In Search of Ambergris; or, the Problem with the French

I was flying over the remote west coast of Stewart Island in a single-engine Cessna, plastered against the window in the high air, stuck there by the G-force, when I took this photo. The blue water. The little wrinkled waves. The sand in the water. A few moments later, the pilot touched down on the sand and taxied to a standstill in the morning sun. Opening the doors on their hinges, the pilot let out two hikers who were heading into the bush for a few days. Mason Bay is a long unbroken stretch of coastline. Twelve-miles-long. No people. No buildings. Wild. And it's famous for its ambergris.

"The last time we were here," said one of the trampers with a grunt, as he swung his greasy bag over his shoulder, "there was this French guy who ran around naked for four days. Up and down the beach all day. Naked."

The other hiker stepped onto the hard sand -- wearing shorts and gators and well-worn hiking boots. Low tide. Waves in the distance. Silence on the flat sand, like a tea-colored highway.

"Oh, bloody hell, yeah," said the second hiker. "I hope that bloody naked French guy isn't still around."

Ambergris found in Mangatoetoe, New Zealand

Reports surfaced this week of a significant haul of ambergris, which was found last August on the remote Mangatoetoe coastline -- on the south coast of New Zealand's north island.

The incident began when a bull sperm whale measuring 18-meters -- or 60-feet -- in length washed ashore. Its carcass was mutilated by those who found it first. Its jaw was removed -- the teeth are very valuable, and also culturally important -- and the jaw-less body was set on fire, and left burning on the rocky shoreline. In New Zealand, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, when a whale strands and dies on the coastline, its remains are offered first to the tangata whenua -- or the Maori. The Maori culture includes a sacred and worshipful relationship with whales.

Members of the Ngati Hinewaka -- the local iwi, or tribe -- were contacted, arrived on the beach and prepared to bury the carcass.

"We had to cut it in half to bury it," spokesman Haami Te Whaiti told the Wairarapa Age-Times newspaper, "and, after separation, we noticed a dark brown, almost black lump just lying there in the gravel. It just appeared there. I'd never seen anything like it before."

The lump was more than eighty pounds of fresh, black ambergris. Potential buyers flew to meet with the iwi, arriving from France and the United States to assess the ambergris. It was sold eventually to a French company for an undisclosed sum.

Read the full story here: http://www.times-age.co.nz/have-your-say/news/whale-rewards-wairarapa-maori/3951004/

Welcome to The Ambergris Files

"It is almost as hard to know what it is, as where to find it," wrote Thomas Fuller, describing ambergris in his compendium, The History of the Worthies of England, which he completed around 1651. 

Fuller then went on to recount the washing ashore of a mass of ambergris on the Cornwall coastline a few decades earlier. It occurred "about the third year of king Charles," who had ascended to the throne in 1626. The ambergris had been "found in this county, at low water, close to the shore of the manor of Anthony, then belonging to Richard Carew, Esquire."

Like almost everyone else in the seventeenth century, Fuller was more than aware of the value of ambergris. But its source still was a mystery.  

Fuller wrote: "Some will have it the sperm of a fish, or some other unctious matter arising from them; others, that it is the foam of the sea, or some excrescency thence, boiled to such a height by the heat of the sun; others, that it is a gum that grows on the shore. In a word, no certainty can be collected herein, some physicians holding one way, and some another. But this is most sure, that apothecaries hold it at five pounds an ounce, which some say is dearer than ever it was in the memory of man."

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And with those words from Thomas Fuller, welcome to The Ambergris Files. I'm a writer and a scientist, and I've just completed a non-fiction book about ambergris, for publication in 2012 by Harper Collins in Australia and New Zealand, and the University of Chicago Press in the US and Europe. Over the next year, I'll be sharing more passages like this one, and also posting photographs and more detailed information about ambergris -- the strangest and most singular natural substance known to man. And, by the way, ambergris is what an eighteenth century German scientist called "preternaturally hardened whale dung." It's a fatty concretion of squid beaks -- the product of a squid beak-fueled indigestion.

And I'd also like to consider this a sorting room, a kind of clearing house, for all queries, comments and questions about ambergris, along with a history of its use, tips on how to identify it properly and some information about where it is most often found. I'll share photos I've taken and conversations I've had with ambergris dealers, collectors and end-users. So, feel free to contact me, read along and join the conversation!