Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris

Dear Friends,

I hope this isn't considered a commercial post, because it's definitely not! My book on ambergris will be published in May, 2012, by the University of Chicago Press. Its title is Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. I'm really excited about the book and the project. I hope it sheds light on this strange, mysterious and misunderstood substance.

On several different occasions while I was writing and researching the book, I posted questions on Basenotes and received some really useful and important help and feedback from members ... so it seems only appropriate that you all know the book is soon on its way.

It's available on Amazon and AmazonUK. If you're on Facebook, you should be able to find the dedicated page for the book, where you can "Like" it. In fact, on the Facebook page there's a tab that allows people to link straight to the publishers to buy the book at 30% off.

Again, this isn't a commercial post. I'm just trying to make sure that the people who helped me don't pay full price for something they can buy with a significant discount.

All very best, and thanks so much for your support!!

Christopher Kemp

Thanks so much! With regard to your question, I actually think that there's far better information about which fragrances contain ambergris notes right here on the forum and on the Basenotes website. This sort of information can also be found on numerous perfume blogs and even in newspapers like the New York Times, which employs perfume critics, etc.

I'm not a perfumer or a fragrance expert. I'm a biologist and so I spend quite a bit of time on the natural history of ambergris production, and also on the science behind the molecular characteristics of ambergris, and the oceanographic conditions required to make it wash ashore. I also meet and talk with ambergris hunters, traders, sellers, end users, etc.

Crikey ... how do I cross post to another forum?

Dear Friends,

I hope this isn't considered a commercial post, because it's definitely not! My book on ambergris will be published in May, 2012, by the University of Chicago Press. Its title is Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. I'm really excited about the book and the project. I hope it sheds light on this strange, mysterious and misunderstood substance.

On several different occasions while I was writing and researching the book, I posted questions on Basenotes and received some really useful and important help and feedback from members ... so it seems only appropriate that you all know the book is soon on its way.

It's available on Amazon and AmazonUK. If you're on Facebook, you should be able to find the dedicated page for the book, where you can "Like" it. In fact, on the Facebook page there's a tab that allows people to link straight to the publishers to buy the book at 30% off.

Again, this isn't a commercial post. I'm just trying to make sure that the people who helped me don't pay full price for something they can buy with a significant discount.

All very best, and thanks so much for your support!!

Christopher Kemp

Poop! Almost without doubt. I think the lives of sperm whales are sufficiently mysterious that no one can be 100% certain ... but the anatomy, and the location in which its found, and the physiologic processes behind it mean it's almost certainly poop!

Definitely! What part of town are you in?

Hmmm. There's really no guarantee. As with anything else, you take your chances. Do you have a name or website? I might know them. I might be more comfortable than the average person identifying it from a photo ... but even then, you really need to be able to handle it, feel its weight and smell it, etc.

I'm guessing it would occasionally wash up around Vancouver. It washes ashore everywhere sperm whales are found, for a start. There are many many instances of it washing ashore in places people don't always connect with ambergris, like England and Wales, or the Florida coastline.

You might know more about the prevailing ocean currents than me?

Found a couple of fun archived news stories for you:

first: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...mbergris&hl=en

and then: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...mbergris&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...mbergris&hl=en

Oh yeah. I know. But the point with ambergris is that, when people find it, they don't shout about it. I just thought the articles were fun.

Like I said, it depends on the prevailing currents. I know, for instance, that the Gulf Stream currents along the western coastline of South America -- Peru, for example -- really transport flotsam like ambergris north rapidly and it rarely washes ashore there. But I'm not sure about British Columbia. I'm not an oceanographer.

I'd be really surprised if ambergris did NOT wash ashore there from time to time though. Really really surprised.

Here's a fun one: http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi...G19111016.2.41

Sperm whales in BC ... not too common relative to other species, but definitely there: http://wildwhales.org/sperm-whale/

Don't worry! I certainly wouldn't mind accusatory intentions.

Yes, so poop or vomit. All the evidence -- and there's quite a bit -- suggests poop. Sperm whales eat about a ton of squid a day and can't digest the beaks. Like ruminants, sperm whales have several stomachs, or more correctly I suppose, several stomach chambers. It seems that sperm whales probably void or vomit up the non-digestible material. But this isn't ambergris, and isn't anything like it. In just a few instances (an estimated 1% of sperm whales), the durable beaks make it through the stomachs and into the small intestine where they chafe and irritate the gut lining. The whales starts to bind up the beaks with a cholesterol-rich secretion, which really resembles sticky poop, which forms concretions of beaks.

If you've ever smelled extremely fresh ambergris, it smells and looks just like sheep dung. There's absolutely no question of where it came from. It's poop. Robert Clarke, the cetologist, who just died last year and wrote the only really detailed and considered scientific article on ambergris classified it as a coprolite -- or hardened dung.

Even as early as the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, whalers described how they searched a whale for ambergris ... basically, they made a large cut in the carcass, by the anus, and then carefully and slowly worked their way north, toward the stomach, until they either found ambergris, or didn't. I saw a large piece of ambergris in New Zealand, in the national museum in Wellington, and met the man who had cut it from a dead, stranded whale.

There's really no doubt to me regarding what it is and where it comes from. I sort of think of it in human terms ... if you're sick and you have a gastrointestinal problem, anything in the stomach will come back up, but anything that makes it past the pyloric sphincter and into the small intestine ... well, it's only got one direction to go in.

Hope this helps. It's all in the book!

Hey Jim,

I'm sorry, that's not something I really know how to do. I'm not a perfumer but a biologist and a journalist. I'm betting you could find someone here online who knows how to do it though. Good luck with it!

And how is the tincture? Any good?

--ck

Sounds good!