Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  It takes almost no imagination to predict what happened next. Maoris soon realized that European traders would pay in guns and ammunition for preserved, tattooed heads. Almost overnight the market for heads exploded, transforming what was once an honor reserved for the few into a base, mercantile affair. No head with a good tattoo was safe, and in order to increase the supply, chiefs began tattooing their slaves with the express purpose of selling their heads as soon as they were finished. All kinds of insane stories began circulating, like the one Frederick Maning recorded of a head that was selected, sold, and paid for while its owner was still alive. Meanwhile, across the Tasman Sea, an item described as “Baked Heads” appeared on the list of imports at Sydney customs. Not surprisingly, Maoris quickly stopped preserving the heads of their friends and relatives, leaving only those of enemies, slaves, and unfortunate Pakehas in circulation.

  By the early 1830s this vicious cycle—heads for muskets, muskets for heads—had spiraled out of control. In Sydney, Governor Darling issued a general order prohibiting the importation of heads into New South Wales, and what had begun in 1770 as an exercise in scientific curiosity (tinged perhaps with pleasurable horror) became a capital offense. This effectively stopped the trade, but by then hundreds of Maori heads had made their way out of New Zealand and into the hands of collectors around the world. Robley lists some of the collections in which they were held in the 1890s, including the British Museum, the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, the Florence Anthropological Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, the Paris Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, and the Royal College of Surgeons in London. There are, or were, Maori heads (and a few tattooed heads of Europeans) in New York, Dublin, Rome, Moscow, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and many other American and European cities, while Robley himself had perhaps the finest collection in private hands.

  Simply looking at him in this picture, surrounded by his collection of heads, one could be forgiven for thinking Robley an archetypal colonial: arrogant, cold, acquisitive, smug. Has he no feeling? one wonders. Can he not see that these too were men, whose grief and pleasure were no different from his own? Why does he not distinguish between carved inanimate objects, like the wahaika he holds in his hands, and the carved human remains on the wall behind him? And yet it should be said in Robley’s defense that his treatment of these objects was motivated by respect and admiration for them as works of art, and by a powerful desire to understand them in a scientific sense. Even an untutored observer will recognize the continuity of style between the carving of Maori weapons, canoes, and house posts and the lines on a tattooed face. From an aesthetic or technical point of view, it is all of a piece, and it was Robley’s wish to preserve a unique aspect of Maori material culture that was on the verge of vanishing in his lifetime.

  I had had a copy of this photo for about a year when I showed it to one of Seven’s sisters in New Zealand. She took one glance at it and looked as if she were going to be sick.

  I was appalled. She was appalled. But we were appalled for different reasons.

  “They’re somebody’s tupuna,” she said. “Ancestors. Imagine if it was your grandfather.”

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t see my grandfather, with his snow-white hair and steel gray eyes and his papery old man’s skin, decapitated, smoked, and mounted on the wall of a photographer’s studio flanked by a Maori warrior in a dogskin cloak holding a Smith and Wesson. There is no precedent for such an image. One can only invent it by inverting the details. Nor, to be frank, could I connect in that emotional way with any image of a man I’d never known. The heads in this picture were not those of her grandparents; they were people who could not be fewer than five or six generations distant. Nor was there any evidence to say that they were Ngapuhi; they were probably not even members of her tribe. In fact, if you wanted to get right down to it, they were probably her ancestors’ enemies, victims of the great Ngapuhi, like as not.

  None of this made any difference to my sister-in-law. It didn’t matter that they were not her relations, that nobody knew whose relations they were, that no matter how vivid they looked, they were basically anonymous. To her there was something deeply shocking, almost pornographic about the heads. What wasn’t clear to me was exactly what had upset her: whether it was the heads per se, the horror of them, or the idea of such a collection and such a collector, or the fact that I was in possession of this picture, or that I had been so thoughtless as to show it to her.

  After that I carried the photograph back and forth to New Zealand like contraband, tucked inside a book hidden in my suitcase. I thought of showing it to my mother-in-law, who took a keen interest in Maori history and who, I thought, might have interesting information to share. But I was afraid of what she might say, of what she might think of me, as if this would prove conclusively that I was a barbarian, to have so little feeling for the dead. It was like the other things I wanted to know about but didn’t dare ask—religious things, customary things, things that conflicted with Christianity, things that had been suppressed. I suppose I could have gotten rid of the photo, but I’d become attached to it over the years. Its discovery had been one of my research triumphs; at first I’d imagined I would use it as some kind of illustration, maybe one day even the cover of a book. But gradually I realized this was not going to be possible and I put the photograph away.

  It was almost a decade before I took the photo out again. I had learned that a museum in Boston owned a couple of specimens of Maori mokomokai. This was not a well-publicized bit of information but no one denied the fact, and when I asked if I could see them, the curator said yes, it could be arranged.

  I wanted Seven to go with me. He had seen the Robley photograph but he had never seen an actual head and he was curious about them—though not perhaps as curious as I was to see how he’d react. Our appointment was for a weekday afternoon, so we took some time off work and made a day of it, allowing time to wander around the museum and go out to lunch. When the time for our appointment came, the curator met us in the lobby. After she had signed us in, she led us down a narrow hallway and through a door to a labyrinthine set of passages, up some stairs, down a corridor, into the freight elevator, and finally into the warehouse through one last set of well-locked doors.

  It was a large, cavernous space, or would have been, had it not been stuffed to the rafters with crates and pallets. I looked around in awe, wondering what was in them: wahaika like the one in the Robley photo, greenstone adzes, royal Hawaiian necklaces made of human hair? There was a small open area near the doorway in which a little table had been placed. The heads, which had been set out earlier in anticipation of our arrival, were on this table covered with a piece of tissue paper.

  “I’ve been here for eleven years and I’ve never taken these out of their box before,” said the curator, as she put on a smock, a pair of gloves, and a disposable mask.

  “Is that to protect you or the heads?” I asked.

  “Both, really.”

  I wondered what the heads, which had been in a perfect state of preservation for almost two hundred years, could do to anyone now.

  “There’s a lot of weird dust around here,” she said. “I don’t think you can be too careful.”

  I walked slowly over to the table. One corner of the tissue paper was lifted slightly and beneath it I could see a couple of teeth. For a minute I felt a shiver of contact with the supernatural. Then the curator lifted the sheet of paper and the feeling vanished.

  What I saw were two heads, slightly smaller than I’d expected, the color of oak, with dry, dusty-looking hair. Their ears were shriveled and at first Seven thought they’d been cut off. But, no, I told him, look closer, there they are; it must have been the effect of the drying process. Their teeth were intact but rather yellowed. The moko, or tattoo, was much less vivid than I’d expected, just a series of faint, rather delicate blue lines, and I could see why it was so hard to decipher in the photographs. It was not at all obvious to me how one would tell if the tattooing had be
en added posthumously—making the head a “fake” in nineteenth-century terms—though Robley claimed it was easy to distinguish. Looking closer, I could see that the lines on one of the heads appeared to have been inscribed, though on the other I simply could not tell. One of the heads was in a better state of preservation. Interestingly, this one had its mouth stitched closed—again, something I had not expected to see.

  There was almost no information about their provenance. One was received by the museum in 1904, the gift of a physician and art collector. The other, the better of the two, was purchased in 1926 and came, according to the catalog, from an old French collection. “Old,” of course, is a tantalizing word, suggesting that it might have been acquired in or around the Bay of Islands, where much of the earliest collecting took place. Many of the oldest heads in European collections were traded by Ngapuhi, though, of course, they probably belonged to people who came from farther south. Curiously, the hair on this head was tightly curled—the catalog suggested that it “[had] been curled,” as if the wearer had been fashion-conscious. More likely, the hair was just naturally curly. This is not the classic Maori look—most Maoris have wavy hair, but people can certainly be found whose hair is quite kinky. Seven, for example.

  After we left, I asked him what he thought of the heads.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Did you think they were spooky? Did they feel like real people? How did you feel when you were looking at them?”

  “I thought they were kind of small.”

  “Me too. What else?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really feel anything.”

  This was also the experience I was having. I hadn’t really felt much at all. After the first flicker of excitement, which seemed to have as much to do with their being covered up as anything, I couldn’t seem to generate any reaction to the heads. I was almost more aware of the curator, of her vague distaste for the objects I had asked her to unwrap, of her busy schedule and the fact that we were taking up her time, of an uncertainty on my part about how long I should spend looking at the objects, and whether I should touch them (in the end I did not), and the fact that the curator had never been curious enough to look at them in eleven years. In the swirl of all these other issues, the heads themselves seemed almost to disappear. When I left, I found that already I could not remember many of their details.

  “What color would you say their skin was?” I asked Seven, as we were driving home.

  “Kind of yellowish brown.”

  I put my feet up on the dashboard and looked out the window of the car. Seven turned on the radio, which was tuned to some station the children liked, and we merged onto the freeway to the sound of some sweet but silly pop tune. I thought about my sister-in-law and wondered how she would have felt if she’d been there with us in the museum storeroom, whether the experience would have heightened or lessened her revulsion, whether she would even have agreed to go.

  And I wondered, too, about Seven: why he didn’t share his sister’s feelings, why he seemed, like me, nonplussed in the presence of these complicated things. Was it a measure of his assimilation? Did it have something to do with his being a guy? Was he—as my mother sometimes said of me—unfeeling? Or was there nothing there to be felt, nothing to be communicated beyond the facts, the historical circumstances that produced these objects, nothing supernatural after all?

  “I suppose it depends on what you think happens after death,” the curator said mildly as she closed and locked the warehouse door. “My husband, for example, believes that we just return to the earth, to the physical elements we are made of. These heads would never bother him.”

  10

  Turton’s Land Deeds

  When Seven and I had been married two years, I finished my dissertation, and in order to celebrate we decided to move. What followed was a strange peripatetic period, during which we lived in a series of cities, moving from Melbourne to Boston to Honolulu to Brisbane and back to Melbourne again in the space of about four years. I had a series of short-term jobs and fellowships and Seven was content to go where I went, and the only complicating factor was that, as we set out on the first leg of our journey, I found that I was pregnant with our first child.

  I made this discovery in California, where we’d stopped en route to Boston to visit my aunt, and after the first flush of excitement the only thing I could think about was how I was going to manage the drive. Our plan had been to buy a car in Los Angeles and set out across the country in the great, time-honored (if, in this case, reversed) American tradition. We had done a lot of driving together in Australia, up to Broken Hill and Port Macquarie, all the way across the Nullarbor to Perth. And Seven was what I thought of as a car guy. He read the automotive section of the paper and never took his car to the garage unless the job required tools he didn’t have.

  I was a lot less handy with a wrench but I also liked to drive and had crossed the country several times when I was in college: I-90 from Boston to Buffalo, Chicago, and Sioux Falls; I-70 from Baltimore to Denver via Kansas City; I-40 across the south—Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Knoxville, Nashville, Little Rock; I-10 from Jacksonville to the City of Angels by way of New Orleans. It seemed like a good way for Seven to see America and, besides, he hated flying and was relieved that we’d now reached a part of the journey that could be conducted on the ground.

  The last thing Seven had done before we left Melbourne was to give away our car, a copper-colored, two-door Valiant with a black vinyl top. We had left pretty much everything behind us, apart from my books, his toolbox, and his bike. But the car was our main possession, and as soon as we reached Los Angeles, we started looking for a replacement.

  L.A. being what it is, we had to rent a car in order to buy one. And so, while I stood at the counter making coffee and thinking about whether I really wanted to drink it, Seven sat at my aunt’s kitchen table flipping through the Yellow Pages.

  “Hires, car hire, motorcar—why can’t I find what I’m looking for?”

  “Because that’s not what we call it,” I told him. “Try looking under car rental.”

  We figured we had about a week to find a suitable vehicle, and every morning Seven would comb through the paper picking out the possibilities. I was in charge of the map.

  “How about Glendale.”

  “OK.”

  “Long Beach.”

  “No.”

  “Montebello.”

  “Maybe.”

  Being the expert, Seven naturally made the inquiries. He knew what he wanted—something cheap and solid that would make it to New England—and he definitely knew his automobiles. The only problem was that, on the phone particularly, no one could understand a word he said.

  “I undustend you hev a cah for sale?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A cah, I’m looking for a cah. You know, a motucah?”

  In the end, I had to do the calling. Seven would tell me what to ask and I relayed back to him whatever the seller said and then he would feed me the next question. Once we’d narrowed the search to a handful of possibilities, we set out in our rental to tour the suburbs within reach—Alhambra, Burbank, Altadena—returning home in the afternoon, hot and cranky, and, in my case, increasingly nauseated. At last, however, we found it: a mustard-colored Volvo wagon with about eighty thousand miles. It was an unlovely vehicle, but it was roomy and solid, and Seven was fairly confident it would get us to the other side.

  What I mostly rememeber about that drive is the smell of the inside of the Volvo, which I ever after associated with being sick. We stopped in Las Vegas and New Mexico and in Kansas, where we were hustled into a motel basement during a tornado scare. The weather was hot; the air-conditioning in the car was broken; and the country passed me by in a sort of swoon. But, at length, we arrived in Boston.

  Perhaps because this was the end of the journey and we were no longer in the surreal limbo in which travelers float, or because we were now within the
gravitational field exerted by my family, almost as soon as we reached the Massachusetts Turnpike I felt the first flickers of doubt. Dimly, through the fog of my morning sickness, I began to perceive some of the difficulties that lay ahead.

  We were not only unemployed; we were not very employable. Even the taxi drivers in Boston had Ph.D.s and Seven was a blue-collar worker with a nineteenth-century trade. Plus, until we managed to find jobs, we had no health insurance. Seven had never lived in the United States before and he didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation. He had grown up in a country with nationalized health care, and he couldn’t even imagine what kind of bind we might find ourselves in if anything went wrong. But I knew all about America. “You’re on your own here,” I wrote to a friend back in Australia. “I’d almost forgotten what it’s like.”

  But it was hard to stay worried around Seven. Worrying is just envisioning a future in which things don’t work out, and Seven hardly ever thought about the future. To the extent that he did, he simply assumed that everything would be fine. I tried to follow his example—it seemed much the nicest way to live—but my instincts, my training, my background were against me, as evidenced by a dream I had not long after we’d arrived.

  I dreamed I was driving some kind of bus. I had never driven a bus before and I was nervous. Everything was going well until, all of a sudden, the bus began to roll backward into a parking lot full of cars. It crashed slowly—in that horrible dreamlike way—into a large number of vehicles. People everywhere began to yell at me: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” they shouted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” And then I realized that I had no insurance and that I was going to have to pay for all the damage to all the cars.

  In the morning I told Seven about this dream.

  “It’s a money dream,” he said.