The first of these heads that I remember to have been brought up was by a wild fellow of the name of Tucker, in 1811, who got it by plunder; and so tenacious were the natives at that time of these heads, that a whole boat’s crew were nearly cut off for the crime of this villain, which was not known until he exposed the head for sale in Sydney. The crew had an hour before the sacrilege committed by Tucker, been upon the most friendly footing with the natives; when suddenly an alarm burst out, and had the vessel not immediately got away, a hundred war canoes would have boarded her at once.This man has since been killed at New Zealand.6 Since records from this early period of contact are sparse and incomplete, there were almost certainly many other such instances of mokomokai being acquired by non-Maori of which no records remain. Those recorded instances that exist reveal a variety of tactics on the part of outsiders. In 1819 a chief was so eager to obtain an axe that he promised his own head to Marsden:
Samuel Leigh was a Wesleyan missionary in New South Wales and became an acolyte of Marsden. He spent a month in the Bay of Islands in 1819. Leigh entered a village and saw twelve heads displayed along a path. Leigh asked the chief why the heads had been displayed in this manner: “Because I expected you to buy them!” “Buy them!” said Mr. Leigh, with considerable vehemence, “I buy spars, pigs, and flax, but not the heads of men.” On returning through the same village in the evening, he perceived that the heads had been removed. On meeting the chief, he inquired why he had removed the heads. “Because,” he observed, “you did not like to see them, and wished that you might not see any more. But the captain of the next ship will, in all probability, purchase them.”9 Leigh’s experience of being offered mokomokai by a chief is further evidence of how active the trade in heads had become by that time, when they were already being sold at auction in London.10
NEW SOUTH WALES AS A TRANSIT POINT Because of its excellent harbor and other resources, Sydney soon became a transit point for trade in mokomokai between New Zealand and Europe and North America. “Verax,” another Sydney newspaper correspondent, reported seeing two Maori heads on display at a Sydney residence in 1812, which were priced at twenty guineas each:
1
An old chief with a very long beard and his face tattooed all over had accompanied us from where we slept last night. He wanted an axe very much. At last he said if we would give him an axe he would give us his head. Nothing is held in so much veneration by the natives as the head of their chief. I asked him who should have the axe when I had got his head. He replied I might give it to his son. At length he said, “Perhaps you will trust me a little time, and when I die you shall have my head.” I promised him he should have an axe, and he gave me two mats in order to secure one.7 Though Marsden was apparently unwilling to enter into this particular arrangement, he was later accused by a subordinate, the Reverend John Gare Butler, of purchasing two heads.8 Marsden refuted these allegations and their accuracy is uncertain.
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TATTOOED HISTORY: THE STORY OF MOKOMOKAI
fig. 1 From Anne E. Keeling, What He did For Convicts and Cannibals; Some Account of the Life and Work of the Rev. Samuel Leigh (1896).
In passing through George Street in this town a few days since, my attention was suddenly arrested by a very extraordinary sort of bundle under the arm of a man who was passing me on the footpath. [. . .] I called to and asked him what the handkerchief under his arm contained; judge my astonishment and horror, Sir, at beholding a human head, with long black hair, in a state of perfect preservation. [. . .] As soon as I had recovered myself, I asked the man if what he showed me was really a human head; with perfect indifference as to my feelings and consternation, the man replied it was the head of a New Zealander, which he had purchased from a person lately arrived from that country, and that he was going to dispose of it for two guineas to a gentleman who was about to embark for England. I remember, about 7 or 8 years ago, to have seen in a private house in this town two human heads of the same kind, tattooed and ornamented in a manner customary among the natives of the higher classes in New Zealand, and so far as my recollection serves me, I think they were valued at twenty guineas each head. [. . .] If the import of human heads from New Zealand be so far countenanced and encouraged that the price shall fall, in the course of seven years, from 20 guineas to 2 guineas each, the inference must be, that human heads, having become by
COLONIAL COMMODITIES
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