Heirloom Whale Barf

[rostasi]

December 18, 2006

Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk

By COREY KILGANNON

MONTAUK, N.Y. — In this season of strange presents

from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other

day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It

was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt

in the box.

Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky

candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified

whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.

“I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did

you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has

lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since

1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the

beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around.

You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out

there what it is.’ ”

So Ms. Ferreira called the Town of East Hampton’s

department of natural resources, which dispatched an

old salt from Montauk named Walter Galcik.

Mr. Galcik, 80, concluded that the mysterious gift

might be ambergris, the storied substance created in

the intestines of a sperm whale and spewed into the

ocean. Also called “whale’s pearl” or “floating gold,”

ambergris is a rare and often valuable ingredient in

fine perfumes.

“He told me, ‘Don’t let this out of your sight,’ ” Ms.

Ferreira said.

She was soon summoned to show the thing at a town

board meeting, after which a story in The Independent,

a local newspaper, declared Ms. Ferreira the proud new

owner of “heirloom whale barf.” Friends and neighbors

flocked to her tchotchke-filled cottage overlooking

Fort Pond Bay, the very shores where her sister, Ruth

Carpenter, said she found the object in the mid-1950s.

Childless and never married, Ms. Ferreira bounced from

job to job, most recently as a short-order cook at a

local deli, and now lives on her Social Security

income.

“If it really does have value, I’m not silly, of

course I’d want to sell it,” Ms. Ferreira said as she

looked out past her lace curtains and picket fence at

the whitecaps on the bay. “This could be my

retirement.”

After researching ambergris on the Internet, Ms.

Ferreira’s neighbor, Joe Luiksic, advised, “Put it on

eBay.” But endangered species legislation has made

buying or selling the stuff illegal since the 1970s; a

couple who found a large lump of ambergris valued at

almost $300,000 on an Australian beach in January has

had legal problems selling it.

“If I get locked up, will you bail me out?” Ms.

Ferreira asked her friends.

Ambergris begins as a waxlike substance secreted in

the intestines of some sperm whales, perhaps to

protect the whale from the hard, indigestible “beaks”

of giant squid it feeds upon. The whales expel the

blobs, dark and foul-smelling, to float the ocean.

After much seasoning by waves, wind, salt and sun,

they may wash up as solid, fragrant chunks.

Because ambergris varies widely in color, shape and

texture, identification falls to those who have

handled it before, a group that in a post-whaling age

is very small. Ms. Ferreira says she has yet to find

an ambergris expert.

“A hundred years ago, you would have no problem

finding someone who could identify this,” said James

G. Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian

Institution, who said he hears of new ambergris

surfacing somewhere in the world maybe once every five

or six years. “More often, you have people who think

they’ve found it and they can retire, only to find out

it’s a big hunk of floor wax.”

Adrienne Beuse, an ambergris dealer in New Zealand,

said in a telephone interview that good-quality

ambergris can be sold for up to $10 per gram, adding

that for the finest grades, “the sky’s the limit.”

At $10 per gram, Ms. Ferreira’s chunk, according to a

neighbor’s kitchen scale, would have a value of

$18,000. “The only way to positively identify

ambergris is to have experience handling and smelling

it, and very few people in the world have that,” Ms.

Beuse said. “Certainly, if she has it, it’s like

winning a mini-lottery.”

Larry Penny, 71, director of East Hampton’s natural

resources department, said he had no way of making a

definite determination, because “we don’t keep a

certified whale-vomit expert on staff.”

Mr. Penny, whose great-great-uncle was skipper of a

whaling ship out of Sag Harbor, said he grew up

searching the beach for ambergris.

“The older folks would always tell us, ‘Keep your eyes

open for that whale vomit because it’ll pay your way

through college,’ ” he recalled. “We used to bring

home anything that we thought looked like it, but it

never turned out to be ambergris. The average person

today could trip over it on the beach and never know

what it was.”

Ambergris has been a valued commodity for centuries,

used in perfume because of its strangely alluring

aroma as well as its ability to retain other

fine-fragrance ingredients and “fix” a scent so it

does not evaporate quickly. Its name is derived from

the French “ambre gris,” or gray amber. During the

Renaissance, ambergris was molded, dried, decorated

and worn as jewelry. It has been an aphrodisiac, a

restorative balm, and a spice for food and wine. Arabs

used it as heart and brain medicine. The Chinese

called it lung sien hiang, or “dragon’s spittle

fragrance.” It has been the object of high-seas

treachery and caused countries to enact maritime

possession laws and laws banning whale hunting. Madame

du Barry supposedly washed herself with it to make

herself irresistible to Louis XV.

In “Paradise Regained,” Milton describes Satan

tempting Christ with meat pastries steamed in

ambergris. In “Moby-Dick,” Melville called it the

“essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick

whale.” Old newspapers show clippings every few years

describing some whaling crew coming upon a hunk, or

some vacationing family finding it on the beach and

either cashing in — or discovering it was just ocean

detritus.

“We always heard about it, but I don’t remember

finding any,” recalled Encie Babcock, 95, of Sag

Harbor, whose great-uncle Henry Babcock was captain of

a whaling ship in the 1800s.

Mrs. Carpenter, Ms. Ferreira’s sister, said she was

about 30 years old, beachcombing with her dog in front

of the family house, when she spied the object and

“and just liked the way it looked, so I kept it.”

After moving with her husband to Iowa, Mrs. Carpenter

kept the waxy hunk in a box in her bedroom closet.

“Anytime we had houseguests, I’d take it out and ask

them if they knew what it was,” she said. “Of course

they didn’t. This is Iowa.” She sent it to her sister,

Mrs. Carpenter said, because “I’m not feeling too

good, and I don’t have much time left.”

[Rooster_Ties]

[Alexander]

Ambergris was highly prized and much sought after during the whaling era. Melville talks about it in "Moby Dick" (as he does just about anything else whale-related).

Got a problem with that, Clem?

[BERIGAN]

http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/Epis...s/4ACV16/07.mp3