 friend.…" The black soot from candlenut kernels used in tattooing was probably used as a paint instead of wood charcoal which was merely rubbed on.
Various other colors were also used, for Williams (81, p. 67) says of the people of Aitutaki who came out in canoes to meet his ship: "…Some were painted most fantastically, with pipe-clay and yellow and red ochre; others were smeared all over with charcoal, dancing, shouting, and exhibiting the most frantic gestures."
Williams (81, p. 175), in giving the Tahitian missionary Papeiha's account of a scene on a native temple in Rarotonga, says of the people gathered there: "Some had one side of their body blackened with charcoal, others were painted in stripes of all the colours they could procure. …"
During mourning, it was customary for the near of kin or intimate friends to exaggerate their grief for the deceased by cutting the skin with sharp shells or flakes to allow the flow of blood to relieve their feelings. The older women were particularly prone to this form of expression and Cook (20, p. 195) in speaking of women of advanced age in Atiu, says: "…many were cut, in oblique lines, all over the fore-part of the body; and some of the wounds, which formed rhomboidal figures, had been so lately inflicted, that the coagulated blood still remained in them."
These self-inflicted wounds were on the forepart of the body, and oblique lines were the natural direction in reaching across the body with the sharp shell. The rhomboidal figures were due to crossing the cuts rather than to design. When the wounds healed they left scars but such scars were merely the tokens of a grief custom and are not to be confounded with the ornamental scarification of Melanesia and other areas.