Floating Gold

by Christopher Kemp

  It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but I was willing to accept it. For a year, as I tirelessly searched the local beaches for ambergris, I struggled to answer the most fundamental question: when a pungent boulder of ambergris washes ashore on the beaches of Sri Lanka, Australia, or Indonesia, who buys it and for what purpose do they use it?

  And then I called Bernard Perrin, who told me nonchalantly, as green Normandy swirled and flashed past his window, that Chandler Burr was wrong.

  At L’École de Pharmacie in Paris in 1820, in a cramped but industrious laboratory, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaime Caventou were about to embark on a new project. The bright Parisian sunlight was angling in through the windows and bouncing off a bristling forest of glass distillation columns and a row of bubbling water baths. On the cluttered workbench, in front of Pelletier and Caventou, sat a small and fragrant piece of ambergris. In the previous few years, the two scientists had made several important discoveries. They were quietly becoming world-famous: there is a monument in Paris honouring their achievements; and in 1970 a postage stamp was issued in France with their profiles on it. Eventually, Caventou would even have a crater on the moon named after him. Together, they had developed new techniques that allowed them to isolate and extract the active compounds from medicinal plants. It was a development that would revolutionize medicine. First, in 1817, they had isolated chlorophyll. A year later, strychnine. A year after that, brucine. Then, in 1820, they had isolated an anti-malarial compound from the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree and named it quinine — the name came from the Incan word quinaquina, which literally means “bark of barks.”

  Before the discovery of quinine, long strips of dried cinchona bark were ground into a fine powder and mixed with wine into a thick and unpalatable slurry. Malarial patients had to drink large and frequent doses to subdue their fevers, complaining that the mixture got stuck in their throats and made them sick. It worked, but anyone who drank it spent most of the day drunk. Then came quinine. It was a life-saving revolution. Within six years, Pelletier owned a factory that was producing more than 3 tonnes of quinine sulfate each year. It was being shipped anywhere in the world there was an outbreak. But in 1820— the same year they isolated quinine — Pelletier and Caventou had turned their attention to ambergris.

  Nineteenth-century chemistry was a much more primitive discipline. A description of ambergris in A Dictionary of Chemistry and the Allied Branches of the Other Sciences from 1863 reads:

  If good, it adheres like wax to the edge of a knife with which it is scraped, retains the impression of the teeth or nails, and emits a fat odoriferous liquid on being penetrated with a hot needle. It is generally brittle; but on rubbing it with the nail, it becomes smooth, like hard soap. Its colour is either white, black, ash-coloured, yellow, or blackish; or it is variegated, namely, grey with black specks, or grey with yellow specks. Its smell is peculiar, and not easy to be counterfeited.

  Perhaps Pelletier picked up the ambergris from the workbench and tested it with his teeth, biting into it like an apple and then holding it up to the pearly Parisian light to look for a bite mark. He carefully weighed and measured it. Together, he and Caventou made notes on its colour and odour, calculated its density, and measured its boiling point. After dissolving it in hot alcohol, filtering the solution, and then leaving it to stand, they noticed white crystals forming in bulky and irregular clumps. This was what they were interested in most of all. It was the active compound in ambergris. They named it ambrein. This was not quite the same as isolating quinine. No one was saved by the discovery of ambrein. Almost as quickly as it was completed, their work on ambergris was eclipsed forever by the possibility of using quinine to eradicate malaria. But the known world had become a little larger, and now ambrein was part of it too.

  Somewhere in Grasse —“Next to Cannes, next to Nice, in the south of France,” explains Perrin — there is a small and darkened storage room. Occasionally, that room is filled with pungent cotton-wrapped pieces of ambergris worth several million dollars. There are large, rounded pumpkin-size lumps, pale flattened slabs, and long, thin pieces with tapering ends. They have come here from across the world: from the Bahamas, the Philippines, and the Norfolk Islands. For a short time, they are Perrin’s. And then, as suddenly as they arrived, they are gone again, sold to the highest bidder.

  “You need to buy when you find,” Perrin says, explaining the fluctuations in his stock, “because sometimes you don’t find some and sometimes you are short. You are short, you have no more, and people are asking, so sometimes you can have stock of one hundred kilos and sometimes nothing. Generally, whenever I find, I sell it very quickly. Sometimes, with some customers, they book in advance and say if you have five good, I will buy it. You can find in India, you can find in Maldives, you can find in Philippines, in New Zealand, in New Caledonia. You can find also in Somalia, but I don’t buy in Somalia. You can find in Madagascar.”

  Samples of ambergris from Bernard Perrin’s collection.

  Almost without exception, says Perrin, the boulders of ambergris in his storeroom were found on the shoreline, washed up by the ocean. In some countries, he employs local agents to represent him, buying ambergris from villagers on his behalf. In other locations, he maintains relationships with people who find ambergris regularly.

  “You have some people who are finding,” Perrin explains. “They are fisherman, they are used to going on the beach and on the boat, so they are …” He pauses, searching for the right word. “I have very good finders, I would say. Regular. Sometimes you don’t find at all. You don’t buy at all for six months, it depends. Sometimes, you find the big piece. Sometimes you find small pieces. It’s not a regular business. We can buy any quantity available. In some countries we have agents, and they will buy for us. Yeah, sometimes we buy one hundred grams, fifty grams, but it will be bought by a local agent.”

  A few weeks later, Perrin sent me photographs of several pieces of ambergris he had traded in recent years. They arrived, loaded onto a flash drive, in the mail. There is a photograph of a long and slender piece of ambergris that was found in Bermuda. It looks like it was chiselled from a piece of coastal English chalkstone, and it dwarfs a Marlboro Lights cigarette packet that has been placed carefully on the floor beside it to provide an idea of scale. In another photograph, a piece of ambergris is laid alongside a yellow measuring tape: it is 18 inches (45 centimetres) long. It is, in short, not the sort of thing one would miss on a remote beach while searching for ambergris.

  Another photograph shows an implausibly large round boulder of ambergris that washed ashore in New Caledonia in May 2007. It weighed, Perrin tells me, 100 kilograms. It is simply huge: an extraordinary, superlative, egg-shaped boulder of ambergris. It is the colour of granite, mottled in places with irregular brown and white patches. And it is worth around $1 million. It sits solidly on the floral print of a bedsheet, which has been spread out on a concrete floor somewhere in New Caledonia. In the background, two people stand behind it, their legs small and out of focus behind the enormous ambergris that swallows up the foreground.

  In early September 2005, a large piece of ambergris washed ashore in North Carolina. A local woman found it there and contacted Will Lapaz, the proprietor of Eden Botanicals, a northern California – based company that sells wholesale essential oils and aromatherapy products to perfumers.

  The same woman had contacted him a few years earlier, says Lapaz, believing she had found a piece of ambergris. On closer inspection, it proved to be a lump of copal — a non-fossilized and immature type of hardened tree resin. But this time, she was certain. She had found ambergris. “It was after Hurricane Katrina,” recalls Lapaz. “It was after a lot of hurricanes. It was that year, late in that hurricane season, so she was looking for it. She’s been looking for it all her life, as a kid, for thirty years. And she found it. I said, ‘This sounds good, send me a sample.’”

  When he received a small, grey, aromatic sample of it in
the mail, Lapaz knew it was genuine ambergris. “I sent it off to a couple of people,” he says, “you know, old-timers, a French old-timer in the perfumery business, and he wasn’t exactly sure. He had worked with ambergris tincture, but he’d never worked with raw ambergris, so he wasn’t sure. I went ahead and I sent it off to other people, who said, ‘That’s it. Don’t break it. Don’t do anything. We want to buy it.’”

  Eventually, Lapaz bought the ambergris from the woman who found it, whose name he is unwilling to share. After the purchase, he transported it — by means he is equally reluctant to disclose — across the country, from North Carolina to Hyampom, California. “It was several kilos,” says Lapaz. Since then, he has been selling it to independent perfumers across the United States, who then use it to make their own ambergris tincture, grinding it up with a pestle and mortar and dissolving it in alcohol. “I sold it off piece by piece,” he explains. “I have twenty-five grams left. That’s it. Everything went. It took about four years to sell everything I had, and it was all word of mouth. I never advertised it. I never offered it for sale on my website. I never went public with it.”

  One of the perfumers who bought ambergris from Lapaz was Mandy Aftel. A California-based perfumer, founder of the Natural Perfumers Guild, and the author of Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume (2001), Aftel has been credited with popularizing a modern and resurgent style of perfumery using only natural ingredients. “I make a tincture of the ambergris, and I put it in my perfumes,” she says.

  Alongside the French artisanal perfumer Francis Kurkdjian — who charges clients more than $10,000 to create two fluid ounces (around 60 millilitres) of custom-designed perfume — Aftel was named one of the world’s best custom perfumers by Forbes Magazine in 2009. For slightly more than $1,000, Aftel will provide a client with a half-ounce of custom-made, specially designed bespoke fragrance.

  In her Berkeley, California, studio, Aftel sits with her clients, carefully building a fragrance layer by layer, in front of a bank of wooden shelves lined with hundreds of glass vials — more than six hundred of them, in fact, filled with different essential oils, tinctures, extracts, pastes, and resins. There are essences of green tea and licorice, and extracts of sarsaparilla and seaweed; there is blond tobacco essence and porcini oil; there is even essence of Africa Stone, extracted from the petrified and centuries-old excrement of an African mammal called the Cape Hyrax (Procavia capensis). And, of course, there is tincture of ambergris, made with the ambergris she purchased from Will Lapaz.

  “I don’t use it for all of my perfumes because I’m very fickle,” says Aftel. “Each perfume for me is a clean white sheet of paper. It’s a new narrative, a new experience for me. There’s nothing that’s in every single perfume of mine. That’s not how I work. Although, if something was going to be in every perfume of mine, ambergris would be a good candidate, because I love it.”

  After spending a significant amount of money on ambergris in the past, and then discovering that what she had bought was not ambergris at all, Aftel was eager to buy genuine ambergris from Lapaz. “It has, I’d say, two functions in a perfume,” she explains.

  It has a very beautiful, almost hard-to-describe, kind of sweet, ambery, rich, aroma that it brings to a perfume that really makes everything more beautiful. But it also has an effect on the other oils in a perfume. It’s got this kind of transformative quality about it. Some of the really magical essences in perfume have a magical quality not just in their aroma profile but in the way that they affect the other essences that you have in the perfume. Ambergris is an absolute star in that department. It creates almost, if you can stretch your mind to imagine this, a kind of shimmery, sparkly effect on the other essences. It moves around inside them and changes the way that they smell, and it makes them just more beautiful. It’s the real argument for the naturals, which is: it’s more than the sum of its parts.

  In the months before I finally smelled genuine ambergris, I devised a plan that I thought would allow me to smell at least a facsimile of its complex and indescribable odour. I would collect a sample of every substance that had ever been used to describe ambergris, and then mix them all together to create a sort of compost. The resulting bouquet, I hoped, might begin to approximate the smell of ambergris.

  The idea had a simple practical appeal. And there were plenty of substances to collect: old cow dung, damp leaf litter and freshly turned earth, new-mown hay, seaweed, Brazil nuts, fine tobacco, vanilla, and violets. I began to formulate lists in my head. I would make a potion. On a bright windy morning, I drove to Aramoana and collected wet fronds of sea lettuce from the rocks at low tide. For the first time in a year, as I drove along the harbour road, I looked away from the water, ignoring the ambergris that might be floating there, and stared instead toward the steep green hills. I was looking for a fern copse. I had already located a cliff-top field that was home to a noisy herd of cows. At a later date, I planned to return there, select a cowpat that was neither too fresh nor too old and weathered, prise it from the grass, and take it home. I would add it to the soil, the damp moss, and the seaweed I had already collected. In town, I walked along grocery store aisles, looking for jars of Brazil nuts and affordable cigars to crumble into the mixture. And at night, I wondered if I would have to grow my own violets, carefully watering and nurturing them in pots, only to pluck their petals from their stems and drop them into a growing and slowly liquefying compost.

  One day I told my wife I needed to acquire some wood from an old church. She frowned. It was the first time she had displayed anything but unreserved enthusiasm for my growing obsession. After some discussion, we arrived at a compromise: I would combine all of the other ingredients in a container I could carry with me, and then, when I was ready, I would find an old church, sit in an isolated pew, lift the lid off the container, and bury my nose inside it.

  If I had not abandoned my plans — and I’m still mostly relieved that I did — I would have been hoping that my strange compost was also more than the sum of its parts. In fact, I was hoping that, together, its components would smell almost exactly like ambergris.

  “Ambergris, as you can imagine, is what we call an animal note,” says master perfumer Tony Morris, whose thirty-year career with the Swiss-based multinational perfume and flavour giant Firmenich ended with his retirement in 2001.

  His accent is proper and clipped English, made strangely musical by his decades spent in Switzerland. He continues:

  Animal notes — which include musk and a few others, civet and castoreum, which comes from the beaver — these animal notes, they’ve been used in perfumes because the animal note gives warmth and complexity to a perfume. It’s rather like if you have some wines, some of them have animal notes, and it gives this warmth and complexity; and that’s the key element of why ambergris and civet and these other materials were used.

  The form of the ambergris is rather complex, a lump, you know how it is, colours and so on? It has different colours within the piece. How do you know what is in there until you open it? And you can’t open it before you’ve bought it. Do you know how they test for the quality of it? The key part is the grey part, do you understand? You have to assess how much of the piece is grey, and you do it without cutting it open. Do you know how they would do it? You actually take a little sample, like going down to drill into the Earth to make an oil well, and they take a sample of it going through. Of course, the shape of it can be confusing because the white part or the grey part can vary according to the shape. In some parts you make a little insertion with a special tool and you take a sample out, a little fine sample, and you find, “Oh, there’s grey of this amount,” so you make an offer to how much to buy. That’s how they do it, or used to do it.

  In 1792 a rowdy enthusiasm was sweeping across revolutionary Paris for a new invention: the guillotine. Used for the first time on April 25, 1792, to dispatch Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, a highwayman, it was considered a modern and humane method of execution. Two year
s later, thousands had shared Pelletier’s fate. Heads had rolled. Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January 1793. Marie Antoinette, found guilty of treason, followed him nine months later.

  So bloody was this business that in Paris, in front of the Saint-Antoine gate, an aqueduct was constructed to collect and redirect the blood of the guillotined. And at Metz to the east, the heads of the guillotined were placed on the tops of their houses.

  “At elegant dinners,” wrote the French historian Imbert de Saint-Armand a hundred years later in Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty (1891), “a little guillotine is brought in with the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would make a vaudeville out of the day of judgment.”

  In 2005 Elisabeth de Feydeau, a Sorbonne-educated historian and a professor at the Institut Supérieur International du Parfum de la Cosmétique et de Aromatique Alimentaire, joined forces with artisanal perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. Their goal was to recreate a 200-year-old fragrance that had been made by perfumer Jean-Louis Fargeon for Marie Antoinette, the queen of France. The result was a fragrance called Sillage de la Reine, which translates approximately to “Wake of the Queen”. A thousand bottles were made, containing 25 millilitres of perfume and priced at almost $500 each. For high rollers, ten Baccarat flasks, each filled with 250 millilitres of the honey-coloured fragrance, were sold for $11,000 a piece.

  I emailed de Feydeau, who rediscovered the formula for the perfume in a notebook belonging to Fargeon while researching her book A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette’s Perfumer (2006). When I asked if it contained ambergris, she responded, “Of course, we used ambergris.”