I couldn’t improve on the headline that The Millions placed atop a review of “Floating Gold: A Natural (& Unnatural) History of Ambergris,” by Christopher Kemp, so I just went ahead and reproduced it.
What is ambergris? The question has vexed many people over the years: “Before Nantucket whalemen hacked it out of sperm whales’ intestines in the early 18th century, Europeans were mystified by the fragrant nubbins randomly washing ashore,” writes the reviewer, Ben Shattuck. The Chinese called it “dragon’s spittle.” Others proposed it was the fruit of undiscovered undersea trees. And it continues to confuse: An Atlantic headline-writer recently dubbed it “Whale Barf.”
While some of the descriptions may disconcert the stomach, ambergris has in fact been viewed as a delicacy—”the unknowable embodiment of the sea.” Casanova added a dash of ambergris to his chocolate mousse, The Millions explains, and England’s King Charles II added it to his eggs. (French physicians thought it cured rabies.)
This description by Kemp, a molecular biologist, rises to near-Melvillean heights:
In its complex odor is reflected every squall and every cold gray wave. I am smelling months of tidal movement and equatorial heat—the unseen molecular degradation of folded compounds slowly evolving and changing shape beneath its resinous surface. A year of rain. A decade spent swirling around a distant and sinuous gyre. A dozen Antarctic circuits.
And this blurb by the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, author of “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century,” also piques the reader’s interest:
Ambergris! Perhaps nature’s strangest and rarest gift—one could walk the shores for a lifetime and come up empty-handed. Christopher Kemp’s lovely quest tale put me in mind of an afternoon, several years ago, when I opened a dusty letter in the archive of an old whale scientist: suddenly the room burst with the smell of violets, musk, and fresh-hewn wood. To the sheet was taped a little dab of greasy gum, with a note reading, “Could this be it?” Indeed it was! Would that a little piece of the magic could be tipped inside every copy of ‘Floating Gold.’ Read it, for it’s as close as one can get without the stuff itself.
Including “a little piece of the magic” in each copy is unfeasible, obviously, but is a scratch ‘n’ sniff feature for the paperback edition so unthinkable?