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One of them, a grey-haired, deeply-bronzed man of sixty, with his neck and hands tatooed in strange markings, imprinted thereon by the hands of the wild natives of Tucopia, in the South Seas, with whom he has lived forty years before as one of themselves, is mine own particular friend and crony, for his two sons have been playmates with my brothers and myself, who were all born in this quaint old-time seaport of the first colony in Australia; this forgotten remnant of the dread days of the awful convict system, when the clank of horrible gyves sounded on the now deserted and grass-grown streets, and the swish of the hateful and ever active "cat" was heard within the walls of the huge red-brick prison on the bluff facing the sea.
They were no better clothed than the natives, and were tatooed and smeared with a yellow powder after the native fashion; so that it would have been hard to recognize them but for their white skins and more intelligent looks.
His complexion was light, and his body most beautifully tatooed and slightly coloured with a preparation of tumeric and ginger, which gave it a light orange tinge, and, in the estimation of the Raratongans, added much to the beauty of his appearance. The two chiefs advanced frankly to each other, and amiably rubbed noses together the South Sea method of salutation!
Are you tatooed on your body, snakes and ships and things, like a gardener once we had? He had a sea-serpent all down his back. He showed me one day." The Captain smiled proudly. "Tatooed! Talk of tatooing! I'll show yer and it isn't everybody I'd do it for neither. But I've taken a fancy to you, like my own young nipper what died."
"Oh, let the Bishop take another man for that, you are the minister for us." He is, you know, wonderfully tatooed, and a great object of curiosity to the boys! Before many days had passed, there had occurred the first case of that fatal tetanus, which became only too well known to those concerned in the Mission.
The women only tatoo their hands and arms, the ends of their ears, and their lips. The lower classes are less tatooed, and many of them not at all; and it is therefore not improbable that this ornament serves to point out a noble, or, at any rate, a distinguished personage.
An elderly man came forward, a man with a crop of curly grey hair, in a blue lava-lava, elaborately tatooed, with the skin of his body wrinkled like a wine-skin. "What have you come for?" Walker asked him abruptly. In a whining voice the man said that he could not eat without vomiting and that he had pains here and pains there. "Go to the missionaries," said Walker.
It is probable that our savage ancestors tatooed themselves, or painted their bodies, as did the Britons in the time of Caesar, and as do modern savages, or, not to go so far afield, as do English sailors and some of the workingmen of France.
Here I was bathed again, and sprayed with a very valuable perfume, a curious blending of rose and patchouli. "I have three crosses tatooed on my body. Each cross consists of eleven blue dots, one on each of my shoulders, and one on my breast, and I noticed a look of horror come into the faces of the two slave-women who were attending me, but neither of them asked any question of me.
"That black panther of so rare a breed," thought he, "which I see here at Paris, upon the stage, must be the very one that the Malay" the Thug who had tatooed Djalma at Java during his sleep "took quite young from his den, and sold to a European captain. Bowanee's power is everywhere!" added the Thug, in his sanguinary superstition.
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