The olfactory paradox: The story of a stranded whale

Leviathan Press:

In "One Thousand and One Nights", there was a description of an ambergris spring on an unknown island. The waxy ambergris flowed into the sea with a fragrant aroma, feeding whales, and then sprayed out and condensed into ambergris on the sea surface. Unfortunately, myths are myths, and the birth of ambergris in reality is far from so romantic. Although the claim that ambergris comes from whale vomit is still controversial, the ambergris excreted together with feces is enough to make people imagine. As interesting as the "olfactory paradox" is the explosion of the whale. On January 29, 2004, in Tainan City, Taiwan, China, a 17-meter-long sperm whale weighing more than 60 tons was stranded. Researchers were transporting it on a trailer when the whale suddenly exploded. Hundreds of onlookers were instantly covered with blood, fat and internal organs... So, when you are lucky enough to see the following scene at the seaside in the future, it is best to stay away and watch: bad omen

In the 17th century, whales of different species and sizes washed up on the Dutch coast. Sometimes, the creatures were already seized by rot; other times, they were stranded alive on the beach, groaning deafeningly, crushed by their own weight. As they decayed, gases would build up, sometimes causing foul-smelling explosions. If the tide didn't carry the whale away, there would be a long and arduous process of decomposing the carcass and cleaning up the wreckage.

These huge creatures attracted onlookers who were fascinated by the spectacle, and artists were hidden among the crowds, carrying their painting necessities to record what they saw and smelled. Jan Saenredam once depicted a sperm whale stranded on December 19, 1601 (the picture at the beginning of this article). The sperm whale was lying on its side due to being stranded, its belly facing the shore. Groups of tourists gathered around the bloated whale carcass and climbed on its body to examine it carefully.

The descriptive top border further outlines the state of the whale, with its gaping mouth on the left and its ruptured back on the right, its entrails pouring out.

Sarnredam also painted himself, standing near the whale's mouth, copying the whale's carcass on a piece of paper that was rustling in the wind. In the center of the picture stands Count Ernest Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, a military leader and nephew of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the governor of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. In his left hand he holds a tasseled handkerchief in front of his nose to block out the stench.

The Dutch writer and poet Theodorus Schrevelius wrote a Latin poem about the event that evokes the stench:

"Its form was lost, its opening extended deep into its viscera, and its mouth: liquid and copious amounts of blood gushed out of it."

The painting depicts the entrails pouring out of the whale's mouth and back, and besides that, it also emits a foul odor. Facing the stench that permeates the whale's body, the count's handkerchief seems futile.

Detail from The Stranded Whale of Beverwijk, Jan Saenleidam, 1602. Detail showing Saenleidam himself sketching the whale (left), the gushing entrails and a handkerchief used by Count Ernst Casimir of Nassau-Dietz to hide the stench (right). © rijksmuseum.nl

According to Schreiferius, the whale was a monster not only because of its terrible size but also because it was considered an omen.

In terms of the word meaning, a monster is a messenger that portends disaster, because its Latin word “monstrum” means both “monster” in the modern sense and an ominous sign.

A few days after arriving, the whale’s warning came true: a solar eclipse occurred on December 24, 1601. Nine days later, an earthquake followed, and on June 4, 1602, a lunar eclipse. These ominous events are played out within the painting’s intricate borders.

In 1618, the engraving was reworked to depict another disaster that struck the Dutch Republic after the whale’s arrival. Below the top border, the skeletal figure of Death emerges from the clouds, his arrows shooting down a winged woman. A shield formed by three crosses identifies her as the “Maid of Amsterdam.” Death reigned in the city during the plague outbreak of 1601–1602, and the painting suggests that the sperm whale’s arrival predicted this event.

Detail of The Stranded Whale at Beverwijk, Jan Saenredam, 1618. This late version of Saenredam's painting features a skeleton shooting a young Amsterdam girl, a reference to the plague of 1601-02. © rijksmuseum.nl

Early modern medical theory held that disease was spread through the smell of stagnant, foul matter. When another plague broke out in the Dutch Republic between 1667 and 1669, German polymath Athanasius Kircher’s Latin work on the plague, Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur, was translated into Dutch. He reported that the causes of the plague included dead bodies, foul air, and rotting whales washed up on the coast.

In the second version of the painting, the Count’s handkerchief takes on a new, ominous meaning: He holds it to ward off the awful smell of decay, to be sure, but he also protects himself from the virus-causing gas.

The olfactory paradox

As plague descends on Amsterdam, deep in the gut of a whale stranded in Beverwijk lies an olfactory paradox.

When undigested squid beaks irritate the intestines of sperm whales, it produces an unusually fragrant substance called ambergris. This substance can accumulate for years until the sperm whale excretes it or it bursts its intestines and finally breaks free from the whale's body. As the substance floats to the surface, its smell changes in the salt water and sunlight, from the disgusting stench of feces to the exquisite and alluring aroma of ambergris. The gray ambergris may drift in the sea for years before washing up on land, perfectly hidden on a rocky beach.

In early modern Europe, the origin of ambergris was a mystery. It could have come from whales, underwater islands, or mountain mud. It could also have come from honeycombs that fell from rocks by the sea, or from the aromatic excrement of East Indian birds, which were thought to feed on aromatic fruits and insects, giving their feces a pleasant smell.

Justus Fidus Klobius, a Wittenberg-born scientist who favored the bird theory, depicted four seabirds in his book on ambergris, standing on a rock amid the hum of insects. A kneeling figure was collecting guano, while another ambergris collector was looking for more droppings on the seashore.

Clobius's work lists at least eighteen hypotheses about the origin of ambergris, and for more than a century, none of these hypotheses could be concluded.

The excrement of an East Indian bird, once thought to be ambergris, is collected in a bowl. Illustration from Justus Phidus Clobius's Ambræ historiam (1666). © archive.org

The man who discovered ambergris made a fortune. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a botanist for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), described an unimaginably large piece of ambergris in his natural history book. In 1693, the VOC's Amsterdam office acquired the nearly six-foot-tall (1.25-meter-tall) block from the King of Tidore in the Moluccas, estimating its value at 116,400 Dutch guilders, or about 1.13 million euros today. The accompanying images make no mention of its potent scent, but they clearly depict the rugged, sinuous, marbled surface structure of the incense.

Illustration of ambergris purchased by the Dutch East India Company, from Georg Eberhard Langfurns's D'amboinsche rariteitkamer (1705). © wellcome collection

Ambergris is often sought out for its fragrance and flavor. It was sprinkled on the scrambled eggs of King Charles II of England, adding color to his breakfast table until his death in 1685, when its rich aroma masked the suspected poison that was said to have caused his death. Half an ounce of finely ground ambergris is an essential ingredient in the Dutch dish "Amber-Podding," a hedonistic stew made with lard, almonds, sugar, white bread, musk (an aromatic secretion of the musk deer) and orange flower water, cooked in pig intestines with ambergris.

In addition to flavoring food, the substance was used to impregnate leather goods, tamping down the smell of the foul residue produced during the tanning process. In Sarnreddam’s painting, tourists viewing a stranded sperm whale in Beverwijk keep warm with leather gloves and fur muffs, which are likely to have retained the scent of ambergris. Standing in front of the stranded whale, the tourists are face to face with their rotting perfumer.

Visitors wore leather gloves and fur muffs, often scented with ambergris. Detail of The Stranded Whale at Beverwijk, Jan Saanredam, 1602. © rijksmuseum.nl

The rich aroma of ambergris was believed to ward off disease. Early medical theory held that foul-smelling substances might breed disease, while fragrant substances protected the body. Ambergris was included in incense recipes for fumigating homes and added to sweetened water decoctions to rid the body of plague. One of the most fascinating anti-epidemic objects was the pomander, a scented pendant. The name came from the Latin for "pomum ambrae," because the main ingredient in the pomander was sperm whale perfume.

This luxurious silver compartmentalized perfume box contains six small boxes that once held different scented ointments. Ambergris was often mixed with cinnamon, rosemary, cloves, and other spices. Some perfume box recipes call for amber, a fossilized resin that is different from ambergris but whose scent was also believed to be strong enough to ward off disease. For people in the early modern era, ambergris was one of the classic scents used to ward off plague.

The rotting corpses in Sarnreddam’s paintings reveal the source of Amsterdam’s troubles, but paradoxically, deep in its bowels, where the rich ambergris hides, lies the solution to its problems.

Silver Dutch perfume box with a carved bird perched on a branch (c. 1600-25). All the compartments for the spices can be opened. © rijksmuseum.nl

Oil paint applied to flat surface

Decades after the beached whale predicted Amsterdam’s fate, tourists to the city came to Rembrandt’s studio to admire his latest works. As Rembrandt’s biographer Arnold Houbraken recounted, when visitors approached the paintings, the painter would pull them away, saying, “The smell of the paintings will make you sick.” Oil paint is made by mixing powdered pigment with linseed oil, a pungent binding medium that is pressed from flax seeds. The combination produces an extremely soft, jewel-like pigment that can be painted with fine details and different textures.

In Rembrandt's self-portrait, he did not use oil sparingly, but literally sculpted it. He applied flesh-colored paint to create his nose, and to create the wrinkles in his hat, he scraped away streaks of blue and yellow paint to reveal the black background beneath. In the studio, the smell of linseed oil must have had a powerful destructive effect, and Rembrandt used it to persuade visitors to move away from the painting in order to see the rough, impastoed marks of oil paint from the best angle. The painting retains much of its luster, but the smell has faded over time.

Self-Portrait, Rembrandt, 1669. © www.mauritshuis.nl

Rembrandt's hat was painted with impasto. Detail from Self-Portrait, Rembrandt, 1669. © www.mauritshuis.nl

To truly defeat the smell of paint, it was thought that artists needed to create work so appealing to the viewer that the sharp smell of the studio became unnoticeable. Nearly 20 years before Houbraken wrote about Rembrandt’s studio, the artist and critic Roger de Piles remarked that a bad painting “will always smell like the palette.”

If a work of art fails to thoroughly engage the viewer’s imagination, reality creeps in and the painting reveals itself to be what it is: paint on a flat surface. But perhaps there is an exception to Depiler’s dictum. Viewers faced with a still life of rotting fruit might not be drawn back to the studio. Instead, their imaginations are awakened by the whiff of paint, and the pungent smell of decay becomes real.

A rich palette of smells can be discerned in paintings. Artists have brought the Dutch Republic to life with microscopic precision. Smells are alluded to in landscapes, grand histories, scenes of everyday life, and portraits.

They waft from small coal fires and bubbling pots, humorously excreted from the body, and seeped from stagnant matter. Scattered across the works are the paraphernalia of scent: clay pipes, snuff boxes, incense boxes, waist chains, candy bags, nutmeg grinders, incense burners, teapots, medicine jars, fans, gloves, and ornate incense ornaments. In Sarnredam's paintings, it is the scattered entrails of a whale and the earl's handkerchief that suggest the bad smell. By leaving a visual record in the work of art, the smell is also displayed, and the viewer's imagination is stimulated.

Bones on a building

The end of the Whale Watching Route is at Amsterdam's City Hall, a scene that Pieter Jansz. Saenredam has accurately depicted, having seen a monstrous whale in Beverwijk more than half a century earlier. Although the City Hall had burned down years earlier (Rembrandt painted the smoldering ruins), Saenredam painted the scene from memory. He used some of his earlier sketches to add details to the pastel structures: overgrown grass, crumbling stonework, swaying shutters, and tiny figures wandering the streets and resting under the arcades.

Above the left arcade of the Vierschaar, the High Court, we can see a large, bow-shaped whale rib hanging by a hook and chain. The origin of the rib is unknown, but it was already fixed to the facade when Jan Saenredam saw the stranded sperm whale in 1601. These monsters had already left their mark on Amsterdam long before the whale landed in Beverwijk.

The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam, Pieter Jans Saenredamm, 1657. © rijksmuseum.nl

This whale rib hangs on chains above the arcade of the High Court. Detail of the Old Town Hall in Amsterdam, Pieter Jans Saenredam, 1657. © rijksmuseum.nl

Whale bones were often prominently displayed in public buildings. In 1577, after a group of sperm whales stranded, their tailbones and jawbones were hung in the hall of the High Court of Holland in The Hague as a permanent memorial. In 1596, when the merchant Jan Huyghen van Linschoten returned from his voyage to Nova Zembla, he presented a whale jawbone to the Haarlem town hall to display and commemorate this rare treasure.

Although these whales are stripped of their original appearance after a long process, their bodies can still be preserved through the residual smell of their viscera. In 1549, a whale was landed in Livorno and its skeleton was transported to the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence for display. However, it was not long before the display was taken down: the marrow in the bones had rotted away, emitting an unbearable stench. Whalers in the 17th century tried to alleviate the smell by drilling holes in the bones to drain the body fluids, but with little success.

The whale rib must have stirred our imaginations, made us ponder the beast that devoured Jonah, made us marvel at the immensity of God’s creation, made us think of the throbbing creatures that whalers caught in the northern colony of Spitsbergen. It might also have brought to mind stories of strandings on the Dutch coast. If the whalebone in the town hall smells of decay—for we don’t know the details of its origin—then the viewer’s mind’s eye can make the whale re-emerge in flesh and drift in thought to the beach where its body rotted.

By Lizzie Marx

Translated by Kushan

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original text/publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturing-scent

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Kushan on Leviathan

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