history head notes in passing that the prostitutes of the Lower East Side’s Corlears Hook provided the origin of the term ‘hookers’.) There, Dako and Monday – a second New Guinean captured by Morrell – joined the other commodities on offer.
Fairhead, a social anthropologist at the University of Sussex, deftly cites contemporary accounts to show how the islanders were seen as examples of a ‘superior sort of savage’. They had ‘copper coloured’ skin, unlike the ‘dull, snub nosed idolaters’ of Hawaii or ‘the shrunken and misshaped cannibals’ of New Zealand. Dako and Monday were toured upstate to Albany – where a young Herman Melville may have seen them, giving rise to his own tattooed character of Queequeg in Moby-Dick – and on to Philadelphia and Baltimore. Accessorised with accoutrements gathered from around the Pacific, they became an approximation of Rousseau’s noble savage, ‘in all their unseemly loveliness and horrible beauty’. When Dako was shown a sketch of himself by a newspaper artist, he recoiled in terror: he had become an object rather than a being. Fairhead compares this culture shock to the way early 20th-century artists such as Picasso and Matisse would incorporate ‘primitive’ imagery into their work: ‘Dako’s panic was, then, both modernist and medieval.’
The second quarter of the 19th century saw an explosion of interest in the ‘other’. Phrenology and anthropology combined uncomfortably in a mania for collecting skulls. These served as an index of stolen people and helped to stir evolutionary theories. Merchant pirates like Morrell fed this curious hunger. (In Moby-Dick, Queequeg is first seen selling preserved Maori heads on the streets of New Bedford.) Some traders even paid for slaves to be tattooed and then killed in order to supply the market. Dako and Monday seemed to fear such a fate – still more so when they found themselves in museums next to wax figures, as if they might be turned into simulacra too. When Monday escaped, his fugitive status raised the question of what right Morrell had to exhibit the two men. Only a few years before, in 1821, a certain Captain Hadlock had been charged with kidnap when he had put three Inuit on show in New York. Morrell’s solution was to propose a new expedition to restore Dako and Monday to their rightful homes – though his true motive was to plunder their islands anew.
That return to the Pacific was a potent reversal of fortunes. When Dako saw his homeland again, he was unrecognisable to his peers. Only when he stripped and stood naked, like some wild figurehead carved on the ship’s boom, was he triumphantly accepted as having come back from the dead. With his most lucrative resource gone, Morrell sought to recoup his losses, having promised his investors pearls, ambergris and tortoiseshell to the value of $390,000. But his mission of self-interest fell apart, possibly due to a newly acquired opium habit. Just as he had altered Dako’s life, so Morrell’s own existence was overturned. His ship was wrecked off Madagascar and he died of fever in Mozambique, a disgraced and almost forgotten man. We only have his story, as Fairhead notes, because Morrell, ever aware of the value of publicity, had taken with him two young American men,
Selim Woodworth and Tom Jacobs (their story itself is worth the price of this book). These two writers – and, we presume, lovers – would document the voyage and relay the narrative back to America, albeit in a romanticised manner.
Fairhead’s story loses something with Dako’s departure: Morrell’s greed and venality cannot replace the exotic fascination of his tattooed captive. Yet there is a wonderful ambiguity to the relationship that the book discerns. In a sentimental last meeting, the captain and the ‘cannibal’ embraced, apparently declaring their love for one another. This moment is echoed in a scene in Moby-Dick, in which Ishmael and Queequeg cosy up for the night in the Spouter Inn and announce themselves wedded to one another. Melville created an image of the meeting of East and West as romantic as that which Morrell had propagated in the selling of his savages. Teasing truth out of fiction, Fairhead provides us with a tale as remarkable for what it says about ‘us’ as for what it says about ‘them’. To order this book through our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 46
july 2015 | Literary Review 9
