The way the picture was composed, one instantly saw Robley’s own head as one among many. It lay in the same plane and was on the same scale and occupied the position of the second head from the right in the fourth row down. The difference, of course, was that Robley’s head was attached to something at the neck, while the Maori heads floated in space, mounted by invisible means, casting only the faintest of shadows. The message of this composition cut both ways, suggesting, on the one hand, that the Maori heads were also once attached to bodies and belonged to individual men—an idea strongly reinforced by the remarkable preservation of their features. And yet, at the same time, it was obvious that in this context they were objects, specimens in a collection, while Robley was clearly a collector.
At the end of the bench on which Robley sat were two small objects about the size of cantaloupes that looked as smooth as polished stone. They were the heads of children and they had a different look about them from the rest. Their mouths were shut, their eyes were closed, and they looked as if they were sleeping. They were not the first thing you saw in the photo but, rather, almost the last, and they seemed to tell a different story, or perhaps to complicate the story told by Robley and the grown-up heads.
The process by which the heads were preserved has been detailed in various places. According to one account,
The preparation of the skull was called Paki Paki or Popo, which signified taking out the brain. The heads were then steamed in the oven several times, and after each steaming were carefully wiped with the flowers of the kakaho or reed, and every portion of flesh and brain was removed, a small thin manuka stick being inserted between the skin and bone of the nose to preserve its form. This over, the heads were dried in the sun, and afterwards exposed to the smoke of their houses. The eyes were extracted, the sockets filled with flax, and the lids sewn together …
I found these descriptions mesmerizing but not repellant. I was, strangely, not appalled by accounts of the process, by the idea of dropping a head into boiling water, or wrapping it in leaves and steaming it in an earth oven until the skin slips off the skull. It did not distress me to learn that in the final stages of preparation the head was heated and basted with fat; I even found myself wondering what kind of fat they used. But it did occur to me that perhaps I didn’t really understand what any of this meant. The heads seemed a test of my ability to imagine what I would never know, and perhaps the fact that I was not appalled meant that I hadn’t imagined it properly.
In principle, I have always been committed to the idea of disinterested curiosity and to the way of seeing it represents: an empirical, purely secular approach to the things of this world. It is a stance with roots in the Englightenment, one that arose in the days of Cook, and it is certainly cultural. I would never expect Seven, for example, to share it with me. But the reason I value this perspective is that I think it gives me the best possible chance of understanding what has really happened.
Although it is difficult to look at this photograph and not see the wholesale exploitation, even slaughter, of one people by another, it is important to try. Because that is not the story this picture tells us. This picture tells a story of colonialism, but it is not a story about the impact of one culture on another like a hammer on a nail. It is more like the story of two systems colliding, like trains heading in opposite directions that have been mistakenly shunted onto the same track. It was the Maoris who took and preserved these heads; it was the Europeans who bought and sold them. And it was the interaction of the two that made possible a photograph in which a man in a morning coat can sit looking unperturbed surrounded by trophies with shining teeth and sunken cheeks and albatross feathers in their hair.
In 1864 Horatio Gordon Robley, then a lieutenant in the 68th Durham Light Infantry, arrived in New Zealand as part of a British imperial force sent to occupy Tauranga. An amateur artist, he took his sketchbook with him and made many drawings of Maori life. He sketched canoe races and storehouses, war dances, cemeteries, funerals, soldiers, forts, churches, and battles. He paid particular attention to Maori art, especially the art of the tattoo, which was even then disappearing under the influence of the missionaries, and he earned a reputation for oddity by going around after battles and squatting in the mud next to Maori corpses in order to copy the designs on the faces of the dead. He was an avid collector of coins, curios, and other objects, including moko-tnokai, or smoked heads. In 1896 he published a monograph called Moko; or, Maori Tattooing, which remains an important sourcebook on the history of the art form.
Although most Polynesians practiced some form of tattooing, the Maoris were famous for their facial tattoos, which were excruciatingly painful and took years to complete. A full facial tattoo was considered a sign of the highest distinction and only the most important and aged chiefs succeeded in acquiring it. The designs might cover every inch of the face, even the eyelids and the lips, with patterned bands and spirals. Each moko was unique, and though generally symmetrical, they often varied slightly from side to side. It was considered by its wearer to be a sign of his identity and some of the earliest deeds and contracts entered into by Maoris show, instead of a signature, a drawing of the signer’s moko, ingeniously represented in two dimensions, as if the head had been flayed and the skin laid out flat upon a table.
The Maori method of applying a tattoo might almost have been designed as a test of endurance. Not content to prick or lightly score the skin, the Maoris carved their designs into the face with a chisel dipped in a solution of charcoal (or, in later years, gunpowder) and tapped with a wooden mallet, a process one early observer referred to as “being chipped.” Naturally, it was considered unmanly to groan or writhe or give any other indication of discomfort, but the handful of Pakeha sailors and vagabonds who had themselves tattooed in the early decades of the nineteenth century reported that the process was almost unbearable. The resulting scars left the skin ridged and rough, and sometimes, if the cuts were made too deep, interfered with the facial muscles. But it also gave the wearer an ageless look, making the young look older and the old look young, for “where moko is elaborated,” wrote Robley, “time can write no wrinkles.” Notwithstanding the difficulties of the ordeal, all men of status underwent some degree of tattooing, as did most women, though less extensively and usually only on the lips and chin.
The relationship between tattooing faces and preserving heads is an obvious one, and in some sense, it was the moko that was being preserved. In later years tattooed skin was salvaged from other parts of the body; Robley tells of cartouche boxes made from the tattooed skin of a man’s buttocks and thighs. But it was heads that Maoris really valued. Traditionally, the heads of both enemies and friends or relatives were preserved. But, in either case, only the heads of the most exalted, and therefore the most fully tattooed, were considered fit for preservation (although exceptions might be made in the case of a favorite wife or child). The curing of the head, writes Robley, was “an acknowledgment of the nobility of its owner” and served to keep his memory alive. When the head of a family member was preserved, the lips were sewn together in the middle, making an elegant shape of the mouth, like two almonds side by side. This gives the face a comparatively quiet expression, unanimated, almost serene. Heads of this type were considered treasures and were kept carefully hidden away by the family of the deceased and brought out only on important occasions.
It was a different matter with enemies’ heads. These were the heads most often seen and described by Europeans, and the ones, generally speaking, that turned up in private collections and museums later on. In the case of an enemy, the mouth was left unstitched—thus the ghastly grin—and the head was treated with a curious mixture of reverence and contempt. Early visitors to New Zealand often reported seeing them fixed on the ramparts of a pa, or stuck on poles outside a village, where they were taunted and jeered at by passersby. According to Reverend William Yates, a warrior would stand and address his enemy’s head in words that went something like this:
You wanted to run away, did you? But my mere [club] overtook you, and after you were cooked you were made food for my mouth. And where is your father? He is cooked. Where is your brother? He is eaten. Where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me. Where are your children? There they are, with loads on their backs, carrying food as my slaves.
For all this, mokomokai served an important political purpose. The central governing concept of Maori political life was utu, a word that is often translated as “revenge” but means something closer to “satisfaction” or “reciprocity.” Utu demanded that both favors and grievances be repaid in kind, but it was the grievances, naturally, that caused the most trouble. Tribes often went to war to settle scores that had been nursed for generations, and this, in turn, laid the foundation for what Marsden called “new acts of cruelty and blood,” creating new grounds for utu. Heads, in this context, served as bargaining chips in tribal negotiations. In order to conclude a peace treaty the parties might require an exchange of heads. Or if an important chief fell in battle, the deliverance of his head might be enough to bring the hostilities to an end. By the same token, it was said that if a chief destroyed an enemy’s head while it was in his possession, it was a sign that he would never make peace with that tribe.
All this changed with the arrival of the Europeans. Among Maoris, heads might be traded, but only for political reasons and not in the commercial sense, as one kind of good to be exchanged for another. One could not purchase potatoes, for example, with a head—an idea that would have struck any Maori as obscene. Heads were highly sacred objects, imbued with a significance or power that could not be converted into something else, particularly something base or worldly. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, however, heads were instantly understood as curios, like dinosaur bones or iridescent beetles, objects of aesthetic and scientific interest.
The first “sale” of a Maori head occurred during Captain Cook’s first circumnavigation of New Zealand. Toward the end of January 1770, the Endeavour was reconnoitering an area of coastline about seventy miles from Tasman’s Murderers’ Bay. Going ashore one afternoon, Cook, Banks, and Tupaia, their Tahitian translator, met a family employed in preparing a meal. A dog was cooking in an earth oven and there were some baskets containing food nearby. Looking casually into one of these, Banks reported that they saw two bones, “pretty clean picked,” which, upon examination, proved to be those of a human being. Although Maoris up and down the coast had repeatedly and freely admitted to the practice of eating their enemies, Cook and his companions felt the need to be convinced. So Banks began to question the Maoris. “What bones are these?” he asked.
—The bones of a man.
—And have you eat the flesh?
—Yes.
—Have you none of it left?
—No.
—Why did not you eat the woman who we saw today in the water [referring to a body they had seen floating in the bay]?
—She was our relation.
—Who then is it that you do eat?
—Those who are killed in war.
—And who was the man whose bones these are?
—Five days ago a boat of our enemies came into this bay and of them we killed seven, of whom the owner of these bones was one.
Cook then took a bone and asserted that it was not the bone of a man but rather that of a dog. “But [the Maori] with great fervency took hold of his fore-arm and told us again that it was that bone and to convince us that they had eat the flesh he took hold of the flesh of his own arm with his teeth and made show of eating.” Which plainly showed, Cook added drily, “that the flesh to them was a dainty bit.”
The next day a small canoe came out to the ship and Tupaia questioned the Maoris further. Where were the skulls, he asked, “Do you eat them?” To which an old man replied, “We do not eat the heads … but we do the brains and tomorrow I will bring one and show you.” A few days later he reappeared, bringing with him four preserved heads. Banks immediately grasped what sort of things these were, describing them as trophies and likening them to scalps taken by North American Indians. The old man, Cook reported, was extremely reluctant to part with any of the heads, but Banks at last convinced him to sell one, that of a teenage boy whose skull had been badly fractured, for the price of a pair of linen drawers.
In the days before the arrival of Europeans, Maoris fought each other in sporadic, limited, intertribal wars, conducted during the summer months by small kin-based parties of perhaps two hundred men. They used clubs and spears of hardened wood, bone, or stone. They had no real projectile weapons, no bows and arrows, no slings except for killing birds, while the spear, or taiaha, was twirled and thrust, but not typically thrown. This meant that hand-to-hand combat was the norm. No one expected to be killed at a distance and all the defensive techniques that had been developed over centuries of regular warfare assumed that as long as your enemy could not reach you, he could do you no harm. Thus, the gun, even the unreliable flintlock trade musket that was in circulation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was greeted by those who first felt its effect, writes the historian R. D. Crosby, with “a deep and widespread despair.” Describing a battle in which the attackers were armed with guns while the defending tribe had never before experienced musket-fire, he writes, “The initial reaction of stunned silence was followed by a wail which grew in volume as awareness of the horror of the power of the musket struck home.”
The first appearance of guns in Maori intertribal warfare dates to 1807, when they were used in a battle at Moremonui. The guns did not, on this occasion, ensure their owners’ triumph. On the contrary, so many of their bodies were left on the beach that the battle came to be known as Te Kai a te Karoro, or the Seagulls’ Feast. But among those who survived the slaughter was a clever young rangatira from the Bay of Islands named Hongi Hika. It was Hongi who first recognized that the key to future success lay in the acquisition of the Pakeha’s guns. He was entirely motivated by utu, that is, by the desire to avenge his tribe’s losses at Moremonui and elsewhere. He was not fundamentally interested in Europeans, except insofar as they were able to provide him with the means of achieving his goal. The accident of history is that Hongi belonged to Ngapuhi and Ngapuhi came from the Bay of Islands and the Bay of Islands was the first major port of call for European vessels, which meant that he was among the very first to have significant access to guns.
Hongi led his first great raid against his southern neighbors, the tribes of the Bay of Plenty, in 1818. The taua, or war party, consisted of over nine hundred men, of whom fifty or so were armed with muskets. They returned to the Bay of Islands in January of the following year, bringing with them a thousand prisoners and hundreds of heads—one witness counted seventy piled in a single canoe. The next year Hongi sailed to England with the missionary Thomas Kendall. Kendall was seeking ordination; Hongi was seeking guns. In London, Hongi and his cousin Waikato were presented to King George and showered with presents, including a suit of armor from the Tower of London. On the way back home they stopped in Sydney, where Hongi sold everything—except the armor, which he liked to wear—and used the money to buy guns.
On the way back to New Zealand he encountered two of his long-standing rivals before whom he laid out his new collection, saying,
E mara ma! O friends! O Te Horeta! and Te Hinaki! Behold! this gun is “Te Wai-whariki” [the Blood-stained Stream], this is “Kaikai-a-te-karoro” [the Seagulls’ Feast], this is “Wai-kohu” [River Mist] this is “Te Ringa-huru-huru” [the Warrior’s Arm], this is “Mahurangi” [the Exalted],
naming one by one the defeats that Ngapuhi had suffered and that he intended to revenge. Almost as soon as he returned to New Zealand, Hongi embarked on an expedition of war unlike anything the Maoris had ever seen. He had two thousand warriors and one thousand guns and there was not a tribe in New Zealand that could withstand him.
These were the opening salvos of the Musket Wars, a period of intense internecine warfa
re that lasted almost three decades and resulted in tens of thousands of Maori deaths, the destruction of whole tribes, and the depopulation of entire regions. Hongi was by no means the only force behind the devastation—by the early 1830s almost every major tribe in New Zealand was at war—but he was one of a handful whose desire to see old debts repaid mutated into a taste for pandemonium. It was, however, a self-limiting disorder. As Ngapuhi proceeded down the North Island, exacting retribution for old wrongs, their victims naturally concluded that they too must have muskets, no matter what the cost. The price of a musket in 1820 was a ton of dressed flax, the principal commodity of European exchange, and soon whole tribes began relocating to swamps, where the plant grew in abundance. People sickened in the damp and neglected the cultivation of their food crops. The demand for slaves skyrocketed—slaves who could only be had by raiding tribal neighbors—to meet the insatiable need for labor to produce more flax.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 12