Floating Gold

by Christopher Kemp

  But it was a hopeless endeavour.

  Settlers to New England were not the first to benefit from colonizing a new and untapped source of ambergris. For centuries, ambergris had been an important footnote in numerous accounts of conquest and colonization. In October 1613, when the fledgling colony of Bermuda was still named for its founder, Admiral Sir George Somers, John Chamberlain wrote in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton:

  Great store of ambergris from the Somers Islands this year, the only commodity as yet. People begin to nestle and plant there very handsomely. The Spaniards, nothing pleased thereat, threaten to remove them next year, but the inhabitants are nothing dismayed, trusting rather to the difficulty of access, than to any other strength of their own. A piece of ambergris found as big as the body of a giant, the head and one arm wanting, but so foolishly handled, that it brake in pieces. The largest piece brought home, was not above 68 ounces, which sells for 12 or 15 shillings an ounce more than smaller pieces.

  In 1682, in Carolina; or, A Description of the Present State of that Country, Thomas Ashe wrote, “Ambergrise is often thrown on their Shoars; a pretious Commodity to him who finds it, if Native and pure, in Worth and Value It surpasses Gold; being estimated at 5 and 6 Pound the Ounce, if not adulterated.” In 1678, when the Lords Proprietors of Carolina appointed Robert Holden as the collector of customs for the new colony of Carolina, history had already taught them an important lesson: ambergris was a valuable substance. It deserved well-worded legislation. With its long and unbroken Atlantic coastline, the new colony of Carolina produced a lot of ambergris.

  In a letter dated February 19, 1679, the Lords Proprietors issued Holden the following instructions: “You are responsible for wrecks, ambergris, and other ‘ejections of the sea,’ as well as rents, and will receive 10 per cent. of all receipts and recoveries for your pay.” Similarly, in 1703, when James Moore became “the Receiver Generall of all that Part of our Province of Carolina that lyes south and west of Cape Feare,” he also received instructions to “take into your Possession our share of wrecks, Ambergreen and all such other things as of right belong to us.”

  For several decades at the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire North American ambergris market — in fact, the world market — was ruled by one man: David C. Stull, the self-proclaimed “Ambergris King.” He lived in Provincetown, in a handsome little house on Commercial Street that looked out on the harbour. Before his death in 1926, he claimed he had bought and traded at least half of the ambergris that had ever entered the United States.

  Stull’s watch oil business, which he ran from a cramped refinery in the East End of Provincetown, was his first concern: “Mr. Stull conducts a trade that is unique,” reported the Washington Post in April 1911. “He purchases an animal oil that is worth $15 a gallon aboard the whaleship and by a secret process converts it into an oil which sells readily at the rate of 25 cents for a thimbleful.”

  Although his watch oil business clearly paid the rent, Stull’s true obsession was ambergris. As early as the 1880s, he had bought a 10-pound (4.5 kilogram) lump of ambergris, obtained in the south Cuban keys by the crew of a Provincetown schooner called the William A. Crozier, and then sold it for $500 per pound. It was an astonishing sum. For the next four decades, Stull handled more ambergris than anyone in the world.

  “It is said,” reported the Post, “that less than one and a half tons of ambergris is known to have been offered for sale in the history of the world, and that Mr. Stull, in his capacity of agent for a wealthy French concern, has handled half of that quantity. Moreover, he has obtained nearly all of the precious stuff brought to port by the dwindling fleets of sperm-whale seekers in the last twenty years, thus possessing a giant’s share of the world’s supply.”

  As his reputation grew, Stull — whose business card read: “First Hands for Ambergris”— was asked to appraise a constant stream of pieces of suspected ambergris at his Provincetown headquarters. People arrived from across New England carrying boulders of animal fat, lumps of wood pulp, wax, and whale blubber.

  In There Goes Flukes, published in 1938, William H. Tripp included the following description of a meeting with Stull in 1921. The two met in New Bedford. Stull had arrived from Provincetown to bid on a haul of ambergris weighing more than 70 pounds (30 kilograms), which had been brought to port by the Valkyria:

  “See what I have here,” he said as he called my attention to a ring on one of the fingers of his left hand. Set in the ring was a large rectangular stone, known as a goldstone. Much to my surprise, with a finger nail he raised the goldstone, as one would the cover of a box, and inside the setting of the ring was a depression filled with a black, sticky substance.

  “That’s ambergris,” he said, “but of very poor quality. Some of a small lot I bought once. It was no good because it would never dry as it should. I keep that in my ring to show people what poor ambergris looks like.”

  I have a photograph of Stull on my desk as I write this. On a sepia-tinted postcard from the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection, Stull cuts a strange figure, crouched on the sand in Provincetown Harbour, a stout little man with white muttonchops that hang down almost to his collar. He is cutting a deep circular incision around the muscular neck of a dead and stranded pilot whale. Behind him, a wooden pier marches into the harbour. A caption on the card reads: “D. C. Stull. Provincetown, Mass., cutting up Blackfish to manufacture his Watch and Clock Oil”.

  “A few years ago,” reported the Boston Daily Globe in 1909, “there was great excitement on the North shore over a greasy mass of stuff which floated onto the beach and was promptly spotted by the wise ones as ambergris. As usual a sample was sent to Mr. Stull, who with cold conclusiveness returned it as refuse from the Boston dump.”

  Back on Herring Cove Beach, the sand has been scoured clean by the trailing edges of the storm front that barrelled across the cape the previous night. In this bright place, it should be possible to stand briefly in the wintry morning light to consider the sublime beauty of water in motion. But it is so cold that I can only withstand it for a few minutes. I hide in the shelter of the locked restrooms, fumbling to put on a pair of gloves, and then start to walk back along the sand to my car. Driving back into town, I return to Whaler’s Wharf and walk the thin strip of sand again. It is cold and sunny now. I find two dead horseshoe crabs on the sand half hidden in a long, wet frilly drift of sea lettuce. The storm has thrown up mussel shells, gloves, pieces of plastic, strips of bubble wrap, fish bones, and a condom. The two boats I had watched the night before, being thrown around by the waves, are submerged now in the harbour, broken in pieces, their hulls filled with swirling water.

  Leaving the harbour behind, I walk east along Commercial Street and find a small nondescript wooden building, its white paint peeling. Now an art gallery, it was once the site of Stull’s whale-oil refinery. At one time, most of the ambergris that entered the United States was brought here, appraised and graded by Stull, and prepared for the French perfumery market. No trace of that trade exists. The gallery is closed and filled with bad art.

  A little farther along the road, facing the blue glinting water in the harbour, is the handsome white clapboard house that Stull lived in until his death. I linger outside and take photographs of a bright blue plaque on the wall: “David C. Stull 1844–1926 Whale Oil Refiner ‘Ambergris King’ Lived Here.”

  Later that day, I follow the arc of Cape Cod back to Boston, stopping along the way to search other beaches after it has become warm enough to walk the shoreline. At Head of the Meadow Beach on the Atlantic coast near Truro, I struggle over grassy and gorse-covered dunes to walk several kilometres along the coast, my shoes slipping on the steeply inclined sand. Two seals — black-headed and glistening — bob around in the surf, playing among the blue peaks of a 4-metre swell. At First Encounter Beach near Eastham, I look out across an undulating dun-coloured kilometre of mudflats at low tide. In December 1620, the Pilgrims skirmished with Wampanoag Indians on th
e sand here.

  Dolin described the encounter in Leviathan: “A dozen or so Indians were ‘busie about a blacke thing,’ which the explorers could not quite discern. Seeing the white men approach, the Indians ran back and forth as if gathering their things, and then disappeared into the woods.”

  The “blacke thing” was a pilot whale, a species that frequently strands on shorelines in huge numbers. In some instances, pods of several hundred pilot whales have stranded at once and beaten each other to death on the shore with their tails. These events confound cetologists, who have struggled for centuries to explain their cause. In this particular instance, the carcass was worth a second glance. Both the Indians and the settlers knew that a single pilot whale could produce about a barrel of valuable oil. In the morning, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians skirmished on the shore here, exchanging arrows and musket fire.

  It is strange to think of the fighting that had taken place here over a dead pilot whale carcass almost 400 years before. I stand on the parking lot and look out over the mudflats in the winter sun. A few scattered stands of pine are green in the sunlight. Walking onto the slick mud — which is still wet from the last tide — I sink into the thick ooze and almost fall over. I walk back to my car, pausing to wipe my shoes on the yellow dune grass. The sky is blue.

  In the parking lot, a lone seagull pecks disconsolately at a dead eel, tugging at the skin around its grey wrist-thick neck.

  “The museum was founded by Louis Agassiz in 1859,” Judy Chupasko tells me as we walk through the Mammalogy Department of the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a sprawling, cabinet-filled Victorian-era suite of rooms that houses a collection of around 87,000 mammalian specimens. “It’s the second oldest natural history museum in this country actually. It’s older than the Smithsonian and the American Museum, and the Field Museum in Chicago. In the Mammalogy Department, we have specimens that were collected by Agassiz that date back to the 1830s, actually, so even before the museum opened. He was collecting for a long time before he got the money to build this place.”

  We walk into a room filled with row after row of military-grey lockers, each filled with drawers of specimens. “This room is all rodents,” says curatorial assistant Chupasko, opening one of the shallow drawers. Inside are two neat rows of misshapen carcasses: North American flying squirrels. I count almost thirty of them, splay-legged and frozen in mid-flight. “We have about 35,000 rodents in the collections. We have a good bat collection too. Rodents and bats are the biggest orders of mammals, under the class Mammalia.”

  I look at the squirrels in the drawer again: a strange sight in their two rows, white-eyed and lumpy. In front of each specimen is a sturdy little plastic box, which houses its bones. They had each, in effect, been carefully dismantled.

  “They’re not taxidermied,” Chupasko tells me, when she sees me looking at the squirrels arranged in their rows. “These are called scientific study skins. People get confused between specimens mounted for display and education and exhibit, versus scientific specimens. We don’t need them to look pretty, although we want them to look as nice as possible. The main thing is to make sure they’re not greasy, or have meat, or they’re not rotten. That way, we don’t attract pests in the collection.”

  A metre or so farther along, Chupasko opens another drawer and pulls out the stiff, flattened carcass of an enormous Chinese flying squirrel. With its long bushy tail, it measures perhaps a metre or more in length and is a deep chestnut-red colour. Although they are the size of house cats, these specimens are a species of flying squirrel too. “These are squirrels found in China,” Chupasko explains, holding one in the air. “They’re beautiful too. For a mammal, this is a brilliant colour, because most mammals are brown. Most mammals are nocturnal, so they’re not as colourful as birds are.”

  Together, we wander through the department, stopping to look at lion pelts, preserved anteaters and pangolins, and mounted warthog heads. Everywhere we walk, beady black eyes follow our progress. “It’s all skeletons in here,” Chupasko says as we enter another room. “All the hoofed mammals, mostly the artiodactyls that are in the family Bovidae, like all the cows and antelopes and sheep and goats and bighorn. Those are all in the family Bovidae. But we have the Giraffidae here too and the Antilocaprodae, which are the American pronghorns, so we have three families of hoofed mammals in this room.”

  After a while, just thinking about the number of different mammal specimens that surround us becomes a dizzying task. With every step, I walk past the jumbled bones of entire orders of mammals. For a biologist, it is like visiting a library that contains a copy of every book ever written. Chupasko points out another two rows of cases. Inside them is the rabbit collection. “The Lagomorpha, that whole order,” she says, before pointing in another direction. “We have the pig family and the deer family over here, and the rhinos and hippos over here.”

  I peer through the distortions and imperfections of an original Victorian hand-blown pane of glass and see inside a jumble of greying bones. Beneath them, a faded card reads: “Hippopotamus amphibius.” In another drawer: “Choeropsis liberiensis,” or the bones of a pygmy hippopotamus. We walk along another unremarkable-looking corridor, entering another spacious room. Family after family of carnivores unspool beside us with every step. “We call it the carnivore room,” says Chupasko, “because, by sheer volume, it’s mostly carnivores. It has the cat family, dog family, seal families in it, all the carnivores, bears, mongooses, civets, genets. All the carnivores are in here, but we also have the marsupials in here, and our monotremes, the little duck-billed platypuses and the spiny echidnas are in this room. So we have these, the marsupials, the anteaters, aardvarks, sloths, armadillos — we have a lot of orders in this room but we call it the carnivore room.”

  Ambergris, collected by J. Henry Blake and donated to the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Credit: Christopher Kemp.

  Finally, she stops in front of an oversize whale skull, stored upright. It is the size of a small car. The underside of the enormous jawbone is stained black — sooty like charred wood — by old whale oil. “An odd fin whale,” she says. “This should be at the field station, but it’s just hard to get out of the department. I think the building was built around it or something.”

  Later Judy Chupasko holds a small green cardboard box in her hands. She places it on a table outside her office.

  “You hit a little gold mine here, I think,” she says cheerfully, gesturing toward the box on the table before leaving me alone with its contents. I sit and prise open the lid. Inside, there is a haphazard clutter of glass vials and specimen jars from the first decades of the twentieth century. A few have lost their cork stoppers, which have dried and crumbled in the eighty years since they last were stoppered. All of the pieces of ambergris inside the vials came from one man — an artist from Somerville, Massachusetts, named J. Henry Blake.

  There is a whitened flat piece from May 1921 that sits on a wad of cotton wool in a fragile thin-walled vial. Next to it, a heavier ridged glass flask contains a dark lump, like a nut. Its label reads: “Immature ambergris of little value from Mr. Stull.” Another vial contains a handwritten label in shiny pencil that reads: “Ambergris best quality 300 pr lb (the piece this came from was 75 lbs and sold 90 pr lb).” I retrieve another glass tube, filled with a handful of black curving squid beaks. Beside it I place a squat glass flask filled with several grey aromatic lumps. I smell the lumps and wince before reading the faded label: “D. Stull ‘Ambergris King’ says Sewer Grease, From Beach Nausett, Mass. Aug 3, 1915. J. Henry Blake.” Working slowly, I remove one container after another. Before too long, I have arranged in front of me a miniature cityscape made of glass.

  On June 24, 1937, from his home in Somerville, Massachusetts, just a few kilometres north of the Harvard campus, J. Henry Blake wrote the following letter to G. M. Allen, the curator of the mammal collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology:

/>   Dear Dr Allen,

  According to your letter of the 17th inst. I am sending box of specimens of Ambergris and (separate cover) notes, clippings, photographs and list.

  It is difficult to get a collection of this nature, because the parties are more interested in the money part than science. Fortunately, I have known Mr. Stull, the “Ambergris King”, since boyhood and this has aided me in getting spms.

  I am glad this has come into such good hands as your own, and glad to help in any way.

  With thanks to Dr Barbour and yourself, I am,

  Very truly yours,

  J. Henry Blake

  Inside the brown envelope addressed to Allen — it has become as soft as a bedsheet after decades in storage — there are several beautifully rendered hand-drawn sketches by Blake. Each was drawn on a postcard-size card: a piece of ambergris with a squid beak embedded in it; a square-shaped grey-green lump of ambergris, its surface covered with hairs; a squid eye, removed from a piece of Stull’s ambergris. I place them carefully side by side on the table. From the envelope, I remove a black-and-white photograph of a large dark boulder of ambergris. On the back is written: “Taken by Brig Viola in 1917, on coast Africa from a 15 bbl sperm whale. I saw at office Howe, French Co. 99 Broad St Bos. It weighed 162 lbs in Bos. but 155 lbs in NY at which weight it sold for $225. pr. lb. = $34,875.”

  Letter from J. Henry Blake to G. M. Allen (1937). Credit: Christopher Kemp.

  Alongside the sketches and the specimens and Blake’s spidery handwritten notes, there is a yellowing stack of newspaper clippings. One of them, dated November 8, 1911, and taken from the Gloucester Times, recounted the washing ashore of a large dead sperm whale at Ocean City, on the New Jersey shoreline.