Floating Gold

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Floating Gold Page 17

by Christopher Kemp


  The first time I heard the story of Cyril Leask’s lucky find, it had sounded like the sort of tall tale that always grows taller in places like Oban. It sounded mythic. It reminded me of Jack and the Beanstalk. The details were half-formed, and they swirled around Halfmoon Bay like a cold easterly, gradually mutating and changing. In other versions, it was Andrew Leask who found the ambergris, and when he sold it, he bought a new engine for his boat. In yet other accounts, it was Cyril Leask again, but the location had changed: it was Mason Bay, or Hellfire Beach farther to the north, or Doughboy Bay to the south. I suspected the story was a product of island community gossip.

  With so many variations to the story, I was inclined not to believe any of them at first. But with each retelling, even the most far-fetched stories slowly become believable. These days, Leask hunts for ambergris full-time, I was told, going to great lengths to veil his movements in secrecy in order to stay a step ahead of the other hunters. Supposedly, Adam Adamson built dams, diverting and redirecting rivers to scour the dunes and expose the buried ambergris. And he walked backward along the beach to disguise the direction he was travelling. Perhaps Leask does the same.

  In his 1939 article about ambergris for the New Zealand Railways Magazine, McIntosh wrote:

  Nowhere does the substance occur more frequently than on Stewart Island, where the beaches of Doughboy Bay, Mason’s Bay, Little Hellfire and Big Hellfire are favourite hunting grounds, being exposed to the fury of wind and sea when the roaring southerlies sweep up from the home of the whales — the ice barrier and the Ross Sea. Many notable finds have been made in these localities, chief of which, perhaps, was that of Mr. John Leask, who kicked a boulder in the sand at Mason’s Bay and found it to be a lump of ambergris weighing 2,000 oz.

  The profits from the 2,000-ounce piece of ambergris that John Leask kicked in Mason Bay — a huge boulder weighing 56 kilograms — would have been more than enough to build a new boat.

  And in The Stewart Islanders, a history of the European settlement of Stewart Island from 1970, Olga Sansom wrote:

  One of the luckiest finds of ambergris on Mason Bay was made at the south end of the beach. Eric Leask and his father walking the beach to Kilbride saw pieces of ambergris of all sizes, fist-sized and smaller, strewn about. They had to get a kerosene tin to collect it more easily. It was obvious that it was from a sperm whale which had exploded somewhere at sea, as dead whales sometimes do, so Eric’s brothers, George and Stanford, decided to take a look at the Hellfire beaches further north. Hellfire had nothing, so they decided to make back to Kilbride. Near Cavalier Creek they noticed a boulder half-buried in the sand. On examination it proved to be a boulder of ambergris, a twenty-five pound nugget and of a goldy-brown colour like tobacco. With the old horse and cart Eric and his father had set out to meet the two boys, so the good find was thrown on board. The nugget was high-grade quality and, along with the smaller pieces of immature stuff, the “catch” for the few days at Mason Bay realized well over 1000 pounds.

  Finding large pieces of ambergris seems to be a Leask family tradition. I decide to talk with Cyril Leask.

  “I’d rather not,” he says politely, when I consult the one-page telephone directory and call him one evening. And then, before I can say another word, he is gone.

  Hours earlier, I had left the Department of Conservation rangers to their spraying program on the dunes. I had been excited by seeing Taylor’s ambergris and by the prospect of seeing some that belonged to another ranger later. I watched two of them walk south along the bay, their silhouettes growing smaller and smaller until they were swallowed up by the glaring sunshine and the scattered driftwood. With a renewed sense of purpose, I began sifting through the flotsam again, hoping to find a piece of my own. A day before flying to the west coast, I had taken a boat trip with my wife and son, travelling from Halfmoon Bay to Ulva Island, a peaceful nature reserve at Paterson Inlet. On the boat, I had met Ann Pullen, a ranger for the Department of Conservation. White-haired and grandmotherly, Pullen is in her sixties. As we watched sturdy white albatrosses bobbing on the waves near the boat, she had offered me only one piece of advice: “Be careful of the quicksand,” she said gravely, “and I’m really serious about that.”

  I had heard about the quicksand on Doughboy Bay. And it worried me. It had worried my wife, who was sitting in Oban with our one-year-old son. Weeks before I flew to Stewart Island, I had bought several maps. At home, I had unfolded them and spread them over the floor to study their contours and coastlines. One of the maps was a large-scale topographical map of Doughboy Bay, which included, stretching toward the northernmost margins of the map, the southern half of an abbreviated and truncated Mason Bay. Clearly marked on the map, near the spot the pilot had bounced and landed the Cessna at low tide, printed at an angle that followed the gentle curve of the bay, was one word: QUICKSAND.

  A river cuts through the middle of Doughboy Bay, rust-coloured with tannins from the leaves that choke its bed inland. It was brackish when I first arrived on the beach, but it became fast-moving as the tide began to rise. This, I am guessing, is where the sand is waterlogged and dangerous. This is where the word QUICKSAND is printed on the map. As I approach the channel, my feet sink deeper and deeper into the sand, which makes a sucking sound every time I take a step. The rising water dislodges some of the larger logjams that have formed across its mouth like a poorly made fence. I am standing on a hot, cluttered patch of sand, surrounded by a colourful array of tide-swept and incongruous objects that have been broken and worn down by the sea. The tide is too high, the water is too fast, and the sand is too wet. I sink up to my ankles in it. On the other side of the channel, the bay continues, curling around to the south. Arctic terns drift across the sky like slender kites.

  All day, I have seen sun-bleached whalebones on the beach — half-buried in sand or tangled in seaweed and plastic bags. Outside the hut, someone had left a long white jawbone with empty tooth sockets leaning against a windowsill, like a stowed umbrella. Next to it, a whale vertebra, a thick disc of bone with its three processes radiating from it, which reminds me of a naval mine. I find another broken fragment of jawbone, like a pale elbow. Doughboy Bay is a remote and dangerous place, governed by the natural elements.

  In October 1998, two hunters camping in the bush arrived on Doughboy Bay and found the beach covered in almost 300 dead or dying long-finned pilot whales. It was one of the worst whale strandings in recorded history. The large pod had entered the sheltered bay, and the whales had become beached as the tide receded. Early the next morning, DoC rangers helicoptered onto the beach. Hundreds of the whales were already dead, and rangers shot the few that were still alive. The carcasses of 288 long-finned pilot whales were left to decompose on Doughboy Bay.

  If I get stuck in quicksand here, no one will help me. I consider the risk of trying to cross the choppy brown water in the channel. Standing in the sun, I have a sudden vision: my green bushman’s hat, on the surface of the quicksand — seaweed stuck to its brim — the only proof that I was ever here. Perhaps the bodies of Adam Adamson and Fisherman Phil, and numerous other long-forgotten ambergris hunters, are still sinking beneath my feet, pirouetting slowly through the soft, wet sand, past old graved lumps of ambergris, coming to rest somewhere deep below me in the darkness. I don’t want to join them. With a final glance at the southern end of the bay, I turn my back on the channel and its logjams and head north. Retracing my steps in the silence, I kick a few rounded pieces of pumice aside and walk toward the hut. On the way, I lift some of the larger pieces of driftwood, looking for ambergris in their wet shadows.

  But I find none.

  Marty “Doc” Pepers has been the district nurse on Stewart Island since 1991. When I first see him in the Health Clinic, he is wearing blue jeans, a scruffy red T-shirt, and a short pair of gumboots that end just above his ankles. His T-shirt has “Trust Me I’m a Doctor” printed across the chest. He reminds me of a younger Gene Hackman — in his forties, burly and b
alding, with curly, closely trimmed red hair. At first I assume he is a fisherman. Perhaps he has sustained an injury on one of the fishing vessels moored in the harbour. But then he calls a patient’s name, and a boy and his mother rise slowly from their seats and disappear into one of the examination rooms.

  “In my life,” he says, “I’ve probably found about maybe half a kilo of ambergris.”

  I ask him if he has any at the moment. “Bugger all,” he says. “I’ve probably got about 30 or 40 grams. I’ve got a wee cupful, that’s it. The biggest piece I’ve seen was 42 kilos, about fifteen years ago.”

  “Was it found on Mason Bay?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says. “Hellfire, I think it was. This big 40-kilo piece had been pushed out of a whale’s arse. You could see it. It was one big huge fucking poo.”

  “Who found it?”

  “Cyril Leask,” he says.

  His grandfather found a big hunk too, when they were kids. He got 2,000 guineas for it and that was a huge amount of money in the thirties. That was like bloody winning the Lotto. He found half of it, and then he went back and found the other half just around the corner. But he’s been looking for twenty-five, thirty years. Good on him. And he’s a lovely bloke. There are big finds, but they’re rare and few and far between. There are a few people make a living out of it, but they’re very secretive about it because they don’t want everyone going down looking for it. At the end of the day, like, I’ve walked behind the experts and found it.

  None of them will talk to you, you know. Cyril Leask, he won’t talk to you. He’s too private. A very private man. He’s the expert; he’s not interested, doesn’t want people to know. Mark Butler’s one, Mark Moxham, have you spoken with him? He’s different … It’s like the gold rush mentality. You could call it the Ambergris Conspiracy. Well, there is! And the thing is, it’s the only part of a whale that you can harvest without causing any harm to the whale.

  I ask Pepers if he’s heard of Fisherman Phil. “Yeah, yeah,” he says.

  Him and Butler, they’re just new boys on the patch … They’re on the beaches. They can go hunting. And make money. What a great life. It’s pretty good. Money for mud, really.

  To me, it’s cultural. It’s not about money. What I don’t like about [some of] these new guys, they’re too commercialized, looking for it, and there are old fellas here on the island who have been finding it for years as part of their annual income, you know, and they’ve been doing it since they were kids. Every time I go hunting, I find a bit. I only go over there once or twice a year, but every time I go to Mason’s Bay I find some. Yeah, I know what I’m looking for too, you see. The trick is, on a beach, is to look for something that doesn’t make sense, okay? Because it can be any bloody colour at once, from black to grey to white. It can look like pumice. It can look like snot. I’ve seen big greasy bits of it that are green. You’d walk past it and think it was rotten seaweed, but it’s not: it’s ambergris.

  So, really, some of it’s obvious. It’s not a shell, it’s not a stick, it’s not a piece of rotten seaweed, and that’s what you find on the beaches. You find shells, sticks, bits of rotten seaweed, this and that, stones, you know. The thing about Mason’s, I’ve found coconuts on Mason’s Bay beach. So where the fuck do they come from?

  Why I like having ambergris in the house is every now and again I’ll burn a little bit on the fire on a very special occasion, put it on top and get that beautiful smell through the house, you know. And it smells like shit, ambergris, but when you burn it, it smells divine. I’m trying to dry some in the freezer at the moment. I’ve got a big soft bit. The thing is: how do you age it? How do you age it quickly? That’s the conundrum with fresh stuff. How do you get it to go grey because that’s where the money is, you see. I’ve done one trick which worked. I got a piece of fresh ambergris, soft ambergris, and I stuck it in an ice-cream container, drilled it full of holes, put sand in it and stuck it on the roof, and just let Mother Nature do its thing. And after six months, half of it had turned white. But I thought okay … if you put a piece of blue cod or a piece of fish or a piece of paua in the freezer, what happens to it if it’s not well-sealed? It dehydrates. So this is a real soft bit. It’s about the size of a human shit, or half the size of a decent human shit, and I’ve stuck it in the freezer, just for an experiment, to see what it does. It probably won’t work but I thought, if there’s moisture in there, it’s going to start pulling the moisture out of it.

  He laughs a dry, humourless laugh, but I know he’s not joking.

  On Doughboy Bay, the sun is still hanging high above the water, but the air has grown cooler. The green hills have started to find their shadows again. The plane is an hour late, and Oban seems like a long way away. I have finished my water, and I’m thirsty. I’m disappointed too. I was hoping to find ambergris of my own — to see a large lump of it in the distance, like a misshapen tree stump. But I found none. For an hour or so, I’ve been waiting in silence in the stuffy one-roomed hut, listening intently for any sound that might slowly gather around itself and grow into the drone of an airplane engine. I stare at the long white whalebones leaning on the windowsill. Several times, I have picked my bag up, opened the door, and then realized I have mistaken the buzzing of a trapped bee for an airplane making its way over the hills.

  In the hut, I write and date an entry in the dog-eared visitors’ book. Leafing through the previous pages, I see two names I recognize: Robbie and Rob Anderson, the ten-year-old boy who found a piece of ambergris on Long Beach, near Dunedin in May 2006, and his father. In March 2009, almost a year before my visit here, the Andersons had spent several days here, sleeping on the makeshift bunks. Their names are written in blue ink, with the address listed as Long Beach, Otago. I wonder to myself if they found a fist-size piece of ambergris hidden among the wet piles of driftwood on Doughboy Bay.

  As I wait for the Cessna to take me back to Oban, I meet DoC rangers Winston Polotu and Jonathan Armitage. Sunburned, they are trudging slowly along the beach after a long day in the dunes. I am reminded of French Foreign Legionnaires. Armitage says he has two more pieces of ambergris. “It’s the first time I’ve ever found any,” he says, unrolling a Ziploc bag with two dark shapes inside. “I’ve been searching for weeks.”

  “I’ve got a piece too,” says Polotu, opening his large hand and showing me a dark peanut-size piece of ambergris. Polotu is thickset, built like a rugby player, but he looks tired. He is wearing a hat with flaps that protect his ears and neck from the sun. I suggest he’ll be happy when this ten-day stint on the beach is over. “Not now we’ve started finding ambergris,” he says.

  Back at the DoC hut, Armitage makes himself a drink, shaking re-hydration salts into his water bottle. I photograph his two largest pieces of ambergris, placing them on my notebook. The smaller piece is black, like a little lump of coal, and is the length of my thumb. Soft and tacky, it smells like sheep dung. The largest piece is a dirty yellow colour. Like Stewart Island, it is “irregularly triquetrous in outline.” It is the size of an egg, and its pitted surface is creased and marked with gentle depressions, like a piece of wet clay. It looks like a lump of mouldy cheese, mustard-coloured and soft. I wonder if this is what cheese might look like if it spent a week or two rolling around in the southern Pacific Ocean. Perhaps someone had thrown it from the wharf in Halfmoon Bay and the currents brought it here. I lift it to my nose, and the smell is unmistakably complex: like rotten wood and dung and the smell of seaweed. It is ambergris.

  Ambergris collected by Department of Conservation worker Jonathan Armitage on Doughboy Bay. Credit: Christopher Kemp.

  Ambergris in the Stewart Island Museum collection. Credit: Christopher Kemp.

  In the distance, I hear the thin sound of an airplane rising from the other side of the nearest green ridge.

  “There was another guy who used to work for DoC,” says Armitage, taking a long swallow from his bottle as I pick up my bag and prepare to leave, “and he sold a jarful of a
mbergris for $3,000 or $4,000.”

  8 ON THE ROAD

  The reported find of a piece of ambergris on the sea beach at Napier appears to have been somewhat premature. On analysis the ambergris is said to have proved to be tallow.

  * New Zealand Evening Post (June 13, 1900)

  “You would not have known me,” remarked the skipper, a polished, courteous gentleman, to the press representative, in his quick, genial way. “Blood from head to foot, but I got the ambergris.”

  * CAPTAIN LARSEN, of the Norwegia, to the Poverty Bay Herald (January 1913)

  Anton van Helden has a problem. He has lost his ambergris. I watch as he rushes around a spacious well-lit utility room at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, trying to locate it among the thousands of other specimens and samples stored there. The marine mammals collection manager strides across the room and into another avenue with cardboard box walls. I try to follow him, but at the end of the aisle he makes a tight turn and disappears from sight. When I catch up with him, he is standing with his head down, his chin on his chest, silently thinking. Then he bustles down another aisle, his untucked shirt flapping behind him like a sail, past shelves filled with more mostly unmarked boxes.

  It is early in the morning on a wet day in Wellington. Outside, the rain is falling in diagonal sheets on the choppy water. An hour earlier, I had arrived at the harbour-front museum building to discover that van Helden’s office is elsewhere, another kilometre or so across town at a satellite location. I ran uphill in the rain, splashing clumsily through puddles, leaving behind the untidy grey water in the harbour. I am now standing in a multi-purpose basement as van Helden continues to search for the ambergris he has agreed to show me. We had entered the room — past mounted deer heads and a stuffed porcupine in a case — and van Helden had nodded fraternally at a man bent in a crouch, carefully pinning and arranging a taxidermied mouse for a museum exhibit.

 

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