Tattoo

Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and Europe

Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, Bronwen Douglas, Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, Bronwen Douglas

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781861892256
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861898234
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The popularity of tattoos today is a revival of a practice begun in the late eighteenth century, when Westerners first made contact with the native peoples of the Pacific. The term ‘tattoo’ entered Europe with the publication of Captain Cook's voyages in the 1770s, and Pacific tattoos became fashionable in the West as sailors, whalers and explorers brought home tattoos from Tahiti, the Marquesas, New Zealand and Polynesia. In recent years these early contacts have been revived, as native tattooists from Oceania have begun tattooing non-Polynesians in Europe, the USA and elsewhere.

Tattoo is both a fascinating book about these early Oceanic–European exchanges, that also documents developments up to the present day, and the first to look at the history of tattooing in Oceania itself. Documenting these complex cultural interactions in the first part of the book, the authors move from issues of encounter, representation and exchange to the interventions of missionaries and the colonial state in local tattoo practices. Highly illustrated with many previously unseen images, for example the original voyage sketches of the first Russian circumnavigation of 1803–6, this is a fascinating account of early tattooing and cultural exchange in Oceania, and will appeal to the wide audience interested in the history of tattooing.

PART ONE

Histories and Encounters

CHAPTER ONE

‘Cureous Figures’: European Voyagers
and Tatau/Tattoo in Polynesia, 1595–1800

Bronwen Douglas

‘They all came naked, without any part covered; their faces and bodies in patterns of a blue colour, painted with fish and other patterns’.¹ The Portuguese-born Spanish navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós thus depicted the men he saw in 1595 at Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. This is the earliest reference I have found to any Polynesian variety of the pan-Austronesian practice of indelible body marking called te patu tiki, ‘wrap in images’, in the Marquesan language; tatau, ‘mark’, ‘strike’, in Tahitian and Samoan; and ta moko, ‘strike’, ‘tap’, in Maori. Sydney Parkinson, the artist on James Cook’s first voyage of 1768–71, recorded the Tahitian term: ‘The natives are accustomed to mark themselves in a very singular manner, which they call tataowing’.²

‘Tataow’ denoted not only the stained designs that Polynesians and other Oceanic people painfully chiselled or punctured on their faces, limbs and bodies but, universalized as ‘tattoo’, quickly came to designate historical precedents elsewhere, as well as the foreign adaptations initiated by Parkinson and many of his shipmates. Whereas these and subsequent European voyagers in Polynesia exclaimed over the ‘singular’ practice and gave it much ethnographic attention, their Spanish predecessors wrote little about the spectacular full body patu tiki they saw in the Marquesas, perhaps in part because it was no novelty to them. Indeed, in another account of his voyage published in Antonio de Morga’s history of the Spanish colony in the Philippines, Quirós wrote that the Fatu Hivans were ‘marked in the same manner’ as the Visayans, the indigenous people of the islands south of Luzon.³ Morga explained that they and their islands were also called Pintados, ‘painted people’ in Spanish, because ‘the more prominent men’ marked their whole bodies, ‘pricking them according to a design, then throwing a black indelible powder over the bleeding’. Morga’s modern English editor called the practice ‘tattoo’ and glossed Pintados as ‘Picts’, a historical allusion to the early inhabitants of northern Britain who were so called by the Romans because they were picti, ‘painted’.⁴ The universalization of the term tattoo is further evident in formal modern definitions of ‘Pict’: a late nineteenth-century Latin–English dictionary derived Picti, ‘Picts or ancient Caledonians’, from ‘their practice of tattooing themselves’, while the Oxford English Dictionary linked the etymology of the word to Latin picti, ‘painted or tattooed people’.⁵

The widely travelled Englishman William Dampier depicted the full body marking of one Visayan man in graphic terms that anticipated later accounts of patu tiki:

He was painted all down the Breast, between his Shoulders behind; on his Thighs (mostly) before; and in the form of several broad Rings, or Bracelets, round his Arms and Legs. I cannot liken the Drawings to any Figure of Animals, or the like; but they were very curious, full of great variety of Lines, Flourishes, Chequered Work, &c. keeping a very graceful Proportion, and appearing very Artificial, even to wonder, especially that upon and between his Shoulder-blades.⁶

The man was ‘Jeoly’ or Giolo (illus. 17), the so-called Painted Prince from Miangis, a tiny isolated island due east of southern Mindanao, where he had been enslaved with members of his family when blown off course in a storm. In 1690 Dampier purchased a half-share in him and his equally ‘painted’ mother, who soon died. Notwithstanding Jeoly’s objectification as a slave and Dampier’s hopes to profit from him, he made a strong impression on the Englishman who claimed to have cared for him and his mother when they were sick, ‘as if they had been my Brother and Sister’. Dampier, though, never met Jeoly on equal terms or in his indigenous setting. He remained a singular curiosity, detached from his own world and extolled as ‘the just wonder of the Age’ in England, where his ‘painted’ body was ‘shown for a Sight’ and where he ultimately died.⁷

These vignettes set the scene for a comparative ethno-historical investigation of representations of ‘tattaowing’/‘tatouement’ in the artwork and writings of British and French voyagers in Polynesia during the classic era of scientific maritime exploration, spanning the four decades between the voyages of Samuel Wallis (1766–8) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1766–9) and the voyage of the Russians Ivan Kruzenshtern and Iury Lisiansky (1803–6). During more or less fleeting visits to indigenous communities that had previously encountered few, if any Europeans, members of a dozen or so official naval expeditions produced the earliest systematic representations of Polynesians. The ethnographic legacy of scientific voyaging is limited but crucial, both for its priority and also, especially with respect to a visual medium like tattoo, because such voyages usually combined the trained empirical observation of naturalist-anthropologists with the expertise of artists whose job was to produce naturalistic images of the people, places and things they saw.⁸

During the late eighteenth century there was considerable flux in European ideas about and conventions for representing non-white people as new information poured into Europe from around the globe and the battle over slavery intensified. The modernist biological idea that race is phylogenetic and fundamentally differentiating began to challenge older, holistic beliefs about essential human similitude, while empirical naturalism supplanted long dominant neo-Classical values in art and aesthetics. Neo-Classicism had tied accuracy in depiction to an ideal of perfection, producing portraits that by more naturalistic standards are far from lifelike – for instance, in works by Parkinson considered below. But, as Bernard Smith argued,⁹ these conventions steadily gave way to insistence on greater realism, exemplified in the demand of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder that artists adopt ‘the accurate and natural-historic manner of delineating the human species’.¹⁰ More realistic depiction paralleled hardening attitudes to Polynesian ‘savages’, who had initially inspired excesses of primitivist idealization but whose notorious series of lethal assaults on European navigators during the 1770s and ’80s provoked an increasingly racialized disgust.¹¹

This chapter charts variations in indigenous tattoo motifs and tattooing techniques as recorded by European sailors, naturalists and artists in various Polynesian settings – mainly Tahiti, Aotearoa-New Zealand, the Marquesas and Hawaii. For the self-styled civilized in the late eighteenth century, tattoo was an emblem of the exotic, a ‘curiosity’, something worthy of discerning interest and collection as a specimen.¹² It is tempting, but inappropriate, to take this attitude at face value and regard European representations of indigenous body marking as merely the discursive appropriation of passive native bodies by a dominant imperial gaze, or the growing fashion for tattoo among European voyagers as just artistic colonization.¹³ Yet first-hand drawings of tattoo were always produced in situations of performative interaction, as was indigenous tattooing of European bodies. Both processes hinted at ambiguous stories of cross-cultural agency and exchange.¹⁴ I thus relate the representations of tattoo by outsiders not only to contemporary European artistic conventions and ethnocentric or racialist ideas about non-Europeans, but to the actual circumstances of their generation in particular situations of cross-cultural interaction in Polynesia, which often left subtle countersigns of indigenous agency in what visiting Europeans wrote and drew.

George Robertson, master on HMS Dolphin, the first European vessel known to have visited Tahiti, described ‘a very particular Custom’ observed during a month-long stay on the island in 1767: ‘at the age of Sixteen they paint all the men’s thighs Black, and soon after paint cureous figures on their Legs and Arms’, while girls ‘go through that operation’ somewhat earlier. Robert -son took the ‘Custom’ for a kind of initiation rite, whereas his captain Samuel Wallis assumed it was a sign of ‘superior rank and authority’ in a few men ‘whose legs were marked in chequers’.¹⁵ The following year, members of Bougainville’s French expedition wrote somewhat more about the body ‘painting’ they saw during less than a fortnight spent in Tahiti. Charles-Félix-Pierre Fesche, a young volunteer, included the term tatau, ‘marks they have on the body’, in his vocabulary of 184 Tahitian terms. The physician-botanist Philibert Commerson heard the word as tata and glossed it as ‘blue stain’.¹⁶ Bougainville himself drew ethnographic or historical parallels between these ‘indelible marks’ and those he had seen worn ‘by the natives of Canada’ or read about in Caesar’s account of the ancient Britons. From these cases, he generalized a timeless association of body painting with ‘peoples close to the state of nature’. In Tahiti, it seemed to him to be a ‘mark of rank’ – ‘free men’ were distinguished from ‘slaves’ by their ‘painted buttocks’ – and also ‘a fashion like in Paris’.¹⁷ Fesche provided the earliest reasonably accurate ethnographic description of the process of tattooing:

their buttocks [are] painted black and encircled with garlands; to do this, they use an instrument made from an extremely thin piece of shell, toothed at the end like a comb and fixed to the end of a small stick half a foot long; they dip the piece of toothed shell into the colour and apply it to the skin which they pierce by striking the handle with another stick held in the other hand; the colour thus applied seeps into the holes and stays there forever. This operation is painful, the skin swells at once and remains that way for several hours.¹⁸

During their relatively brief sojourns in Tahiti, Wallis and Bougainville were both preoccupied by the need to obtain fresh supplies and ensure the security of ships and crews. To this end, Wallis used extreme force to suppress Tahitian assaults on the ship. Neither voyage produced first-hand visual impressions of indigenous people, while the journals and narratives written by participants are of great historical value but ethnographically superficial. In general, the authors of these random catalogues of exotic practices were so mesmerized by the startling sexual complaisance of unmarried Tahitian girls that they referred only in passing to cultural practices like body marking. In contrast, Cook’s three-month stay in 1769 provided extended opportunities for Europeans, including several naturalists and artists, to interact at length with Tahitians, learn something of their language, and write or draw detailed impressions of the local people, not least of their tatau. Bernard Smith suggested that Joseph Banks, the gentleman naturalist on this voyage who commissioned its artists, had set himself to assemble ‘a systematic, empirical, and faithful graphic account of all the principal kinds of rocks, plants, animals, and peoples in the world’.¹⁹ Banks regarded pictures as superior to writing in conveying information, but with regard to people his aim was ethnography rather than portraiture – the accurate representation of typical figures, dress, artefacts and bodily adornment, rather than the portrayal of particular individuals. In convention and technique, this ethnographic project paralleled natural history draughtsmanship, Parkinson’s chief employment under Banks. Smith saw its adoption in the service of science overseas as the first stage in the triumph of empirical naturalism in European art.²⁰

Accordingly, Parkinson and the assistant naturalist Herman Diedrich Spöring drew dis -embodied loins, legs and buttocks embellished with different tattoo motifs they had seen in Tahiti, Raiatea and Aotearoa.²¹ One such pencil sketch done by Parkinson in Tahiti in mid-1769 is the earliest extant visual representation of a Polynesian tattoo (illus. 18). Others, probably executed in Raiatea, served him as studies for formal compositions of Leeward Islanders engaged in everyday tasks (illus. 19).²² These compositions depict both women and men with tattooed buttocks, but the artist’s concern was ethnographic rather than voyeuristic: he represented purposeful action by generalized indigenous subjects who typically undressed in order to swim, fish, wash or work canoes. Banks remarked – and Cook echoed him – on the ‘infinite diversity’ of the figures tattooed on Tahitian bodies, apparently dependent ‘upon the humour of each individual’. Both, however, stressed the ubiquity of blackened buttocks capped by arches over the loins, which appeared to be ‘their great pride’ and were shown ‘with great pleasure’.²³ These observations were confirmed and extended 20 years later by James Morrison, a Bounty mutineer and Tahiti’s earliest ethnographer, whose word picture of this characteristic tattooing mode laboriously complements the economy of Parkin son’s pencil:

the Hips of Both sexes are Markd with four or five Arched lines on each side, the Upermost taking the whole sweep of the Hip from the Hip bone to the Middle of the Back where the two lines Meet on one, which is drawn right a Cross from one hip bone to the other and on this all the other lines begin and end; under this Center line are generally four or five more, sweeping downwards, but Most Weomen have that part blackd all over with the Tattowing – but evry one pleases their own fancy in the Number of lines or the Fashion of them, some making only one broad one while others have 5 or 6 small ones ornamented with stars & sprigs &c.

Morrison added that tattooing of the hips was ‘at their own option’, but that ‘it is as bad to want these Marks as it would be among us not to be Christened or to go Naked’. Nonetheless, ‘some want both’.²⁴ Indeed, a ‘want’ of tatau was reported in one of the highest-ranking ari’i, ‘chief’, on the island, the man known to the English as Pomare I or Tina. According to George Tobin, a lieutenant on William Bligh’s second breadfruit voyage to Tahiti in 1792, Tina’s skin was ‘darker than that of most of the natives’ and was not ‘much tatowed’.²⁵

Banks noticed only one instance of facial tatau in Tahiti, possibly on the man with ‘curiously tataow’d’ neck and chin whose portrait was engraved by R. B. Godfrey for Parkinson’s post -humously published journal.²⁶ By contrast, tattooed faces feature significantly in written and visual representations of Maori encountered in Aotearoa late in 1769 by Cook’s party and by the contemporaneous French commercial venture of Jean-François-Marie de Surville. Ethnography remained the object in Parkinson’s celebrated finished drawing...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE: HISTORIES AND ENCOUNTERS
• PART TWO: CONTEMPORARY EXCHANGES
• Epilogue: Embodied Exchanges and their Limits
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index