The Strand once published a jade specimen worth exactly one fat man

In 1897, The Strand Magazine — the London monthly best known as the home of Sherlock Holmes — published a photograph of a polished green jade specimen under the heading "The Price of a Man." The caption described it as "of very considerable interest, not only on account of its beauty as a fine specimen of the green jade, now so rare, but also from the fact of its representing the price paid by cannibals of the Mare Islands, Polynesia, for a fat man for eating purposes."

That was the full explanation. Who sold the man, who bought him, what qualified as fat are left as exercises for the reader. The Mare Islands are now called Maré, part of the Loyalty Islands in New Caledonia — Melanesia, not Polynesia, though Victorian editors weren't particular about the distinction.

The Strand, founded in 1891 and edited by George Newnes, filled its bound volumes with photographic curiosities like this alongside fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Jules Verne.

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