Ambergris – what is it and where does it come from?

perfume, since it enabled a scent to retain its fragrance for much longer than might otherwise have been possible. Most ambergris was found in the form of lumps floating on the surface of the sea, or washed up on the shores of tropical and temperate oceans. At one time, ambergris was worth its weight in gold, but there was much confusion about its origins. Ambergris was known to the Arabs as ‘ambar’ and was originally called amber in the West in the Middle Ages. This eventually led to further confusion in the popular mind between ambergris and true amber, the mineral known to mineralogists as succinite, which is actually fossilised tree resin, and generally yellow in colour. Both substances were rare and costly, and both were associated with the sea, largely because for Europeans the most common source of amber was the shores of the Baltic. In Chapter 92 of Moby Dick, the American writer Herman Melville pours scorn on those who believed the two substances to be the same: "Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea.…