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Nautical harpoon tattoo11/14/2023 ![]() ![]() This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible,’ Cook wrote while at anchor in Tahiti in 1769. ‘Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. Both the scientific gentlemen were taken enough with the practice to have themselves modified, as did many ordinary Endeavour seamen. ![]() ![]() Lieutenant James Cook and his crew observed and recorded Polynesian tattooing on their first Pacific voyage in HMS Endeavour (1768–1771): the naturalist Joseph Banks wrote an account of a girl being tattooed in Tahiti, and the artist Sydney Parkinson drew tattoos he came across in Tōtaiete mā the Society Islands as well as in Aotearoa. By the eighteenth century, the sight of indelible body marking was not then novel in Europe, but the art practised since Neolithic times received a boost as Pacific exploration accelerated in the later part of that century. Tattoo has been associated with seafarers at all levels of a ship’s hierarchy ever since Britain’s fleet began to encounter, and sometimes pillage, non-European cultures the Yorkshire-born privateer Martin Frobisher in 1577, during his voyage on Gabriel searching for a north-west passage to China, took a tattooed Inuit woman hostage and back to England, where for the month before her death she was viewed at the court of Elizabeth I. The animals were often shipped in crates-which floated if a ship wrecked. Some are merit badges a full-rigged ship on a chest, for example, meant the wearer had rounded Cape Horn at the southern tip of Chile, which Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle almost didn’t manage in 1832, writing, ‘One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about shipwrecks, peril and death.’ Other tattoos were talismanic and summoned otherworldly assistance as Darwin and the crew of Beagle might have done a tattoo of a pig on one foot and a rooster on the other wards off drowning for reasons Bellwood details in ‘Homeward Bound’. Some are job-specific a whaler might have sported a harpoon. While Bugs Bunny on a bicep qualifies as signifier-light, other tattoos of Western seafarers are steeped in symbolism and lore. ‘A sailor without a tattoo is like a ship without grog: not seaworthy,’ said the New York tattooist Samuel O’Reilly, who patented the first electric tattoo machine in 1891. Her poster ‘Homeward Bound’ decodes the visual language of sailors, which has been around for a while. The cartoonist Lucy Bellwood has spent a deal of time in craft-beer and coffee-swilling Portland in the American state of Oregon-a place, she says, where everyone bar her has a tattoo. ![]()
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