Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society

March 6th, 2007

The Romance of Ambergris

From “Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris,” an essay by Robert Cushman Murphy, curator of oceanic birds at the American Museum of Natural History, which appeared in Natural History Magazine in 1933 and is worth revisiting:

Unimaginable numbers of squids, which occur in practically all parts of the oceans, are devoured by sperm whales. The certainty of this is, of course, obvious from the bulk of the mighty foragers and the size and number of the schools engaged in an unceasing quest for food throughout all the warmer sea waters of the globe. It was indelibly impressed upon my mind, however, by an incident witnessed during a South Atlantic cruise in the old New Bedford whaling brig “Daisy.” I manned stroke oar in the mate’s boat, and on one occasion our harpooner made fast to a medium-sized sperm whale, perhaps thirty-five feet in length, which showed very little fight, and which we overtook soon after the iron had been planted. The first pricks of the terrible lance, thrust and “churned” by the mate, evidently found its life, for the whale went immediately into a flurry, swimming desperately around the boat, and rolling over and over so that the line encircled it many times. Then, while we watched its dying struggles at close range, the beast began to belch up squids. Barrelful after barrelful of the tentacled creatures, some but freshly swallowed, others in advanced stages of disintegration, floated to the surface all about our boat. Most of them seemed to have bodies a foot and a half or two feet long, but some were larger. By the time the whale floated fin-out and lay still, the slimy carcasses and fragments of squids covered the space of an acre or more.

Eleven months in the “Daisy,” and participation in the exciting slaughter and subsequent butchery of twenty-seven sperm whales, never brought me, alas, the thrill that may not come even once in a lifetime—a find of native ambergris. The search was made in every whale, as the final stage of the cutting-in, but it seemed to be a half-hearted effort, the expression of a forlorn hope, much as though you should scan the gutter along twenty blocks of Broadway in a deliberate, cold-blooded hunt for a five-dollar bill that somebody might have lost.

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The Romance of Ambergris

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