Dyer picks up a rough-hewn wooden box, filled with several dark brown rectangular bricks. “I think this is whale oil soap,” he says, holding one of the heavy blocks in his hand. He brings it to his nose and inhales. “It’s soap,” he says. “Believe it or not, that stuff is really good soap. It really does the job. It lathers up beautifully and leaves your skin nice and soft and cleans exceptionally well, and I know that because there were some little flakes of it and in the process of putting stuff on exhibit I grabbed one of those flakes.”
He holds his thumb and index finger a few centimetres apart. “It was just about that big,” he says, “and I took it down and I washed my hands with it. It was made in New Bedford in 1835 by Zenas Whittimore. It’s this big block of this hideous-looking stuff. It looked like that. But, boy, was it nice. Nice soap. Smelled like soap, worked just like soap. It actually says it right on there: Whittimore. It’s stamped on the soap itself.” He places the box of whale oil soap to one side, looks up with a grimace at the shelving in front of us, and scratches his salt-and-pepper hair.
In the spacious lobby of the museum, three huge whale skeletons hang in the air, suspended more than 12 metres above the ground. Stretching almost the length of the building are the enormous pale bones of a juvenile blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) skeleton. More than 20 metres long — only about half the length of an adult specimen — everything about it is still oversize. The slender, slightly flattened ribs descend from the vertebral column like warped pieces of driftwood, forming the curved walls of a rib cage that is large enough to sit inside. The elegantly bowed jawbones of the lower jaw protrude into the empty air like an implausibly long spade. Above it, the elongated skull is pointed and birdlike. It measures almost 6 metres in length and weighs one and a half tonnes.
The oil-stained skull continues slowly to release oil, filling the air of the lobby with its fumes. It oozes from the surfaces of the large porous bones. Dripping at intervals onto a well-placed plastic tray, the oil enters a long snakelike coil of plastic tubing and descends to ground level, collecting there in a glass flask. Half an hour earlier, I had placed my nose at the mouth of the flask, sampling the odour of the whale oil. More than 2 centimetres deep and dark brown like maple syrup, it is intensely aromatic and reminds me of the thick slippery smell of diesel. Cetologists expect the bones to continue releasing oil for at least the next sixty years.
On an upper level of the museum, the centre of another room is filled by a sperm whale skeleton. I walk around it, admiring its enormous pale flabellate scapulae, which measure more than a metre across. Its long, thin bottom jaw is studded with a row of incurving conical teeth. The skull — whalers called it the sleigh — is shaped like a narrow trough. It reminds me of an old and weather-beaten wooden boat. At its centre is a smooth, rounded concavity — the cistern that once housed the mysterious spermaceti organ.
It is cold in the storage facility. Dyer is on his knees now with his head buried in a large box of miscellaneous whaling artifacts and specimens. He picks up a little glass jar, quickly inspects it, and places it back into the box. “That’s all Japanese,” he says to himself quietly, moving to another box. He picks up another specimen. “That’s all Japanese,” he continues. “Japanese. Japanese.”
Ambergris in the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Credit: Christopher Kemp.
I look at bottles of honey-coloured whale oil and the cracked green paint of ships’ boxes, arranged in an orderly row on the shelf nearest to me. “We’re interested in it, you know,” Dyer had said when I first asked him about ambergris, “but we’re interested in collecting. If there’s nothing to collect, then it’s simply information. Information-wise, you’ve got chapters of stories on ambergris. Who found it and how they found it. To start with, Moby-Dick, obviously … that chunk of the book is an important part of the story. But there are many other accounts of substantial chunks of this stuff that came back to New Bedford, and they were duly entered as material obtained in the fishery.”
We are trying to locate several pieces of ambergris that belong to the museum collection. “We have a number from the Atlantic, for sure,” says Dyer, “late in the 1880s, 1890s, in that time frame. For some reason or other, a lot of ambergris came back and was recorded at that time.”
He pushes the stepladder toward another shelf and begins to climb it. I watch as his head disappears between boxes and trays. “Okay,” he says then, in a quiet and muffled voice. “There we go.”
Moments later Dyer steps off the ladder with a large rusted tin in his hands. On the outside of the pockmarked tin is a label and printed on it are the words: “M. L. Barrett & Co. ~ Importers & Manufacturers ~ Fine Drugs, Essential Oils, Vanilla Beans, etc. ~ Chicago”. Dyer opens the tin and pulls out a large black piece of ambergris, the size of an apple. “Now that’s ambergris,” he says, holding it toward me. “Smell it. It smells like ambergris. What I don’t see prominently are any squid beaks in it. I wonder whether it has been processed somehow.”
He places the ambergris on a desk and pulls out another smaller piece with a shiny whorled surface. “It looks like charcoal and smells like tobacco,” says Dyer. “That’s the way I describe it.” In fact, it has a much more complex odour than that. I smell it and I’m reminded of tobacco, old musk and furniture polish, and the sort of thick cloying fragrances that grandmothers tend to wear. As I inhale, I become aware of an entire spectrum of different odours, some of which I can identify, while others pass over my olfactory bulb and diminish too quickly for me to recognize. Lurking somewhere deep beneath the immediately accessible surface aroma, I can detect the incongruous smell of black licorice, which lingers stubbornly in my nose and stays on my hands for hours. “I’d put that between 1900 and 1920, the first twenty years of the twentieth century,” says Dyer.
During the long years spent in storage, perhaps a hundred years or more, a black powder has accumulated at the bottom of the tin. It is a few centimetres deep and thick like coal dust.
“That’s some pretty nice-looking stuff, right there,” says Dyer, pouring the powder out onto a carefully placed piece of cardboard. “So this is the real deal. This might answer your question. What did they do with it? This stuff was obviously sold to M. L. Barrett & Company in Chicago, right? It’s not a New Bedford thing. It’s not a Nantucket thing. It’s not a New England thing. So, there’s a market for the stuff. It’s pretty old. I mean, it could have been as early as the 1880s. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
I find a little hooked fragment of squid beak and put it to one side. And then another. Dyer finds one too. We begin to line them up carefully in a row. They look like sharp black pieces of broken nutshell. It is an odd moment. For a while, we stand side by side in the silence of the storage room, wordlessly removing squid beaks from a heap of black powder with the tips of our fingers and placing them with the others. In another box, Dyer finds a small glass vial and hands it to me. It is empty. Its interior walls are dusty and yellowed with time. “The pieces that were in here are on exhibit,” he says, “but that was collected on board the schooner John R. Manta in the nineteen teens, nineteen twenties.”
Several times a year, says Dyer, people contact him in the hope that he will confirm that the substance they have sent him is genuine ambergris. He receives these packages of unknown substances — fragments, nuggets, shavings, slices, splinters, and shards — and is unsure of what to do with them. “Every time somebody finds something on the beach,” he says, “they think it’s ambergris and they bring it in. You know: is this ambergris? It has to be ambergris. I’ve never had a piece where I’ve said, ‘Yep, that’s exactly like the stuff that I’ve seen, and that is in fact ambergris.’ I’ve never been able to actually say that. They bring all kinds of stuff. I’ve got two samples up in my office, and I’m going to start keeping them more and more because it’s really interesting. I’ll show you the stuff up in my office.”
An hour later, and a block or so
across New Bedford, Dyer is sitting in the museum’s research library in front of a tall grey filing cabinet. Each drawer is filled with index cards, reducing the 2,000 or so whaling logbooks in the museum collection into a list of alphabetized terms that can be searched by researchers.
Dyer opens the drawer marked A – B and riffles the top of the index cards with his thumb. Each card represents a reference in a logbook. “You can see,” he says, “compared to cards for things like ‘blackfish’ and ‘bone,’ just how few there are for ‘ambergris’.” In fact, there are only perhaps twenty or so index cards for “ambergris”, and as many as several hundred cards for more common words like “baleen.” An entry from the 1869 logbook of the Sea Fox, a whaling barque from Westport, Massachusetts, reads: “Ambergris sold at Nossi bay, Madagascar, for $5,839.00 French gold.” From the logbook of the Marcella, which detailed a voyage that began in 1873 and lasted three years: “Ambergris sold at Zanzibar for $67. per lb.” In another logbook — from an 1879 cruise taken by the Falcon of New Bedford — simply: “Ambergris, 136 lbs.”
A few weeks before my visit, I had bought The History of the American Whale Fishery by Alexander Starbuck, an exhaustive 800-page compendium of whaling records that was first published in 1878. From it, one can learn the ephemera of countless whaling voyages that sailed from American ports between 1784 and 1876: almost a hundred years of whaling cruises, painstakingly tabulated along with dates of departure and return, the name of the captain of each ship, the port of origin, and the amounts of whale oil and bone harvested.
On June 6, 1817, the Atlas, a ship from Nantucket captained by William Easton, returned from the Pacific Ocean with 1,372 barrels of sperm whale oil in its hold; in 1841, Captain Prince Sherman of the Parker from New Bedford was killed when his whaleboat was stove in by a whale; and in 1876, the crew of the Camilla from New Bedford abandoned her in the Arctic, leaving on board 190 barrels of spermaceti, 300 barrels of whale oil, and 5,000 pounds (2,250 kilograms) of whalebone. There are thousands of entries like these, for hundreds of ships. The record seems complete.
But I was surprised to find that ambergris is mentioned just five times in The History of the American Whale Fishery. And, even in those few scattered instances, the entries are unremarkable: on August 28, 1867, the Wm Wilson returned to port with 8 pounds (3.5 kilograms) of ambergris aboard; in 1842, the America, from Wareham, Massachusetts, had brought home 18 pounds (8 kilograms). Modest amounts of ambergris, collected after years spent at sea. And these dates are important: in 1852, in almost the middle of this time period, the New England whaling fleet enjoyed its most successful year ever, killing more than 8,000 whales, from which it harvested 103,000 barrels of sperm oil and 260,000 barrels of whale oil. But still, ambergris is, for the most part, oddly absent from the record.
“The thousands of logbooks that I’ve read over the years,” says Dyer, “and I don’t find references to ambergris very often. You see it sometimes. Occasionally. But I mean these guys are killing anywhere from twenty-five to sixty whales between a twelve-month and a four-year voyage, and you don’t see it very often. Say you had officers or sailors who joined the vessel somewhere out there in the world and rose through the ranks, they might not actually even know what it is, or have ever heard of it. But I suspect that career whalemen knew all about it.”
I sit quietly in the wooden stillness of the library for an hour, lost in the smell of foxed books. A row of old wooden paddles from whaleboats and a long iron harpoon lean against the wall near the entrance, like a collection of arcane relics. Dyer had piled a stack of battered textbooks and whaling logbooks on the table in front of me: A Compleat History of Druggs by Pierre Pomet from 1712; a slim and dusty first printing of Caspar Neumann’s 1729 dissertation on ambergris, printed in the original German; a handful of whaling logbooks that mention ambergris; and There Goes Flukes by William Henry Tripp, published in 1938.
I am sitting a couple of blocks from the harbour. Once such a bustling place, it is quieter now. I had visited it earlier in the morning, before the museum opened. Now a fleet of fishing boats — hulls covered with blisters of rust — rolls on the oily water. In the library, I am hunched over the crinkly blue pages of the Sea Fox logbook from 1869, trying to make sense of the faded, looping script. I turn a page and slowly read the following entry, from 1870:
Saturday 10th
At 6 PM got underway and stood to the N.E. ward toward the island Nos-Beh where we came to anchor at noon on Sunday where we lay till the 20th. Obtained some refreshment and stores such Sugar Beans and Rice. Sold all the dry goods belonging to the ship, also those belonging to my self, all at re-numerative prices. Also the ambergris, suppose I did realize for it as much as the owners of it expected but I am satisfied with the sale and am glad it is off my hands. It was a bad lot, scarsely a pound of good ambergris in the whole and it had decreased fifteen pounds in weight since it was put on board. After spending a week in negotiations, I sold the lot for the sum of five thousand eight hundred and thirtynine dollars French gold & silver. Waited four days for the money, finaly got it and have it on board together with the proceeds of sales of goods amounting in all to a little over six thousand dollars.
The weather is very hot and if we get clear without sicknes I shall be glad. I shall remit the money to the owners as fast as I can find an opportunity not infringing upon my own voyage. Better to sell ambergris when it is first taken.
Two days after visiting New Bedford, I am standing at the tip of Cape Cod, a long, spiralling strip of land that extends into the windswept Atlantic Ocean. It is just before sunrise on Herring Cove Beach, and the wind is brutally cold. A fierce northerly sweeps in relentlessly from the sea, as sharp as a knife. I lean into it and begin to walk northward, dark grey land rising to my right and silver-edged ocean to my left. It’s almost seven o’clock. The sun finally peeps over the darkened Massachusetts landmass to the east, across the water of Cape Cod Bay. It hits the top of the dunes. The sky is a clear wintry pink. In the distance, I can see Race Point lighthouse. The sea crashes up the sloping shoreline, sending a white wall of spray into the air. It is so cold, and my eyes are watering so much that I close them, opting instead to trudge blindly over the tangles of bladderwrack seaweed with my nose dripping into the wind.
I am completely alone on a brittle Atlantic winter coastline. One of the most popular beaches on Cape Cod in the summertime, Herring Cove Beach is a challenging and unwelcoming place in December. There are parking spaces for several hundred cars. But, just after dawn, mine is the only car parked there. I never saw more than ten other people the entire time I was in Provincetown. The buildings along Commercial Street, the imposing Town Hall, the stores, and the little houses in the East End were all unoccupied. Plenty of cars lined the streets, but there was no one around to drive them. After an hour or so, the absence of other people became unsettling.
If Cape Cod resembles a muscleman’s flexed arm, jutting out from the east coast before bending northward into the Atlantic Ocean, Provincetown sits nestled within the semi-protective curve of its curled fist. The cape stands like a lone bracket. The day before, I had driven south and east from Boston, through quiet wintering New England fishing towns like Barnstable and Yarmouth, before turning north at Harwich to follow the green curving land of the peninsula.
In the seventeenth century, early settlers sent back to England astonishing stories of seas thick with whales. In fact, the abundance of whales was apparent the moment the pilgrims steered the Mayflower toward the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620. Writing in Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, historian Eric Jay Dolin described the pilgrims’ arrival: “On the morning of November 11, the weary wanderers dropped anchor in modern-day Provincetown Harbor. Almost immediately, whales surrounded the ship.”
Before long, the pilgrims began to understand that the whales represented an important potential source of revenue, something they desperately needed. Within a hundred years or so, whalers were beginning to develop
techniques that would bring them thousands of whales from across the world. But before the whaling era, the waters around New England were filled with whales. “An entry from a diary written in 1762,” wrote Dolin, “tells the story of a sixty-year-old Truro resident who recalled when, as a younger man, ‘he had seen as many whales in Cape Cod [Provincetown] harbor at one time as would have made a bridge from the end of the Cape to Truro shore, which is seven miles across and could require two thousand whales.’”
I had arrived in Provincetown after nightfall. A storm was approaching, closing in quickly on the cape in the darkness. The wind rumbled and howled through the streets, rattling flagpoles and shaking Christmas decorations. Lights swung in the wet sky. Hastily handwritten signs on store windows read: “See You in the Spring!” In the darkness, I walked through Whaler’s Wharf, an enclosed parade of shuttered candy shops and souvenir stores, and stepped onto the sandy beach of Provincetown Harbour. Twenty feet away, huge breakers crashed on the beach. Two small boats were moored at the shoreline. Each enormous wave threatened to break them into pieces. First their prows pointed to the night sky, and then they were gone altogether, hidden behind another towering wave.
Gulls whipped over my head, ghostly in the night. I crouched low near the sand and made my way along the curve of the bay in the darkness, trying to detect the smell of ambergris on the shore before the winds stripped it away from me.
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