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By Root 715 0

explained that this was the next best thing to squid ink. Spermaceti was the oil found in the forehead of the sperm whale—and it was the most lucrative product of the old whaling industry. The most massive of all toothed cetaceans, sperm whales have huge heads like battering rams, and when whalers cut a captured whale's head open it was filled with barrels of a rose-tinted oil called spermaceti. Before electricity was harnessed for lighting and wax substitutes such as paraffin were devised, spermaceti was used to make the world's finest, most clean-burning candles. It was also used in cosmetics, including lubricants and lotions. (Why was it called spermaceti? For some reason, it was once thought the oil, which congeals into white lumps on contact with air, was actually involved with the whale's reproductive system and that the lumps were the whale's sperm. Whale scientists are still not sure what the oil filling the whale's head is for, but it might help these deep-diving whales—they plunge to three thousand feet in the dark abyss where no light penetrates and giant squid are believed to live—maintain enough buoyancy to return to the surface.)

We gazed at Alexis's spermaceti. This was the stuff that once anointed the heads of kings. It may even have been used as an aphrodisiac.

Spermaceti's fine qualities were memorialized in a very curious chapter of Moby-Dick in which Ishmael, along with several other seamen, takes on the job of squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti and has a peak experience:

It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! …as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules…as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow…. Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

The way Ishmael described it, squeezing spermaceti with your friends and co-workers was like being at a party where everyone's on X. We looked at the waxy lump that had formed in the vial of oil. We thought about having a group squeeze, but then settled for unscrewing the lid and tentatively sniffing the bottle. It smelled like a combination of canned sardines and wet Labrador. Maybe it was the packaging, but the white lump of spermaceti reminded us of a kidney stone.

“Have you ever thought of giving up your pot for spermaceti?”

Alexis shook his head. He had other plans for his new stash. He held up the vial to the light and calculated. “The sperm whale feeds on the giant squid, right? That means there's got to be Architeuthis in here someplace.”

We went down to a seafood restaurant on the waterfront and ordered fried calamari. Later, Alexis drew a sperm whale with the tentacle of a giant squid hanging out of its mouth.

26. IN THE NAME OF GEORGE PRIDEAUX HARRIS

One thing that made pursuing the seemingly unattainable goal of seeing a tiger easier was achieving a series of smaller goals. Observing a Tasmanian devil. Check. Watching a wombat jiggle its butt. Done. Swimming with platypuses. Sort of. Now that we were in Hobart, another one of these challenges was immediately in front of us: Mount Wellington. Often shrouded in mist, Mount Wellington