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

Author:Christopher Kemp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

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This is how it happens. A man has managed somehow to clamber atop the whale. He sits in the morning sun, proudly astride its slippery silver flank. It is early, but the air is already steamy with the tropical heat. Below the man, on the sandy beach, a crowd watches impassively. The surf breaks against the dead whale’s long box-like head. The man surveys his kingly domain. There are more than a hundred people assembled on the beach. They stand in the surf and push against the 50-foot-long whale carcass, milling around hopefully on the sand. With every passing minute, the crowd grows larger. The sweet, nauseating smell of decay hangs over it all.

The man atop the whale is not Louis Smith. This is not July 1891. It is July 2010. In fact, the self-appointed leader of operations—who now points and issues instructions to the crowd—is a Sri Lankan villager. He’s sitting astride the lean carcass of a dead sperm whale, which has finally come to rest, perpendicular to the shore, on Manpuriya beach in Mundalama, in the North Western Province of Sri Lanka.

The whale had washed ashore a day earlier, near the small fishing village of Puttalam on the island’s west coast, sixty miles north of Colombo, the capital city. The tide had brought it in from the ocean and rolled it unceremoniously up the sloping beach. Its arrival on the shoreline filled the modest village with excitement. Inevitably, people soon began to wonder if the carcass held some ambergris.

The crowd presses closer. A bright-yellow mechanical backhoe is maneuvered inexpertly across the sand, cleaving the crowd into two watchful camps. The bucket is raised into the steamy air. The crowd waits. The surf breaks. And the bucket is finally lowered, through the whale carcass, separating the pale stiffened flukes from the rest of it.

Out it comes: little black-brown boulders of ambergris, rounded like eggs, delicately marbled with tea-colored irregular seams. Photographs of the haul accompany a report of the incident in the Daily Mirror, an English-language Sri Lankan newspaper, under the headline “people cut up whale seeking ambergris.” In one, a long-fingered brown hand cradles an apple-sized lump of ambergris in front of a ragged saffron-colored dress. In another, a smiling woman stands next to a group of frowning and unsure villagers, holding a broken plastic bucket toward the camera: in the bottom, several large pieces of ambergris. On the beach, the whale is slowly dismantled in front of the watchful crowd. Piece by piece, the ambergris is removed from its intestines, and afterward the carcass is buried beneath the sand on Manpuriya beach.

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