Together, Butler, Beuse, and Perrin form one small part of a sprawling and tangled network that moves ambergris around the world, from finder to end user. Perhaps Butler, on one of his extended hikes along the remote western beaches of Stewart Island, found an exceptionally high-quality piece of white ambergris and sold it to Beuse in Dargaville, who then sold it to Perrin on the Côte d’Azur.
I lift my camera to take another photo. Beuse rises from her chair again, as if stung by a bee.
On February 6, 1685, Charles II, king of England and Scotland, died at Whitehall Palace, famously apologizing to his courtiers on his deathbed, “I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such an unconscionable time a-dying.”
Four days earlier, he had suffered what appeared to be a seizure or a stroke. For a short time, he had been unable to speak. Since then, his physicians — as many as twelve of them fretting around him at once — had become more creative. In all, before he died, they subjected him to an estimated fifty-eight remedies. From Royal Charles by Antonia Fraser: he was bled several times; doctors gave him white hellebore root to make him sneeze; plasters of Burgundy pitch were applied to his feet; he was given anti-spasmodic medications made from black cherry water and spirits of human skull; doctors administered emetics to make him vomit and gave him enemas of rock salt and syrup of buckthorn; and red-hot irons were applied to his shaved scalp and his feet. Not surprisingly, he died anyway.
Immediately after his death, rumours began to circulate regarding the cause of his seizure. A growing list of theories was collected by Thomas Babington Macaulay in The History of England: “His Majesty’s tongue had swelled to the size of a neat’s tongue. A cake of deleterious powder had been found in his brain. There were blue spots on his breast. There were black spots on his shoulder.”
Others believed the Duchess of Portsmouth was responsible. She had given the king, they claimed, a cup of poisoned chocolate. Perhaps, others said, it was the queen who had killed him, with a jar of poisoned dried pears. There was another possibility: “Something,” Macaulay wrote, “had been put into his favorite dish of eggs and ambergris.”
In fact, Charles II was not alone in enjoying an occasional plate of eggs and ambergris. At this time in history, ambergris was one of the scarcest and costliest substances in the world. It came to England slowly, harvested from remote places, like the Somali coastline and the Nicobar Islands, and then brought westward along the well-trodden spice routes. Over previous centuries, ambergris had come to represent an elevated status — especially to the privileged aristocracy, who gladly ate it.
In seventeenth-century England, the Tudors enjoyed an early version of marmalade made of pippin apples and perfumed with ambergris and musk. It was rumoured that the Earl of Carlisle served a pie that was flavoured with ambergris, musk, and magisterial of pearl. It was so expensive that no one could afford to eat it. “There is no knowing how scientifically a great cook may have distributed his musk and his ambergrease,” wrote a contributor to The Book of Table-Talk in 1847, “but, not having tasted of such a dish, we are inclined to say, generally, that we should prefer a small Perigord pie, scented with truffles, and which may be bought in perfection for about two pounds sterling.”
Elizabeth I, who ascended to the throne in 1558, was more than partial to ambergris: “To the last Princess of the House of Tudor,” reported The Court Journal: Court Circular and Fashionable Gazette in 1833, “we are to attribute the universal adoption of ambergris and spikenard, in preference to the more pungent spices in vogue among her predecessors. Elizabeth, an idolator of scents and essences, chose that even the delicate flavour of a quail or ortolan should be lost in a ‘steam of thick distilled perfumes’; and but for the frugal predilection of her Caledonian successor for cock-a-leekie, and a singed sheep’s head, this feminine corruption of taste might perhaps have been stereotyped into a national infirmity.”
Cookbooks from the period are filled with numerous elaborate recipes that require ambergris. The 1685 edition of Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook included a recipe for a hen made of puff pastry, with its wings displayed, sitting on top of a clutch of pastry eggs, each of which contained a fat nightingale, seasoned with pepper and ambergris. Alongside recipes for carp pie and fritters of sheep feet, The Compleat Cook by Nathan Brook from 1658 had instructions for several dishes that required ambergris, including a partridge tart, and boiled cream with codlings.
To know and experience ambergris as completely as possible, I decide I need to eat it. I begin to search for recipes that I can replicate at home.
Adrienne and Frans Beuse have been trading ambergris since 2004. The previous four or five years, Frans had been an independent ambergris collector. Before that, they owned and managed a hostel together.
“We have probably fifty-plus collectors on our books,” Adrienne says. “Most traders will have dedicated collectors who, for one reason or another, will stick like glue to the trader they work with. But some collectors are freewheelers. They’ll be with one person one year and then another person the next. They do flit about.”
Beuse classifies the ambergris collectors on her payroll: “There are four different types of collector,” she tells me.
There’s the person who just happened to take a walk on the beach and found some. They just noticed something odd about it and picked it up. They might take it home and put it away and keep it for a while. The next would be someone who knows about ambergris a bit. They go out to the beach occasionally, they know what they’re looking for, and they’re really what we call sort of Sunday-afternoon drivers. And then there are the full-time, part-time hobby people, and they usually live by the sea. They could be farming on the side, or hubby is working but wife goes for a look around in the week. They’re hobbyists. Some of them can be very serious: it pays for the bills or the holiday each year. Then you get the more dedicated semi-professional people, and they’ll go to the back of beyond; and they have to be pretty tough, and they walk hundreds of kilometres. That’s a pretty limited bunch of people.
In Dargaville and elsewhere, says Beuse, collectors will scour a stretch of coastline for ambergris after every high tide, moving along the beach in three distinct waves. The first collectors are travelling at high speed, in cars — a practice that is legal on most New Zealand beaches despite a recent spate of accidents and deaths from collisions.
“They’d spot that going 50 kilometres an hour,” she says, pointing to a small pale-grey nugget of ambergris on the table. “It tends to sit proud on the high-tide line, so these people zoom along these high-tide lines looking for these pieces. It’s about doing distance. You’re going to wait a long time to get that large piece. In Dargaville, you’re going to have to be moving like greased lightning at high-tide time, or you’re going to be beaten.”
The next wave moves more slowly, surveying the beach on motorbikes. “They’ll chug-chug along after high tide and find smaller pieces,” Beuse says. Finally, after the collectors in cars and on bikes have disturbed the sand, making off with the larger pieces, the walkers make their way onto the beach. Moving aside pieces of driftwood, they find the smaller pieces that have washed ashore and remain undetected. “It’s a sense of thoroughness,” she explains. “Dogs are used in the collection. It takes about a year to train a good ambergris dog.”
Whether they rely on speed, churning up the beach after every high tide in a car, or use trained dogs and trek for days into remote and isolated backwaters, ambergris collectors take things seriously. “Here in New Zealand, it’s almost a science,” says Beuse. “They follow their currents and weather patterns. They’re throwing a sandal in and following it and seeing where it ends up a week later. You know, practical experiments.”
In 1825, in The Handbook of Gastronomy, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote:
It is well known that Marshal Richelieu, of glorious memory, habitually chewed ambergris pastilles; and as for me, whenever I feel, some day or other, the burden of age, when I thin
k with difficulty, and feel oppressed by some power unknown, I take as much powdered amber as will lay on a shilling with a cup of chocolate, sugar it to my taste, and it has always done me a great deal of good. This tonic renders life more easy, makes thoughts flow with facility; and I do not suffer from that sleeplessness which is the infallible result of a cup of coffee taken with the intention of procuring the same effect.
On a cold drizzly day near the end of winter, finding myself in need of a tonic, I stand at my kitchen sink holding a teaspoon. In the bowl of the spoon is a little cairn of grey and black ambergris fragments from Taiwan — a small portion of a larger piece that was crushed in transit. It resembles cigarette ash now. After preparing a cup of hot chocolate, I pick up the spoon, drop it into the just-boiled liquid, and begin to stir. The ambergris disappears, replaced by a thick aromatic cloud of steam. I take two or three deep breaths. It is overpowering — floral, pungent, and grassy, with an aggressive sharp-edged underlying note to it.
Cautiously, I swallow a mouthful. A warm chewy lump of ambergris remains on my tongue. I bite down on it, and it sticks to my teeth. Unsuccessfully, I try to scrape it off, first with my tongue and then a fingertip. Remnants of it are still there two hours later — an oily black smear across one of my front teeth.
Around the rim of my mug, a thick black grainy ring of crushed ambergris remains. I sit calmly in my chair, in the gloom, waiting for some of the effects that Brillat-Savarin described. But I’m not sure they ever come.
Like traders of any other commodity, Beuse is a hostage to the vagaries of the market: to its soaring peaks and unanticipated troughs; the busy seasons, followed by the long slow months; the inescapable pressures of supply and demand. On occasion, she will receive so many requests to evaluate objects that people have found — which they hope are ambergris — that she is unable to answer them all. In September 2008, when the mysterious white lump washed ashore on Breaker Bay, Beuse says she watched the news reports with growing dread. For the next few days, her phone rang almost constantly.
“Sometimes,” Beuse explains, “a big lot comes into the market and the prices are affected, but inevitably that supply will be exhausted. Then there’s a real demand spike, because there’s not enough around. And this is why the ambergris industry always lives in a state of tension.”
Almost all of the ambergris she buys from collectors in New Zealand eventually will be sold overseas. “It’s so expensive because it goes into a lot of different products,” Beuse says. “There are a lot of end users. Beyond that, it’s used in so much of the fragrance industry, throughout India and Asia. You’ve got religious associations with it in Arabic countries.”
I suggest that the large French perfume houses — like Guerlain and Chanel — have replaced ambergris with synthetic ambergris compounds, such as Ambrox and Synambrane. “No,” she says firmly. “No, no.”
The largest piece of ambergris Beuse has traded, she says, weighed around 20 kilos — almost 50 pounds. I mime holding something the size of a large grapefruit in my hands. “Larger than that,” she says, shaking her head. I slowly increase the distance between my hands until an imaginary basketball floats there. She shakes her head again. “It is important to know,” she explains, “that New Zealand is not really known as a country that produces a quantity of ambergris, but New Zealand, because of its isolation, it’s believed, and because perhaps of the diet of the whales that live around here: it’s all pretty nicely cured here. We’re about quality, not quantity. A big piece here in New Zealand is in the 5-to 10-kilo range.”
Beuse continues, “The higher the quality, the smaller the size. It reduces in size and rolls and knocks around and becomes better quality over time. If you come along with a hundred kilos, it’s not going to be the best quality. New Zealand collectors generally get the best prices in the world. It’s known throughout the industry. It’s not liked, but it’s known.”
Sitting incongruously on the tabletop, among the ambergris, is a box of cold-and-flu medication. “I’ve got some beaks in here,” Beuse says, picking up the box and tipping out a rolled-up piece of tissue paper, which she flattens to reveal a little black pile of squid beaks, like shiny blackened cinders. “There’s a nice big beautiful one,” she says, pointing out a long squid beak, curved like a claw and ending in a sharp point.
“This one is still sitting in the ambergris,” she says, holding up a beak by its incurving tip so that I can see the rest of it, embedded in a little light-grey stratified cube of ambergris.
I tell Beuse I prefer the odour of the less-refined pieces. She describes them as “more faecal”, but I find the aroma bold and sweet and enjoyable. Comparing its odour profile to the smaller white pieces of ambergris is like comparing the jolt of a strong Turkish coffee to the smoother, more subtle flavours of a café latte.
Soft, fresh ambergris. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
“I’ll show you the really bad stuff, then,” she says, pulling out another wad of tissue paper and slowly unwrapping a black shiny object. It is a little larger than a golf ball. “This is called soft ambergris, or fresh black ambergris, and this has been rolled into balls by a collector. They picked up one oozing mess.” She hands it to me. “It’s quite pliable,” she says.
I squeeze it. It is soft, moist, and clammy, and it smells like fresh sheep droppings. The ambergris collector who found it and sold it to Beuse has left his or her fingerprints across its surface. It has been worked and shaped and kneaded like dough. I can see the whorls of a thumbprint on it.
Soft black ambergris is so fresh that it will melt if left in direct sunlight, says Beuse. “The demand for that product is considerably less,” she explains. “It’s probably used quite a bit for burning for religious purposes. When collectors see that sort of soft black ambergris, it’s associated with whales being around in recent months or even weeks.”
A day or so later, I attempt another dish, this time from Robert May’s 1685 edition of The Accomplisht Cook. The recipe:
ANOTHER FORC’T FRYED DISH
Make a little past with yolks of eggs, flower, and boiling liquor.
Then take a quarter of a pound of marrow, half an ounce of cinamon, and a little ginger. Then have some yolks of Eggs, and mash your marrow, and a little Rose-water, musk or amber, and a few currans or none, and a little suet, and make little pasties, fry them with clarified butter, and serve them with scraped sugar, and juyce of orange.
I spend hours soaking and boiling beef bones, before removing the gelatinous marrow with a teaspoon. Yellow and flaccid, like a softened banana, it makes a wet sucking sound as it slides onto my plate. I mash it with beaten eggs, cinnamon, and raisins into a pale fatty mixture, and use a microplane to grate a small black piece of ambergris over it. The ambergris covers the surface like a layer of fine grey dust. I use the mixture to fill little homemade ravioli, carefully sealing their edges with a fork before frying them in butter.
The end result is unpleasant — chewy and tasteless. The fatty unctuous marrow filling has disappeared from inside the ravioli, rendered away by the cooking process. The ambergris seems to have disappeared completely with it. There is no sign that it was ever there. The pastry reminds me of cinnamon-flavoured cardboard. I throw it away.
Instead, I scramble some eggs. Taking a small piece of white ambergris that Beuse had given me, I grate it over a plate of steaming fluffy eggs. It crumbles like a truffle. I fold it carefully into the eggs with a fork. Rising and mingling with curls of steam from the eggs, the now familiar odour of ambergris begins to fill and clog my throat, a thick and unmistakable smell that I can taste. It inhabits the back of my throat and fills my sinuses. It is aromatic — both woody and floral. The smell reminds me of leaf litter on a forest floor and of the delicate, frilly undersides of mushrooms that grow in damp and shaded places. Although present in only very small amounts, the cholesterol-rich ambergris coats my tongue and the inside of my mouth with a greasy film. I try to rinse it away by drinking water and eating d
ry slices of bread, but it remains for an hour or longer.
Back in the hotel room in Auckland, I’m holding a long thin piece of ambergris, which is almost white. It fills my hand. Its rough and pockmarked surface is covered with delicate white blooms and swirls of darker grey. I bring it to my nose and smell it. Even within the aromatic cloud that surrounds us, its odour is discernible immediately from the rest: it smells of the ocean. There is a thick briny freshness to it — the green, vegetal smell of wet seaweed. An hour earlier, when Beuse unwrapped it and placed it on the table, I was reminded of a museum curator handling an artifact.
I begin to understand it is an artifact.
It has taken decades to become the substance I am holding in my hand. In its complex odour is reflected every squall and every cold grey wave. I am smelling months of tidal movement and equatorial heat — the unseen molecular degradation of folded compounds slowly evolving and changing shape beneath its resinous surface. A year of rain. A decade spent swirling around a distant sinuous gyre. A dozen Antarctic circuits. In that moment, I finally understand why someone would be compelled to travel across the world to collect ambergris, and why it has been so highly valued throughout history.
“Roughly, that piece should be about $1,000,” says Beuse matter-of-factly. “I might be out a bit if there’s more weight there. It’s pretty much classic grey. It’s high quality, not as refined as white. It’s often very marine, very ocean, very fresh. You can smell the whales in that classic one there. You’ll notice it’s got an earthiness, but there’s a marine quality there.” She picks up a smaller white piece, cratered over its surface like a piece of a moon rock. “But if you smell this,” she says, placing it beneath her nose, “you’ll notice a sweetness. It almost has a vanilla to it.”
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