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The Origin of Ambergris (2012)
“Following on the scent of what must be the strangest known natural substance, Christopher Kemp’s adventure–filled journey into the often–bizarre world of ambergris takes us from whale innards to remote islands. A compelling narrative, a detective story, and a wonderful window into history and obsession, Floating Gold has struck a rich oceanic seam.
Reading parts of Clarke’s “The Origin of Ambergris,” I find it impossible not to imagine him sitting across from me in the galley of a pitching and yawing vessel, several days from landfall and dimly lit by a guttering lantern, as we slide down the sheer gray face of another thirty–foot wave somewhere in the southern Pacific. “Ambergrease is also found on the Scots Coasts,” wrote Guy Miege in 1715, in The Present State of Great–Britain and Ireland: In Three Parts, “particularly on that of the Island Bernera, one of the Harris Isles, where a Weaver ?nding a Lump of it, and not knowing what it was, burnt it to shew him light, when the strong Scent discover’d it, and made his Head ake. In September 1908, the Hartford Courant reported a lucky find by a Noank, Connecticut, fisherman: while hauling up lobster pots from the bottom of Long Island Sound, John Carrington, captain of the Ella May, discovered that one of his traps contained a one–pound piece of ambergris.
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