Naturally enough, in the places where sperm whales were killed and brought to shore, the men who killed them were the first to learn the truth about ambergris. It was a revelation. Fifty years earlier, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle — regarded by many as the first modern chemist — had published his own account in the pages of Philosophical Transactions, in which he shared his own theory of the origins of ambergris: “Amber-greece is not the Scum or Excrement of the Whale, &c. but issues from the Root of a Tree, which Tree how far soever it stands on the Land, alwaies shoots forth its roots towards the Sea, seeking the warmth of it, thereby to deliver the fattest Gum that comes out of it.”
The intrepid whalers of Nantucket could not have proven Boyle more wrong.
The weeks tumble by. On a hot day near the end of summer, I drive east for two hours under blue skies, through hills covered with yellow sun-baked grass, from the thermal resort town of Hanmer Springs toward Kaikoura on the eastern coast of the South Island. In the afternoon, I plan to board a boat to take a whale-watching tour.
Kaikoura is a geophysical oddity. It sits on a narrow coastal plain backed by the Seaward Kaikoura Range, a long blade-like wall of snowcapped peaks that runs almost parallel to the coast, clearing heights of 2,400 metres in places. Beneath the forbidding peaks, Kaikoura is a quiet and ordinary place, with around two thousand residents. But less than a kilometre offshore, the seafloor drops sharply away, forming part of an extraordinary system of deep oceanic trenches and canyons that stretches eastward toward the Chatham Islands, and north all the way to Tonga. Like a deep curving basin, the Kaikoura Canyon sits to the south and southeast of the Kaikoura Peninsula like a fattened horseshoe. In places, it is more than one and a half kilometres deep. This underwater canyon then extends north, joining a larger system called the Hikurangi Trough, which then runs northward to meet the Kermadec Trench, a 1,200-kilometre-long abyssal trench. At depths of more than 10 kilometres in places, it is one of the deepest oceanic trenches in the world. Together this sprawling underwater range forms a vast system of bluffs and rises, deep rocky valleys, escarpments, terraces, and mesas that covers thousands of square kilometres of ocean floor.
Underwater geological features like these are unusual so close to the coastline. In Kaikoura, their effect is specific: just a few kilometres from shore, they replicate deep-sea conditions. As a result, sperm whales — normally a roving deep-water species — are present here year-round. Tourists visit from across the world to take whale-watching tours. With a backdrop of jagged peaks, they board tour boats operated by a handful of companies, watching as whales spout noisily, breathing in lungsful of air at the surface to prepare for dives into Kaikoura Canyon that might last an hour. Excited at the prospect of seeing sperm whales in their own environment, I park my car in a large lot herringboned with tour buses and make my way through a crowd of tourists to a busy reception desk.
“All the whale-watching tours are cancelled today,” says an old woman from behind a desk. “They’re running seismic exercises today.” She looks over my shoulder, to the wide bay. “There won’t be any whale activity out there, so we’ve cancelled all the tours.”
I ask the woman for more information. Who is running the seismic exercises? She shrugs. It seems inconvenient in an oddly personalized way. I walk slowly back to my car in the sun, trying to decide whether to begin driving the two hours back to Hanmer Springs, where my family is waiting. I drive a kilometre or so south, to Fyffe House instead.
At the southern end of Kaikoura, Fyffe House sits on a green rise of land, overlooking a long sloping plateau of rock that disappears into the Pacific Ocean beyond it. Painted powder pink, half-hidden by an untended screen of shrubbery, and bordered by a white picket fence, it is all that remains of the Waiopuka whaling fishery, established here in 1842 by European settler Robert Fyfe. The oldest parts of the building — which was built for the cooper who made the barrels for Fyfe’s whale oil — were built on pilings of whale vertebrae. I can see them now — pitted white discs of sun-bleached bone, the diameter of dinner plates, almost hidden beneath the pink-painted woodwork.
I walk across the road in front of the house and step onto a sloping rocky table, which extends some distance into the bay, absentmindedly kicking stray stones into the water. The sea is calm, and the sun is so bright that I struggle to look at the gentle swell on the ocean surface for more than a few seconds at a time. Standing before a flat blue bowl of water, I try to discern the vast deep-walled underwater canyon system that lies beneath the surface, stretching for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. A lone gull flies overhead, flapping white against the sky. I stand on my rocky platform, trying to remain as still as possible. Watching the surface of the ocean for clues, glancing at the gulls overhead for a telltale sign — a strange mid-flap stutter perhaps; or an unusual feint toward the shoreline — I wonder what evidence a seismic exercise would leave for someone standing on the shoreline to witness.
Fyfe and his men were shore whalers. On spotting a whale spouting in the bay, a lookout stationed on the shore would raise the alarm, sending the whalers into a flurry of activity. Using the sandy beach farther along the curve of the bay, they launched their boats in pursuit of the whale. Killed whales were towed back to the rocky platform I am now standing on — which forms a long natural wharf — where they were stripped of their blubber and tried out, a process that turned the water and the rocks bright red with blood. During the 1844 whaling season, Fyfe operated four boats and a crew of thirty-five men from the shore, harvesting 72 tons of oil and 3 tons of whalebone, or baleen. The following year, he took 110 tons of oil and 4.5 tons of whalebone. The year after that, 119 tons of oil, with three boats and fewer men. Arranged on the shelves and mantelpieces inside Fyffe House, like strange dusty bric-a-brac, are fan-like pieces of whalebone and old jars of spermaceti oil. The walls are covered with faded whaling-era photographs. I walk past lace-curtained windows and along quiet unpeopled hallways, papered with peeling Victorian wallpaper.
Ambergris in the Kaikoura Museum collection. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
Back in town, later in the afternoon, I find a large misshapen piece of ambergris in Kaikoura Museum, a modest single-floor building filled with a clutter of artifacts. Stored in a wooden case behind glass, it is long and flattened, like a deflated rugby ball, mostly white and dimpled in places with darker grey patches. Its label reads: “Found north of the Kowhai River[,] Kaikoura. Donor: Bev Elliott.”
It is the second piece of ambergris I have seen since we left Dunedin. We are still a week away from van Helden in Wellington. Days earlier, we had seen another sample at the Okains Bay Maori and Colonial Museum, a sprawling collection of reconstructed historic buildings almost hidden in a green coastal fold of the Banks Peninsula, two hours east of Christchurch.
It was a rainy day. I walked from one ramshackle outhouse to another, past cabinets filled with an array of stone adzes, bone fishhooks, and samples of indigenous basket-weaving. The museum and the surrounding buildings were deserted. In a small hut near the entrance, I was met with a wall of glass eyes: stuffed ducks, weasels, and deer; fur seal and dolphin skulls — all arranged in a crowded cabinet.
Outside, rain poured noisily from blocked gutters, forming puddles in the grassy meadow. A windmill turned in a grey blur. An unlatched door banged against its peeling frame. The stuffed ducks glowered in the settling silence. The place was deserted. I photographed a long, slender wooden Maori war canoe from 1867 and a collection of stone adzes and primitive tools. Everything seemed to be decaying. Baskets slowly unravelled in the damp coastal air. It was an eerie place. A large spacious room, the Whare Taonga was filled with thousands of Maori artifacts. A man’s voice on a muffled vocal track spoke to no one as the wind whistled and the rain splattered outside.
In the farthest corner of a large hall cluttered with exhibits, next to a bright green to-scale model of the pleated Banks Peninsula coastline, I found a display cabinet dedicated to the New Zealand wh
aling era. There, next to scrimshawed sperm whale teeth and a rusting spade-ended blubber knife, was a large black brick of ambergris. A hand-cut label was tucked beneath it, as if it was a strange and fragrant paperweight. The label, written in black pen, read simply: “AMBERGRIS”.
Finally, on February 13, 1783, any remaining confusion surrounding the origin of ambergris was laid to rest in London. Joseph Banks presented a paper to the gathered members of the Royal Society, written by Franz Xavier Schwediawer, a German physician living in London, and titled “An Account of Ambergrise”:
We are told by all writers on ambergrise that sometimes claws and beaks of birds, feathers of birds, parts of vegetables, shells, fish, and bones of fish, are found in the middle of it, or variously mixed with it; but of a large quantity of pieces which I have seen, and which I have carefully examined, I have found none that contained any such thing, though I do not deny, that such substances may sometimes be found in it; but the circumstance which to me seems to be the most remarkable, is, that in all the pieces of ambergrise of any considerable size, whether found on the sea, or in the whale, which I have seen, I have constantly found a considerable quantity of black spots, which, after the most careful examination, appear to be the beaks of the Sepia Octopedia. These beaks seem to be the substances which have hitherto been always mistaken for claws or beaks of birds, or for shells.
Schwediawer had managed to put together a collection of several ambergris samples, all of which contained well-preserved squid beaks, and displayed them for members of the Royal Society. Alongside them: a cuttlefish beak that Schwediawer had removed from a preserved specimen in Banks’s collection.
“Any gentleman, who will be at the pains to compare them together,” wrote Schwediawer, “will be enabled to convince himself of the truth of what I have advanced.”
And so the truth was incontrovertibly known. For a select few, this mattered, but for most, the revelation meant little.
Even more impressive though was Schwediawer’s intuitive understanding of what his findings meant. More than 220 years before Robert Clarke made the same assertion, Schwediawer wrote:
The beak of the Sepia is a black horny substance, and therefore passes un-digested through the stomach and into the intestinal canal, where it is mixed with the faeces; after which it is either evacuated with them, or if these latter be preternaturally retained, forms concretions with them, which render the animal sick and torpid, and produce an obstipation, which ends either in an abscess of the abdomen, as has been frequently observed, or becomes fatal to the animal; whence in both the cases, on the bursting of its belly, that hardened substance, known under the name of ambergrise, is found swimming on the sea, or thrown upon the coast.
It is midmorning and Wilma Blom meets me beneath the airy dome of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s spacious Grand Atrium. A small crowd has begun to gather, milling around the cafeteria entrance, waiting for the museum to open. Blom and I leave them behind, ascending the stairs that spiral gently upward, following the sweeping exterior walls of the atrium. I have come here to see a piece of ambergris. In fact, I have come here to see AK75784: a large, rounded piece of ambergris that weighs slightly more than 1 kilogram and has been part of the museum collection for almost twenty years.
Once upstairs, we enter a wet and dry storage section of the marine collection, walking past shelves of blond wood filled with jars of starfish and mollusk species. I am reminded vaguely of an upscale hair salon. Blom introduces me to Tom Trnski, the research manager, grey-haired and fit-looking, dressed in jeans and a green T-shirt. Together now, we all exit the storage room and continue down a curving corridor toward Blom’s office. The moment we enter her office, I smell it. AK75784. It rests on Blom’s desk, mottled with black and white patches, tethered by a thin length of black twine to a piece of wood that has been painted pink.
Found in February 1992 on Ruapuke Beach, a black-sanded beach 160 kilometres south of Auckland, situated along the sinuous welt of the west coast, the ambergris was donated to the museum by the married couple —“a Mr and Mrs Suisted,” Blom tells me — who found it there.
A week earlier I had pulled on a wetsuit, hopping gracelessly along the dark, silty sand at Ngarunui Beach, a few kilometres north of Ruapuke Beach, so that I could float in the frigid ocean on the west coast. For an hour, I drifted between the surfers. In almost complete silence, I floated on my back watching the grassy cliffs as they yawed up and down, framed on either side by my feet. For long seconds at a time, I was invisible to everyone on the beach, lying at the bottom of blue valleys of shining water. Minutes earlier, preparing to enter the surf, I had accidentally picked up my wife’s wetsuit instead of mine. My wife is much smaller than I am. For several minutes, I had wrestled with the suit — tugging at the foamy material and grunting with effort — only realizing my error when it stuck firmly on my hips and would not move higher or lower. The black neoprene was stretched across my thighs, taut and grey.
Exasperated, I had pulled the suit off, picked up the larger one and mistakenly — hastily, and to my horror — put my feet into its sleeves. I stumbled around on the sand, like a strange insect, with the black legs of the suit twirling in the air. By the time I finally lay in the water, I had no dignity left. And I was exhausted. Wisps of cirrus clouds drifted high above me in the blue sky. I lay in the ocean and gave myself to the water. I slipped over the crests of the breaking waves, imagining that I was an ocean-borne block of ambergris. Sturdy black-backed gulls flew across the sky. The only sound I could hear was the static-like rush of sand particles colliding with each other in the water, propelled along the ocean bed by the waves.
Back on Blom’s desk: a dark, almost spherical, core sits in the middle of the lump. At one end, additional grey strata wrap like a rind around the curving exterior of the core — an exterior layer almost swallowing a spherical interior core. Parts of it are covered with a thin white cracked crust, like ash. From certain angles, the external strata are shaped like a snake head with the dark inner core resembling an egg, being swallowed. In places, its shape becomes more irregular and knobbly, with lots of smooth, rounded protrusions. It is approximately the size of a misshapen bowling ball. By now, the odour is unmistakable: a sweet, pleasant earthy rush of tobacco and old wood that lingers in the nostrils, accompanied by a faint tang of the ocean and the slippery mudflats at low tide.
I ask Blom where the ambergris is stored when she isn’t showing it to people like me. “Oh, right there,” she says, nodding over my shoulder to a conspicuously empty space on an otherwise well-utilized shelf. “I don’t know whether we’ve all got used to it,” she says, “but I really don’t notice the smell anymore.”
9 GONE A-WHALING
Occasionally visitors to Cape Cod have heard ambergris mentioned by grizzled whalers of New Bedford. But the public in general never heard of it.
* The Practical Druggist (1922)
They call me the “Ambergris King,” and I’ll tell you why they call me that. You see, I know all about it. Like anything else, a man’s got to be trained to ambergris.
* DAVID C. STULL, talking to author William Tripp in There Goes Flukes (1938)
“We’re supposed to have a twenty-pound block,” says Michael Dyer loudly from the top of a stepladder, “and I just have no idea what happened to it.”
Dyer, a curator of maritime history at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, is teetering on the top step of the ladder, surveying the least-visited shelves of a tall storage unit. He is looking for ambergris. I am standing beneath him, trying to extrapolate — given Dyer’s posture and everything I know about gravity — exactly where he will land when he falls.
“It might actually still be in the museum somewhere,” he continues, now searching another shelf. “It’s not in here, but then we have at least one other storage facility that I have not been through entirely.”
It is early December and I have come to New Bedford, driving an hour south of Boston to the sout
h Massachusetts coast, hoping to see more ambergris. There is a reason I am here and not elsewhere. For more than a hundred years — from the mid-eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century — New Bedford was the world centre of the sperm whaling industry. From the New Bedford Harbour, vessels embarked on cruises that took them around the world to hunt sperm whales — to the Arctic and the Antarctic, to the Pacific, the Azores, and the Indian Ocean.
At its peak in 1857, the New Bedford whaling fleet consisted of 329 vessels employing more than ten thousand men, making it one of the wealthiest cities in the world. In a black-and-white photograph from 1870, the Central Wharf of New Bedford is completely covered with barrels of whale oil. The geometric repetition of the barrels, arranged in neat rows along the harbour front, seems at first to be an optical illusion. One has to stop for a moment and look at it again to understand that the wharf is hidden beneath a thousand wooden barrels laid end to end, like oversize cobblestones. Used to make candles and as a fuel for lamps, the oil became such an important commodity that New Bedford was known as the “City That Lit the World.” And so if ambergris has an ancestral American home, it is New Bedford, Massachusetts. For more than a century, much of the ambergris that was found anywhere in the world was brought here first.
Floating Gold Page 19
