by Skye Moody
In 2004, Bernard Pathé of the business Cadima Pathé, a purveyor of fragrances, claimed to have found a 130-kilogram lump of ambergris floating in the Pacific, near the Vanuatu atolls. At the time of his reported find, ambergris was selling for between $500 and $15,000 per kilogram, depending on quality. In late January 2006, news came out of Australia that beachcombers Leon and Loralee Wright had plucked a thirty-two-and-change-pound lump of ambergris off the shore. That lump has been valued at $295,000.
The auction Web site eBay lists about a dozen products claiming to be, or to contain, ambergris, including Bonne Bell Body Oil, which “has been the natural way for centuries in making perfume. It has a natural scent and its texture makes it the best in natural beauty enhancements.” An ad from Morocco said: “This is genuine ambergris from Saudi Arabia and is fixes [sic] other scent.” And from Bermuda, this: “Sperm whales frequent the waters around Bermuda and I have a lump of ambergris that is amber-yellowish in color and has a very distinctive pleasant smell. It is about 7.5 oz in weight. Bidding starting at $5.”
The National Maritime Mammal Laboratory in Seattle maintains that ambergris is mainly harvested from whale carcasses, a viewpoint opposed by ambergris purveyors who sell to industry traditionalists. These ambergris merchants claim their “rare” ambergris is flotsam collected off a beach or found floating in the ocean, and they offer “certification” to that effect. The globs do occasionally wash up along seashores in China, India, Africa, New Zealand, the Bahamas, and Brazil.
While the 1985 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) protects the sperm whale, and indeed, many nations prohibit trade in ambergris, a controversy rages over technicalities in the CITES law as written. Opponents of the CITES law say it does not apply to the sperm whales’ “urine, feces, and ambergris.” Presently, U.S. commerce laws prohibit purchasing or selling ambergris. Possession of ambergris is prohibited by the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which includes the sperm whale. This means that U.S. manufacturers of fine perfumes today are not allowed to import or export ambergris, nor to sell perfumes containing it. Online purveyors of ambergris may claim the substance they are selling is “gathered, beach-washed product. No harm comes to any animal to obtain it,” and “certified beach collected.” The better side of caution recommends passing up the offer: A five-dollar purchase shipped from Bermuda to the United States could result in a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a holiday in Sing Sing.
But, wait. We’re not through with Moby Dick.
As a child I suffered from anxiety attacks whenever my family went out for dinner. Inevitably I vomited at the table and was instantly removed from the party. Once at the tony Washington Athletic Club, an Easter dinner, I recall, when served ham with pineapple sauce, I immediately vomited across the white damask tablecloth. My Italian uncle was the only family member who spoke to me the remainder of the afternoon. The part that most mortified my mother was that the actress Vivien Leigh was dining at the next table and saw it all. And so I think I understand how a whale feels when the act of yacking draws attention. But the real case in point here concerns the candles used as decoration for such elegant dining, the Italian uncle who never heard of spermaceti, and how flotsam revolutionized the candle industry.
Candles have always represented class status, serving as a signal to visitors of their host’s financial condition. Disgustingly pungent tallow candles in the eighteenth century decorated tables of lower-class homes and establishments. In literature as in real life, tallow candles reek of poverty and decrepitude.
In 1850, Charles Dickens’s Mr. Booley (Household Words) recounts the Last Lord Mayor’s Show in which a procession of tallow candlemakers was separated deliberately from the elephant, in order to spare the elephant the stink of the tallow makers: “After the Camel of Asia, came the Elephant of Africa. I found this idea, likewise, very pleasant. The exquisite scent possessed by the elephant rendered it out of the question that he could have been produced at an earlier stage of the Procession, or the Tallow-Chandlers, with their under Beadles, Beadles, and Band of Pensioners, might have roused him to a state of fury. Therefore, the Civic Dignitaries and Aldermen (whose noses are not keen) immediately followed that ill-savoured Company, and the Elephant was reserved until now.”
Tallow, a hard form of sheep or cattle fat, was melted and molded into candles, which provided light and heat while the fat emitted its repugnant odor. Beeswax, the preferred material, made fine, sweet smelling candles, but like tallow candles, in the heat of summer, beeswax often turned soft and melted, making a mess of the dinner table.
Nevertheless, beeswax candles, from ancient Egypt to today, have enjoyed a fine reputation among the higher classes and the religious. Because beeswax candles burn cleanly and produce a pleasant odor, with little smoke and virtually no dribbling down a candle’s length, they symbolize purity and are the preferred choice for religious rites of many faiths.
But it was a puzzling flotsam that struck like lightning over the poorly illuminated world. For eons a strange stuff had been spied drifting on the ocean surface and sometimes washed up along the shores. Buoyant, greasy, grayish in color, with a surprisingly pleasant odor, these mysterious globs—no, they weren’t ambergris—fascinated sailors who discovered them bobbing in the sea, and while beachcombers generally found them too disgusting to handle, they nonetheless could not deny the blobs’ attractive olfactory quality. People talked about it, much the way people today talk about mutton tripe—in hushed, cautious tones.
History records that eighteenth-century whalers finally identified the floatable globs as the same substance that they found in a sperm whale’s unique skull cavity, which they called spermaceti. Then someone—I’m betting on a whaler’s wife—discovered the blobs might actually be good for something. Once the blobs had crystallized, they formed a fragrant wax, not quite suited to the bikini line but fragrant and long-burning, and therefore perfectly suited to candle making.
The sperm whale derives its common name from its spermaceti organ, which comprises the greater mass of matter inside its skull. The organ is a waxy glob that possibly provides some buoyancy control, assisting the whale in diving and ascending. With a change in blood flow, the whale can alter the substance from a solid wax to a liquid state. In this theory, when solid, the organ becomes denser, allowing the whale to sink; when liquid, it is less dense, providing more buoyancy. A second theory suggests the spermaceti organ is used for echolocation, allowing the whale to focus and control sound waves. Both theories may prove correct.
Literature introduced the world to spermaceti in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick: “Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state [my italics]. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.”
And so flotsam blobs transformed candle making. The resulting spermaceti oil, when burned, elicited that pleasant odor and, too, spermaceti wax was harder than tallow or beeswax, producing longer-burning candles. By the late eighteenth century, spermaceti wax had set the standard for candle making. Beeswax remained the candle of choice for religious ceremonies. Tallow was reserved for the lower classes.
Although spermaceti trade is, like ambergris trade, prohibited by CITES, the market for spermaceti is worldwide and healthy. The stuff is as easily purchased as ambergris on eBay, but spermaceti today usually is physicall
y extracted from captured whales, and no captured whale survives the extraction. Anyone offering spermaceti oil for sale likely obtained it from an illegally captured sperm whale. Rarely, anymore, does spermaceti wash up.
One final note on the subject of spermaceti: When I asked my Italian uncle if he had ever heard of spermaceti, he replied, “That’s a Sicilian dish. We northerners aren’t so crude.”
Mrs. Stramanos’s Wonderful Flotsam Jewelry
I know a woman who covers herself in flotsam jewelry. Her earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings are all made from ancient flotsam washed up on beaches in and around Riga, Latvia, where her husband is from. He’s a successful neurologist with what Americans call disposable income. Apparently all of Dr. Stramanos’s disposable income is invested in his wife’s jewelry. She is a tall, broad-beamed, refined Amazon who lopes when she walks, probably a result of the combined weight of her jewelry. Each time I see her, Mrs. Stramanos has added more flotsam around her neck, her wrists, or on her ears. She is beginning to resemble a glorious noble fir decorated for Christmas. The most amazing thing about Mrs. Stramanos is that she can tell you where each piece of her flotsam jewelry originated before it went afloat on the Baltic Sea eventually to wash up in Latvia.
Mrs. Stramanos wears amber. Some of her necklaces include amber beads the size of golf balls. Translucent and millions of years old, the cognac and honey-colored amber chunks, carefully cut and polished, reveal tiny bits of prehistoric plants and insects, even little hairlike threads inside. One pendant hanging very near her jugular vein contains an ancient mosquito with blood in its stomach. If the mosquito ever escapes, God help Mrs. Stramanos. It looks like it wants to bite Mrs. Stramanos, but she calmly reassures me that creatures trapped in this ancient flotsam will never again fly or crawl or bite. Mrs. Stramanos is a walking textbook on the subject of amber flotsam and its trapped prehistoric flora and fauna.
The poet Alexander Pope in “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735), wrote this:Pretty! In amber to observe the forms
Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms;
The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare,
But wonder how the devil they got there.
Fossil amber, Mrs. Stramanos tells me, when it’s rubbed against a cloth, becomes charged with negative electricity. Baltic peoples believe that, like ocean-borne negative ions, this negative electricity is a good thing. Not only Baltic folk: New Agers, shamans, Wiccans, and soothsayers also ascribe supernatural properties to amber. A recent eBay auctioneer, hawking “Golden Amber Rough Organic Gemstone” from the Baltic Sea under the moniker “Future of Light—Feel Yourself Here and Now,” claims that amber “dissolves negativity and depression,” is a “Disintoxicant and painkiller. Helps us to find greater peace and harmony, transforms negative energies in positive [sic] and develops altruism. It is a symbol of personal power, health, virtue, happiness and joy of living. Purifies the living and working spaces and protects from radiations.” And here is the one and only fact upon which eBay amber merchants and Mrs. Stramanos agree: “In contact with the skin its electromagnetic properties create a field that tends to heal the area around it.”
Snicker if you will, but whenever I approach Mrs. Stramanos at a cocktail party or other social event, I immediately sense an electromagnetic irradiation of all negative aspects of my being, notice increased purification and a harmonious attitude, and if I have a stomachache or similar internal or external malady, it immediately disappears.
Fossil amber is the fossilized resin of plinus succinifera, coniferous trees, from the Eocene period about 40 million to 55 million years ago. Mainly found washed up on beaches of the Baltic Sea or floating upon its surface, amber is also mined in open pits, but it’s the flotsam amber that’s most prized, I suppose because a gift from the sea carries more romance than pit-mined treasure. For thousands of years, Mrs. Stramanos explained to me, collectors have prized chunks of amber whose honey, golden, or cognac translucence not only emits a warm incandescence but also reveals whole insects, or flower blossoms, or swaths of pollen of prehistoric vintage trapped inside and perfectly preserved. Mrs. Stramanos has an amber bead enfolding a rare intact prehistoric flower blossom, a precursor, I think, to edelweiss. It’s quite a treasure. But it’s rare insects that really excite the cognoscenti. A fossilized rare species of gnat, for example, can send thrills up an entomologist’s spine and trigger instant inflation in the amber market. Mrs. Stramanos has an amber cabochon ring whose stone encases a rare beetle species.
I ask Mrs. Stramanos how the insect got inside her cabochon. “Millions of years ago, when resin dripped down a tree’s bark, insects would get trapped,” she tells me. “When the resin set, the insects became encased for eternity. This has been a boon to entomology. Of course, the same is true for flowers and other plant materials, contributing to the knowledge of botany and other natural sciences.”
One of her favorite subjects is the Victorian fascination with amber. “The Victorians revered amber, not only for its beauty, but for its healing powers,” Mrs. Stramanos informs me. “Especially the Brits. The English bourgeoisie made a sport of acquiring really big chunks of amber with all sorts of interesting stuff trapped inside. They used them as paper-weights, or just as conversation pieces, and they set them on their parlor tables to impress their guests.”
Mrs. Stramanos has made the pursuit and knowledge of amber her life’s work. This may explain why Dr. Stramanos always seems to wear a wistful, slightly wan expression. The poor man has lost his true love to his native land’s most revered flotsam. He is literally hidden behind her now when they appear at social gatherings, with Mrs. Stramanos bedecked in her wonderful flotsam jewelry.
Amber’s components include approximately 80 percent carbon, 10 percent hydrogen, and small quantities of sulfur. Its hardness registers 2 to 2.5 on Mohs scale. Think of a substance not quite as hard as a pearl. Fossil amber varies in color depending on what materials it contains. Black amber contains tree bark or bits of fossilized plant material from forest floors. Brown and green amber contain moss. The clearer shades of cognac, golden yellow, and even pale ivory contain mostly resin and because of their lightness and translucence, show off the captured detritus. Rare specimens of blue and cherry amber have been plucked off Baltic beaches, and these are highly prized.
I ask Mrs. Stramanos if amber can be found anywhere besides the Baltic region. She sniffs. “People will say so,” she demurs, “but it’s not really amber. The stuff that comes from the Dominican Republic, or from New Jersey? That’s all much younger than Baltic amber, much less interesting to the knowledgeable collector.”
“New Jersey?”
Mrs. Stramanos rolls her eyes. “So they claim.”
When found on the Baltic shore, amber can seem like a lump of plastic with a rough, weather-beaten character, not the purveyor of supernatural golden light that will reveal itself once it is properly cleaned and polished. A good test for amber’s authenticity is to put a lighted match to it. While plastic gives off a putrid chemical odor, amber releases an aromatic resinous perfume. My Scots grandmother used to wear a perfume called Tabu, which gave off distinctly amber bottom notes. I tell Mrs. Stramanos this.
“Of course,” she starts, “amber essence is somewhat of an aphrodisiac.”
I stop her right there. I can’t bear even an insinuation that my grandmother dabbed aphrodisiacs on her décolletage.
Both ambergris (of whale yack origin) and amber are among the oldest known substances traded between Asian and European merchants. Both substances have for millennia been burned as incense, and applied to the body or swallowed for medicinal reasons. Sailors have made fortunes collecting the sea’s most exotic flotsam.
The demand for amber jewelry is so great that a process called pressed amber was developed to spread the material around. In this process, small bits of true amber otherwise unsuitable as jewelry are heated to nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit (around 320 degrees Celsius) and pressed together int
o plate or cylindrical shapes, from which objects are stamped or carved out. Sometimes the jewelry maker will sprinkle gold or silver flecks into the liquid amber before it is pressed. These flecks impart the false impression of captured organic material. Much of the amber jewelry for sale today is manufactured from this pressed amber technique. The Chinese melt honey-colored resin and cleverly insert modern-era bugs whose corpses they have tortured to give a prehistoric appearance. They sell these miniature artifacts on eBay for ninety-nine cents a pop. They are tiny frauds, worth the price. The Chinese, Mrs. Stramanos tells me, sell so many of these fakes that if the Cultural Revolution’s Away With All Pests campaign wasn’t successful the first time around, surely by now all of Guangzhou’s flies have been captured in amber pendants for sale on eBay.
Chunks of real amber containing insects or flora proliferate on eBay auctions, but these are mostly processed amber or fragments containing boring species of flora and fauna; few measure up to Latvian standards—the highest indicator of quality. None of the amber decorating Mrs. Stramanos would ever be traded online.
I have walked Latvian beaches hoping to find even the tiniest chunk of amber. I don’t care if it holds an insect leg or rare flower petal, or botanically interesting pollen; a tiny speck of prehistoric pollen would suffice. But as Mrs. Stramanos explains to me, amber flotsam has become harder and harder to find. “Most of the really rare stuff,” she says, “has already been snatched up. Sadly, the Baltic has given up most of its amber.”