The smell, on the skin, is both subtle and somehow radiant. But it’s a lot better on the skin, I learned. “It was a bit of a let-down, to be honest-it didn’t match the hype. “My first impressions of the scent were that it was slightly waxy, vaguely marine, sweet, and a teeny tiny bit fecal,” recalls Saskia Wilson-Brown of the Institute for Art and Olfaction. “When you finally hold a piece of it, and smell its strange bouquet of old wood, and earth, and compost and dung, and wide open places, you understand that none of the other things you’d suspected were ambergris were anything like it,” Kemp says. But even the smell is difficult to describe. It’s that smell that has captivated the perfume industry. One test for ambergris is to poke it with a hot needle and a liquid should ooze out giving off a musky smell. Kemp tells a story about “a Tasmanian fisherman who supposedly-on finding a whale carcass on the shoreline in 1891-cut a hole in its neck just large enough to fit into, and then crawled into the whale, squirming through its cold intestines in search of a boulder of ambergris that was lodged there.”Īmbergris usually come in small chunks from less than 15 grams up to 50 kilograms, but one chunk found in the Dutch East Indies weighed about 635 kg.Īmbergris is difficult to identify. Instead of waiting for a lump to wash ashore, many collectors seek out for whale carcasses. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, only about one percent of the world’s 350,000 sperm whales produce ambergris. The high price is due to the rarity of the substance. A pound of ambergris discovered by an eight-year-old boy in the UK in 2012 was said to be worth $63,000. Photo: Gabriel Barathieu/WikimediaĮventually the lumps wash ashore, wherein they are collected and sold at lucrative prices. Its “like butter in your fridge take on the smell of other things”, explains Vera Thoss of Bangor University.Ī mother sperm whale and her calf. The longer the ambergris remains at sea, the more it incorporates the scents of the sea. The mass floats to the ocean’s surface where, exposed to the sun and salt water, it gradually hardens, developing a dark grey or black color, a crusty and waxy texture, and a peculiar odor that is at once sweet, earthy, marine, and animalic. When it’s first released from the guts, ambergris is pale white in color, soft, and greasy with a strong fecal smell. “Well, it smells more like the back end than the front end,” he says. Sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University suspects the substance is defecated. The substance is then expelled from the body, although researchers aren’t sure from which end of the whale the blob of ambergris comes out. Because whales consume large quantities of squid and cuttlefish, which have hard, sharp beaks, it has been speculated that the whale secrets a protective, fatty substance that engulfs the hard, indigestible beaks to keep them from injuring their guts and organs. Ambergris is whale shit (or vomit).Īmbergris is formed in the intestinal tract of sperm whales. It wasn’t until 1724 that Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston finally uncovered the truth. One Englishman asserted with confidence that it was nothing but honeycombs that bees made upon large rocks on the seaside, which then fell into the sea. Others believed it was seabird poop, or some kind of marine fungus. The ancient Chinese thought it was dragon’s spit. ![]() Photo: David Liittschwager/National Geographicĭespite its wide application, for centuries nobody knew where this rare waxy substance came from, except that it washed up on beaches. During the Middle Ages, ambergris was used as a medication for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments.Īmbergris. Ambergris is also used as a flavoring agent in Turkish coffee and 18th century European drank it with hot chocolate. A serving of eggs and ambergris was reportedly King Charles II of England's favorite dish. Ambergris was also used to flavor food and drink. The Ancient Egyptians burned the substance as incense, and modern Egyptians smoke it in cigarettes. ![]() But nothing is as precious as ambergris, a hard, resin-like substance with a light gray or yellow tinge and having a pleasant aroma.įor thousands of years, ambergris was staple in perfumes. The sea washes up all kinds of strange stuff, from carcasses of whales and squids to fossils and ancient shipwrecks.
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