At home earlier that morning, I had read a December 2006 article in the New York Times with a headline that reminded me of a 1950s B movie: “PLEASE LET IT BE WHALE VOMIT, NOT JUST SEA JUNK”. It described the circumstances by which Dorothy Ferreira, a sixty-seven-year-old woman from Long Island, became the owner of a strange green object that she hoped was ambergris. In an accompanying photograph, Ferreira — a grey helmet of hair, a smudge of bright red lipstick — peered myopically from behind the object, gripping it tightly in both hands like a steering wheel. Against the wood panelling in Ferreira’s home, it was a translucent, sickly olive-green colour. Its dimpled surface was an accumulation, a confusion really, of long, thin tangles, which reminded me of worm castings — the intricate little piles of mud work sometimes left behind on a lawn by earthworms that have tunnelled beneath it.
Several days earlier, Ferreira had received a box from her eighty-two-year-old sister in Iowa. Inside the box: the object. It weighed 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms). Her sister had found it in Fort Pond Bay, off the Long Island Sound, in the mid-1950s. Decades later she moved to Iowa and took it with her: a bright green heart-shaped tangle of unidentified material she had found while beachcombing with her dog, half her lifetime ago. For more than fifty years, she had wondered what the object was and whether it was valuable. When asked by the Times why she had sent the object to Ferreira in Montauk, New York, the older sister replied: “I’m not feeling too good, and I don’t have much time left.”
Ferreira had eagerly shown the bright green object to neighbours, local reporters, representatives from the local office of the Department of Natural Resources, and anyone else willing to take a look. Eventually, someone suggested to Ferreira that it might be ambergris.
“A hundred years ago, you would have no problem finding someone who could identify this,” James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, told the Times. “More often, you have people who think they’ve found it and they can retire, only to find out it’s a big hunk of floor wax.”
Back on the beach in Brighton, under a ceiling of dark clouds, I have made it to the end of the bay. I have nothing to show for the two kilometres I walked. From the portentous clouds, I know a storm is on its way. Hurrying now to make it back to my car, I still stop every few steps to prod another random object with my driftwood. And as I do so, I wonder how to gain that experience for myself — the experience that so few people have — to be able to identify ambergris.
A few days earlier, I had read another description of ambergris in The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses. Author Chandler Burr recounted a conversation with fragrance chemist Luca Turin, who described a journey made by Guy Robert — the French perfumer who, in the 1970s, created the fragrance Dioressence for Dior — to London, to evaluate a large piece of ambergris.
Turin told him: “So Guy gets on a plane and flies up to see the dealer, and they bring out the chunk of ambergris. It looks like black butter. This chunk was about 2 feet square, 30 kilos or something. Huge. A brick like that can power Chanel’s ambergris needs for twenty years. This chunk is worth half a million pounds.”
In fact, established perfume houses like Chanel and Dior likely would have avoided purchasing ambergris that resembled black butter. A hundred years ago, the largest French perfume houses employed specialists with highly trained noses to evaluate and purchase ambergris directly from dealers. And they made sure to select and obtain only the very best ambergris. In the mid-1930s, two fragrance chemists named A. C. Stirling and William Poucher attempted to further classify ambergris, dividing it into ten distinct gradations, based on colour, origin, and other characteristics. The differences between the several grades of ambergris are narrow but deep: black ambergris is fresh and soft, and smells like sheep dung. It can be worked with the hands like wet clay and is soft enough that several pieces can be added to one another and rolled into pungent balls. The least refined grade of ambergris, it requires additional processing before it can be used to make perfumes. It lacks all the complexity of a small weathered piece of silver ambergris — the highest grade in Stirling and Poucher’s classification system — that has spent decades in the ocean, slowly transforming one molecule at a time.
Back on Brighton Beach, I have finally reached the deserted parking lot and my waiting car. The wind is even stronger now, angling in sharply from the sea. The boughs of the slender pines growing near the grassy backshore are beginning to bounce with each gust. I am exhausted. I had prodded a few hundred random objects on the beach and prised up several heavy pieces of warped timber deposited on the camber of the shoreline by a recent storm. And I am more confused than ever: am I looking for something that is luminescent and olive green, like the object Ferreira received from her sister in the winter of 2006? Or should I be searching for a substance that instead resembles a block of greasy black butter, like the ambergris in the anecdote Turin shared with Burr? Could it be both? Or is it, in fact, neither?
In March 2009, while swimming in the ocean near Oakura, near New Plymouth, on New Zealand’s North Island, seven-year-old Ben Marsh swam straight into a large round lump of ambergris. A few days later, an article reporting the find appeared in the Taranaki Daily News, beneath the headline “BEN STRIKES IT LUCKY WITH SMELLY FIND”.
Marsh had seen the ambergris floating in the waves, picked it up, and carried it from the ocean. The newspaper article was accompanied by a photograph of blond-haired Marsh, proudly cradling his ambergris: a potato-size lump that filled both of Marsh’s small hands. It had a dark and shiny surface, a patina, and, at each end, its surface was white, as if it had polar icecaps. It weighed a little more than 300 grams. Also visible in the photograph is the boy’s mother, Julie, who told reporters that the lump smelled strongly, like manure, and would have stayed on the beach had her husband, Nigel, not listened recently to a radio show about the value of ambergris. The lump had been appraised by an ambergris trader, who confirmed its authenticity and, the Marsh family hoped, would soon be extending an offer of purchase. The potential value of the ambergris had come as something of a surprise to Ben Marsh.
“I thought,” he told a reporter, “it was just an ordinary floating rock.”
By the time I read about Ben Marsh’s ambergris, I had begun a transformation of my own. I had been searching for ambergris for more than six months — since the moment I first read about the half-tonne boulder of tallow that had washed ashore on Breaker Bay, near Wellington. Gradually, as the months passed, I had become tight-lipped and territorial about it too. It began slowly. At first, I started to eye other people on the beach with suspicion. After several months of walking the local beaches, this had become, in my mind at least, my territory. It was my patch. One day my wife and I saw three people on the beach at Aramoana, watching a scrappy little dog dig into the flat wet sand. The dog was almost out of sight, at the bottom of a rapidly growing hole. The sky was an unbroken blue, but it was cold and windy on the beach. The people had turned their backs to the surf and were instead facing the dunes and the grassy banks of the backshore, glancing at their watches and holding empty bags. Clearly, they were searching for something. Wet clumps of sand flew through the air. We approached them across the beach. I tried to adopt a friendly what a beautiful day for a walk on the beach tone of voice and asked them, “What are you looking for?” They said nothing. The surf broke behind us on the beach. A gull flew past in the wind. The people stared at us without smiling and finally answered, “Nothing.”
Maybe they were looking for tuatua, a flavourful type of shellfish found on flat sandy beaches like this one. At other times, I had seen people combing the beach for shells or harvesting slippery armfuls of fresh seaweed from the sand and carrying them away in dripping bags. But perhaps they were looking for ambergris along the tide line, right here on my patch. It felt like a violation.
Eventually, several months after beginning my search for ambergris, I contact Adrienne Beuse, a
full-time ambergris dealer based in Dargaville, about 160 kilometres north of Auckland, and find that she is willing to talk with me. Together with her husband, Frans, Adrienne Beuse runs one of the most successful and high-profile ambergris trading companies in New Zealand, selling ambergris to buyers spread across the world.
Along with several other local residents, Beuse claims, Vodanovich is part of a large, semi-organized collective — what she calls a gang — that collects and trades ambergris aggressively from Northland beaches. “They’re called the Beach Mafia up here,” she says matter-of-factly. “They claim a proprietary interest in the beach. They are defending, I guess in their minds, their territory. And it’s worth a lot of money. If a piece worth $50,000 washes up, they don’t want anyone else to find it.”
Beuse pauses, as she tries to find the right words to describe the situation in Dargaville, with so many different factions searching for the ambergris that washes ashore there. “Trouble,” she says eventually, “can ensue.”
A small city with fewer than five thousand residents, Dargaville is mostly an uneventful place, situated on a slow, wide bend of the Wairoa River, as it winds toward the coast 13 kilometres westward. Nothing much happens. Nevertheless, in late 2003 a quiet sort of war really was taking place on its beaches, in front of the pounding surf. Most of the local residents were oblivious to it, but a current of threat ran along the shoreline. Posture was sufficient to win most battles, and owning a ferocious-looking dog helped. But, inevitably, the threat sometimes exploded into incident. The Beach Mafia occasionally had to act to retain control of local beaches. If the weather conditions were right for ambergris — sustained periods of strong westerly and southwesterly winds, which cause high tides and rough seas — several separate groups of ambergris collectors, each with their own allegiances, would make their way to the coastline to harvest ambergris. At those times, the potential for violence became palpable.
More than once, the local police had been forced to intervene. Adrienne and Frans Beuse had been threatened and then attacked while driving their all-terrain vehicle along the shoreline near their home. Two speeding cars had pursued them along the beach, edging closer and closer, almost forcing them into the ocean. The incident was reported in a September 2004 article in the New Zealand Herald under the headline “WHALE WASTE CAUSING BEACH DISPUTES”. “When we reported it,” Adrienne Beuse told the Herald, “we were told by the police to either stay away from the beach or to take several people with us if we wanted to go down there but we feel sooner or later there’s going to be a tragedy out there …
“These northern beaches are, you know, premium collecting areas, and there’s a bunch of people that rely on them. In fact, someone came to me the other day and there was some good weather, and they said some groups were running into each other on the beach. And they figured they would go and get a deck chair and set it up on the beach, because something good was going to happen.”
Every morning I make a 13-kilometre journey to work, driving south from our tiny house in the historic town of Port Chalmers to Dunedin, along the twisting harbour road. Sometimes I ride the bus to work instead, past cramped little houses squeezed into suburbs: Sawyers Bay, St Leonards, Roseneath, Burkes, and Maia. Smoke curls from chimneys into a wet, grey sky. Peeling wooden boats sit on trailers in driveways. A handwritten sign on a gate reads: “Horse poo $2 a bag”. Overgrown clumps of flax line the pavement, their spindly black stalks bent over the roadside by the wind. Through a thick green screen of trees and bushes, I watch the water closely. To the north, churning past the heads, fresh tidewaters surge into the harbour, refilling the rocky bays. In the middle of the channel, the water is brisk and blue. Seagulls have settled on the waves, like grains of salt sprinkled on the dark water. On cold winter mornings, the lights of Broad Bay, Portobello, and Macandrew Bay across the harbour twinkle in muted yellow clusters through the fog, like unnamed constellations.
The entrance to Otago Harbour a few kilometres farther to the north is narrow and acts like a natural bottleneck. Immediately after the harbour opening, the channel widens briefly before narrowing again, as the water is forced between two rocky peninsulas, through a tideway almost completely obstructed by two islands — Quarantine Island and Goat Island — that sit green and round-shouldered on an anticline in the strait. In short, the harbour is a 22-kilometre-long bottle. Its contents are completely replaced every twenty-four hours. From above, it resembles a sea horse, clearly divided somewhere near its middle, after which its tail unfurls to the southwest and terminates finally at Dunedin.
Occasionally, things get trapped in bottles, able to enter but not exit again. Perhaps the tides have carried pieces of ambergris through the tight opening of the harbour, and they have become trapped somewhere in the natural green net strung across the channel. In fact, it isn’t difficult to imagine countless pieces of ambergris — heavy, misshapen boulders of it — littering the undisturbed rocky shores of Quarantine Island in the middle of the channel.
I have read on the website of French ambergris trader Bernard Perrin that weathered, waxy lumps of ambergris floating in the ocean can be identified from the shore by a trained and careful eye, and will be surrounded by a ring of calmer water. The hydrophobic organic compounds in the ambergris — the alcohols, ketones, lactones, and aldehydes — disrupt the surface of the water so that, from a distance, it resembles a little localized oil slick. I scan the channel beyond the cabbage trees and the flax: seagulls bobbing on the waves, fishing boats, green rocky coastline. But this morning there are no unexpected patches of calm water amid the whitecaps. In other words, I will not have to explain my actions to my wife, who has asked me several times what I will do if I actually see an area of oddly calm water in the harbour as I drive to work in the morning.
One hundred twenty-five years before Ben Marsh collided with a lump of ambergris in the water off Oakura, someone in nearby New Plymouth devised one of the strangest ambergris-related business schemes that I have come across. The plan was reported in the Wanganui Herald in September 1883. “I hear they have an idea at Waitara of developing a new industry there,” wrote the Herald’s correspondent. “A few young whales are to be captured and literated in the river — the bar preventing their return to the ocean — where they will be fed on a preparation of chloridine. This, in course of time, will produce vast quantities of ambergris, which commands almost a fabulous price in the home market.”
But ambergris cannot be farmed like potatoes. It cannot be produced by intentionally poisoning sperm whales. It must be found. And finding ambergris is a little like finding gold. In the mid-nineteenth century, across the wide and empty plains of the American West, fortunes were made and squandered by those who turned the soil over and saw the dull gleam of gold glinting back at them through the dirt. But there are important differences between ambergris and gold. Unlike ambergris, gold and other mineral resources are predictable. Their formation, millions of years ago, required a specific set of geological conditions to occur all at the same time. Knowing the geological conditions that produced them increases the likelihood of finding deposits that can be mined and extracted. This could not be less true for ambergris. Its formation is mysterious and still debated among cetologists, and knowing the precise conditions under which it is formed helps very little. It is simply out there somewhere, riding the cold waves until the correct conditions combine with one another and bring it to shore.
The most important distinction is that, under almost all circumstances, mineral resources like gold stay precisely where they were made. Locked within the rock, they remain unchanged and unmoved for millions of years. The only challenge is to locate and extract them before someone else gets to them. In contrast, ambergris is always changing. The challenge is to locate it before it is eroded by the elements into pieces that are infinitesimally small and worthless. Eventually, it will become nothing and will simply disappear. And ambergris is always moving. It is highly mobile. It might be found tens of thousa
nds of kilometres from where it was made, decades later. Imagine how different the history of the California Gold Rush might have been if the gleaming nuggets of gold that the prospectors were seeking traveled vast distances, were likely to move again, and were eroding as the hopeful prospectors searched for them.
Nevertheless, in January 2006, Leon and Loralee Wright must have felt like they had found gold. During a walk on Streaky Bay, in remote South Australia, they stumbled over a boulder of ambergris weighing 14.5 kilograms. It didn’t gleam like gold. In fact, they told the Reuters news agency, it resembled a tree stump. It was odd-looking, they said, and not worth a second glance. They left it on the beach. As they walked away from it, a dizzying number of destinies waited for the object in Streaky Bay. It might be picked up again twelve hours later by the following high tide. Afterward, it could reappear somewhere else, in another bay farther along the coast, or be borne away on the open seas to drift again for years. At sea, it could be caught in a net and hauled out of the water, or broken up into smaller pieces by rough seas. Or it might stay exactly where it was, left to erode on Streaky Bay, a remote and windswept place that sees few visitors.
Floating Gold Page 6