And there was no limit, seemingly, to what soldiers were willing to collect during war as curiosities. Simon J. Harrison tells us how in the nineteenth century British soldiers serving in the colonies sometimes even collected enemy body parts: when Hintsa, a chief of the Xhosa in the Sixth Frontier War of 1834–6 was killed, his ears were cut off as souvenirs, a military surgeon was seen trying to extract some of his teeth and someone even tried to cut out ‘the emblems of [Hintsa’s] manhood’.
