Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  It was a marvellous irony, thought Thomas Beale, ‘that a resemblance to the smell of this drug, which is the most agreeable of all the perfumes, should be produced by a preparation of one of the most odious of all substances’. On his own researches into the interior of the whale, Beale cited the chemist Wilhelm Homberg, who found ‘that a vessel in which he had made a long digestion of human fæces, acquired a very strong and perfect smell of ambergris’. This somewhat unsavoury experiment–which swiftly led to the evacuation of Homberg’s laboratory by his assistants–brought Beale to the same conclusion: that ambergris was ‘nothing but the hardened fæces of the spermaceti whale, which is pretty well proved from its being mixed so intimately with the refuse of its food’. Indeed, his friend Samuel Enderby possessed ‘a fine specimen…about six or seven inches long, and which bears very evident marks of having been moulded by the lower portion of the rectum of the Whale’. And during his own adventures in the North Pacific, Beale himself had collected some ‘semi-fluid fæces’ which had floated from the carcase of a whale, ‘and which on being dried in the sun bore all the properties of ambergris’.

  The exact origins of ambergris remain obscure; but it is certainly the result of a remarkable process. The sperm whale swallows squid alive, taking its food into the first of four stomachs. It then passes into a second stomach to be broken down by strong acids, assisted by a writhing mass of nematode worms, ‘a disgusting sight’ according to Malcolm, who has seen it many times. When the waste moves through the lower intestine the brittle, shiny black squid beaks–along with other indigestible material such as nematode cuticles–prompt the whale’s digestive system to secrete bile and thereby ease their passage. Occasionally–in as few as one in a hundred whales–this chemical reaction produces ambergris. Once expelled, it may spend months or even years in the water, oxidizing and hardening into layered lumps, often still containing bits of squid beaks. Lighter than water, ambergris is occasionally cast up on beaches–hence its name, grey amber, an allusion to the fossilized tree resin also found on seashores.

  Early authorities thought that ambergris was only produced by ailing whales. Frederick Bennett concluded that animals that displayed ‘a torpid and sickly appearance’ and which failed to ‘void liquid excrement’ when alarmed or harpooned were those most likely to yield the stuff. He reasoned that the sharp beaks could cause a cicatrix to form, a scarred wound which closed up the return, leaving the whale to waste away to its death, ‘a goose killed by the golden egg within’. Modern cetologists, however, think that ambergris comes from healthy whales.

  I smell the lump again, trying to detect its complexity like a wine-taster–the qualities that make it so desirable to parfumiers:

  its ability to absorb, intensify and capture volatile fragrances, sometimes for years. It is as though its depth can encompass all aromas. As I hold it in my fingers, Malcolm warns that it will stay with me for days. I smear a little in my journal; months later, it is still there: the lingering scent of whale.

  This romantic stuff–which reminded one scientist ‘of a cool English wood in spring, and the scent you smell when you tear up the moss to uncover the dark soil underneath’–had many strange and exotic uses. The ancient Chinese called it lung sien hiang, or ‘dragon’s spittle fragrance’, and spiced their wine with it. During the Black Death, ambergris was carried to ward off the plague. In the Renaissance it was moulded, dried, decorated and used as jewellery; it was also said to be efficacious as an aphrodisiac, as a medicine for the heart or brain, and for diseases such as epilepsy, typhoid and asthma. In Milton’s Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Christ with ‘Grisamber steamed’; and drawing on Thomas Beale’s researches, Ishmael notes that the Turks took it to Mecca, ‘for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St Peter’s in Rome’. More prosaically, sailors used it as a laxative.

  Although Ishmael declares that it was whale oil that was rubbed on the British sovereign’s head in the coronation service, this was in fact an ambergris-infused concoction, as I discovered on a visit to the Gormenghast-like library set in the eaves high above Westminster Abbey. Here the custodian of the panelled eyrie, reached by a door set in the gloomy corner of the cloister and at the top of a flight of narrow wooden spiral stairs, divulged to me the secret recipe, handed down over the centuries. ‘ Oleaum Præscriptum Ad Ungendum in Coronatione Carolum I Britanniæ Regem’. Among oils of jasmine, rose, cinnamon, musk and civet was the all-important and precious ingredient, ‘Ambrægrisiæ 3iiij’, which created a fluid with ‘a rich and peculiar fragrance; it is amber coloured when freshly made, but time deepens the colour and the odour becomes mellow and rare’. In the most sacred part of the ceremony, shielded from the common gaze by a canopy of cloth of gold, the new monarch is marked on the head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with this oil, although Queen Victoria is said to have hated the stickiness and the smell and insisted on washing it off soon after, rather than allowing it to baste her imperial majesty with its whale-stink.

  This amazing substance remained as rare and mysterious as the unicorn’s horn until the American whalers began to find it within the whale itself. In 1724, Beale records, Dr Boylston of Boston wrote to the Royal Society in London, having interviewed Nantucket whalers who ‘cutting up a spermaceti bull-whale…found accidentally in him about twenty pounds’ weight, more or less, of that drug; after which, they and other such fishermen became very curious in searching all such whales they killed, and it has been since found in lesser quantities in several male whales of that kind, and in no other…’

  ‘They add further,’ Boylston noted, ‘that it is contained in a syst or bag…nowhere to be found but near the genital parts of the fish. The ambergris is when first taken out moist, and of an exceedingly strong and offensive smell.’ The idea that this sac was situated at the root of the whale’s penis, along with the masculine smell as it ripened, contributed to the erroneous and perhaps chauvinist notion that only bull sperm whales could produce ambergris. Although males, being larger, produced bigger pieces, females were equally able to excrete their own perfume.

  In 1783 Joseph Banks presented a paper to the Royal Society by Franz Xavier Schwedier, a German doctor, which conclusively identified the true origins of ambergris. The subject was even discussed in Parliament; and in January 1791 The Times noted that ‘a whale lately brought from the South Seas, in the Lord Hawkesbury, contained near four hundred ounces of amber-grease, which sold by the hammer at Lloyd’s Coffee-house at nineteen shillings and sixpence the ounce’, a great price to pay for this prize.

  Like a precious metal, ambergris has retained its worth over time. In 1912 a Norwegian company was saved from bankruptcy by a one-thousand-pound lump found in a whale caught off Australia, and which sold in London for £23,000. In 1931–as a cutting stuck inside my edition of Frank Bullen’s The Cruise of the Cachalot notes–a seventy-foot male found dead on New Zealand’s South Island produced a quarter of a ton of ambergris worth over £10,000. In the 1950s four pounds of this ‘floating gold’ fetched £100,000. Meanwhile, Soviet fleets gathered so much ambergris–including sixty-three pieces found in one whale–that by 1963 the Communist state no longer had any need to import it.

  Modern chemical analysis would show that the active element of ambergris is ambrien, a crystalline, fatty cholesterol able to fix volatile oils by slowing evaporation. Despite synthetic substitutes, it remains an irreplaceable ingredient in perfume. All the grandest French houses still produce exquisite scents based on this most mysterious of components, from Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent to Givenchy and Christian Dior; if you happen to be wearing Dioressence today, you are wearing the scent of a sperm whale. One of the oldest perfumers, Creed’s of London, which guards its formulæ as jealously as the custodians of the coronation rite, has been patronized by George III, by the Prince Imperial, dandy son of Louis Napoleon, who was wearing Creed’s whale-infused fragrance when he met his death at the end of eighteen assegais in the Zulu Wars in 1879–and by Cary Grant,
for whom the company designed a perfume all of his own, based on ambergris.

  Having smelt the raw material, I can now identify the trace of ambergris in expensive scents that waft from the shoulders of party-goers. Like their clients, perfume makers are, of course, discerning in what they buy. The highest prized pieces are pale in colour, from white to gold to grey with sometimes a mauvish tint; dark brown or black lumps are of a lesser worth. Most ambergris comes from the Indian Ocean, but when Dorothy Ferreira of Montauk, Long Island, inherited a large piece from an elderly friend, she was told that her gnarled legacy–which prompted a headline in the New York Times, ‘PRECIOUS WHALE VOMIT, NOT JUST JUNK’–would fetch $18,000. And in a story which might have come from the pages of Roald Dahl, a ten-year-old girl found a yellowy lump of ‘whale sick’ on a Welsh beach, supposedly valued at £35,000. ‘We recently heard on the radio about ambergris,’ her mother told a tabloid newspaper, ‘but when Melissa found some I couldn’t believe it!’ Unfortunately for Melissa, such finds usually turn out to be industrial plastic, or surfboard wax, or, as Richard Sabin reports, ‘something even less pleasant’.

  Yet even scientists have been known to become childlike when faced with the prospect of this elusive stuff. One told me how, when dissecting a sperm whale washed up on the island of Malta–a week-long process which began with some twenty-six cheerful helpers on the first day, but which had dwindled to a mere handful of hardy souls by the last, such was the stench–he squeezed through two hundred metres of malodorous guts in a determined but ultimately unsuccessful search for ambergris.

  Light-giving wax, lubricating oil, scented fæces: sometimes it seems as though the whales are cetacean Magi, bringing offerings that presage their own sacrifice. Such is the whales’ abiding paradox that they should secrete such precious substances from the profundities of their bodies, places as unknown as the seas in which they swim, even as our own interiors are a mystery to us.

  Like Melville writing about Nantucket, an island he had never visited, I write about animals I have never seen, for all that I can smell them and handle their most intimate secrets. The closer I get, the further away they seem; and the more I learn, the less I know about these strange cetaceans, mammals like us, yet so separated in scale in our microcosms of greater unknowns, from the sea to infinity.

  Even their most basic mechanics have a functional, fatal beauty. In Malcolm’s museum, a diagram shows how a sperm whale’s trachea and æsophagus share the same internal space, the one able to shut off the other to prevent the lungs filling with water as the whale feeds. Another charts the spectrum visible to deep-diving whales, which have blue-shifted eye pigments–being the most useful colour to discern in waters which turn from turquoise to black as they recede from the sun. A hinged wooden model demonstrates Malcolm’s theory of how the sperm whale adjusts its buoyancy by altering the temperature of the oil in its head, although he allows rival scientific interpretations: pre-eminently, that the spermaceti functions as a focus for the whale’s sonar clicks. A piece of bone cut in half shows honeycomb cells which in life would be filled with oil; filled with air, they would expand with changing water pressure as the animal dived.

  So many occupational hazards for the whale.

  There is something atavistic about these objects. The smallest comes from the whale’s inner ear, the same shell-like bone found in the bilges of the Morgan. These are the parts of the whale that survive the longest: otoliths, the fossilized ears of fifteen-million-year-old whales, have been found in South Carolina, their strange curling chambers evocative of ancient oceans and prehistoric sounds, as if by holding them to your own ear you might hear extinct animals singing in long-vanished seas.

  Outside his museum, on a rocky ledge overlooking the ocean, Malcolm has built a life-size model whale out of tubular grey scaffolding. It resembles a cross between Ishmael’s Arsacidean temple and a children’s climbing frame. As buzzards hover overhead, we talk about Malcolm’s years at sea. At my urging, he even speaks of monsters: of the giant squid that one fisherman saw alongside his boat, its tentacles longer than the hundred-foot vessel, making the entire animal twice its length; and of the pilot of a whale-spotting plane flying over the Indian Ocean off Durban who saw a wrecked plane’s fuselage sticking out of the water, only to watch the shape animate itself into a long neck and slip silently into the ocean.

  Such stories seem to suit this infernal island, a half-formed place of fire and water; I could imagine Melville and Hawthorne meeting here. Even the cliffs on which we stand are undermined by hidden caves. Due south from here lies Antarctica. And somewhere down in the fathomless, gathering darkness, sperm whales swim, eternally aware, their lives one waking dream, moving through valleys that run thirty thousand miles along the ocean floor, through lakes that lie stilly in the abyss, separated by temperature like pools of mercury, past jellyfish pulsating as ghostly Victorian brides in ectoplasmic crinolines.

  XV

  The Chase

  And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  Job

  ‘Now, Philip.’

  João’s command is urgent, unexpected. There is no time to get into my wet suit. I scramble to spit into my mask and jam the snorkel into my mouth. Marco stands on my fins so that I can push my feet into them. Climbing over the side of the rigid inflatable boat, I am launched into the Atlantic.

  I am swimming in waters more than two miles deep. I can’t see ahead of me. Below the blue gives way to complete black, the kind of impenetrable black I only ever saw in a cave in Cheddar Gorge as a child, when the guide turned the lights out and told us that we would never experience such a profound darkness.

  João shouts directions from the boat. It is getting smaller with every minute that I swim away from it, away from safety, into the unknown. I might as well be swimming into outer space.

  I hardly knew it, as we hurried to leave the harbour, but the conditions were perfect. The sea’s surface was glassy, barely rippling in the summer sun. João, with his cropped hair and an orca tattooed on the calf of his leg, scanned the horizon through his sunglasses; Marco, his first mate, peering in the other direction as he hung from the superstructure of the rib, a modern-day whaleboat with a 250-horsepower engine.

  As we picked up speed out of the harbour, a pod of common dolphins had zoomed out of nowhere and into our path, playing at the bow. Competing to be first, they rode so close I could easily have reached out and touched them. Steel blue and dove grey, their hour-glass, go-faster stripes were raked with each other’s teeth marks; as cute as they looked, these animals were bigger than me. They swam in water so clear that they appeared to float in a vacuum, streams of silver bubbles trailing from their blowholes. As they twisted and turned their bodies to peer up at us, it seemed as though they were escorting us to some appointed meeting, here at the end of the world.

  Then something larger loomed ahead. Even from a mile away, I knew it was a whale–albeit one unlike any other I had ever seen before. Its blow was utterly distinctive, spouting at forty-five degrees to the surface. Instantly I saw the reason for the Latin name. It really was a big-headed blower; Physeter even sounded like its bursts of exhaled breath.

  As the boat drew closer, I could make out a grey shape, lying like a pale shiny log in the water. It was difficult to tell one end from the other: which was the head and which the dorsal fin? Then, as it rose to take its breath, I saw its single nostril, wantonly lopsided. It was shockingly strange. The animal was an arrangement of sun-burnished bumps, ‘compared to little else than a dark rock, or the bole of some giant tree’, as Frederick Bennett wrote in the 1830s.

  As the head lifted out of the water, I saw that it was not alone. Quietly, it became part of an assembly. Further off lay two or three animals, then yet more until, almost disguised by the waves, a group of ten or twelve sperm whales hung there, breathing in rhythm with the sea, a rhythm that caught my breath too as the boat rose and fell with the swell.

  All that was five minutes ago, bu
t it might have been a lifetime. Now I was fighting for air in the water, trying to remember to breathe through my nose and not my mouth, like them.

  ‘To your left, Philip!’ João called through cupped hands. I had no idea which was left and which was right. I kicked my legs furiously, but I didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The waves seemed to push me back and under. With my heart pounding in my ribs, I took a deep breath and peered beneath me, down into the unknown.

  It was as if I were looking into the universe. The blue was intangible yet distinct; untouchable and all-enveloping, like the sky. I felt like an astronaut set adrift, the world falling away beneath me. Floating in and out of focus before my eyes were a myriad of miniature planets or asteroids, some elliptical, some perfect spheres. Set sharply against the blue, the glaucous, gelatinous micro-animals and what seemed to be fish roe moved in a firmament of their own, both within and beyond my perception.

  I was moving through another dimension, suspended in salt water, held over an earth that had disappeared far below. I could see nothing ahead. The rich soup on which those same tiny organisms fed combined to defeat my sight, reducing lateral visibility as they drifted like dust motes caught in the sunlight.

  Then, suddenly, there it was.

  Ahead, taking shape out of the darkness, was an outline familiar from words and pictures and books and films but which had never seemed real; an image I might have invented out of my childhood nightmares, a recollection of something impossible. Something so huge I could not see it, yet which now resolved itself into reality.

  A sperm whale, hanging at the surface. I was less than thirty feet away before I saw it, before its blunt head, connected by muscular flanks to its infinite, slowly swaying flukes, filled my field of vision.