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f i v e . The Later Fate of Heads Cannibalism, Decapitation, and Capitalism [This] here harpooner I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios you know), and he’s sold all of ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause tomorrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions. herman melville, Moby Dick 117 THE AESTHETICS OF CURIOUS HEADS For the moment let me bracket “this cannibal business of selling the heads of dead idolators” that Melville’s Ishmael speaks about and shift instead to the significance of that queer trade of Queequeg trying to sell his many heads even though the “market’s overstocked.”1 I will do so by continuing my earlier treatise on decapitated heads with an incident recorded by Samuel Marsden, the coordinator of the Protestant missions in New Zealand on behalf of the Church Missionary Society. Marsden was a “Evangelical Anglican” well educated at Cambridge and strongly influenced by popular Wesleyanism and other Calvinist movements of the time. After he settled in Australia, he became a large landowner and a Sydney magistrate who loved to flog those other savages, the Irish convicts. Though he was also a rabid hater of the Australian adivasi (Aborigines) he developed friendships with Maori chiefs. Perhaps the contempt his Maori friends had for the Aborigines was an infection contacted from Marsden.2 Writing in 1831 Marsden notes, “When the chief who was with me went on board the Prince of Denmark he saw 14 heads of chiefs upon the table in the cabin,” their chiefly features identifiable by elaborate tattoos (HR 1, 716). Marsden must surely have known that the practice of selling aboriginal skulls for phreno- 118 . t h e l at e r fat e o f h e a d s logical purposes had already taken place in Australia.3 Nevertheless, Maori heads had greater aesthetic and commercial value. The practice of trading their heads became so scandalous that the governor of New South Wales forbade their importation into the colony by a proclamation of 1831, unhappily long after this nefarious activity had reached its peak. The document though couched in deadly legalese is worth quoting: Whereas it has been represented to His Excellency the Governor, that the masters and crews of vessel trading between this Colony and New Zealand, are in the practice of purchasing and bringing from thence human heads, which are preserved in a manner peculiar to that country: And whereas there is strong reason to believe that such disgusting traffic tends greatly to increase the sacrifice of human life among savages, whose disregard of it is notorious, His Excellency is desirous of evincing his entire disapprobation of the practice above mentioned, as well as his determination to check it by all means in his power; and with this view, His Excellency has been pleased to order that the Officers of the Customs do strictly watch and report every instance which they may discover of an attempt to import into this Colony any dried or preserved human heads in future, with the names of all parties concerned in every such attempt. (LJS, 500) Apart from this belated humane concern for the preservation of the lives of natives one might ask the following question: What are the implications of this extraordinary practice of shipping Maori heads to Port Jackson to be transshipped to old curiosity shops in London and other metropolitan capitals? Let me initially focus on both the exotic and aesthetic interests involved by shifting to another scene, this time to London in 1820 where Hongi Hika, the warrior chief of the Nga Puhi along with a chief of Waikato was being entertained and treated as an “object of mere curiosity” in an English drawing room.4 “Hongi conducted himself with an air of conscious superiority and that scrupulous regard to etiquette by which he was generally distinguished, until he observed some of the ladies evidently tracing the lines upon his tattooed countenance, while a smile played upon their own, implying as he thought a feeling...

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