When we returned, Rogers came on board with the German. He was quite
recovered, and he and his host were evidently on very friendly terms,
and bade farewell to each other with some show of feeling.

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 Contin