Reading 28

“It was the intricate facial tattoos worn by Maori chiefs that made their heads particularly attractive to Europeans. […] The best heads as far as Europeans were concerned were those of powerful chiefs who had been heavily tattooed, but these were the hardest to find.

“So great was the demand for tattooed heads that by the early nineteenth century, Maori chiefs were forcibly tattooing their slaves before killing them to sell their heads for a profit. Some chiefs even offered traders the choice of live subjects, who were then tattooed, killed and prepared to order. The Maori tattoo, once an elaborate work of art developed over a lifetime and testament to a man’s courage, honour and social status, had become a decoration designed only to please – or fool – foreign consumers.

“Europeans in New Zealand were sometimes killed so that their heads could be tattooed and then sold back to their own unsuspecting countrymen. There are stories of the very same trading agents who had been sent from Australia to scout out the best heads being murdered so that their heads could be preserved and traded back again as ‘Maori warriors’. All this meant that by 1830 the ‘Baked Heads’ arriving at the Sydney Customs House were just as likely to be made to order for Europeans, or from dead Europeans, as they were to be authentic Maori chiefs slain in battle.”

- Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (2014)