$18,000 Whale Vomit...

[Kor37 9]

Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk

By COREY KILGANNON

The New York Times

MONTAUK, N.Y. (Dec. 18) — In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box.

 

Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.

 

“I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since 1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around. You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out there what it is.’ ”

 

So Ms. Ferreira called the Town of East Hampton’s department of natural resources, which dispatched an old salt from Montauk named Walter Galcik.

 

Mr. Galcik, 80, concluded that the mysterious gift might be ambergris, the storied substance created in the intestines of a sperm whale and spewed into the ocean. Also called “whale’s pearl” or “floating gold,” ambergris is a rare and often valuable ingredient in fine perfumes.

 

“He told me, ‘Don’t let this out of your sight,’ ” Ms. Ferreira said.

 

She was soon summoned to show the thing at a town board meeting, after which a story in The Independent, a local newspaper, declared Ms. Ferreira the proud new owner of “heirloom whale barf.” Friends and neighbors flocked to her tchotchke-filled cottage overlooking Fort Pond Bay, the very shores where her sister, Ruth Carpenter, said she found the object in the mid-1950s.

 

Childless and never married, Ms. Ferreira bounced from job to job, most recently as a short-order cook at a local deli, and now lives on her Social Security income.

 

“If it really does have value, I’m not silly, of course I’d want to sell it,” Ms. Ferreira said as she looked out past her lace curtains and picket fence at the whitecaps on the bay. “This could be my retirement.”

 

After researching ambergris on the Internet, Ms. Ferreira’s neighbor, Joe Luiksic, advised, “Put it on eBay.” But endangered species legislation has made buying or selling the stuff illegal since the 1970s; a couple who found a large lump of ambergris valued at almost $300,000 on an Australian beach in January has had legal problems selling it.

 

“If I get locked up, will you bail me out?” Ms. Ferreira asked her friends.

 

Ambergris begins as a waxlike substance secreted in the intestines of some sperm whales, perhaps to protect the whale from the hard, indigestible “beaks” of giant squid it feeds upon. The whales expel the blobs, dark and foul-smelling, to float the ocean. After much seasoning by waves, wind, salt and sun, they may wash up as solid, fragrant chunks.

 

 

 

There you go, ladies. The next time you buy perfume, make sure it has a proper amount of whale barf in it..

[MrPsychic 1]

This also reminds me of how eau de toilette, a common phrase for perfume, translates from French to mean toilet water.

Edited December 20, 2006 by MrPsychic

[Theunicornhunter 2]

Of course the word "toilet" doesn't mean the same thing in French as it does in English.

 

As for perfume - is this that much different than being made from the musk glands of animals - which at one time I think was done.

[mowzer 0]

I thought Futurama made that up.