Royal Society

The Royal Society is presented as a point of connection between whaling experience and scientific inquiry. In the book’s account of ambergris, reports from Nantucket whalers reach the Society before a later paper identifies the substance’s origins, tracing a shift from a rare and mysterious whale product to a subject of documented investigation.

Reports from Whalers

In 1724, Dr Boylston of Boston wrote to the Royal Society after interviewing Nantucket whalers. Their account described finding about twenty pounds of ambergris in a sperm whale and said that smaller quantities had subsequently been found in other males of the same kind. The report made the whalers’ experience available beyond the hunt itself: what they had encountered while cutting up whales became evidence for a wider inquiry into the substance.

Identifying Ambergris

In 1783, Joseph Banks presented a paper by the German doctor Franz Xavier Schwedier that identified ambergris’s true origins. The episode follows the earlier reports by nearly six decades. Where the whalers’ observations established that ambergris could be found in whales, Schwedier’s paper supplied an account of its origin. The Royal Society thus figures in the passage not as a whaling body, but as a venue through which evidence and explanation entered scientific discussion.

A Further Institutional Connection

The Royal Society also appears in the account of the Scoresby family. A museum portrait of William Scoresby Jr. is distinguished from that of his father, a lifelong merchantman, by the younger man’s association with the Enlightenment and his expected future as a Fellow of the Royal Society. This reference links the institution to a career shaped by maritime knowledge while keeping the distinction between the Society’s scientific standing and the practical experience of whaling visible.