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My friendly and intimate relations with primitive man, in Oceania and elsewhere, have imbued me with a deplorable taste for tattoo-work; and I had wished to carry away on my own person, as a curiosity, an ornament, a specimen of the work of the Japanese tattooers, who have a delicacy of finish which is unequalled. From their albums spread out upon my table I make my choice.
The itinerants are a reproach to their profession, mere cobblers, dealing in nothing but jagged lines and clumsy patches, and utterly incapable of soaring to those heights of fancy attained by the gentlemen of the faculty. All professors of the arts love to fraternize; and so, in Hannamanoo, the tattooers came together in the chapters of their worshipful order.
At the first glance, even in the bewilderment of waking up, I gather from their appearance what their errand is, and guessing with what visitors I have to deal, I say: "Come in, Messieurs the tattooers!" These are the specialists most in renown in Nagasaki; I had engaged them two days ago, not knowing that we were about to leave, and since they are here I will not turn them away.
In this society, duly organized, and conferring degrees, Hardy, from his influence as a white, was a sort of honorary Grand Master. The blue shark, and a sort of Urim and Thummim engraven upon his chest, were the seal of his initiation. All over Hivarhoo are established these orders of tattooers. The way in which the renegado's came to be founded is this.
Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death half way, the grave a haven. In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone, makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the archipelago for centuries.
The celebrated American traveler, Carpenter, remarks that on his visit to a great prison in Burmah, which contains more than 3000 men, he saw 6000 tattooed legs. The origin of the custom he was unable to find out, but in Burmah tattooing was a sign of manhood, and professional tattooers go about with books of designs, each design warding off some danger.
These curiosities were done up in a piece of native cloth, and consulted before going to battle. If the bundle felt heavy, that was a bad omen; but if light, the sign was good, and off they went to the fight. Taema and Tila fainga, or Tila the sportive, were the goddesses of the tattooers.
Beside the regular practitioners, there are a parcel of shabby, itinerant tattooers, who, by virtue of their calling, stroll unmolested from one hostile bay to another, doing their work dog-cheap for the multitude. They always repair to the various religious festivals, which gather great crowds.
Behrens, in describing these natives in his narrative of Roggewein's voyage of 1772, says: "They were clothed from the waist downwards with fringes and a kind of silken stuff artificially wrought." As it extends over such a large surface the operation is a tedious and painful affair. After smarting and bleeding for a while under the hands of the tattooers, the patience of the youth is exhausted.
It behoves the professor to have a nice eye, for a suit to be worn for life should be well cut. Some tattooers, yearning after perfection, employ, at large wages, one or two men of the commonest order vile fellows, utterly regardless of appearances, upon whom they first try their patterns and practise generally.
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