Leviathan or The Whale

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