“The whale was a great show for visitors for a time and then Nature began to assert itself,” the Times reported, “and then the town offered $300 to anybody who would remove the dead carcass. Mr. Whale was 56 feet long and weighed about 30 tons. It had Ocean City by the nose.” According to the clipped article, on hearing of the offer, an old New Bedford whaler boarded a train to Ocean City and, in a move that baffled some of those present, paid $500 to secure the $300 contract. “Then, with warp, tackle, cutting irons, and boiling pots,” the article continued, “the New Bedford man went to work. Strips of the heavy blubber came off briskly and went into the pots. Gradually the atmosphere of Ocean City cleared in one way, but darkened in another, for the natives saw that Yankee visitor chop out ambergris by the chunk and boil out oil by the barrel.”
Working against time, and in front of an increasingly hostile audience, the whaler finally removed ambergris worth $4,800 from the carcass, along with $1,000 in sperm oil and $500 of crude oil from its tried-out blubber. I sit at the table next to Chupasko’s office, reading this and other clippings, and leafing through Blake’s copious notes. It is raining outside. I am in no hurry to leave. Through the windows, I can see students crossing the wet streets under umbrellas. Next door, Chupasko types on her keyboard and listens to the radio. I hold each chipped glass vial to my nose for a second and then a third time, savouring the individual odour profile of each fragrant hundred-year-old piece of ambergris. I rattle the squid beaks in their little jar.
It seems to me an error — an error of judgment and omission — that these pieces of ambergris have not been catalogued and described as carefully as the lumpy squadrons of flying squirrels in the nearby specimen rooms, which have been dismantled and categorized, and laid out side by side in their shallow drawer. Their bones have been measured, their stomach contents assessed, the number of embryos in both the left and right horns of the uterus have been counted. They have been reduced to statistical data.
The few pieces of ambergris, crumbling in their jars on the table outside Chupasko’s office, represent a glaring gap in our attempts to describe the natural world. The record is incomplete, inadequate with respect to ambergris. From the largest whale to the smallest shrew, everything else in the collection — a staggering total of 87,000 specimens — has been painstakingly studied, described, weighed, numbered, inventoried, catalogued, added to databases, referenced, and then cross-referenced. Whereas the samples of ambergris — one of the only physical manifestations of one of the most reclusive animals on the planet — have been relegated to a distant storage facility and left to gather dust, as their corks slowly desiccate into powder. The same is true elsewhere: the Smithsonian Institution has one small piece of ambergris in its collection, known simply as USNM 571430; the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, with a collection of more than 21 million natural history specimens, has none.
There must have been, it seems to me, a moment in the development of scientific thinking when ambergris could have been included in the record. Perhaps it might then have been studied and described as exhaustively as everything else in the museum collection. There must have been an opportunity, but despite Blake’s insistence, it has not been taken. Instead, ambergris remains an oddity — a strange relic. One by one, I return each sample to the green box. I stack the paperwork — Blake’s clippings and photographs, handwritten notes and sketches — in a yellowing pile and slowly ease it back into its envelope, so thin now that it begins to come apart between my fingers when I reopen it. Arranging it all in the centre of the table, like a cluttered shrine to missed opportunity, I thank Chupasko and step reluctantly into the rain.
“Those are Crepidula fornicata,” says Eric Jay Dolin, the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, pointing to an empty pinkish-brown speckled shell lying open like a book, its inner surface shining whitely on the sand. “The common slipper shell, they’re protandric hermaphrodites, so they change sex during their lifetimes. They live one on top of the other in a stack. The ones on the top are the males; the ones in the middle are hermaphrodites; and the ones at the bottom are the females. As you move higher in the stack, you change from one sex to the other.”
I am standing with Dolin on Revere Beach, a few kilometres north of Boston. It is early in the morning and very cold. With his back to the surf, Dolin is holding a large pale shell, which almost fills his gloved hand. It is a large fat shell, with a rounded body whorl. We find another and another — each larger than a golf ball. They are moon snails, says Dolin, who looks enough like Robert De Niro that it seems odd to be standing on the beach with him in the winter, identifying mollusks by their Latin names. He picks up another. “Here’s one that recently died,” he says, pointing to a stiffened chocolate-brown piece of tissue on its underside, blocking its aperture. “That’s the operculum. That’s like the trapdoor, the protective mechanism.”
As it happened, I had chosen the right person to invite on an ambergris hunt. We follow the shoreline, and Dolin names every mollusk and each type of seaweed that we find on the sand. “I worked in the Mollusk Department at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard,” he explains. “It was when I was in college. I took some time off. It was in the summer. I had a great time. I worked for Dr Ruth Turner, who was fairly famous — she was one of the first women to be tenured at Harvard, and she went down in the Alvin to the deep-sea vents with Bob Ballard. She’s the one who did a lot of the scientific work to identify those chemo-synthetic tubeworms they found down there. I had a lot of fun. I basically spent the whole summer of 1980 identifying shells from Australia, with my arms in formaldehyde.”
The sky is clear and cloudless, lit with a wintry brightness that makes us both squint. We walk between two headlands — Winthrop to the south and Nahant to the north — alongside the flat calm of water of Broad Sound. Farther out to sea, a distant ship travels across Massachusetts Bay. Dolin points to a dark reddish-green bed of seaweed on the shore. “There’s Chondrus crispus, or Irish moss,” he says, “which is a seaweed from which you get carrageenan — a thickener for ice cream. They used to collect it around here for that. See those green fronds? That’s Zostera marina. That’s eelgrass. There are eelgrass beds off here.”
I had invited Dolin here hoping that, in some imperceptible way, his presence might somehow be beneficial in my search for ambergris. A couple of years ago, he published a definitive history of whaling in America, which means he is familiar with ambergris. And he is local, living a few kilometres farther north of here. But, says Dolin, in the eight years that he has lived nearby, he has never walked on the beach before and has only ever driven past it. Established in 1896, Revere Beach was the first public beach in the United States. In 1882 the Stranger’s Illustrated Guide to Boston and Its Suburbs included the following description of the shoreline: “This magnificent beach is about five miles long, and is lined, at short distances, with hotels, restaurants, cottages and bath-houses. Being but a short distance from Boston, it has always been a favorite resort for the Massachusetts public, and visited during the hot season by the thousands. On a pleasant Sunday, it is not uncommon to see from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people strolling along the beach.”
With Eric Jay Dolin on Revere Beach in Boston. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
This morning there are just two of us strolling along the beach. And we are cold. But Dolin is undeterred. He points a leather-gloved finger at three or four large dark saucer-shaped shells, each as big as one of my shoes. They are, he tells me, surf clams. “Spisula solidissima,” he continues. “They live in a little bit deeper water. There was a big storm actually, recently. There were some pretty big waves, and that’s usually when these get thrown up here. This is Mytilus edulis— that’s the common blue mussel. When you go to a local restaurant and you order mussels, that’s the type that you’ll get.
“There just seemed to be this era, a couple of centuries, where everybody was amazed, confused, scared of, and making all sorts
of strange conjecture about everything in the natural world,” says Dolin, who researched and wrote about ambergris for Leviathan. “It was a time of real flux where the understanding was minimal, the guesses were all over the place, and it was fascinating.”
Trudging northward through the marine litter, which has been thrown on the shore by the recent storm, Dolin bends and points to an empty pointillated crab shell, half-buried in the sand. “This is the carapace, or the shell, of an Ovalipes ocellatus,” he says. “It’s the lady crab, a beautiful crab around here. They don’t have blue crab here, but they have those, and they have Jonah crabs.” We crunch over skate egg cases, jackknife clams, mussels, and softshell clams. I pick up a dog whelk — a large shell with a curved rounded body whorl and an elegant pointed spire, which reminds me of a treble clef. “You don’t normally see these either,” says Dolin. “This one’s been beaten up a lot.”
We have been walking along the beach for more than half an hour. Finally, we are beginning to feel the effects of the frigid temperatures. My fingers are numb. Turning around at the northern end of the beach, we begin to walk back to where our cars are parked. “Just walking along here,” says Dolin, “this brings me back to my childhood because, as a kid, my nickname was Nature Boy. I spent a lot of time alone. My dad was a scientist, a physicist, so I tended to read actually a lot of Scientific American. I didn’t read many books when I was a kid. We lived on Long Island, near the shores of Long Island Sound, and I loved just walking along the beach, going to tide pools, seeing what I could find.”
As my feet crunch over broken shells, Dolin suddenly comes to a stop. “Look at that!” he says, bending toward an olive-green tangle of eelgrass and jackknife clam shells. We are huddled together against the wind on the shoreline. In the distance, cars trundle along Revere Beach Boulevard. I think for a moment that Dolin has spotted some ambergris on the beach. But he points instead to a delicate pearly shell that sits open like a butterfly on the sand. “That’s a Purplish Tagelus,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s one of the more beautiful New England bivalves, with those faint purplish rays of colour radiating out toward its edges.”
Finally, we have made our way back to where we began. My pockets are filled with moon snail shells and a few long straight jackknife clams. I’m holding the white spindle of a whelk, like a central spoke, which is all that remains after the sea has eroded its Baroque rounded outer spirals. I climb into my rental car, relieved to be out of the cold. Although I have failed, now on the shores of two oceans, to find my own ambergris, I have finally seen plenty of it. There are traces of ambergris everywhere I have been in coastal New England. I leave Dolin standing on the sidewalk on Revere Beach Boulevard, next to the entrance of Kelly’s Roast Beef, and drive my rental car southward, away from the shoreline and toward the parking lots and the grey towers of the airport.
10 A MEETING
On scraping it with a knife into powder, part of it adheres to the cold steel like wax; so it does also to the teeth, if masticated; it yields also the impression of the nail; it has no peculiar but rather an earthy taste when chewed.
* FRANZ XAVIER SCHWEDIAWER, “An Account of Ambergrise” (1783)
Geese, capons, pheasants drenched with ambergrease, and pies of carps-tongues, helped to furnish the table in bygone Christmases.
* ROBERT CHAMBERS, The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities (1864)
Adrienne Beuse bends in her chair to pick up a black tote bag from the floor and places it gently in her lap. She carefully reaches a hand into its dark folds and pulls out a smaller cloth bag, which she places gently in the middle of a glass-topped table. In turn, several smaller cotton-wrapped lumps are removed from the bag. One by one, like a museum curator unpacking artifacts, Beuse unwraps each of them: first, a few small pieces of rounded white ambergris, like broken little pieces of chalk. “This is like perfection in white,” she says, holding one between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s about as good as it gets.”
Next to it, she places a larger piece, pitted and grey like an egg-size lump of eroded coral. “That’s when it’s almost gone past its best,” she says. “It gets pitted like that, and that normally means it’s been locked up in some sand dunes for a while.” Beuse then shows me a thin flat piece, turning it over in her hand like flint. “We call this plate ambergris,” she tells me quietly, placing it with a clicking sound on the table, alongside the pieces already there. Then she unwraps a few larger, darker pieces, which join the growing collection. “Classic grey,” Beuse says almost to herself, like a butterfly collector identifying a familiar species.
Different grades of ambergris, shown to the author by ambergris dealer Adrienne Beuse. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
A selection of Adrienne Beuse’s finest white ambergris. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
Slowly, the table becomes cluttered with an array of different pieces of ambergris. Beuse begins to arrange them in order, from the large granite-coloured pieces to the smaller shiny white fragments, which sit in a cairn, like shards of bleached bone. A thick sweet aromatic cloud envelops us.
Beuse and I are sitting across from one another in a cramped Auckland hotel room. It is dark. The curtains are closed. Outside, it is a warm Friday afternoon in spring. The curtains are outlined with a border of bright sunlight. Earlier in the morning, from my north-facing window, I had watched a long line of cars moving across the harbour bridge in the distance, toward the green-grey haze of the north shore, windshields winking in the morning light. A flotilla of tiny boats floated in the harbour — a thicket of white masts in the sun.
A couple of days ago, I had taken a two-hour flight north from Dunedin to meet Beuse, who has driven two hours south today from her home in Dargaville. The meeting almost never took place at all. We had tentatively arranged to meet months earlier by email. Ten days before I was due to arrive in Auckland, I sent Beuse another email to confirm our meeting, but she never responded. A few days later, I emailed again: still no response. I phoned and left several voicemail messages, none of which were returned. And then, a couple of days before I left for Auckland, I made a final halfhearted attempt to contact Beuse, and she answered the phone.
“We don’t normally like to do the coffee shop thing,” she had said, once she’d confirmed the meeting would still take place. “When you pull out samples of ambergris, which is a pretty funny-looking thing, you tend to attract some attention. If you have a hotel room, that’s fine.”
Middle-aged and a little overweight, Beuse’s untended dark brown hair falls to her shoulders. She has thick bangs that curl over her forehead, partly obscuring her eyes. Sometimes, when she blinks, her bangs twitch. “I’d rather you didn’t tape me,” she says, frowning at the digital recorder in my hand. “I think that will make me guarded in what I say,” she explains guardedly. I’m not allowed to photograph her either, she says. I explain that photographs of the ambergris would be useful to me later when I try to describe them in a meaningful way. She agrees: I am permitted to photograph the ambergris on the table, but not Beuse. Every time I raise my camera, she jumps up from her chair and walks stiffly away from the table, like someone walking off a sudden leg cramp. She seems nervous and flustered. During our meeting, she receives text messages, which she answers furtively. And when I handle the ambergris — cradling it in my hands, feeling its weight, slowly raising it to my nostrils — she scrutinizes me. I feel like I’m making a drug deal. In a city the size of Auckland, with more than a million inhabitants, it’s probably much easier to buy illegal drugs than ambergris.
“The only time people are really secretive is when there are really big quantities of ambergris,” Beuse says. “They tend to disappear into the ether, shall we say, very quickly. If you found 20 kilos and told twenty people, someone would come along and knock you on the head. I mean: those twenty people might each tell twenty people, and then suddenly a lot of people know … and then you might get knocked on the head. People who find a high-value item tend to be v
ery frightened and nervous. If you’re buying a piece of ambergris under those circumstances, you’re going to those meetings with a lot of cash.”
In the months before we finally meet each other, Beuse had offered several times to introduce me to one of the collectors from whom she regularly buys ambergris. I was hoping to accompany one of them on a hike into the isolated and remote country in the north, in search of ambergris. But they had all refused to meet me. Instead, I had this one opportunity. It was an aberration — as if a door had opened for a moment, allowing a glimpse into a secretive and clandestine world. I had managed to slip through the door before it closed again. Beuse’s resting state is one of suspicion and guardedness. At the same time, she is here and somehow not here at all. This feels like only half a meeting: I can speak with Beuse, but I’m not allowed to photograph her or record her voice. For a few moments, I can cradle and inspect the ambergris on the table, but I can never know certain specific and, to me, more important details — like where they were found, or by whom, or when — because she refuses to tell me.
Paradoxically, in other ways, Beuse is one of the most high-profile people in the ambergris world: in 2006, when Dorothy Ferreira received the strange green disc-shaped object in the mail from her sister, the New York Times used Beuse as a source for the article. And in 2009, after Ben Marsh swam into a rounded lump of ambergris floating in the ocean near Oakura, Beuse was the trader who first appraised it and then, eventually, purchased it. When I spoke with French trader Bernard Perrin, as he drove through Normandy, the way he talked about Beuse gave the impression that she was an old acquaintance of his. He had, he told me, once bought a few pieces of ambergris from Beuse. And Mark Butler on Stewart Island knows Beuse too, occasionally selling her pieces of ambergris that he finds there.
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