It was just a casual stroll on an English beach for this couple. However, then they stumbled across something that was both extraordinary and amazingly valuable.

It was spring 2016 and Gary Williams, 48, and his wife Angela, 49, were taking a walk along one of their favorite stretches of beach in Lancashire, England. That beach is Middleton Sands, and it looks out onto the Irish Sea. It’s also not far from the village of Overton, where Gary, an engineer, and Angela, a nurse, live together.

Middleton Sands is a picturesque, sandy strip that’s popular with hikers and dog walkers, although the Williamses were walking on a less visited part of the beach. In any case, that April day Angela and Gary noticed something rather unpleasant. It was a noxious smell which Gary later described as being like rotting fish.

Their curiosity nevertheless piqued, the couple followed the unpleasant smell to find its source – and what they discovered was a pale lump not quite the size of a football. The lump certainly smelled bad, and it had a waxy texture. What’s more, the pair actually had an idea of what it might be.

You see, the Williamses had read about similar finds in the news and thought they may have stumbled across a rare marine substance called ambergris. From time to time, lumps of ambergris – or whale vomit, as it’s often called – are washed ashore to be found by beachcombers. So, Gary and Angela covered their find in a scarf and then took it with them.

Once they’d got it back to their house, Gary used his fisherman’s scales to weigh the lump. It was almost 3.5 pounds. This, therefore, made Gary and Angela even more excited about their find. Why? Because they knew that a man had found a lump of ambergris on the coast at Morecambe, not far from where they were.

That other lump had weighed a little more than twice the one that Angela and Gary had found. Moreover, it had been valued at a hefty $155,000 – which could mean that their own piece of ambergris might fetch a staggering $65,000. That’s a lot of money for a chunk of old so-called vomit.

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“It smells too bad, though – it’s a very distinctive smell, like a cross between squid and farmyard manure,” Gary later told the Daily Mirror. “It feels like a rock-hard rubber ball, its texture is like wax, like a candle. When you touch it, you get wax sticking to your fingers.”

But what exactly is ambergris? Well, its alternative name, whale vomit, while not strictly accurate, does provide a clue. You see, although the substance is created by whales, it isn’t actually vomit. It’s something else altogether, and it’s produced by only one species of whale, to boot.

That’s the sperm whale – a magnificent beast that’s found in oceans and seas around the world, including Britain’s coastal waters. Individuals can grow to a length of 67 feet and have been recorded with weights as high as 63 tons.

At one time, these whales were commonly hunted for their blubber, which was used to make everything from candles and soap to machine oil and pencils. Ambergris was also harvested. Indeed, as many as one million whales were slaughtered for the various products they yielded during the 19th and 20th centuries. But the population has, nonetheless, since been slowly recovering since hunting was outlawed in the 1980s.

Needless to say that back in the day, hunting these whales could sometimes be a dangerous business. In 1820 a sperm whale with a claimed length of 85 feet rammed the Essex, a whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts. The ship subsequently sank, too, leaving 20 crewmen stranded in small lifeboats in the southern Pacific with little in the way of supplies.

The men were at sea for 95 days, during which time they ate the corpses of 12 of their fellow sailors. Only eight men survived the ordeal. And Herman Melville is said to have based his classic novel Moby Dick on this real-life incident.

Now although harvesting blubber was the main motive for hunting sperm whales, ambergris was also highly prized. It is incorporated in the manufacture of perfume, and its fragrance has been compared to that of musk. The ancient Egyptians used it as a kind of incense, while Europeans in the Middle Ages believed it had medicinal properties.

Image: YouTube/United News International

How, then, could the horribly smelly lump found by Gary and Angela Williams be something that’s used in the production of perfume? The answer is that it’s freshly created ambergris which has this unpleasant odor. Its attractive scent, meanwhile, becomes apparent as the substance gets older.

That still leaves one other key question unanswered, though – namely, what makes the sperm whale create such a strange substance? Well, scientists believe that it’s connected to this vast mammal’s feeding habits. You see, sperm whales love to eat giant squid, which have decidedly hard beaks that cannot be digested. The whales therefore vomit most of the beaks out – but not all of them.

Those beaks that then travel into the individual whale’s digestive system are subsequently covered in ambergris as a protection for the animal’s intestines and stomach. The ambergris is actually formed from liquid that comes out of the bile duct located in the whale’s innards. Now usually that ambergris will be discharged with feces, but sometimes it exits via the mouth. And that’s what has led to the idea of whale vomit.

Interestingly, ambergris is only created very slowly, over periods of years, and it’s also believed that not all sperm whales produce it. It may even be that the proportion of whales that do so is as low as 1 percent. As for where you’ll come across the stuff, well, it is most commonly found in the Atlantic Ocean, although most commercial gathering of the substance happens in the Caribbean, especially in the Bahamas.

The sperm whale itself, meanwhile, is an extraordinary animal. It can dive to an astonishing depth of around 7,400 feet – or not far off a mile and a half. Indeed, only the Cuvier’s beaked whale can dive deeper. Another distinguishing feature of the sperm whale is that it has a massive brain – bigger than that of any other animal on Earth, in fact. Each of the animals’ brains weighs five times more than that of a human.

So, using your own gray matter, if you’re taking a walk along the beach, it’s well worth keeping an eye out for ambergris – which is sometimes referred to as floating gold. That being said, remember that most lumpy things you’ll find on the beach and which smell of poop probably are just that…

But what, meanwhile, became of Gary and Angela Williams? How did they spend their unexpected windfall? Well, with what might be called typically British restraint, Gary told the Daily Mirror, “If it is worth a lot of money, it will go a long way towards buying us a static caravan. It would be a dream come true.”