Tattoos and the sea

I was listening to an old audiobook by Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), a range of essays linking Dutch narratives, artefacts and culture with an emerging idea of Netherlands nationhood. The book was exploring the South Pacific explorations of the Dutch, with the indigenous people which Dutch seafarers were encountering being "horribly tattooed savages" (p. 28), when I started wondering how and why sailors had become culturally affiliated to tattooing.

When I had time, I decided, I would do a little bit of digging to gain a layperson's idea of how skin ink had transferred from those "savages" to those who work at sea.

The term we use for tattoo today arose from Polynesian tatau meaning "the markings" (Simpson & Weiner, 1989) apparently common across Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan cultures; but in the case of the Marquesas as 'tatu'. It was "recorded from Tahiti as tataou in Bougainville’s Voyage autour du Monde 1766-9 [...] and as tattow in Capt. Cook’s First Voyage July 1769 [with the note that the Eng.] tattoo and F. tatou are perversions of the native name" (p. 666). Apparently Cook noted in the ships journal of his first voyage in 1769 that "Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible". It seems likely that tattooing travelled out across the Pacific with the waves of migration from China/Taiwan (Evans, 2011).

What I was quite surprised at was how long the idea of permanently marking the skin had been around and where it had arisen. An authority on the history of tattooing, Caplan (2000) explained that, as "one of many forms of irreversible body alteration, including scarification, cicatrization, piercing and branding, [tattooing] is the probably the oldest and most widespread" (p. xi). Apparently "cicatrization" is a more natural scarring process, as opposed to deliberate scarification. So who was tattooed? The "Greeks, Romans and Celts [... mark criminals and slaves"; the "early Christians in Roman territories"; "Christians in the Holy Land, Egypt and the Balkans"; "chastisement [in...] medieval Christendom"; the Picts in northern Britain (Caplan, 2000, pp. xvi-xvii).

It seems at the same time these practices were arising in Asia and the Pacific (Evans, 2011), there was "convict tattooing in Europe, its colonies and Russia", [so while t]he European practice of tattooing [...] did not originate in the Pacific", European nation attitudes to tattooing were changed by what was found in the Pacific, North and South America, Japan, India and the Philippines (Caplan, 2000, p. xvi; Kroupa, 2023). "European sailors had certainly already known and practised tattooing as a result of their relations with other cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (Caplan, 2000, p. xvii).

But why sailors? One hypothesis is that tattoos allowed sailors to "avoid colonial exploitation and the slave trade" (more particularly if seafarers were of African origin). Being tattooed created differentiation in what was a "disposable labor" market (Crutcher, 2023, p. 1), where lives were "one of hard work, low pay, grueling physical labor, and little [self] ownership" (p. 3). Where life was that hard at sea, perhaps the wayfaring skill of the Polynesian navigator made tattooing more aspirational; it became a in-trade cultural marker. Tattoos were a visible marker of "the cultural and social identity" of the searfarer (p. 3). And the Polynesian navigators of the Pacific were amazing sailors: not coastal hopping, but crossing broad stretches of a vast ocean largely unknown and unknowable to Europeans; but the stars, by bird and fish migrations, by the clouds, and by the winds.

So to come back to Simon Schama: the amazing seafarers encountered by early European sailors in the Pacific were "tattooed"; but not 'horrible', nor savages. Just different. But definitely tattooed.

Sam

References:

Caplan, J. (Ed.). (2000). Written on the Body: The tattoo in European and American history. Princeton University Press.

Crutcher, M. (2023). Jack Tar’s ink: a comparative analysis of Euro-American and West African sailors’ tattoos during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Maritime Studies, 22(1), 3-x. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-022-00291-0

Evans, J. (2011). Polynesian navigation and the discovery of New Zealand. Oratia Media Ltd.

Kroupa, S. (2022). Reading beneath the Skin: Indigenous Tattooing in the Early Spanish Philippines, ca. 1520–1720. The American Historical Review, 127(3), 1252-1287. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac218

Schama, S. (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age. Audible.

Simpson, J. A., & Weiner, E. S. C. (Eds.) (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., Vol XVII Su-Thrivingly). Clarendon Press.