingered brown hand cradles an apple-size lump of ambergris in front of a ragged saffron-coloured dress. In another, a smiling woman stands next to a group of frowning and unsure villagers, holding a broken plastic bucket toward the camera: in the bottom, several large pieces of ambergris. On the beach, the whale is slowly dismantled in front of the watchful crowd. Piece by piece, the ambergris is removed from its intestines, and afterward the carcass is buried beneath the sand on Manpuriya beach.
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