I pick up another piece — a large dark pebble freckled with a starburst patina and mottled with dark brown and citrine-coloured patches. It smells different again: grassy, like an old sundried cowpat. “That’s pretty fresh,” Beuse says, “and until recently it would have had black sticky material stuck to it.”
The singularity of each piece of ambergris — its individual odour profile, the distinct colour, and the mottling that covers its surface — serves as a reminder of the inadequacy of synthetic ambergris. “Every piece of this stuff smells different,” Beuse confirms, “every single piece. If you have a 1-kilo piece that breaks up on the beach, all of those pieces are likely to have the same properties, but if pieces break up in the ocean and float around, they are likely to have different experiences.”
In 1811 Samuel Hahnemann published the Materia Medica Pura: Volume 1— an exhaustive 700-page compendium of naturally occurring drugs and their potential side effects. Hahnemann was the father of homeopathy. This was his bible. For each substance, Hahnemann painstakingly and obsessively collected hundreds of reports of side effects observed in patients and obtained from numerous different physicians.
There is a long section in the Materia Medica Pura devoted to ambergris and its effects. In total, physicians collected 490 separate observations following the administration of ambergris. Together they take up fifteen pages. The list is extensive. Some personal favourites:
Observation #76: Crepitation and creaking in the left ear, as when a watch is wound up …
Observation #185: A frequent call to stool, but no motion occurs, and this makes her very anxious, and then the propinquity of other people is intolerable to her …
Observation #452: Dreams full of business …
Observation #487: His humour is easily embittered.
For several days after I eat a plateful of eggs and ambergris, when I first wake up in the morning, I lie in bed and take a quick inventory of my still-waking body. I ask myself: is the propinquity of other people intolerable to me? Were my dreams full of business? Until now, I have noticed no effects. And then, this morning, when I awake in the half-darkness, I have an irresistible inclination to stretch (Observation #425).
Adrienne Beuse methodically gathers her ambergris from the tabletop, carefully wrapping each piece again in cotton. She slowly places them back into her bag. At the door to my room, we shake hands, and she turns, trudging away toward the elevator. In the same moment that I close the door behind her, another door — which had opened momentarily on a strange and secretive world populated by ambergris traders like Beuse and Bernard Perrin, and hunters like John Vodanovich — closes too.
After Beuse is gone, the thick musty smell of ambergris still hangs in the air. I try to imagine her riding the elevator to the lobby and pushing through the Italian tourists, her tote bag clutched tightly beneath her arm.
I walk to the window and part the curtains. Late afternoon. It is still bright and warm outside. To the north, the water glitters in the distance. A long line of cars snakes across the bridge, frozen in light, glinting in the sun. I look down toward the sidewalk four stories below, waiting for Beuse to exit the hotel entrance and join the crowds on the streets. Hoping that she might somehow give away more in an unguarded moment than she had in the hours we had just spent together, I decide to watch her for a moment — crossing the street, navigating the city, her tote bag filled with ambergris — unaware she is being watched.
Fixing my eyes on the empty space between two potted plants below, I stand at the window. And I wait. The water shimmers in the blue bowl of the harbour. The cars speed toward downtown Auckland. But Beuse never appears.
EPILOGUE
It’s a rainy morning at Aramoana. The air is wet against my face. I watch the water as it exits the harbour, sliding past the green hills. The tide is oceangoing. I’m standing on the spit with my son. He is eighteen months old now and walking. Across the water, on the grassy cliff tops at Taieri Head, the lighthouse stands like a red-topped tabernacle.
From somewhere — another beach perhaps, or even another continent — the last tide has brought to shore a multitude of tiny white flowers. They are everywhere. Wet clusters of them have collected like confetti in the green folds of the kelp. A thin white seam of them demarcates the high-tide line, stretching irregularly along the beach as far as I can see. We follow it until we grow tired. To our right, the cliffs rise like a weedy overgrown wall.
As it always does, the sea has carried waterlogged pieces of driftwood and dumped them on the shore with a multicoloured collection of gloves, oyster shells, car tyres, fish bones, broken buoys, and crab claws. I pick up a blackened stubby ear of corn. Most of its kernels have been removed by the sea — it reminds me of a mouth, missing teeth. A little farther along the beach, I drop the corn on the sand and exchange it for a red plastic water pistol.
Removing a bag from my pocket, I collect a handful of the elegant, thin spire-shaped shells that gather here after high tide. We will take them home. This morning, they are reason enough for being here. Once again, I have not found ambergris. But, all these months later, I no longer expect to find any. In fact, my search for ambergris is almost over. A few weeks from now, after more than two years in Dunedin, we will leave New Zealand and return to the United States.
In other subtler ways, my journey had begun ending months earlier. On my desk at home, a clutter of accumulated marginalia: a large pitted lump of pumice; a dried sea horse; a vial of perfume that contains ambergris, and another that was made with synthetic ambergris; a 60-centimetre-tall stack of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century monographs on ambergris; large scale maps of Stewart Island and the state of Massachusetts; an old dog-eared paperback edition of Moby-Dick; newspaper clippings; rock samples; and several different and varied samples of ambergris from across the world.
I began this journey because I had so many questions, and it seemed there were so few answers. Finally, I felt that I knew everything there really was to know about ambergris. I had exchanged ignorance for knowledge. I am, after all, a scientist. This is what I was trained to do.
Along the way, I had seen numerous pieces of ambergris. I had handled and smelled it firsthand — in museums in New Zealand, on Stewart Island where Department of Conservation workers were finding rounded pebbles of it on remote west coast beaches, and then farther afield. I’d met with ambergris vendors like Adrienne Beuse and cultivated relationships with full-time ambergris collectors like John Vodanovich. As the months passed, I spoke with museum curators, perfumers, oceanographers, cetologists, and organic chemists. I had even eaten ambergris, attempting to recreate elaborate recipes from seventeenth-century England.
In other words, finding ambergris no longer seemed like an appropriate measure of success. At some point — maybe on Stewart Island; or along the wintry shoreline of Cape Cod; or perhaps somewhere in between — the journey had become the destination instead.
My search for ambergris has allowed me to know the natural world more fully than I otherwise would have. Along the wild Otago coastline, the sky is most beautiful just before a storm. Slate-grey thunderheads begin to form, drifting in from the sea and pressing against the green cliffs. They pile on top of one another — enormous black columns that tower thousands of metres into the sky. And then the rains come, sweeping across the beach in wet gusts, dimpling the sand with quarter-size craters. I might never have known this if I hadn’t been searching, week after week, for ambergris. Before the mysterious object washed ashore on Breaker Bay in September 2008, I had not been accustomed to standing on remote coastlines, as violent storms develop out to sea. On rainy mornings, my son and I would sit in front of our living-room window, watching as fat raindrops wobbled down the telephone lines that crisscross our hilly street. Now we reach for our raincoats instead.
My journey has been a circular one. It had begun here, on the wet sand at Aramoana under a pearlescent sky, and farther north at Long Beach. It seems fitting that it should end here
too.
Low tide. A kilometre or so south of here, a wide sward of green land is emerging from the middle of the harbour, as it always does when the tide recedes. Its rocky clay-coloured edges appear first, like the crenellations atop a crumbling keep — the walls of a lost city. And then comes a broad table of flat land stretching out toward the sea, pristine and crowded with birds. I often imagine rowing across the harbour, waves slapping at the bow, until I arrive at the exposed green apron and step gingerly from the rocking boat, onto the leafy seaweed — feeling it spring softly beneath my feet like wet lettuce. I have discussed this several times with my wife — my eternally patient wife — who is always willing to thoughtfully debate the most ridiculous questions. Will the wet new land in the harbour bear my weight? Yes, she believes it will. And might I find ambergris out there in the quiet air, after all the water is gone?
No one knows. But, for an ambergris collector, the only constant is hopefulness in the face of incredibly low odds.
Back on the beach at Aramoana, the birds are on the water. They ride the rolling swell. I walk past wet green concertinas of wakame with my son, prising up large pieces of driftwood to look beneath them. The storm is approaching, faster now. Gusts of wind flatten the yellow dune grass. I carefully pocket the shells still in my hand — which I now know are a member of the Turritella genus — and we begin the slow trek across the sand back to my car. It’s time to go home. I take my son’s cold hand in mine. We walk past a quick-legged pair of oystercatchers patrolling the margins, and I see a pale rock on the beach that looks different from the rest. I’m drawn to it. It sits next to a toothbrush and a tangle of kelp, half-buried in the sand, shaped almost like a duckbill, white and chalky at one end, mottled with dark striations at the other. I bend to pick it up, still wet, and bring it cautiously to my nose.
And I smell it.
Picture Section
Tom Donaghy and Geraldine Malloy of Wellington break up a large block of suspected ambergris on Breaker Bay, New Zealand, in September 2008. Credit: New Zealand Herald.
Dr Robert Clarke in his home in Pisco, Peru. One bottle contains pieces of ambergris from the 420-kilogram boulder taken on board the Southern Harvester on July 23, 1953, from a sperm whale in the location 53°21'S 14°13'W. The other bottle contains a single ambergris concretion of nearly 1 kilogram from a sperm whale examined in Iquique, Chile, on August 31, 1960. Credit: Aravec Clarke.
Seven-year-old Ben Marsh holding the ambergris he swam into at Oakura, near new Plymouth, New Zealand, in March 2009. Credit: Taranaki Daily News.
A 90-kilogram boulder of ambergris, which washed ashore in New Caledonia in 2007.
Loralee Wright with a piece of ambergris weighing 14.5 kilograms, which she and her husband, Leon, found at Streaky Bay in South Australia in 2006. Credit: Loralee Wright.
Mike Hilton in his office with several pieces of Stewart Island ambergris. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
Coming in at low tide to land on Doughboy Bay, on the remote west coast of Stewart Island. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
A piece of ambergris which had washed ashore on Doughboy Bay, in Department of Conservation ranger Simon Taylor’s hand. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
Anton van Helden, marine mammals collection manager at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, with a large piece of ambergris from the museum collection. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
A piece of ambergris weighing more than 1 kilogram in the Auckland War Memorial Museum collection, found at Ruapuke Beach, near Raglan, in February 1992. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
Ambergris collected by J. Henry Blake and donated to the Department of Mammalogy, Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
A piece of Adrienne Beuse’s ambergris. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
About the Author
Christopher Kemp is a journalist and a molecular biologist, and Floating Gold is the story of his quest to find ambergris. He is English and now lives in the US.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in the USA in 2012
This edition published in 2012
by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois
First published in Australia in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Christopher Kemp 2012
The right of Christopher Kemp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Kemp, Christopher James.
Floating gold: the search for ambergris, the most elusive
natural substance in the world /
Christopher Kemp.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9191 4 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978 0 7304 9726 4 (epub)
Ambergris.
333.9595
Cover design by Matt Stanton and Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover photography by Darren Holt
Image of whale by shutterstock.com
* All dollars referred to throughout are US dollars.
Floating Gold Page 24
