And the lump floated away on the black water. On deck, Moses Bridges quickly pocketed a small piece that he had managed to carve away from the boulder. He kept it in a tin. Several times during the remainder of the journey, Bridges took the greasy little nugget from the tin and greased his boots with it. When the Squantum arrived in Boston and Bridges had the object assessed, the crew discovered it had discarded an enormous boulder of ambergris.
Again and again, I found cautionary tales just like this one. In 1903, somewhere off the coast of Brazil, the crew of the Kelvinbank noticed what the Washington Post reported was “a spongy mass of some greasy substance. It was black, with the exception of a few places, where it was mottled like marble.” Two of the crew dropped a rope over it and hauled the lump aboard. None of them had seen anything like it before. Days later, left to sit on the deck, it began to smell. After using some of it to grease their boots, the crew threw most of it overboard. The remainder was thrown in the slush bucket, along with the refuse from the galley. On arriving in New York, the sailors learned they had discarded approximately 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of ambergris. Five years later, in the summer of 1908, a vessel called the Antiope arrived in San Francisco after a rough two-month voyage from Australia. A few days after leaving Newcastle, about 240 kilometres north of New Zealand, she had encountered a powerful storm, which had swept her cargo from the deck and ripped the sails from her masts. When the ship finally limped into harbour, the British crew had in its possession a few handfuls of a strange greasy substance. It had been collected at sea. It was all that remained of more than 50 pounds (22 kilograms) of the material, which the crew had used to grease down the Antiope’s masts. Taking what small amount was left, the men greased their oilskins and weatherproofed their boots. From the few handfuls that remained, an Oakland druggist confirmed that it was genuine ambergris. Reading each of these accounts, I was determined not to make the same mistake.
I am standing on the curving beach at Aramoana trying — as I can only imagine Sir Francis Godolphin did along the Cornwall coastline — to covet the wind as it blows in briskly from the sea.
Aramoana: in the Maori language it means “pathway to the sea”. It is a beautiful, remote, and windswept place — a wide belt of sand that sits near the narrow mouth of Otago Harbour. Across the water, on the tip of the peninsula, is Taiaroa Head, where a simple lighthouse perches on the towering cliffs. I have walked along the grassy edge of the cliffs there and looked over into the dark wet space below, which is filled with rocks the size of apartment blocks, ringed by an impenetrable tangle of bull kelp. Waves boom down in the hole. After each wave, the high-pitched sound of retreating water, a million droplets falling through the rocks as they make their way back to the gathering sea. Six-metre swells. A muscular ocean. A tower of spray hangs in the hazy air. It is surprising each time and impossible not to watch. The bull kelp below is as thick and rubbery as flattened car tyres. Each flat green blade on every long thick stem straightens as the water retreats, and then corkscrews and collapses into wet folds against the rocks as the waves heave forward again.
I had come here months earlier with my wife to collect edible seaweed. We stood on the rocks hauling in slippery armfuls of bladder kelp and wakame, harvesting the rocky pools for frilly purple-green karengo. We collected sea lettuce, which grows in thin sheets like transparent green cellophane, and sprigs of Neptune’s Necklace and Dead Man’s Fingers. Standing on the shoreline, we bit into them, tasting the seawater that dripped from their stalks. Back home, I’d removed the air-filled bladders from wet lengths of bladder kelp and pickled them in jars. We filled our basement with clothes racks and draped wet strips of seaweed over them to dry.
Over time, I had learned to enjoy the smell of the mudflats at low tide and the briny tang of dried seaweed. Eventually the smell infiltrated every corner of our tiny house. But that was in the spring. The skies were blue then. It is autumn now. The ocean looks hard and cold. On the horizon, the water and the sky are indivisible. Gulls stand near the surf, battered into stillness by the wind. I lower myself toward the wet sand like a sprinter planting his feet in the blocks. I raise my head and straighten my spine, which allows me to look along the shoreline, curving away to the east. And then, rather self-consciously at first, I begin to covet the wind between me and the places I search.
For a long time, I have been convinced that these clean and windswept beaches could act as a catchment area for ambergris. Before the tidewaters enter the harbour, surging between the heads to the east, all kinds of marine debris must lose its momentum, finally coming to rest and washing ashore on the beaches near the mouth of the harbour. Ambergris, floating in the ocean for decades, has to end its journey somewhere. Why not here?
In the distance, a lone dog walker throws a stick into the surf for a wet dog to retrieve. A family plays in the sand nearby, determined to ignore the cold wind that bends the dune grass over until the tip of each stalk touches the sand. Undaunted, I squat near the tide line, fox-like with my nose held in the stiff tidal breeze, trying to sample and discern the smell of every molecule as it passes my olfactory receptors.
“It is pretended that foxes, according to Frèdol, are very partial to ambergris,” wrote Armand Landrin in 1875, in The Monsters of the Deep: And Curiosities of Ocean Life, “and that they resort to the seashore in search of it. They eat it, and restore it much in the same condition as when they swallowed it, if we refer to its perfume only, though greatly altered in colour. To this cause is attributed the existence of some fragments of whitish ambergris in the Aquitanian Landes. Locally, they are called ambre renarde, or fox’s ambergris.”
I doubt this, but I don’t have time to think about it. The winds are growing stronger. The sky is beginning to fill with dangerous-looking rain clouds that roll across, swallowing other clouds, until a black billowing front has completely enclosed the bay.
Closing my eyes, I hold my nose aloft in the cold, sand-filled gusts of wind sweeping in from the ocean, and I proceed slowly along the high-tide line sideways like a crab, in an uncomfortable half-crouched position. Pressing eastward, dark cliffs propping up the pewter sky in front of me, I serve as a counterpoint to their quiet dignity, stumbling around on the sand and dragging behind me two long wet streamers of wakame.
It is almost noon when I call John Vodanovich in Dargaville. In the weeks since we last spoke, I have thought of the ambergris collector often, wondering if his efforts to find ambergris have been more successful than mine.
“Johnny’s on his way down now to have a look,” says Kim Soole, Vodanovich’s partner. “He’s already been down this morning. The sea has been quite high; the winds have been good.” In other words, the weather has turned again in their favour. It is a good time to search for ambergris on the long windswept beaches of Northland. For the next few days, they will scour the beach after every high tide, in heavy rains and battering winds if necessary, in the hope that the rough seas have dumped ambergris on the shore. “He went down yesterday and found a bit,” she continues, “and he found a little bit this morning. It was high tide this morning at eleven thirty-eight, so we usually go down after the high tide.”
Vodanovich and Soole have a secret weapon in the hunt for ambergris: a dog’s sensitive and tireless nose. “Dogs will be able to find a pinhead,” she says. “They dig it out. John found a bit in a bank the other day and it was obviously buried in the bank, but the dogs sniffed it and dug it out.”
For a moment, Soole’s voice is muffled as she asks Vodanovich, “What was it you found yesterday, John?” In the background, I hear Vodanovich’s response in a low-pitched melancholy rumble. “Fifty-something, I think,” says Soole, “59 grams. It’s a nice whitish-grey piece too. He went to Ninety Mile Beach the other day and got about 300-odd grams. That’s pretty good really because the week before they went to Muriwai, and they got hardly nothing. I mean they always come back with some, you know, particularly when you’ve got a dog.”
On the beach,
hobbled by my glistening dark-green leg irons, I finally stop walking. It is cold in the shadows beneath the cliffs. Even the dog walkers and the stubborn families have gone home. I am alone on the sand, with my feet encased in seaweed. I begin to wonder if I should get a dog.
“You’ve never seen it before, have you?” Mike Hilton asks me when I first knock on his office door. The University of Otago geography lecturer is standing by his desk, holding a small Tupperware container. Inside, he says, is ambergris. The two old black pieces of ambergris I had held a month earlier at the Otago Museum had smelled only of camphor, and since handling them, I had begun to wonder if they were ambergris at all. “Let me show it to you,” Hilton says, handing me the container. Resting incongruously on a blue Cookie Monster napkin at the bottom are three small pieces of ambergris.
“I like to lift the lid and have a whiff,” he says, and nods encouragingly, “so go ahead.” He watches eagerly as I slowly peel up the edge of the lid and place my nose at the opening.
A powerful odour fills my nostrils. It is revelatory: a breakthrough. My brain swims. For a moment, I think I am going to sneeze, fighting a sensation that begins as a tickle in my nose and then spreads, filling my throat, and completely occupying my sinuses. All at once, I smell: old cow dung; the lumps of wet, rotting wood that I have kicked along the beach; tobacco; drying seaweed; and the grassy open spaces of Aramoana and Long Beach. And, beneath it all, something indescribably elemental. It is a mixture of the low and the high. The unavoidable and the unobtainable.
A mutual friend had introduced me to Hilton. Small and solidly built, he has a prominent nose and a crest of thick white hair on top of his head. He reminds me, not unkindly, of an inquisitive cockatoo. Bending toward the ambergris on his desk and breathing in deeply, I expect his white crest to rise in appreciation. These black-and-brown nondescript fragments, he tells me quietly, came from Stewart Island, a rugged and isolated island located off the southern coast of New Zealand. For several weeks a year, Hilton is based on Stewart Island, collecting the data necessary for his fieldwork. He tells me they were all found by a graduate student who sometimes accompanies him on his fieldwork, near the high-tide line on Mason Bay, a remote stretch of coastline located on Stewart Island’s exposed west coast.
“She has a nose for it,” he says, a little downcast. “I’ve never found any.”
And then he bends again birdlike toward the ambergris.
It is late afternoon. Hilton sits at his desk now, carefully balancing a piece of the ambergris on a pair of scissors. His forehead is furrowed with concentration. He is holding the closed blades in his hand, and the ambergris sits like a flat black stone, canted precariously in the oval-shaped hole designed to house his thumb. Moments earlier Hilton had been talking. But his voice has trailed away, slowly at first, now stopping altogether. I am holding my breath. One by one, he uses the handles of the scissors to transfer the three small pieces of ambergris from the plastic container to the cover of a textbook, which he then lays reverently on the table in front of me. It is a watershed moment. Finally, I am sitting in front of three genuine, pungently aromatic pieces of ambergris. I can smell them from several feet away.
In fact, I am permitted only to smell them from a distance. The oils on my hands, Hilton says gently, will damage their pale weathered surfaces — hence the scissors and the balancing act.
The three small and irregularly shaped pieces of ambergris sit in front of us now, arranged in a row from largest to smallest They remind me of mysterious, patinated museum relics. But they are ambergris.
Marbled and pocked, their uneven surfaces are mottled with yellow, green, and white patches like mouldy pieces of cheese. In fact, placed side by side, Hilton’s pieces of ambergris represent three distinct stages of maturation. The largest is a flat black piece that would fit comfortably in the palm of my hand if Hilton would allow me to hold it. The other two pieces are progressively smaller and whiter — the smallest is a little white nugget, the size of my thumbnail, white and smooth, with a waxy resinous exterior. They all look like pebbles that, at other times, I have walked past and ignored on the beach.
I ask Hilton to characterize its odour. “It’s musty,” he says, after inhaling and pausing thoughtfully for a moment. “Do I get a hint of fish in it?” he asks, raising his head to look at me before lowering his nose again. “There’s a hint of rotting wood,” he says. “It’s a new smell to me. It’s like nothing I’ve smelled before.”
The odour forms a nimbus around my head and takes up residence in my nose. When I close my eyes, I am transported to a horse stable on a warm afternoon, when the heat of the sun has warmed the hay, filling the air with the smell of livestock and the sweet aroma of the wooden joists crisscrossing the stable roof. For a moment, I am there — and not here, in this small, clean office, overlooking the modern utilitarian buildings of the University of Otago campus.
On several different occasions during his frequent fieldwork trips to Stewart Island, Hilton tells me that he has encountered professional ambergris collectors walking the isolated west-coast beaches. The most intriguing of these is a shadowy figure known as Fisherman Phil. “He’s a fisherman,” says Hilton. “I only know him as Fisherman Phil. This is his off-season, and he spends it searching for ambergris.”
Mike Hilton appreciating the smell of ambergris. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
The last time Hilton had seen Fisherman Phil, the ambergris collector was on Doughboy Bay, a remote and starkly unpeopled west-coast bay that is simply kilometres from the nearest civilization. “He’d been at Doughboy for six weeks,” says Hilton, “and was living in a cave. He and his wife. He had this cave decked out. Every day — the bay is a curve of 3 kilometres — he walks the high-tide line, and then he turns over every log, every bit of debris in the bay. So, he really sieves that bay. He has some oceanographic theories about storms that turn up ambergris on the coast.”
We pause to smell the ambergris again. When I think of Fisherman Phil, I am reminded of the lengths to which people will go, walking kilometres twice a day and spending hours lifting heavy wet pieces of tide-swept lumber, to find ambergris. “So every piece of timber that he could lift had been lifted and looked under,” Hilton continues. “When he gets bored of Doughboy Bay, he walks over the hill to Mason Bay. He did say that this year was a bad year, but I think he might have said that about the last couple too.”
As I sit in Hilton’s office, I decide to visit Stewart Island and try to find Fisherman Phil. Hilton prints out maps of Stewart Island for me, circling Doughboy Bay and Mason Bay on the west coast. He carefully arranges the pieces of ambergris on top of the textbook, moving them into place with the tip of a ballpoint pen. I take photographs of them. During my visit, ambergris fumes have diffused, filling Hilton’s small office with an indescribably complex aroma of dung, old wood, and the sea. After I leave, the smell of ambergris stays with me for hours. Somehow, I am still able to smell it when I climb into bed that night. Only when I wake up the following morning do I realize I’m unable to smell it anymore.
And I miss it immediately.
7 THE HOPEFULS
What is probably the largest and most valuable quantity of ambergris secured for many years was discovered the other day at Doughboy Bay, a few miles south of Mason’s, by Mr. Charles Yunge, owner of the fishing launch Scout, with two companions, Messrs. B. Bailey and J. White. The find weighed 16 lb. in all, one lump tipping the beam at 8 lb.
* New Zealand Evening Post (November 5, 1924)
A piece of ambergris weighing approximately 60 pounds, the largest ever found in the Foveaux Strait area, has been placed in the custody of an Invercargill bank. Its value is estimated at well over four figures. This valuable find was made recently by Mr. F. Traill, Half Moon Bay, while patrolling beaches on the west coast of Stewart Island.
* New Zealand Evening Post (July 4, 1945)
“I think we’ll just come in and land on this one,” the pilot yells to me over the dron
e of the engine. “We’ll take a shit-kicking if we try to come back around. Just stay down.”
We’re flying at low altitude in a small single-engine Cessna, over the remote and bush-clad west coast of Stewart Island. The ground beneath us is like a map — a series of long sandy bays and rocky headlands stretches to the south, punctuated by coastal inlets that become rivers, looping through the hilly, overgrown interior. And everywhere else, the deep blue of the ocean. It is early in the morning. Half of the forest is still in shadow. Strong easterly gusts of wind rock us, suddenly pushing us sideways. We pitch forward in our seats, lurching first to one side and then the other, drifting vertiginously over the sea. Before we had taken off, the pilot told me he would be flying in low over the sand, barely clearing it, so that he could check his approach. And then he would climb again, coming around a second time to land on the beach. Not anymore. It is too windy. We hurtle through the air.
I look at the dials and gauges on the cockpit panel. They are meaningless to me, but I watch them intently. A red light is winking. Colliding with another strong gust of wind, we move through the air diagonally, leading with the tip of one wing. A rolling green carpet of lush native forest unfurls beneath us. Through breaks in the forest canopy, I can see groves of towering tree ferns in the sun. From above, they look like green bombs bursting. I watch the shadow of the plane climbing the hills below, keeping pace with us, crossing rocky riverbeds, falling into dark valleys, and reappearing in the hazy sunlight. The pilot leans toward me, his head almost touching my shoulder, cranking something near his feet noisily like a wrench. To my right, the sea looks calm and wrinkled with whitecaps. But I know it is cold. Suddenly, I notice the forest has stopped rolling beneath us. We have flown over the green lip of a cliff face. A biscuit-coloured apron of sand through the cockpit window, quickly growing larger. Low tide. Grassy dunes to the left. Sea to the right. A final plunge through air, and we land. A moment later, I am standing on Doughboy Bay. The pilot makes a tight turn on the beach and takes off again, droning into the distance. I watch the plane as it becomes a white speck in a blue sky. Then it is gone. I can no longer tell it from the seagulls. I am alone.
Floating Gold Page 14
