Nor did he know it was the head of La Perouse, the doughty old navigator, who had left his bones, the bones of his crews, and the bones of his two frigates, the _Astrolabe_ and the _Boussole_, on the shores of the cannibal Solomons.

Another head--for Bashti was a confirmed head- collector--went back two centuries before La Perouse to Alvaro de Mendana, the Spaniard.

It was the head of one of Mendana's armourers, lost in a beach scrimmage to one of Bashti's remote ancestors.
Still another head, the history of which was vague, was a white woman's head.

What wife of what navigator there was no telling.

But earrings of gold and emerald still clung to the withered ears, and the hair, two-thirds of a fathom long, a shimmering silk of golden floss, flowed from the scalp that covered what had once been the wit and will of her that Bashti reasoned had in her ancient time been quick with love in the arms of man.
Ordinary heads, of bushmen and salt-water men, and even of schnapps-drinking white men like Borckman, he relegated to the canoe houses and devil devil houses.