Floating Gold

by Christopher Kemp

  The whale that washed ashore on Manpuriya beach had looked lean and sickly. Scientists from Sri Lanka’s National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency told reporters from the Daily Mirror that the whale had weighed an estimated 10 tonnes. An adult male sperm whale measuring 15 metres in length should weigh closer to 35 tonnes. This specimen was underweight. From the 1823 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “It is observed, that all those whales in whose bowels ambergris is found, seem not only torpid and sick, but are also constantly leaner than others; so that, if we may judge from the constant union of these two circumstances, it would seem that a larger collection of ambergris in the belly of the whale is a source of disease, and probably sometimes the cause of its death.”

  During the whaling era, whalers knew as much without having to refer to a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The intestines of underweight sickly-looking whales always required a careful and thorough inspection. A single boulder of high-quality ambergris could be worth more than all the barrels of whale oil collected during the long months spent at sea.

  The efforts of the Sri Lankan villagers on Manpuriya beach in July 2010— communally disembowelling a whale carcass for its ambergris — are not uncommon. The grisly practice is unlawful in many countries; nevertheless, it happens all the time. “The most likely way that you would find [ambergris],” says Anton van Helden, the marine mammals collection manager at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, “would be from cutting it out of a sperm whale. We’ve had a number of examples, particularly up in Northland, the west coast, of animals coming up and being discovered, found by DoC [Department of Conservation], and they’ve been disembowelled. But that’s illegal.”

  When I first spoke with John Vodanovich of Dargaville Beach fame, he had mentioned the practice too. “Did you know that people chop up whales and get it out?” he had asked me. “That’s what happens on our beach. I know of a couple of whales that have been chopped once they’ve washed in on the beach. They’ve gotten out 15-kilo hunks. One on Muriwai was 48 kilo.” He had paused, and I could hear him slowly calculating its value under his breath. “Times ten,” he said to himself quietly before continuing, “that would be $480,000, eh? The guy got paid $76,000 for it. He was ripped off big-time.”

  But Vodanovich disagrees with van Helden about the frequency of these events. Most of the ambergris bought and sold commercially, he says, is found on the shoreline, and not cut from whales. Full-time ambergris collectors spend months of each year hiking to some of the wildest and most remote locations in search of beach-cast ambergris. Illegal or otherwise, professional collectors cannot afford to wait for whales to strand and die. It happens too infrequently.

  A sperm whale stranding is a rare event, agrees Laura Boren. The national marine mammal co-ordinator for the New Zealand Department of Conservation, Boren says that between 1873 and 2009, approximately 200 sperm-whale strandings have been recorded on the New Zealand coastline. “This rate of stranding,” she explains, “is what we would consider regular, in that we can anticipate that at least one a year will strand, but they do not strand frequently.”

  In just two of those two hundred sperm whale strandings, people had cut into the stomach of the whale, in an attempt to harvest ambergris. “It is important to note,” writes Boren via email, “that all stranding events and incidents of human interference (e.g., cutting open the stomach to retrieve ambergris) are likely to be an underestimate. New Zealand has a lot of remote coastline, and strandings may occur that we are not aware of. But given the rate of interference for known sperm whale strandings, we believe that the rate at which this happens is relatively low, and that the majority of ambergris found is likely to be found beach-cast.”

  After speaking with Anton van Helden, something had continued to puzzle me. Ambergris obtained directly from a whale carcass is black, viscous, and foul-smelling. “I’ve seen stuff out of a whale because, you know, the odd whale does wash in, and the odd person has got it out,” John Vodanovich had confirmed when I spoke with him. “It’s just sort of black, and it really stinks.” Bernard Perrin had told me, his voice filled with Gallic indignation, that he didn’t even consider this material to be ambergris, and he refused to sell it to his customers. The smooth, white boulders that Perrin sells to perfumers like Chanel have spent years in the ocean, slowly transforming into the refined high-grade ambergris that commands the highest market prices.

  If fresh black ambergris is so unpleasant and unrefined, why would anyone want to remove it from a whale in the first place? Who would have any use for it? These were questions I was unable to answer. For months, I remained confused by the historical accounts, which told of whalers who cut enormous soft boulders of ambergris from whale carcasses and sold them to perfumers, becoming rich in the process. Finally, hoping to solve the puzzle, I contacted Charles Sell at Givaudan again.

  “This question has also vexed me,” Sell replies. “Günter Ohloff showed very clearly how chemistry was responsible for conversion of the raw whale secretion to the highly prized grey ambergris, so the dark brown sticky stuff they would have taken from the whale’s insides would not be the same. I have a lump of fairly fresh ambergris, and it smells mostly of scatole.”

  Present at high concentrations in faeces, scatole is the organic compound that is primarily responsible for the characteristically pungent unpleasant smell of fresh dung. It is also abundant in rotting flesh. In chemical structure, as is the case with so many powerfully malodorous compounds, its structure provides no clue that it will smell completely repulsive. It consists of two adjacent, compact-looking carbon rings — a benzene ring and a pyrrole ring — which are known in combination as an indole ring.

  Luca Turin wrote in The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell, “Indole, probably the most unfairly maligned molecule on earth, smells bitter and inky, but is an essential component of all raspy-voiced white flowers like lilies, tuberoses, etc.” This is true. Several species of flower — freesias, lilies, and narcissus, for example — derive their heavy, almost narcotic fragrances from the presence of indoles at fairly low concentrations: a familiar cloying, indolic sweetness, reminiscent of wilting flowers, of decay and entropy. But scatole is like indole on steroids. Abrasive and discordant, at higher concentrations scatole is a rumbling, sharp-edged base note that threatens to overpower everything else. When diluted, though, it imparts a lasting warm and woody tone to fragrances. Either way, the odour profile of scatole is a powerful one. In 1948, when Parisian perfumer Victor Hasslauer observed that ambergris had an indolent note, he was referring to the unmistakable presence of scatole, abundant and overpowering in lumps of fresh ambergris like the one Sell is describing.

  Sell and I both continue to wonder why fresh scatolic ambergris from a whale would be of any use to perfumers, or to anyone else for that matter. Eventually, Adrienne Beuse provides me with an answer. Not all the ambergris found inside a whale, she tells me, is necessarily of the same grade. In 1891, when Louis Smith crawled the length of a whale carcass to obtain the Bank Lot, brokers in London discovered that its core — a 5-pound (2-kilo) lump, shaped like a rifle bullet — was a much smaller sample of the finest quality ambergris available. A fine grey core, surrounded by soft layers of reeking ambergris that resembled wet, black clay. Beuse explains:

  Sometimes the only material found inside the whale is this black tar-like liquid, which will be full of beaks. You could say that it’s the precursor to ambergris. It’s very thick and dark and totally disgusting, you know. But, in amongst it sometimes, lumps — harder lumps of ambergris — get found, and this is what people go searching for. These hard lumps do have a value, and they seem to have some curing that has taken place inside the whale. We quite often see it with a dead whale that they’ll pass ambergris before they actually die and reach the shore. Sometimes then they’ll get ripped apart by sharks and that might also end up releasing it, and somebody will find a hard lump of ambergris in a
ssociation with a whale stranding. That ambergris will have a value.

  It was because of that value that the Sri Lankan villagers clumsily manoeuvred a backhoe across the sand in order to take apart the whale, which had stranded on their beach.

  “But,” says Beuse, “any ambergris that comes directly from a whale is a different kettle of fish completely from something that has been thirty years out in the ocean, you know?”

  Around this time, deciding I have nothing to lose, I write to Robert Clarke again. “He is 90 years old,” his wife had written several months earlier, “and has a more or less serious disease.” Whatever his ailment, I hope it is of the less serious kind. To my surprise, Clarke responds, and we begin a courteous and slightly lopsided email correspondence. On several occasions, I send him a long list of questions I hope he’ll be willing to answer. Usually, he writes back quickly, but sometimes it takes two or three weeks, and then occasionally he doesn’t respond at all. “I should mention that I am ninety years old, and a bit like ambergris myself,” he explains.

  I request a photograph, which he sends a few days later: a wizened old man, sitting at his desk, a bookshelf filled with journals behind him. Mostly bald now, he stares blue-eyed and intent, directly into the camera. Two scholarly tufts of snow-white hair reach his ears. He wears a bow tie and a pinstripe jacket, with a white handkerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket. On his desk, at his bent elbow, stand two large cylindrical glass jars. On their yellowing handwritten labels, one word is clearly legible: AMBERGRIS.

  I write to ask him about the day in December 1953, when the enormous boulder weighing 926 pounds (420 kilograms) was harvested from a sperm whale on the deck of the Southern Harvester. A photograph of the huge blunt-ended boulder, swinging from a block and tackle like a misshapen wrecking ball, had been included in Clarke’s “The Origin of Ambergris”, a copy of which still sits on my desk. And in the photograph that Clarke has sent me, one of the jars contains two pieces taken from the same large boulder. They sit like two lumps of coal, black and glittering mysteriously, at the bottom of the dusty jar. The label on the jar reads: “Pieces heavy with CRYSTALS from the external layers”.

  Clarke writes back that he was not aboard the Southern Harvester the day the boulder was taken from the whale. Instead, months later, he traveled to the headquarters of Christian Salvesen and Co., in Leith, near Edinburgh, and inspected it there.

  “However, I have a story to tell you about the 155 kg boulder shown in Fig. 2,” he writes, referring to another grainy black-and-white photograph from his paper, of a large misshapen mass of ambergris, resting on the ship’s deck and surrounded by a ring of curious whalers.

  In 1947, I was Whale Fishery Inspector on board the Southern Harvester in the Antarctic. Late one afternoon, work was finishing on the main deck, and a wire hawser was about to sweep the guts of a whale overboard, when I saw a swelling in the large intestine. “Stop — amba [ambergris],” I cried. The gut was not two feet from the ship’s side. Cutting away the intestine revealed the boulder of ambergris weighing 155 kg shown in Fig. 2 of my paper. On page 19 of my paper, I mention that the Government Chemist in London began in 1957 an elaborate analysis of sperm whale faeces, but I have heard nothing of the results, nor of the analyses of ambergris also done at this time.

  More than fifty years later, Clarke is still waiting.

  “The advances of synthetic chemistry in recent years have not only made it possible for chemists to imitate exactly the composition of the compound,” reported a 1928 article on ambergris in the Sydney Mail, “but also to produce artificially other and better aromas at one-hundredth part of the cost of ambergris.”

  The future had arrived. By the 1930s, organic chemists like Max Stoll and Günter Ohloff at Firmenich were constructing synthetic ambergris compounds. And by 1950, they mostly understood the chemistry behind its properties. Within a few decades, ambergris had become obsolete: better living through chemistry. At the turn of the twentieth century, a sharp-eyed beachcomber could find and sell a large piece of ambergris, and his family would enjoy a new life with the proceeds. Suddenly, it had become a greasy, strange-smelling burden.

  The Mail continued:

  Were one to pick up a quantity of the stuff on one of the beaches around Sydney, where in the past some fair-sized lumps of it have been found, it is even doubtful whether it could be disposed of locally with ease. Some years ago several fishermen found a piece on a beach in the vicinity of Catherine Hill Bay, north of Sydney, and although it was genuine ambergris they hawked it around the city for some weeks before they eventually chanced upon a buyer, and the offer which was made for it quickly dissipated their dreams of a prosperous and easy future.

  Today the ambergris market has never been busier. Once again, demand exceeds supply. Ambergris now sells for approximately $1,000 per pound or 450 grams. The very best white ambergris is almost priceless. Why the resurgence now? First, there are limits to molecular chemistry. A substance as complex and singular as ambergris simply cannot be synthesized. And its journey, from sperm whale hindgut to remote coastline — separated by a decades-long interval spent in the ocean — cannot be replicated in a test tube.

  We live in an era of specialization. People adhere to strict and demanding diets: veganism, fruitarianism, and raw foodism. There are gardening enthusiasts who choose to grow only heirloom tomatoes, blush pink and shiny on their vines, or enormous oversize pumpkins. A friend of mine has become an apiarist. Another spends every Sunday afternoon dancing, but exclusively to medieval music. We are all experts in something. Inevitably, someone will want to use genuine ambergris. The synthetic versions, they will tell you, lack an authenticity that can only be obtained from years spent adrift in the ocean. Through the Internet, anyone with sufficient funds can obtain the highest quality white ambergris from online-based vendors in New Zealand, France, Italy, or Taiwan.

  When researching ambergris one night, I register with an online business-to-business website called Trade Boss, which allows importers and exporters to connect with one another to trade goods. There, traders sell everything from emu oil, pork gallbladder, and guano, to goat hair, snake venom, and ox bile powder. Within a week, I begin to receive automated email updates informing me of new sellers and products. One day I receive an offer to buy a baby capuchin monkey from South Africa. Another time I see a request from Poland for scorpion venom.

  I have inadvertently stepped into another world. It is a virtual market, where ambergris sellers in Indonesia sell blocks of ambergris worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to buyers in France or Dubai. In this strange and unfamiliar world, deals take place in luxury hotel rooms in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. It is the sort of alternative reality in which diplomats from the Middle East might arrive in Australia, pack five or six empty suitcases with ambergris, and simply disappear.

  Suddenly, I am receiving regular messages from ambergris traders all over the world. One of the dealers is based in Taiwan. I ask him via email if he will sell me a couple of grams of ambergris. He responds that he deals instead in kilograms of ambergris. When I pose as a perfumer and tell him I am trying to find a source for high-quality ambergris, he offers to send me two grams for free.

  For several months, I trade emails with a Ukrainian dealer calling himself Valentyn. One day he explains in broken English that because of the restrictions on importing ambergris to the United States, I will have to fly to Odessa to buy the 680 grams of ambergris he is selling. I have no intention of buying his ambergris and don’t even know how to respond.

  “Greetings!” he writes a week later. “Well that you have decided to buy ambergris? I to you could and is cheaper sell. You would arrive to us on Ukraine we will tell the econom class and would buy all personally from me. It would exclude any deceit for my part. Money for operation to the father are necessary to me, I cannot long bargain.”

  I’m not sure what Valentyn means. But I know I’m not going to Odessa.

  Perhaps the only error wo
rse than finding sewer grease and believing it is ambergris is finding ambergris and believing it is sewer grease. On a warm clear night in the summer of 1899, in the squid-filled waters near Nova Scotia, the crew of a ship called the Squantum did just that. A few of the men were attempting to pass a rope around a large floating mass as it bumped and slid along the starboard side of the ship. “A torch was lighted and further and closer examination disclosed that the find was a mass of greasy or rather waxy substance,” reported the New York Times. “It was grayish in color, with here and there a streak of black, giving it a marbelized appearance.”

  Someone suggested launching a dory to collect the lump and bring it back to the ship, but the crew decided against it. A crew member suggested waking Bill Griffin, the ship’s captain, who was sleeping soundly in his quarters. “But this met with no approval. It was bad enough to call him when there was something in the wind, but to get him out for what might be nothing at all would be dangerous. For as likely as not he might be dreaming of roast sparerib and apple sauce or fish at $7 a quintal, and it would be wrong to spoil his dreams upon uncertainties.”

  Instead, anxious crew members hung over the railing, peering into the dark water. They had begun to prod the floating lump with gaffs, hoping to haul it aboard. It was, one of the sailors later said, like poking a pumpkin with a pitchfork. The crew watched the lump rolling around in the water. “It became rather tiresome holding on to the stuff with the tide pulling hard all the time and an hour or two of sleep already lost,” reported the Times. “So it was decided to let it go adrift and consider the incident closed.”