One day on Tomahawk Beach, as dark rain clouds unfurled across the horizon like dirty linen, I found a dead seal pup, half-buried in the sand. I walked on, following the sweep of the bay. Farther along the beach I stopped to inspect pinecones, a glove, and an old coconut husk. It began to rain again. Farther still along the beach, with the tide quickly receding, I found a dead stiff-legged starfish, the colour of a gun barrel. I dropped it into a plastic bag that was tied around my wrist. Zigzagging my way steadily northwest across the wet sand, I arrived at the end of the beach, bending to pick up a dinner plate-size bull kelp holdfast (the flat disc-shaped part at the base of the stalk), which I threw into the breakers like a dented and buckled discus.
Over time, the objects I took home gradually changed. It was a period of refinement. I began to recognize each type of shell and seaweed, gradually imposing taxonomic order on an unfamiliar environment. I learned to recognize the common bird species, pointing them out to my son as he slept in his stroller: Arctic terns, cormorants, oystercatchers, spoonbills, and white-faced herons. Once, we saw a yellow-eyed penguin, rushing along the beach into the late afternoon sun like a round-shouldered commuter. We became hopeful beachcombers. I knew the difference between an oyster shell and a mussel shell, and could tell the flat rubbery blades of bull kelp from the thin wrinkled fronds of bladder kelp. One afternoon, finding a delicate little basket of bone in the sand, I was able to identify the skull of a black-backed gull, picked clean by the crabs. And from its design, I could differentiate between a recently discarded Coke can and a vintage, well-traveled can that had spent months in the ocean. But I found no ambergris. All those months and the steady kilometres I spent leaning into the rain, and I was still empty-handed.
Once one has acknowledged its innumerable mysteries, ambergris is just another piece of flotsam, transported by the ponderous and unpredictable movements of the ocean. It arrives on the shore via the same circuitous route taken by the multitudinous other objects I have found there: the lone shoes, the half-eaten fish heads, the bent and rusted umbrella frames stripped of their canvas. But it is the rarest and most valuable flotsam. If a boulder of ambergris weighing 90 kilograms washes ashore on Long Beach, it could be worth, depending on its quality, at least $2 million.
Many of the objects I find on the beach have spent a considerable time — sometimes years and even decades — trapped in huge swirling ocean currents called gyres. The existence of the gyres has become more well known in recent years, since the discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a tangled Texas-size accumulation of marine trash in the central North Pacific Ocean. There are, at different locations in the world’s oceans, five major oceanic gyres: rotating vortices that measure thousands of kilometres across.
A gyre functions, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer tells me, like “a giant clock. A turbine. It’s a giant gearbox.”
And Ebbesmeyer should know: he’s a self-proclaimed flotsametrician. For more than forty years, the coauthor of Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, has studied how flotsam drifts in the world’s oceans. Despite his efforts, he says, almost nothing is known about how long an object can float at sea or the path it will take while adrift. “Nobody really knows,” he admits. “There are all kinds of scenarios.”
Every object behaves differently at sea. On certain beaches, shoes for left feet appear ten times more often than shoes for right feet. Left-handed gloves drift in one direction; right-handed gloves in another. Trees float for about ten years before becoming waterlogged and sinking, or breaking apart in the water. Bottles last longer. After several decades, and a sufficient number of barnacles have anchored themselves to the bottle, it begins to sink. Eventually, its journey comes to an end on the seafloor. Other drifters — as Ebbesmeyer calls them — simply make landfall and eventually disintegrate under solar radiation.
“We’ve had messages in bottles come back after eighty years,” says Ebbesmeyer. “We know that about twenty species of tropical seeds can float for at least thirty-nine years by tank tests. My friends and I have been running tests for thirty-nine years. They’re still floating.”
Eighty years at sea: a human life span spent adrift in the ocean. For simplicity, let’s assume that ambergris floats on the ocean surface for a decade. “Ten years is enough time to drift halfway around the planet,” explains Ebbesmeyer. “The great gyres in the Pacific take six years to go around, so your ten years is about enough time to go twice around those great Pacific gyres, or three times around the Atlantic gyre, or around the five gyres that have three-year periods.”
Once ambergris, or any other piece of flotsam, enters a gyre, it travels on average between 8 and 12 kilometres a day. In one year, a slowly maturing boulder of ambergris might travel 4000 kilometres. But it is a journey about which flotsametricians like Ebbesmeyer know almost nothing. He can never know, for instance, precisely where in the vastness of the ocean a lump of ambergris began its journey, or where it has traveled to since. Even if he knows where a large piece of ambergris washed ashore, Ebbesmeyer would be no closer to understanding where it had come from or how long it had spent in the ocean before it arrived. He would simply know one important but infinitesimally small data point in its oceanic journey: where it ended. The rest of the journey is a mystery, an oceanic enigma. There are endless variations. It takes an object fourteen years to orbit the Melville gyre — a large elliptical current that sits in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia — but, once trapped in it, a drifter travels less than a kilometre a day. An object in the cigar-shaped Turtle gyre, which extends from the West Coast of the United States all the way to South Asia, travels about 10 kilometres a day; glass balls have been recovered after orbiting the Turtle gyre nine times — a journey that lasted almost sixty years.
“To me,” says Ebbesmeyer, “the ocean is kind of half random and half deterministic.”
By concentrating on the more deterministic aspects of ocean currents, Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer, have generated a computer-based modelling system to track the movement of flotsam, called the Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS. “It’s a massive database,” Ebbesmeyer explains. “And to get all that data in there, and clean, and then find the algorithms that represent the wind and the currents is a major undertaking. We were never funded to do that, so we just did it on our spare time.”
I wonder aloud to Ebbesmeyer whether OSCURS would be able to predict the best places to find ambergris. “It’s very crude,” he tells me. “OSCURS is just a model for the North Pacific, and there really is no OSCURS for any other gyre on the planet. It took Jim Ingraham his whole life, forty years of work, to get that far.”
Perhaps, like a message in a bottle, ambergris drifts for longer, even eighty years or more. “There are very few drifters that can last that long,” says Ebbesmeyer. “These are like planetary drifters. They go a long, long, long way. It’s a message to the future. It’s almost like some of the satellites we put out to the stars. They’re still out there. Some of the satellites are still transmitting after thirty years. Tropical seeds can float for at least thirty-nine years, and it looks like ambergris is in that very, very rare category of drifters that can survive for as long as a human might live, or as long as a whale might live.”
Ebbesmeyer pauses for a moment. We are both, I think, considering the immense distances that ambergris might travel after spending so many years at sea. One hundred and sixty thousand kilometres in forty years. In eighty years, a distance of 320,000 kilometres — almost the distance from the Earth to the moon.
“Suppose we were both whales,” Ebbesmeyer says finally, “and we were swimming around and we let some ambergris go. That would be our epitaph. They’re like little floating tombstones of whales.”
Located on the east coast of Otago Peninsula, Sandfly Bay is a long, wide belt of sand that sits between two steep headland
s, book-ended by rugged cliffs and enclosed along its curving length by a natural sandy wall. The shoreline cannot be reached by road. I walk along a gently sloping gravel path with my wife and son, dropping through grassy meadows filled with grazing sheep. We trudge down a precipitously steep and sandy incline, best descended by taking several patient, slow, lunging steps, my son giggling in a backpack behind me. I lunge, sink into the soft sand, and then lunge again, until I stand at the bottom of the slope with sand-filled shoes.
Out to sea, waves crash against a jagged remnant of volcanic rock in the hazy distance, throwing a skirt of white water around its black base. It is a beautiful and unspoiled place. Strong crosswinds whip the water into a rough chop. A solitary wispy cloud unfurls high above us in the blue sky. I watch as it drifts over the grassy dunes and toward the cliffs. It is, I think to myself, almost whale-shaped: a good omen.
At night I have begun to dream of ambergris, of stumbling over a large grey tortoise-shaped lump of it hidden in the dunes on Long Beach, or a few kilometres to the southeast at windswept Aramoana, or on the other side of the peninsula on Allans Beach. In the middle of the night, I lie in bed and imagine, just a few kilometres to the north, out beyond the harbour in the open sea, a slow-moving pod of sperm whales swimming through the black water, past the darkened hillsides. University of Otago professor Steve Dawson had told me that sperm whales almost certainly pass through Otago waters from time to time, headed farther north to Kai-koura — a whale-watching destination popular with tourists — or south, to colder waters. No one really knows. Without trailing a hydrophone from a boat into deep water to listen for their distinctive volleys of vocalized clicks, it is impossible to know.
We search the southern end of the bay first: a dead cormorant, with dirty matted feathers; a flip-flop; dried green-black streamers of kelp; a cassette, with its tape missing from its spools; pale grey clumps of marine sponge; and empty mussel shells. I find a dead sea horse on the beach. It is 15 centimetres long and dried and stiff. Sand has collected in the depressions of its corrugated body. The end of its tail curls into a delicate spiral. Its grey eyes are sunken in their sockets. It smells fishy, but I keep it anyway, carefully folding it into the deep pocket of my raincoat. In more than six months spent searching for ambergris, it is the closest thing to treasure that I have found. I leave my wife and son in the shelter of the grassy wall and begin to head north, crisscrossing the sand, trying to cover as much ground as possible as the tide recedes. The only sound I can hear is the unbroken roar of the sea.
Halfway along the beach, at the edge of the wet sand, I see three or four pieces of something that looks like driftwood — irregular, flattened, almost circular in shape, and grey-brown against the wet sand. Bending over, I take a closer look at one of them. Perhaps, I wonder to myself, it is fresh ambergris that has been dumped on the shore by the last tide. In a few seconds, I have eliminated all the substances usually mistaken for ambergris: it isn’t a white, greasy piece of tallow, a dead gull, or a marine sponge. It isn’t driftwood or a long rotting stalk of bull kelp. I feel my heart begin to quicken at the possibility that, after all these months, I have finally found ambergris.
Leaning closer, I extend an exploratory finger to give it a tentative prod. Unexpectedly, my fingertip enters the lump and then passes through it, leaving a long green painterly smear through its middle. I straighten slowly. In the middle distance, three huge sea lions lie on the beach. They huff and belch and steam in the sun. A large male raises a black flipper in the air and yawns, disturbing a cloud of flies. There is, closer to where I am standing, a long ladder of peaks and troughs in the sand — the distinctive path left by a sea lion as it lumbers back into the sea. With mounting horror, I look again at my finger: a dark, thin green seam now trapped beneath my fingernail. And in the distance, the belching sea lions. Slowly, I begin to realize that I have, with the tip of my finger, sampled a fresh wet lump of sea lion shit. A long rolling breaker collapses on itself in the sun. I run to the water with my finger held aloft. A lone seagull watches impassively as I hold my hand in the ice-cold surf.
When my finger is clean again, I walk back along the beach empty-handed, past the dead cormorant and the driftwood, to my waiting family. It is late in the afternoon. Back at the southern end of the beach, shadows slowly slide down the cliff face as the sun makes its way toward the sea. In the pale blue sky above me, the whale-shaped cloud is gone.
In 1729, when Caspar Neumann wrote his monograph in Philosophical Transactions, the true source of ambergris still remained a mystery:
There are few substances concerning the origin of which there have been so many various Opinions among authors. One ascribes it to the Vegetable Kingdom, another to the Animal, and a third to the Mineral Kingdom. But others not contented with the 3 Kingdoms, into which all natural Bodies are commonly reduced, have thought fit to make it a Subject of an Aereal Kingdom; and others again will have it to belong to none of these Kingdoms, but to a Marine Kingdom: and yet the whole Sea, with all its various Contents of Animals, Fishes, Shells, Plants, Stones, Waters, Salts, etc., may be ascribed to one or other of the three usual Kingdoms; and therefore there is no Need of any such new Distribution.
Neumann was an exhaustive compiler. He managed to compile a list of almost twenty possible sources of ambergris, all of which had been proposed by various scientists during the previous century or so. They ranged from the ridiculous to the absurd. It was, some claimed, the sperm of a whale. Others believed it was a grounded meteor or a certain type of mushroom, which grew at the bottom of the ocean, floating to the surface after stormy weather. It was the fruit of a tree that only grew on the coast in Guyana or the liver of a particular species of fish.
Other writers added to the theories. In 1764 the anonymous author of The History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands described a small sandy bay on the island of Graciosa, which was known by the natives as Playa del Ambar. “Here is sometimes found a very good kind of ambergrease,” the author wrote, “in form something like a pear, having commonly a short stalk: by this it should seem that it grows on the rocks under-water, which are near to this place, and is washed ashore by the waves, for it is generally found after stormy weather.”
Jean-Baptiste Denis, personal physician to King Louis XIV of France, proposed that ambergris was a mixture of wax and honey that had melted in the sun, fallen into the sea, and been transformed by the seawater and the action of the waves. “This opinion seems to be further supported,” states an entry in The New Universal English Dictionary from 1760, “in that large pieces have been found before it has arrived at its full maturity, which being broke had wax and honey in the middle of them.” Writing in The History of Japan in 1690, the German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer concluded that ambergris was “a kind of bitumen generated in the bowels of the earth, or a subterraneous fat, grown to the consistence of a Bitumen, which is by subterraneous canals carried into the sea, and there undergoes a farther digestion, being by the admixtion of its saline particles, and the heat of the sun, changed into Ambergrease.”
Others claimed that ambergris was, as Neumann indignantly put it, “the Dung of Birds.” He continued:
Nay, they go so far as to describe the very Bird from which it proceeds. They say it is the Size of a Goose, with beautiful Feathers, and Spots, and is called in the Maldivian tongue Anacangrispasqui, and, in that of Madagascar, Aschibobuck. Ferdinand Lopez de Castagneda and others affirm, that this Bird feeds upon various fragrant Herbs, and that it deposits the precious Dung proceeding from them, on Rocks and Stones in and about the Sea.
In fact, when Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa encountered Maldivian natives in 1518, that was what they told him. The truth was perhaps stranger still, but, at least for the meantime, it would remain a mystery.
One wet Sunday morning, instead of driving to the coast, I call John Vodanovich, the Dargaville-based ambergris hunter. Several years earlier, he had had an accident — vehicle versus fishing
equipment — with Ross Sherman on Baylys Beach. Back in 2003, Vodanovich had been a professional ambergris collector. I want to know if he still searches for ambergris on Northland beaches.
It is midmorning. Vodanovich sounds very tired. But he is willing to talk. Each question I ask him is followed by a long static-filled silence. I hold the phone to my ear, waiting patiently for a response. Birds twitter outside in the trees. Somewhere on the street, a car horn honks, waits, and honks again. And then Vodanovich slowly begins to answer a question, groaning at first, as he marshals the words. We speak this way for almost an hour. It is exhausting. And it’s difficult to believe he is an important member of a dangerous and territorial Beach Mafia.
Collecting ambergris, Vodanovich tells me, is still his full-time profession. “I got threatened at Taharoa once,” he says, “and got kicked off that beach. These Maoris followed us. They came and they just told us we’d got ten minutes or half an hour or something to get off the beach. We’d already done it though. But that was a bit scary. They must have got wind we were looking for ambergris, and they come down really quick, even though, you know, it’s such a small beach there wouldn’t be much there at all, I’d say.”
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