Leviathan or The Whale

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