*
A similar pattern emerges when you delve into the history of other famous headhunting cultures, like the Maori of New Zealand. Unlike the Shuar, who were raiders, the Maori traditionally took enemy heads during inter-tribal warfare. Maori trophy heads were not shrunken, but preserved with their skulls still inside. Specialists, often tribal chiefs, removed the brains, eyes and tongue before stuffing the nostrils and skull with flax and burying the head with hot stones so that it gradually steamed or cured dry. These toi moko were usually displayed on short poles, around the chief’s house, but the first English visitors to New Zealand, who arrived with Captain James Cook in the 1770s, hardly saw any trophy heads at all.
The first European to acquire a Maori head was Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific and who would, years later, refuse to examine Oliver Cromwell’s head in London. While in New Zealand, Banks managed to persuade a reluctant elderly Maori man to part with a preserved head in return for a pair of white linen drawers. At first the old man took the drawers but refused to relinquish the head, but when Banks ‘enforced his threats’ with a musket, that did the trick. Cook returned to New Zealand twice during the 1770s, but he and his crew only saw one other preserved head in all the months they spent there.
Gradually, though, contact with European whalers and sealers led to more trading in preserved heads and, as in South America, as the desire for guns spread amongst the Maori in the early nineteenth century, the trade escalated. Soon specialist agents were being sent from Australia to pick out the best heads, and the Sydney Customs House began to list these imports under the heading ‘Baked Heads’. Over the course of the fifty years following Cook’s first visit, trade in human heads reached such intensity, and inter-tribal warfare escalated so ferociously, that many believed the Maori would be completely annihilated.
It was the intricate facial tattoos worn by Maori chiefs that made their heads particularly attractive to Europeans. Banks wrote of the ‘elegance and justness’ of these tattoos, with their spirals and flourishes, ‘resembling something of the foliages of old Chasing upon gold or silver; all these finished with a masterly taste and execution’ using nothing more than a bone chisel and burnt tree gum. The best heads as far as Europeans were concerned were those of powerful chiefs who had been heavily tattooed, but these were the hardest to find.
So great was the demand for tattooed heads that by the early nineteenth century, Maori chiefs were forcibly tattooing their slaves before killing them to sell their heads for a profit. Some chiefs even offered traders the choice of live subjects, who were then tattooed, killed and prepared to order. The Maori tattoo, once an elaborate work of art developed over a lifetime and testament to a man’s courage, honour and social status, had become a decoration designed only to please – or fool – foreign consumers.
Europeans in New Zealand were sometimes killed so that their heads could be tattooed and then sold back to their own unsuspecting countrymen. There are stories of the very same trading agents who had been sent from Australia to scout out the best heads being murdered so that their heads could be preserved and traded back again as ‘Maori warriors’. All this meant that by 1830 the ‘Baked Heads’ arriving at the Sydney Customs House were just as likely to be made to order for Europeans, or from dead Europeans, as they were to be authentic Maori chiefs slain in battle.
In 1831, the Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, took action. He passed a law banning the traffic in preserved heads because, as he put it, ‘there is strong reason to believe that such disgusting traffic tends greatly to increase the sacrifice of human life amongst savages whose disregard of it is notorious’. He set a £40 fine for anyone caught selling a preserved head, and suddenly it became much more difficult (although not impossible) to obtain a Maori head. As one nineteenth-century collector, Horatio Robley, observed, the trade in heads had by then stocked the museums of Europe, but ‘considerably reduced the population of New Zealand’.
Horatio Robley, seated with his collection of Maori toi moko in 1895.
It is hard to deny the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century collectors who condemned headhunting as barbaric while seeking out human heads to display at home. It was not just commercial traders who were implicated in this macabre business. By the end of the century, scientists, in particular, were encouraged to collect heads and other body parts in the most definite terms. Headhunting, in this sense, was little short of a professional duty.
Take, for example, the guidance given to collectors in Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was the standard handbook for British anthropologists working in the field. The first edition, published in 1874, advises that skeletons and skulls of natives ‘should, if possible, be brought to England’ for expert analysis. In addition, if ‘after a battle, or other slaughter, the head of a native can be obtained with the soft parts in it’, it should be packed and sent home in a small keg of spirit or brine. The second edition, published in 1892, was even more thorough in its recommendations: ‘The general traveller may also do much to advance the study of the more technical part [of the subject] by collecting specimens of skeletons, hair, even parts of the body, such as the hands, feet, brain, or the entire head, and sending them to our laboratories or museums to have their characters worked out by skilled anatomists.’
This appeal for human body parts was printed under the auspices of two of the most respectable academic institutions in Great Britain, and the academic community was only too happy to oblige. Science, it seemed, excused a multitude of sins, particularly when the ‘subjects of study’ were impoverished, imprisoned or deemed to be primitive. While travelling abroad, collectors behaved in ways that would have been criminal at home. Some scientists in foreign lands dug up graves under cover of night. Others stole the dead from hospital morgues, bought bodies from prisons, offered people goods in exchange for bits of their dead relatives, or asked the locals politely for enemy body parts after battles and raids.
The most arresting evidence for this morbid avarice is the ‘loot’ itself, because our museums are filled with the dead bodies that these learned men, and occasionally women, proudly sent back to the metropolis for further examination. On arrival in a museum, each new addition – each skull, each skeleton, each shrunken head, each piece of dried skin, each organ preserved in a jar – was carefully recorded by a curator before he decided whether to put it on public display. Reading through these accession books is a sobering experience, as on page after page human lives are reduced to a cursory list of acquisitions.
Three heads from Tangalung, Central North Borneo, from C.V. Creagh, Governor of Sandakan.
An artificially deformed ‘Flathead’ skull from Dr Franz Boas, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.
The ears of an adult man and woman, from Professor George Thane.
A Patagonian skeleton from C. MacMunn.
The scalp of an Andaman Islander collected by Colonel Cadel, Chief Commissioner of the Andaman Islands.
This list is from the Pitt Rivers Museum. Similar long lists could be made from the collections of many museums throughout Europe and America. A quick search of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogue, for instance, brings up a piece of Maori facial skin, a number of preserved human heads from the Solomon Islands, a skull trophy from Sarawak with its hair still attached, the ‘preserved head of a Malay’ and five South American shrunken heads.
In accession registers like these, countless people were transformed into objects of science after their deaths. It is telling that the identity of the collector was invariably recorded with more precision than that of the dead people he had collected. Their actual names were long forgotten, but the dead who arrived in museums were given new titles like ‘mongoloid’ or ‘ethiopic’, ‘brachycephalic’ (round-headed) or ‘dolichocephalic’ (long-headed), ‘gracile’ or ‘robust’. They were measured and labelled, cleaned and glued and painted and varnished;
some were pinned together for display, others were cut up for research. They were hung in glass cases and laid out on tables, drawn and described, and packed into boxes to be taken to lectures where well-dressed men passed them around and debated the finer points of the theories of human evolution. And as the decades went by, the number of samples these learned men handled increased almost beyond measure.
If museums were the new cathedrals to science, their ossuaries were filling up fast. The nineteenth century saw a massive increase in the number of human remains housed in museums, as archaeologists, medics and anthropologists, eager to ground their theories in solid evidence, went out in search of more and more data. Between them, they collected thousands of human remains, and today’s curators continue to care for their vast legacy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more than 100,000 human remains in British cultural institutions, while in American federally sponsored institutions there are probably more than 200,000 Native American human remains alone. It is a truly colossal inheritance.
Amid all this diligent Victorian collecting, only occasionally did a scientist’s exploits catch the attention of the media, incite public outrage and prompt questions about the legitimacy of the scientific endeavour. One of these stories hit the headlines in 1890 and centred on James Jameson: collector, big game hunter, scientist, explorer, and recently deceased. Jameson had been a member of Henry Stanley’s high-profile Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to Equatoria, which he joined as a naturalist, although his hopes of collecting flora and fauna from the Congo region were soon scuppered by the harsh realities of expedition life. Instead, he spent much of his time travelling long distances to negotiate for local porters. And, according to later reports in the newspapers and sworn testimony from witnesses, on one occasion, he resorted to the most atrocious form of entertainment to break the monotony of camp life, for Jameson was accused of paying African soldiers to murder, dismember and eat a girl while he watched.
James Jameson, it was said, had been determined to witness an act of cannibalism, and had watched the whole event with his sketchbook in hand. His enthusiasm for brutality did not stop there, because Jameson was also said to have sent an African man’s head back to England – not a ‘mere skull’, but a stuffed head and neck with its skin and hair intact – which he displayed in a glass case in his home. Apparently, the head had belonged to a man who was well known to the expedition members, and who had been shot dead by ‘an Arab’. Jameson had arranged for the man’s head to be cut off and packed in salt, boxed and shipped to London, where he had it stuffed by Rowland Ward, the well-known taxidermy firm in Piccadilly, who were more used to preparing big game trophies than human ones. Perhaps their skills in this new direction left something to be desired, for Jameson’s wife complained that the head tended to exude an unpleasant odour at certain times depending on the weather.
Jameson was no longer alive to defend himself against the accusations levelled at him. He had died of a fever in Africa before his men joined Stanley for the journey home, and it was left to his widow to refute the charges made against him in the newspapers. She published his letters, in which he said that he had believed the offer of a cannibal performance to be in jest, but it was a weak defence. Jameson had paid the price of six handkerchiefs to watch the event; apparently he had done nothing to try and prevent the girl’s death (‘the most horrible scene I ever witnessed in my life’); and while he may not have sketched the scene as it unfolded – he could not, he said, because he did not have a sketchbook with him at the time – he did draw six pictures of the girl’s death later that evening at camp. Moreover, Mrs Jameson was silent on the topic of the stuffed head.
The Jameson story, which was printed in The Times in November 1890, provoked horror and outrage. Henry Stanley had returned to Britain the previous April a national hero. His book about the expedition, In Darkest Africa, was a bestseller; he had been showered with awards, receptions, honorary degrees and speaking engagements. Suddenly, the mood turned sour. Stanley’s ‘Rear Column’ was accused of depravity, disorganization and desertion. It emerged that his second-in-command, Edmund Barttelot, had been shot while interfering in a local festival, and other members of the company had dispersed in disarray. James Jameson’s depraved behaviour was emblematic of the ‘Congo atrocities’, as they became known: stories of floggings, starvation and the slaughter of natives continued to circulate for months. As one correspondent to The Times ruminated grimly: ‘Truly the ways of travellers “in Darkest Africa” are dark indeed.’ Jameson had abused his power to satisfy a perverse and cruel curiosity.
Jameson’s morbid interests raised uncomfortable questions about the easy dichotomy between the primitive and the civilized: here was an educated man, a scientist, no less, taking part in a high-profile expedition – an expedition charged with asserting the rights of Europe over the unruly and inept African people, as much a piece of theatre as it was a strategic mission – who had been revealed as a monster. In the hands of enthusiastic European collectors, trophy heads suggested that there were unsettling commonalities between civilized man and so-called savages after all.
Another of Stanley’s men claimed that Jameson had spoken openly about the incident at the time, and only realized ‘the seriousness’ of his actions much later. ‘Life is very cheap in Central Africa … [and] Mr. Jameson forgot how differently this terrible thing would be regarded at home.’ Jameson, the ‘ardent naturalist’, had to be reminded that his subjects were human beings too.
Jameson, it happens, had been a keen hunter, and his impressive collection of big game trophies had been exhibited in London shortly after his death in 1888. The heads of antelope, deer, white rhino and bison he had shot were displayed alongside ‘the trophies’ he had acquired in the Congo, which included ceremonial daggers and knives, a ‘repulsive’ headdress made from a complete human scalp, and a necklace of human teeth. The collection was displayed by Rowland Ward (the same firm who had, it was later claimed, stuffed a human head for Jameson), and it was presented, by The Times, as a testament to Jameson’s great contribution to science. Clearly there was a difference between collecting an artefact that had been made out of a human head by other people (particularly if those other people were ‘low savages’) and commissioning an artefact made out of a human head yourself. The first was a cultural curiosity, the second was an abuse of power and a moral outrage.
James Jameson’s acts of barbarism were all the more shocking because they took the widespread popular interest in primitive peoples to its logical, and most horrific, extreme. Jameson’s brutality had been born of curiosity, and many people at home shared this same curiosity. Indeed, one correspondent to The Times wondered how many of those who ‘cast up their eyes in holy horror’ at Jameson’s crimes would be first to crowd into the streets, with a shilling firmly in hand, at the announcement that ‘a party of cannibals from Central Africa would kill and eat a fellow-creature twice daily’ at the Westminster Aquarium.
It was not too much of a stretch. Live ‘savages’ were regularly displayed for the paying public at international exhibitions and in travelling shows. Crystal Palace, at Sydenham, was a popular place for displaying ‘natives’ to the public. These appearances were carefully orchestrated to show the natives performing ‘typical’ activities, like hunting, dancing and making pottery, and more dramatic scenes of warfare, cannibalism and headhunting were also staged, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century (as the Jameson story hit the headlines), when organizers began to rely more on spectacular performances to increase their profits. Much of it was pure fantasy. One group of Australian Aborigines, who visited England in the mid-1880s, were introduced as follows:
Male and female Australian cannibals (R.A. Cunningham, Director). The first and only obtained colony of these strange, savage, disfigured and most brutal race ever lured from the remote interior wilds, where they indulge in ceaseless bloody feuds and forays, to feast upon each other’s flesh. The very lowest order of ma
nkind, and beyond conception most curious to look upon.
They claimed to be educational, but shows like these both satisfied and sustained European prejudice. Many of the performers, although not all, defied the roles that had been forced upon them; some ran away, others were mistreated or succumbed to infection in a strange land. But even death did not guarantee an escape. Bones, body parts, moulds and casts of native people were popular with the crowds. When one Maori man died suddenly while touring Europe in the 1820s, his head was preserved and fixed to a model of his body, and so he continued to convince people that he ‘really has eaten other people, because that is indeed the way he looks’. The irony of Europeans displaying the head of a ‘headhunter’ went unremarked.
The thought of James Jameson displaying a stuffed human head in his home may have disgusted readers of The Times, but shops and auction houses regularly sold the heads of people from Ecuador, India and New Zealand as curiosities. And no controversy ensued when the American engineer Fritz Up De Graff wrote a popular and dubious book about his life in Ecuador, including an account of the time he claimed to have joined a headhunting raid and lent his machete to the surrounding ‘horde of fiends, crazed by blood and lust’ so that they might kill a woman for her head. On the contrary, his publishers proudly advertised the fact that ‘[t]he author actually took part in a head hunt, among other daring and unique adventures’. There were a number of academic publications on the subject too, such as the 1923 paper ‘Stuffed Human Heads from New Guinea’ by the anthro pologist Alfred Cort Haddon, who provided a detailed physical comparison of eight stuffed heads in museums and private collections, before ruminating briefly on their significance: were they trophies, memorials or perhaps even rattles? There was no controversy in the newspapers about these heads.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 4
