I ask TeAika if he ever found ambergris on the shore at Mason Bay. “No, no, we didn’t,” he says slowly. “It wasn’t one of my interests really. We did pick up a bit after there was a sperm whale washed ashore and disintegrated over the months and months of just rolling around on the beach.” That was back in the late 1960s, he says. After the surf had broken up the carcass and the carrion eaters had picked over the rest, TeAika made his way to the beach to retrieve the ambergris. “I think we got about ten pounds,” he recalls. “I don’t think it was worth a great deal and, being fairly fresh, I didn’t bother trying to sell it. We gave quite a bit of it away to schools who were interested in teaching whale habits. Yeah, ambergris wasn’t high priority with me. In fact, it was quite low.” Instead, TeAika was busy mustering sheep and hunting deer and opossum.
“There was always the opossums,” he says, almost to himself. “That was an annual winter job that I had.”
In a New Zealand Railways Magazine article in 1939, Ronald McIntosh wrote: “Practically every Stewart Islander has a piece of ambergris, and the menfolk keep it in their tobacco pouches, claiming that it gives the tobacco a distinctive flavour and aroma.” After six months combing the west coast beaches, McIntosh claimed, one successful ambergris hunter was able to retire permanently on a fixed annual income.
“In the old countries ambergris had many uses,” wrote Olga Sansom in The Stewart Islanders, a history of the European settlement of the island. “At Stewart Island we have used it to plug nailholes, to start a fire, to scent a tobacco pouch; and I keep a nice knob of it in my top drawer among the scarves and gloves and handkerchiefs.”
Seated next to me in the waiting room of the Stewart Island Health Clinic, an old man nurses the ragged and tar-filled cough that only develops after years of dedicated smoking. He selects a boating magazine from a dog-eared well-read pile, clears his throat, and says to me, “Well, I can dream, can’t I?” He laughs and starts to wheeze: like a westerly pounding the coast, it begins slowly, deep within his chest, and builds steadily until I feel like I am sitting next to a bellows. The long breezy rattles bend him over in his chair. I look through the stack of magazines. They are all about boats. When the man finally stops coughing, I lean toward him in the sun and quietly ask him if people find much ambergris nearby. “Not here,” he says, still flicking through his magazine. “Over on the west coast, on Mason Bay.” He leans closer, speaking conspiratorially. “One of the blokes built a boat with it,” he says under his breath, “found enough that he sold it and built a boat.”
“Who was it?” I ask.
“It was one of the Leasks,” he says. “Must have been a bloody big piece.”
He begins to cough again, wheezing in the sun like an antique harmonium. “But not here,” he continues breathlessly, “it’s mostly westerlies, you see.” Westerlies bring flotsam to the west coast, which acts like a vast net, but we are sitting in a sunlit waiting room in Oban, on the east coast, road-less, hilly, miles from the ambergris delivered to the other side of the island.
“Mason Bay, though,” the old man says, “is a good few miles of beach.”
Long before Fisherman Phil took up his regular winter residence in the cave on Doughboy Bay, it was used by Adam Adamson: the Ambergris King. “In four years,” Adamson had told a Poverty Bay Herald reporter in July 1914, “I have found, I suppose, from 200 to 300 pounds worth of ambergris washed up by the drift current and buried in the sand.” It was winter in New Zealand, and Adamson had made the journey from his homestead on the west coast of Stewart Island, across the Foveaux Strait to Bluff, to sell his ambergris. “This time I brought in one piece weighing 20 oz. alone,” he said, “and other odd bits, weighing altogether about 50 oz. I found the big bit on Mason’s Bay beach.”
Adamson was a rarity: a talkative and successful ambergris hunter. A 20-ounce (570-gram) piece of ambergris is a significant find anywhere. When Ben Marsh found a lump half that size near New Plymouth in March 2009, he needed both hands to hold it. Adamson’s single largest piece of ambergris would have been the size of a grapefruit, or one of the larger pieces of pumice I have spent all morning lifting and smelling, and throwing back into the seaweed. Depending on its quality, if I found a piece of ambergris like that on Doughboy Bay, it might be worth $10,000 or more today to a wealthy buyer in Asia or in the Middle East. And 300 pounds (140 kilograms) of ambergris — the amount Adamson claimed to have found in four years — would be worth $1.3 million. I have been scouring the bay all morning for even the smallest piece of ambergris, and I have found nothing. After lifting driftwood to look beneath it for the last hour, I would be satisfied with a little nugget the size of my thumbnail. Some of the larger pieces of driftwood are much heavier than I am: long tapering sun-bleached trunks, riddled with wormholes and covered with the tracks of borers, their branches snapped off by the currents of the ocean. It is hard work in the sun. I soon grow tired and bored of walking up and down the same stretch of sand, seeing the same lightbulbs, coconuts, and pinecones. And after months of walking the shoreline, DoC ranger Simon Taylor has found only one small piece of ambergris, which he held in the palm of his hand like a strange nut.
“The pigeons at Doughboy Bay and the kakas are as thick as can be,” Adamson had told the reporter in 1914. “You don’t get much sleep with the teal ducks splashing about all night, and the woodhens holding a corroboree every morning at six.” Adamson came from the Shetland Isles, a rugged archipelago that sits in the North Sea to the northwest of Scotland. The wild landscape around Mason Bay would have reminded him of home. Before settling on Stewart Island, he had worked as a tailor’s apprentice, a fisherman in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, then came spells in the navy and the merchant navy, and a period spent herring fishing, before herding sheep on the Campbell Islands — a remote island chain in the Southern Ocean, farther to the south, and smaller and even more remote than Stewart Island. To Adamson, a long stint on Stewart Island as a sheep farmer and ambergris collector would have felt like semi-retirement.
“The combers,” McIntosh wrote in his 1939 article about Stewart Island ambergris collectors, “are able to class pieces at a glance, and un-matured lumps, whether they be ounces or pounds in weight, are ‘graved’ in specially prepared plots to age and increase in value. Living close to their fields, these men searched the beaches daily, missing very few specks of ambergris and rejecting such obvious traps for the uninitiated as pieces of putrified fat cast overboard from ships’ galleys.”
Adamson graved his ambergris. “When Adam left for World War I,” Sansom wrote in The Stewart Islanders, “he buried all his immature ambergris so that it would mature during his absence and bring a better price. After he returned to Mason Bay — he was decorated while at the war — he stepped off the required number of steps, but was not quite sure of the direction, so the ambergris remains hidden there to this day.”
I stand among the marram grass on Doughboy Bay, with a shiny green wall of foliage behind me and I think of Adam Adamson. In an Evening Star article about Doughboy Bay from December 1927, Basil Howard wrote, “The bay was once the haunt of sealers. It has come into prominence recently owing to its connection with Mr. Adam Adamson, ‘The Ambergris King,’ who recently made it his headquarters. Until the timber for his house arrives, he is living in a cave at the southern entrance to the bay.”
The Department of Conservation is using the cave at the moment. Fisherman Phil came before them. Supposedly, in the 1970s, the cave was used by a Japanese tourist who overstayed her visa and lived in it for several weeks. But long before this — before the rangers set up their chairs against the wet back wall, before Fisherman Phil and his wife and their poorly made bed, and before Keiko Agatsuma the overstayer — Adam Adamson had lived in its damp recesses, perhaps even using the cave to store his ambergris, or graving it somewhere in the wet sand of the bay instead, before making his way to Bluff to sell it. And for just a little while, I had stood in the cave too, listening to the water dripping down its walls and ta
king shelter from the sun there in its dark quiet spaces.
As I arrive at the Justcafe Coffee Shop on Main Road one afternoon, proprietor Britt Moore and her friends have just returned from a helicopter flight to Mason Bay to look for ambergris. They found none, but Moore — an American who has lived on Stewart Island for seventeen years — is not disappointed. “We only looked for an hour or so,” she says. Moore gives me the names of three Stewart Islanders who are known in Oban for their success in finding ambergris: Cyril Leask, Martin Pepers, and Mark Butler.
“Cyril,” says Moore, shaking her head as she steps behind the counter, “he’s a funny guy. Supposedly, he found a massive lump of ambergris on Mason Bay, a gross grey slab of it just sitting there. It was worth $100,000 or something. And the funny thing was, people had been walking past it for a week. I think it was in the last ten years or so, but I don’t think he’ll talk about it. The tax people got on to him about it.”
Stewart Island is a small place — cloistered, even. And Oban is smaller still. Everywhere I go, for the five days I am on the island, I ask local residents about ambergris. Arriving early in the morning for my flight to Doughboy Bay, I ask the woman behind the sunlit check-in desk if people ever find ambergris on visits to the west coast. “Occasionally,” she says. Trying to sound like I am just making conversation as I wait for my flight, I ask her if she’s heard about Cyril Leask finding a piece so large that he sold it and bought a boat with the profits. She pauses. I stare at my reflection in her mirrored aviator sunglasses. Seconds pass. It becomes uncomfortable. Behind me, a child plays with a toy phone on the floor and shouts, “Bwing, bwing, bwing!”
Finally, the woman says, “I think Andrew Leask has found a fair wee bit too,” and then turns away, leaving me at the counter with my questions.
An hour later I ask the pilot who flew me to Doughboy Bay about ambergris, shouting over the deafening noise of the propeller as we hurtle through the air and drop over the hills. The day before, while buying groceries in Oban, I’d tried to talk with the proprietor of the well-stocked Ship to Shore General Store, but she soon became overrun with customers. I left, clutching a warm meat pie, and watched the fishing boats returning to the harbour. And a day later, standing in front of a gigantic map of the island, I asked the staff at the ferry terminal on the wharf if they knew anyone on the island who regularly found ambergris. They referred me to Mark Butler. They knew his wife, they said. His full-time occupation was searching for ambergris, they said. In the musty quiet of the Rakiura Museum in Halfmoon Bay a day later, I asked bespectacled research secretary Jo Riksem if she knew anyone on the island who might be willing to speak with me about ambergris. She, like so many other islanders, suggested speaking with Cyril Leask and Mark Butler. “Do they find ambergris often?” I asked. “You’d need to talk to them,” she said firmly, and then left me alone with the old newspaper clippings.
Responses were sometimes friendly and more often tight-lipped and suspicious, but no one ever pretended not to know about ambergris. Not on Stewart Island. On Stewart Island, it would have been a conceit to do so — roughly equivalent to Alaskan Inupiats claiming their language has no words to describe snow. This is ambergris country: bleak and windswept and pounded constantly by a rolling, churning surf that carries flotsam from across the Pacific Ocean. I heard the same names again and again: Cyril Leask, Martin Pepers, and Mark Butler. If there is a lesson to learn from my exchanges with locals, it is this: if you spend several months a year walking the remotest and most windswept parts of the west coast of Stewart Island to search for ambergris, your neighbours will probably have heard about it. And, soon enough, I had heard about it too.
When I spoke with Tim TeAika, he had dismissed the efforts of Stewart Island’s resident ambergris hunters. “It’s just the hopefuls, I think,” he had said uncertainly over the phone. “It was a bit of an industry for one or two locals, but I certainly didn’t go out of my way to look for it.”
If anyone now occupies the wild, wet spaces vacated by the men like TeAika, it is these characters: a small group of shrewd, weather-hardened, tight-lipped men willing to endure the conditions of the west coast with a shrug, walking a thousand kilometres through the rain each winter, cold water sluicing between their shrivelled toes for weeks at a time, in search of ambergris. There exists no sense of fraternity even between the ambergris collectors. In fact, they probably distrust and dislike each other more than they do anyone else. They wish one another harm or, at least, bad luck.
TeAika had called them the hopefuls. The Hopefuls. Think about this: it takes several days just to walk from Oban to the west coast. They could fly like I did — take a helicopter or a single-engine Cessna and be there in twenty minutes — but these men wouldn’t consider it an option. That would be an extravagance. They could save a day or so — and a lot of money — by taking a water taxi part of the way, and then walking the rest of the way to the coast by a gruelling track. Perhaps a water taxi wasn’t too much of a concession to the limitations of the human body. And then begin the days, or weeks, or even months, of walking, with their eyes downcast, scanning the beaches, the logjams, the tidal mudflats and river mouths, the bays, the sandbars, and the inlets, in the rain. The Hopefuls? Fisherman Phil lives in a cave for six weeks during the winter, sleeping on a lopsided, homemade bed. Mark Butler searches full-time for ambergris in isolated pockets of the west coast visited by almost no one else. So does Cyril Leask. We sleep, but they are out there searching. They are determined and single-minded to a degree that is almost pathological. If these men are hopeful, this is a new kind of hope, unfamiliar to me.
On my last day on the island, a cold wind begins to blow from the east, swirling around the boats moored in Halfmoon Bay. I walk along the harbour, trying to bury my neck into my collar. Low, thin clouds drift over the wharf. The tables and chairs in front of the century-old South Sea Hotel quickly empty, and a bank of solid grey clouds rolls in from the sea, taking up residence in the bay. Suddenly, in the middle of summer, I am reminded of my proximity to the South Pole. I wish I’d brought a coat with me. Easterlies always bring cold weather like this, but westerlies are different. Westerlies bring ambergris. A loose-lipped Stewart Islander would tell you as much, if there were such a thing. Like a 20-kilometre-long scoop out of the west coast, Mason Bay is beaten every winter by strong westerly storms that dump ambergris on its exposed sands. On Stewart Island, everyone knows this.
A child answers the phone. I ask for Mark Butler and wait. Outside, the sun is shining brightly, but the wind is full of glinting Antarctic menace. The water in the harbour looks like broken glass. I am enjoying the relative comfort of the only public phone box in Oban. It smells of old urine, but it is warm. A large brown moth with the same idea flutters through the air and lands on my shoulder.
A minute or so later, Butler is on the end of the line. He is not eager to talk with me about ambergris. He sounds a little angry. There is something of a precedent: in the recent past, Butler had been involved in the filming of a New Zealand-based television show called Hunger for the Wild. In each episode, two chefs drive around New Zealand in a vintage car; at each location, one of them hunts for the main dish and the other gathers the other ingredients. Butler — an accomplished deer hunter — had taken one of the chefs to Mason Bay to hunt whitetail deer. He had received no payment for his involvement and was harbouring a deep resentment for his part in the process. He tells me matter-of-factly that he also plans to write his own book on ambergris hunting, which means, he says firmly, it isn’t in his interests to talk with reporters like me.
Butler is something of an enigma on the island. He goes by two names: Mark Butler and Mark Moxham. No one can explain why this is the case, but everyone seems willing to indulge him. Several people have spoken about him to me, but none have been kind. People tend to roll their eyes when he is mentioned. He either has several occupations or none at all. When, for the third time, standing in the phone box, he asks me, “What do I get fo
r talking to you?” I answer, approximately, that he might enjoy the feeling of well-being that accompanies accommodating behaviour. This, apparently, is not sufficient. I offer to change his name and remove specific information about where or how he finds his ambergris. He refuses. “There are tricks,” he says, “and that’s what I’d be giving away. It’s not always after high tide, and it’s not always westerlies. There are a few tricks and, once people get to know them, we’re all affected, you know, those of us who make a living off it.”
Butler is right, of course, to some degree — assuming there are a lot of people who are willing to fly to Stewart Island, an overgrown, hilly, and half-forgotten dot in a vast and endless ocean, to spend months at a time walking its remote and inhospitable coastline in search of a vanishingly rare fatty concretion of squid beaks produced by just 1 percent of sperm whales.
Several other Stewart Islanders, I tell Butler, have told me that hunting for ambergris is his full-time occupation. “It’s pretty much my full-time job during winter,” he admits. “I do a lot of walking and stuff. I do about a hundred kilometres a week during winter. Well, over about eight days, I suppose. I mean, Mason Bay is 20 kilometres long.”
Outside, it is colder still. The boats are rocking gently on the swell in the harbour. A thin white mist is beginning to form again in Halfmoon Bay, turning the green hills grey. “It’s taken me quite a few years to be good at it,” Butler continues. “You can go out and find nothing, or just a few small pieces, and then another time you can get lucky. The big pieces are the ones that most people are after. All I can say is, you’ve got to be there when it’s happening.”
He pauses. I say nothing. The moth flutters in the phone box. The boats bob in the harbour. “I’ve probably already said too much, haven’t I?” says Butler quietly, almost to himself. And he makes a few excuses, grumbles a little more, and then hangs up.
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