By Roxani Margariti.
Ambergris Vignettes.
“When they catch sight of one [a dead whale filled with ambergris], they haul it ashore with iron grapnels attached to stout ropes, which stick into the whale’s back, in order to cut it open and extract the ambergris from it.”
Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Akhbar al-Sin wa’l-Hind (Accounts of China and India), 10th century (translation by Tim McIntosh-Smith)
“When a waal is beached, the men of the sea call it ‘springtime,’ since it is a source of profit for them.”
Anonymous Egyptian author, Kitab Ghara’ib al-Funun wa-Mulah al-Uyun (Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Delights for the Eyes, aka Book of Curiosities, 11th century(translation by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith)
The young Yemeni fisherman faces the camera with a wry smile: “The smell isn’t sweet but the money is a whole lot!,” he says in Arabic. That smile brims with hope and awareness of the many paradoxes in the extraordinary story in which he is one of the protagonists. He is speaking of عنبر, ambergris, an extremely valuable by-product of the sperm whale. A BBC video-journal and other reports of the event offer glimpses of the fabled substance: vats of a black viscous material and a boulder-like lump, freshly extracted from the stomach and intestines of a dead sperm whale that was found floating in Yemeni waters near the port city of Aden.
The young man and fellow fishermen from the districts of al-Khaysah and Sira in Aden’s environs towed the body of the unlucky leviathan to shore, where they got to its precious contents. The episode resonates strongly with the practice described by the author of maritime lore Abu Zayd al-Sirafi for these very seas eleven centuries earlier! It also prompts us to consider particular ways of exploitation of this marine resource in the waters of Yemen across time: the extraction, processing, supply, and taxation of ambergris and ultimately its contribution to the Yemeni economy.
And if I may free-associate, here’s another resonance: reportedly, when first spotted, the floating carcass gave off a peculiar strong smell that one of today’s Yemeni fishermen recognized as characteristic of a sperm whale containing ambergris. The note about the sperm whale’s distinctive odor brings to mind Herman Melville’s formidable Captain Ahab and the minutes leading up to his first sighting of Moby Dick: “..he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, sniffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch.” To my mind, such parallel notions and practices across space and time highlight the common culture of the sea and its people. Unlike Ahab, of course, the stories of the Yemeni fishermen, both in the 10th and the 21st century, are not tales of manic pursuit and revenge, but rather ones of knowledge and experience of the sea; these protagonists could discern a sperm whale and recognized the value of ambergris!
As the narrator of the BBC video-journal points out, most of the Yemeni population now faces food insecurity as the result of a war that has created one of the worst humanitarian crises of our times. The story of discovery of ambergris is a rare, even unique instance of hopeful news from this long-suffering country. It constitutes only a momentary respite in an otherwise unrelentingly heartbreaking situation. Also, it raises a host of questions about the ethics and politics of whaling, and more broadly about the future of Yemen’s rich fisheries. But here I focus on the serendipitous nature of this and other ambergris finds today so as to consider the resonance of such occurrences across space and time. Ambergris and other parts of the whale have sustained humans across the centuries and have inspired diverse stories and theories about the awesome leviathans.
What is ambergris and why it fascinates
Ambergris is the pathogenic product of the sperm whale’s digestive system. It is generated as the organism attempts to process indigestible elements of its diet, especially the beaks of squid that it consumes in enormous quantities. The mass that results from this digestive labor is viscous, waxy and black, and reaches various degrees of solidity. It may be passed through the intestines out into the sea (excreted, but perhaps also vomited, hence the moniker “whale’s vomit”) or block the whale’s system and eventually lead to its death. A dead animal may be discovered and hauled to shore by ambergris harvesters, or disintegrate in the sea releasing the ambergris that then drifts and is transformed further by weathering.
The value of ambergris has been consistently high across time and culture. Its origins, however, remained a source of considerable confusion and the subject of some wild speculation by learned humans until the late 18th-century. And this even though the quest for ambergris and the interest in its nature and formation began long before that. The evolving theories amount to a fascinating history of ideas and fantasies; fungus, seaside or underwater tree resin, bird excrement (a kind of guano), underwater mineral seepage (akin to naphtha), and congealed honeycombs are some of the earnest if misguided verdicts about the origin of ambergris! As we shall see below, Yemeni fishers of old were directly implicated in the quest to understand ambergris in the Arabic-speaking world. And that stands to reason: the authors and savants who left a written record of the evolving ideas about the origin of ambergris relied on the empirical knowledge of others, what Brian Fagan calls the “fishers in the shadows”!
Given its complex nature, it makes perfect sense that mystery has surrounded ambergris in the minds of people, both laymen and scientists, in the past and even today. Ambergris takes on several forms and changes over time: from black waxy liquid and lumps inside the whale, in seawater it is transformed over time into hardened and weathered pieces of various sizes and colors ranging from dark yellow to whitish grey. It is found in multiple places: accumulated in whale bodies, floating in the sea, weathered and washed out on beaches.
And it presents the paradox of an originally foul-smelling fecal substance that eventually mellows into a pungently but pleasantly smelling ingredient of perfumery! Finally, like many other traditional “spices” it has had many uses—culinary, medicinal, and aromatic. That versatility adds to its value. In perfumery alone, where its use is as widespread today as it was in the past, ambergris is a key ingredient both for the fragrance it imparts in combination with other elements and, perhaps more importantly, for its function as a fixative agent that guarantees the lasting potency of a perfume.
The rarity of ambergris also adds to its mystery and allure. Only sperm whale biology has the potential to produce ambergris, and only a fraction of sperm whales end up with stomachs sick enough to generate it. Rare in the past, ambergris is even rarer today as whale populations in general have suffered dramatic declines, from historic abundances before commercial whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries to today’s mixed fates of the remaining numbers by species. The ethics and politics of whale conservation are as complex as our globalized world, and there is little doubt that sperm whales face myriad dangers today that they did not in the past, even population status is not as critically endangered as that of some of their cousins, such as right whales.
Ambergris in the medieval Indian Ocean: the paradox of origin and use
Medieval polymaths writing in Arabic were intrigued by this curious substance originating in the Indian Ocean—the Islamicate world’s vibrant maritime edges—and fetching high prices in metropolitan markets. Reading Arabic literature, especially materia medica (medical and pharmacological works), cosmographic and travel texts, but also cookbooks and stories about court life in literary works, we find that in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and other great cities of the Islamicate world ambergris was put to much more diversified uses than it is today: drugs, perfumes, breath fresheners, fumigants, drinks and a variety of food flavorings were made with the stuff. But how much did sophisticated urbane consumers know about its origins?
The two prevailing theories gave ambergris a vegetal and a mineral origin respectively. Accordingly, ambergris was either generated by an underwater plant, often likened to a kind of mushroom or truffle, or the bituminous product of underwater springs akin to the seepages of naphtha known from Mesopotamia. A variant of the mineral theory envisioned underwater rocks accruing on them a kind of resin. Medieval Arabic literature, both literary and scientific, offers several variations of these two explanations. The notion that ambergris was in some way connected to marine animals in general and whales in particular, emerged slowly and vaguely. The general idea was that whales and other marine creatures did not generate ambergris, but swallowed pieces of it floating in the sea and got sickened by it. This theory appears as early as the 9th century in the work of the famous belle-lettrist al-Jahiz (died in 869), Κitab al-Hayawan (The Book of Animals).
Perhaps a most revealing story is one that appears in the work of celebrated cosmographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (died ca. 560/1165). In his account, the famous Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid sent envoys to Yemen to ask the people of the sea about the origin of ambergris. Note here the connection between the producers of ambergris—the Yemeni fishermen—and the generation of knowledge about it. The explanation given to the caliph’s fact finders, according to Idrisi, claimed that ambergris was the bituminous product of submarine springs, and confirmed that it was definitively not the excrement of any animal. While this denial of the connection between whale feces and ambergris is misguided, the reason behind stems not from a misunderstanding on the part of the native informants but rather, as Arabist Thierry Bouquet has shown, what we might call a branding problem: how can such a desirable and expensive substance be linked to such an unsavory origin?!
The 13th-century Muslim traveler Ibn al-Mujawir confirms the relative abundance of ambergris across the Yemeni and Omani seaboards as well as the complicated understanding of its nature. Among the many interesting traditions he conveys is a story about a prodigiously large lump of ambergris that funded the building of the first congregational mosque in the early days of the city’s Islamic life. The narrative suggests that there was unease about the handling of the substance and the insinuation of uncertain (potentially impure) legal and ritual status, and that abstraction of its value into funds towards a pious cause (the building of the mosque) was the solution of an end that sanctified the means. Concerns for ritual purity and folkloristic approaches to the substance aside, the Rasulids, the dynasty ruling over most of Yemen from the 13th to the 15th centuries were plainly interested in ambergris production and made sure to control its sale and taxation, as administrative documents from that richly documented state reveal.
Yemen may be a place of heartbreaking suffering today but it remains a land and a people with a deep history and rich in culture, including maritime culture. Going back to the Bronze Age, its economy has been predominantly and famously agricultural but the sea has played a major role as well. The story of ambergris past and present exemplifies both the economic and cultural dimensions of Yemen’s entanglement with the sea.
In the Mediterranean, meanwhile, ambergris does not feature in ancient medical or other texts, perhaps partly a function of the paucity but also the distinctness of the sperm whale population in that sea. Mentions of ambergris appear relatively late, in late antique materia medica. The generalized trade of ambergris from the Indian Ocean begun in earnest after the reorganization and reorientation of political geography brought about by the Islamic conquests, creating an integrated economic and cultural realm stretching from Spain to the borders of India. Even so for the Mediterraneans ambergris remained an exotic, valuable, and mysterious ingredient in the druggist’s panoply.
An early instance of a possible reference to ambergris in ancient Mediterranean literature is as oblique as it is suggestive of the distance and routes that the stuff had to travel before it reached Mediterranean lands. The reference occurs in the latter-day epic work by the late antique Egyptian poet Nonnus of Panopolis, his Dionysiaca. In a delightful passage, Herakles answers Dionysus’s query about the wondrous city of Tyre, which came to be “in the form of a continent and the image of an island” (τύπῳ χθονός εἰκόνι νήσου). The city, it turns out, was built by joining together “two floating rocks known as ambrosial rocks”. What might be behind Nonnus’s ambrosiai petrai and the image of their floating in the ocean before being joined to make a city? The phonological affinity between the terms for ambergris in the Semitic lexicon (anbar) and the Greek term for the food of the gods (ambrosia) may be at play here. Also suggestive is the image of sea-floating rocks of ambrosia, conflating perhaps the prevalent yet misguided notion that ambergris was a mineral of the sea with the reality of ambergris’s dispersal by sea waves. Nonnus’s Egypt constitutes a natural conduit for the early transfer of the knowledge of ambergris, as it stands as a hub and a turn-table between the Indian Ocean world, where ambergris occurs relatively abundantly, and the Mediterranean, where the substance is a rare “exotic” good.
Postscript: Arabic names for whales and using the whole whale
As is hopefully clear by now, whales make their appearance across a wide variety of Arabic written sources. In the medieval Islamicate world, they were well known but were also conflated with mythical creatures under a general rubric of the leviathan. They feature with a number of different names: نون (nun), حوت (hut), وال (wal), just سمك (samak, the generic name for fish), and even the strange قاطوس (qatus), that seems to be nothing but an Arabic rendering of the Greek word κήτος! A fascinating account of whale-human interaction “in the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” appears in the so-called Book of Curiosities, an Arabic treatise of geography and cosmography written in Egypt in the 11th century. The wal, the anonymous author explains, likes to follow ships and may inadvertently sink them while playfully attempting to cross their path! To avoid this, sailors blow horns and beat drums in the hopes of driving it away. Offering a variation the widespread understanding of the connection between whale and ambergris, the author avers that whales become intoxicated when they swallow ambergris, are beached, and become a boon for the people of the sea that find them.
A 16th-century Mughal painting shows sailors with drums and horns battling a water creature. Riverine setting and monster aside, the use of sonic weapons against marine foes resonates delightfully with the much earlier account in the Book of Curiosities. British Library, Or. 3714, vol. 4, f. 504v. See full painting here.
But in addition to ambergris, there are other ways in which whales proved useful to humans in the middle ages as they did in later periods. The Book of Curiosities, for example, notes that seamen gathered its oil in jars and used the skeleton to make chairs! From furniture, roofs, city gates and bridges to prosthetic limbs, umbrellas, corsets and scrimshaw, the range of objects made of whale bone is impressive and offers the possibility of several wonderful case studies of material culture shaped by the sea.
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