A novelist writes of the once-lucrative trade in preserved heads of Māori
The prologue of my 19th century historical novel The Seasonwife opens with a scene where a Māori man is hunted by a party led by an upper-class gentleman. It sounds like something out of The Hunger Games but the terror that man felt is real. He existed. He loved and laughed. He was murdered by the British upper class. This fiction is drawn from that shocking fact.
A letter to Henry Aglionby, a British MP and a director of the New Zealand Company on May 20, 1839, reveals that the man was murdered to meet a collegial obligation: "My dear Agionby, – I have great pleasure in informing you that ... I have at last succeeded in procuring you a capital specimen of a New Zealander’s head, and as soon as it is ‘well cured and properly dried’ I shall send it to you by the first ship that leaves this colony, and I think you will agree with me in considering it for the handsomest room in your house."
His correspondent expands on the offer, and writes, "If you would like his skin, I have it drying, and will send it to you at the first opportunity. Some of the tattoos are exceedingly beautiful, particularly on certain parts, but one figure has suffered a little by having the ball pass through it."
The letter goes on to offer a woman’s head: "I shall have great pleasure in supplying it to you.”
The 'New Zealander', as Māori were known then, would have been living in a thriving community of Māori people in Sydney. The hunt, killing, beheading and skinning, occurred when the British headhunter was traversing from Sydney across the plains. "After a long chase we succeeded bringing him down by a rifle shot."
British merchants orchestrated a trade in human heads from the 1780s to at least the middle of the 19th Century that involved the killing and beheading of Māori.
Like slavery, the trade in human heads and body parts has sometimes been blamed on those who were subjected. This skews the responsibility from the oppressor. Māori valued the head as the most sacred part of the human body. Heads were preserved. Sir Paul Reeves once described this practice as being similar to people keeping photos of their dear, deceased loved ones. The heads of respected people, children, and babies, were placed in specially carved boxes as taonga. These boxes were taken out on special occasions when the dead were remembered. Always they were respected and mourned.
As a peace offering, heads of warriors killed in battle were sometimes offered to their relatives. Heads were not traded commercially by Māori until the British stepped on the scene, creating a vicious trade alongside others, causing the deaths of many Māori.
As early as 1820 the trade was common. This is evidenced by a letter to the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. Writing under the nom de plume Verax, the author said he had been walking along Sydney’s George Street when he saw a man carrying an "extraordinary" package: "Judge my astonishment and horror, Sir, at beholding a human head, with long black hair, in a state of perfect preservation. "
He questioned the person carrying the head wrapped in a kerchief. The man casually replied that "it was the head of a New Zealander which he had purchased from a person lately arrived from that country, and he was going to dispose it for two guineas to a gentleman who was about to embark for England."
The letter writer recalled that he had seen two human heads in a private Sydney house seven years earlier, then valued at about 20 guineas each. The drop in price indicated that the trade in heads was blooming. He was right. The trade in heads along with whales, flax and spars was a chief export from New Zealand.
The author of the letter urged that it should be criminalised. But people at the top echelons of society had the means and wealth to avoid censure. The head trade remained a legal business for another 11 years to 1831, continuing even after it was banned. The killing of the New Zealand Māori man and possibly a woman, in the trade between Willis and his gentleman friend Aglionby occurred six years after the trade was banned.
Many upper- and middle-class families in England had links to the slave trade through relatives in America, Aglionby among them. Then, as now, some railed against the protectionism of businessmen who boosted wealth by investing in the trafficking of people.
Five months before Willis wrote to Aglionby about his hunt and murder of a human being, an extract appeared in The Colonist. William Howitt’s book Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives By The Europeans In All Their Colonies, is riddled with colonial paternalism but shows exemplary outrage at the head trade, comparing it with the trade in slaves.
He writes, "It was not enough that the lands of all newly discovered regions were seized on by fraud or violence; it was not enough that their rightful inhabitants were murdered or enslaved ... One might surely trace these monsters by the smell of death, from their kidnapping haunts to the very sugar mills of the west where canes and human flesh are ground together. The ghosts of murdered millions were enough, one thinks, to lead the way without cart or compass. The very bed of the ocean must be paved with bones."
His chilling words could be a call to those today who embark in this ghoulish trade, trading heads and bodies, on social media. It's a call to raise the conscience of museums and galleries and universities who collectively retain thousands of dead people. Trading people whether dead or alive is never impersonal. These are people who fell in love, who felt loss, who held their children and contemplated the stars. Their span of life which was cut brutally short by the British.
Howitt suggested that New Zealanders "whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums" should be asked whether they see the English as tender-hearted. He recognised the horrible truth that few dared tell: that the sun is still yet to set on the dominion of injustice and oppression. The Seasonwife by Saige England (Bateman, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.
