Citations:ambergris


 * 1851 — Herman Melville. Moby Dick.
 * And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.
 * Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.
 * For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned.