After we had left the island, Rogers came aft, and told us his experiences with the German doctor.
“He's a right good sort of a chap, and treated me well, and did all he could for me, sirs—but although he is a nice cove, I'm glad to get away from him, and be aboard the brig again. For I can hardly believe that I haven't had a horrid, blarsted nightmare for the past six weeks.”
And then he shuddered.
“What was wrong with him, Rogers?” asked the skipper.
“Why, he ain't no naturalist—I mean like them butterfly-hunting coves like you see in the East Indies. He's a head-hunter—buys heads—fresh 'uns by preference, an' smokes an' cures 'em hisself, and sells 'em to the museums in Europe. So help me God, sirs, I've seen him put fresh human heads into a barrel of pickle, then he takes 'em out after a week or so, and cleans out the brains, and smokes the heads, and sorter varnishes and embalms 'em like. An' when he wasn't a picklin' or embalmin' or varnishin', he was a-writing in half a dozen log books. I never knew what he was a-doin' until one day I went into his workshop—as he called it—and saw him bargaining with some niggers for a fresh cut-off head, which he said was not worth much because the skull was badly fractured, and would not set up well.
“He was pretty mad with me at first for comin' in upon him, and surprisin' him like, but after a while he took me into his confidence, and said as how he was engaged in a perfeckly legitimate business, and as the heads was dead he was not hurtin' 'em by preparing 'em for museums and scientific purposes. And he says to me, 'You English peoples have got many peautiful preserved heads of the New Zealand Maories in your museums, but ach, Gott, there is not in England such peautiful heads as I haf mineself brebared here on dis islandt. And already I haf send me away fifty-seven, and in two months I shall haf brebared sixteen more, for which I shall get me five hundred marks each.'”
Rogers told us that when he one day expressed his horror at his host's “business,” the German retorted that it was only forty or fifty years since that many English officials in the Australian colonies did a remarkably good business in buying smoked Maori heads, and selling them to the Continental museums. (This was true enough.) Rogers furthermore told us that the doctor “cured” his heads in a smoke-box, and had “a regular chemist's shop” in which were a number of large bottles of pyroligneous acid, prepared by a London firm.
This distinguished savant left Gerrit Denys Island about a year later in a schooner bound for Singapore. She was found floating bottom up off the Admiralty Group, and a Hong-Kong newspaper, in recording the event, mentioned that “the unfortunate gentleman (Dr. Ludwig S———) had with him an interesting and extremely valuable ethnographical collection “.
Rogers's horrible story had a great interest for me; for it had been my lot to see many human heads just severed from the body, and I was always fascinated by the peculiar expression of the features of those unfortunates who had been decapitated suddenly by one swift blow. “Death,” “Peace,” “Immortality,” say the closed eyelids and the calm, quiet lips to the beholder.
I little imagined that within two years I should have a rather similar experience to that of Rogers, though in my case it was a very brief one. Yet it was all too long for me, and I shall always remember it as the weirdest experience of my life.