Blowing stray hairs from his forehead, he fishes a cell phone from his pocket, dials a number, and waits. Stowed incongruously on the shelf behind him, like wood saws in a cluttered workshop, are the long tooth-filled jawbones of marine mammals. No answer. He pockets his cell phone and disappears down another aisle. “No,” I hear him say, quieter now in the distance. “No, no, no.”
And then: “Ha!” he shouts. “Here it is!”
Moments later he is opening a box and pulling out a folded-over Ziploc bag. At the bottom of the bag is a large black piece of ambergris. Working slowly, van Helden unravels and opens the bag, releasing an expanding nimbus of ambergris fumes into the room. We walk toward a table — van Helden carrying the ambergris. On our way we pass through an invisible but fragrant odour cloud.
He places the ambergris on the tabletop. It resembles a large misshapen bowl of charred wood. In fact, if someone had taken a large wooden salad bowl and then burnt it until it was black and crumbling, it would look a lot like the ambergris in front of us. Leaning over the desk, van Helden uses the tip of a pen to point out several squid beaks, embedded in the rim of the ambergris like shiny black seeds. “All right,” he says, “you can see, look, there are just masses of inclusions of squid beaks throughout. It’s not like it forms around any particular squid beak. It’s not like the reaction that makes a pearl.”
We take turns bending toward the desk to smell the ambergris in front of us. When it is my turn, I place my nose in the concavity formed by the curving walls of the blackened bowl and inhale deeply so that I can savour the odour, which seems to have pooled and collected in its uneven base. I ask van Helden to describe its complex aroma, hoping his familiarity with this and other pieces of ambergris will help him to succeed where others have failed. He struggles: “I find it’s that sort of rich, kind of tobaccoey kind of smell …” he says, before pausing, searching for words, and beginning again, “A sort of musky, musty … kind of tobaccoey … almost, yeah, slightly cow patty kind of smell. It’s a sort of rich sweet smell.” He straightens and thinks for a moment. “There’s nothing unpleasant about it,” he says finally.
“What we know is that it occurs effectively in the intestine of the sperm whales, where it’s produced. So, it probably isn’t in the stomach as people often think. It’s not thrown up. Quite how it’s secreted we don’t know.”
Measuring perhaps 30 centimetres across, it is the largest piece of ambergris I have seen. “This was cut out of the gut of a sperm whale,” says van Helden, before dipping his head toward the tabletop to smell the ambergris again. “It probably caused the animal to die. It created a peritonitis in the animal. It’s about six years old now.” I ask him where it was harvested. “I’m not at liberty to tell you that,” he says quietly. “It’s from the New Zealand coast. The animal was a largish female. It was a much, much, much larger chunk: a lump, like, you know, like a big boulder. It totally occluded the gut, so it would have caused terrible problems for the animal.”
Bowl-shaped piece of ambergris in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
In fact, the piece that van Helden is now placing back into its Ziploc bag was once the outer layer of the larger piece, like a nutshell wrapped around a nut. The inner core — the nut within the shell — is currently touring the world, van Helden tells me, as part of “Whales | Tohora”, an exhibition of whale-related specimens jointly curated by Te Papa and the Smithsonian Institute.
I ask van Helden where the rest of the ambergris is. He thinks for a few seconds, with his head tilted to one side. “It’s in Pittsburgh,” he says. For a moment, we say nothing, standing next to the ambergris, wrapped in the translucent folds of its Ziploc bag. I slowly become aware once again that my feet are wet and my shoes squelch when I walk. After running through the rain across Wellington, I am hoping that van Helden has more pieces of ambergris to show me. “We did have some older pieces,” he says, “but quite where Kent put those now is a mystery to me. They should have been all together. But we don’t have much.”
He looks at me again. “That’s the point really,” he says.
A few weeks earlier, we had loaded our beat-up Subaru with all of our belongings and hit the road in search of ambergris. Over the next month or so, we headed steadily north, from Dunedin toward Auckland. Crisscrossing the country, we drove from the east coast to the wild and mountainous west coast and back again — westward across the Southern Alps and then eastward through narrow passes, dropping into flat basins braided with the bright milky-blue waters of glacial rivers — back and forth we zigged and zagged, returning to the indented coastline. But always approximately north.
Halfway through our journey, we stood on the sunny windswept deck of a ferry as it slid across Cook Strait, with our car parked in its hull. Ghostly constellations of jellyfish drifted past us in the blue water. In September 2008, the cylindrical block of animal fat that washed ashore on Breaker Bay had passed through these waters first, bobbing toward land on the unpredictable currents. “It was seen about ten days ago in the middle of the Cook Strait by one of the ferries,” Wellington City Council member Paul Andrews had told Channel Three News in 2008. “At that stage it was reported as an iceberg as a bit of a joke, and it subsequently washed up here.” Leaning against the railing of the ferry in the cool sun of early autumn, I scanned the whitecaps for a pale grey boulder of ambergris.
By this time, my son is eighteen months old. He has learned to walk along the tide line, selecting random objects from the tangle of marine debris that gathers there. Standing in the surf, he brings each object to his nose, smells it, and says, “No,” in his quiet voice, before dropping it back onto the sand. In short, we have produced a second-generation ambergris hunter.
Around this time, I have begun to buy my own ambergris. Weeks earlier, I had purchased a few samples of different grades from Adrienne and Frans Beuse in Dargaville. Then, the trader in Taiwan sends me two pieces of ambergris after I tell him I plan to make perfume with it. A third little lump — a single gram — is sent by an anonymous seller in London, after I buy it on eBay. These pieces come from across the world in nondescript little envelopes. No one who saw the packets piled on my desk would have the slightest suspicion that some of them contained samples of decades-old ambergris — whitened lumps of a fatty concretion of squid beaks that had swirled around vast oceanic gyres for lengths of time that could only be guessed at.
Late one night, I unpack them all, organizing them in a neat and orderly row on my desk. First, I unwrap the pieces that were sent by the Taiwanese trader. On the envelope is a customs sticker covered with Chinese characters. Inside, there is a fresh black pea-size piece of ambergris, wrapped in a bundle of tissue paper. It has become flattened in transit and is now stuck to the paper — a soft, almost-round disc of pungent, indole-rich, scatolic ambergris. Next to it, I place several fragments of a harder grey sample, which has broken into three or four flinty pieces. Once I remove these flattened, jagged shards, I notice a fine grey dust, which has collected in the creases of the paper like ash.
Alongside these samples, I place a Ziploc bag measuring 5 centimetres square. Inside is a dark grey piece of ambergris that came from London. It is approximately the size and shape of a sugar cube. Without removing it from its bag, I can smell it from several feet away. Parts of the inside of the bag are dark and tacky, covered with a sticky ambergris residue. Removing it from the bag, I turn it in my hand like a die to inspect each face of the cube. One face is divided into numerous strata. I trace them with my fingertip: a thin tea-coloured seam, sandwiched between two solid black layers.
From two large padded envelopes, I remove several pieces of ambergris sent by Adrienne Beuse. They are each packaged in a little black velvet purse with a gold drawstring. First, a large grey-and-white speckled lump, almost exactly the same size as the top joint of my thumb. On its underside is a smooth dark concavity that fits perfectly against the pad of my thumb. At one time, this piece
was wrapped — like the piece Anton van Helden showed me in Wellington — around a spherical interior, and I am looking now at the point of contact between the two strata. With this piece, Beuse has sent a smaller fragment of white ambergris. I unwrap it and place it carefully next to the others. Shaped like a white-domed mushroom cap with a shiny, patinated surface, it’s worth more than $100. But it looks like a dirty piece of chalk.
Without doubt, I knew where each of these pieces of ambergris had come from. They had formed — layer upon stratified layer — in the hindgut of a sperm whale and were then expelled at sea, and borne on ocean currents for months and sometimes years.
Back in Wellington, Anton van Helden had been matter-of-fact about where his blackened piece of ambergris had come from. There was no mystery to it. But the true source of ambergris had remained a mystery — at least to most of the world — until as late as 1783. For at least a thousand years, and perhaps much longer, people had been collecting ambergris from the shoreline with no idea of where it had come from. It happened slowly, but gradually the answers came. In 1729 Caspar Neumann, writing in Berlin, had painstakingly collected and listed around twenty of what he considered the likeliest sources of ambergris. They had ranged from the barely believable (the fruit of a tree) to the completely ridiculous (a grounded meteor). Almost as an afterthought, Neumann had included the possibility that ambergris came from whales — a suggestion that, within the context, seemed no more or less ridiculous than any of the other numerous prevailing theories. It gained few supporters and attracted plenty of detractors.
As late as 1773, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica still included, in its entry for ambergris, the following: “There has been many different hypotheses concerning the origin of ambergrease, but the most probable is that which supposes it to be a fossil, bitumen, or naphtha, exuding out of the bowels of the earth, in a fluid form, and distilling into the sea, where it hardens, and floats on the surface.”
A fossil, bitumen, or naphtha. It was none of them. Slowly, inexorably, the facts began to accumulate, as if they were somehow attracted to one another.
The year was 1721. It was the Age of Enlightenment. A revolution in scientific philosophy was taking place across Europe and in the American colonies, which was based on careful observation, on measurement and empiricism. The city of Boston was in the tightening grip of a smallpox epidemic. Bostonians had everything to gain from a new approach to scientific inquiry.
The outbreak had begun in the spring. The first deaths were reported in May, as the buds began to open on the trees. By October, the disease was claiming more than a hundred lives each week. As the weeks passed, the epidemic continued to spread, jumping from one neighbourhood to the next, sweeping in a wide arc across the city. In desperation, Cotton Mather, a prominent local Puritan minister, appealed to Zabdiel Boylston, a local physician. Boylston was already well-known for a series of earlier medical breakthroughs: in 1710 he had become the first American physician to perform a surgical procedure, successfully removing a patient’s gallbladder stones; and eight years later, he had performed the first surgical resection of a breast tumour. Mather had achieved a degree of notoriety too, for his involvement twenty-nine years earlier in the Salem Witch Trials. In 1689 Mather had published a monograph titled Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, in which he described the witchcraft of a Boston woman. After a short trial, the woman, who was accused of bewitching the children of a local family, was hanged for her crimes.
Following the publication of Mather’s account, paranoia spread across New England, culminating in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Hundreds of men and women were accused of witchcraft, and dozens were put on trial. Insinuating himself into court proceedings, Mather encouraged the five judges — three of whom were acquaintances of his — to consider admissible what he called “spectral evidence” in court proceedings. In all, twenty-nine people were convicted of witchcraft, nineteen of whom were later hanged for their crimes. Almost immediately, the governor of Massachusetts, and even the most vocal accusers, realized the executions were an awful miscarriage of justice, and the trials were declared unlawful in 1702.
Somehow, Cotton Mather survived the Salem Witch Trials with his ministerial reputation intact. In the years since, he had learned from his Sudanese slave, Onesimus, a technique that was used successfully to inoculate African villagers against smallpox. As the outbreak of 1721 worsened, he began trying to convince local doctors that the same methods could be used to vaccinate Bostonians. Numerous doctors refused, but Zabdiel Boylston agreed. The technique was primitive. “His custom,” wrote William White in 1885, in an anti-vaccination screed titled The Story of a Great Delusion in a Series of Matter-of-Fact Chapters, “was to make a couple of incisions in the arms, into which bits of lint dipped in pox-matter were inserted. At the end of twenty-four hours the lint was withdrawn, and the wounds dressed with warm cabbage leaves.” Boylston began boldly, inoculating his own sons. Then two slaves. By the middle of December 1721, he had inserted lint coated with pox-matter into the arms of more than 250 Bostonians. His treatment was successful.
Boylston’s career included a second act too, although it was not quite as redemptive as Mather’s. In 1724 Boylston made one more astonishing observation. Published in Philosophical Transactions, it had the following title: “Ambergris Found in Whales, Communicated by Dr Boylston of Boston in New-England”. It was a bombshell of sorts. And it solved a mystery that had persisted for almost a thousand years: where does ambergris come from?
Included in the same volume of Philosophical Transactions were papers with such enigmatic titles as “Part of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Wasse, Rector of Aynho in Northhamptonshire, to Dr Mead, Concerning the Difference in the Height of a Human Body, between Morning and Night,” and “Some Observations Made in an Ostrich, Dissected by Order of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart. By Mr. John Ranby, Surgeon. F.R.S.”. In one superlatively odd paper from November 1725— titled “An Account of a Fork Put up the Anus, That Was Afterwards Drawn out Through the Buttock; Communicated in a Letter to the Publisher, by Mr. Robert Payne, Surgeon at Lowestofft”— the author described the case of a teenage apprentice to a ship carpenter in nearby Great Yarmouth, who attempted a groundbreaking cure for his constipation: “Being costive,” wrote Payne, “he put the said Fork up his Fundament, thinking by that Means to help himself, but unfortunately it slipt up so far, that he could not recover it again.”
A month or so after the shipbuilder’s apprentice put the fork up his fundament, he began to experience pain in his left buttock. For a while, he voided “Purulent matter” on a daily basis. On his buttock, a swelling began to develop. A few days later, when it finally burst, the prongs of a fork were visible through the skin. Cutting around the tines, Payne surgically removed the fork, noting, “It is 6 Inches and a half long, a long Pocket-Fork; the Handle is Ivory, but is dyed of a very dark-brown Colour; the Iron Part is very black and smooth, but not rusty.”
Sandwiched between such oddities, Boylston’s paper must have seemed almost pedestrian and easily overlooked. It was brief too, taking up less than a single page. Two hundred and six words. But the answer to a millennium-old mystery was contained within it. It began: “The most learned Part of Mankind, are still at a Loss about many Things, even in medical Use; and, particularly, were so in what is called Ambergris, until our Whale Fishermen of Nantucket, in New-England, some three or four Years past, made the discovery.”
With astonishing brevity, Boylston dismantled the outlandish myths surrounding ambergris, recounting the moment that whalers in Nantucket found it inside a whale carcass: “Cutting up a Spermaceti Bull Whale, they found accidentally in him, about twenty Pound Weight, more or less of that Drug. After which, they, and other such Fishermen, became very curious in searching all such Whales they kill’d; and it has been since found in less Quantities, in several Male Whales of that Kind, and in no other, and that scarcely in one of an Hundred of them.” A careful emp
iricist, Boylston was unwilling to overstate his findings. Instead, he concluded: “Whether or not (from the Account above) the Ambergris be naturally, or accidentally produced in that Fish, I leave to the Learned to determine.”
It was the answer people had been waiting centuries to hear. Although it was the first description, it was by no means the last. Not long afterward, on April 2, 1725, Paul Dudley wrote a private letter from Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the Royal Society: “I beg the favour that nothing may be published as from the Royal Society about Ambergreese,” he wrote, “till you receive my account of that secret, for I have taken no small pains to be a master of that matter, and the Society may depend on the account I shall send them, having got it from the most capable persons in this Country.”
Three days later, he sent his disquisition on ambergris to the Royal Society, with the lengthy title: “An Essay upon the Natural History of Whales, with a Particular Account of the Ambergris Found in the Sperma Ceti Whale. In a Letter to the Publisher, from the Honourable Paul Dudley, Esq.; F. R. S.” But he was too late. He had been beaten to the punch by Boylston. An associate justice to the superior court of Massachusetts, Dudley was an autodidact. As a member of the Royal Society, he had already published papers in Philosophical Transactions on such varied subjects as rattlesnakes, Niagara Falls, earthquakes in New England, and a method to discover “Where the Bees Hive in the Woods, in Order to Get Their Honey.”
In every way, Dudley must have felt scooped by Boylston’s single-page communication. During a period when the whalers of Nantucket were the world’s premier sperm whale hunters, Dudley had spent considerable time with them to research his paper. The publication of both papers, just months apart, was no coincidence. And neither was the involvement of Nantucketers. By 1725, when Boylston and Dudley were publishing their monographs in Philosophical Transactions, the whaling industry was growing rapidly in North America. Nantucket had become the most productive whale fishery in the United States and the world. By this time, Nantucketers had begun to venture farther afield in search of whales, leaving behind their shore whaling days, building whaleships to hunt the deeper open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. There, for the first time, they began to encounter sperm whales. In Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (2007), historian Eric Jay Dolin wrote: “For nearly forty years, from roughly 1712 until 1750, Nantucket dominated the offshore whale fishery, primarily targeting sperm whales, but also rights and humpbacks. The number of whaleships on the island rose from six in 1715 to sixty in 1748, and the amount of oil processed annually grew from 600 barrels to 11,250, a nearly twentyfold increase in production.”
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