 he met on his discovery of Rarotonga: "…his body is most beautifully tattooed, and was slightly covered with a preparation of turmeric and ginger, which gave it a light orange tinge, and in the estimation of the Rarotongans, added much to the beauty of his appearance."
In the English edition of John Williams' "A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises", London, 1838, a colored frontispiece from an oil painting by G. Baxter represents the Rarotongan chief Te Pou (incorrectly spelt Te Po) tattooed from neck to toes but with the face unmarked. The tattooing design consists of curved lines encircling the body and meeting a vertical line down the middle of the anterior surface. The arms are covered with similar lines, with a downward curve in front; and the thighs and legs are covered with more horizontal lines, the lines are spaced. On the knees are turtle motifs with the outline of the kneecap forming the body and slight projections forming the four flippers, and the head is projected upward. As the human figure wears the Aitutaki headdress (fig. 39, a), and as G. Baxter was a London engraver, it is quite certain that the painting was composed in London from verbal information given him by missionaries and that the tattooing design depicted cannot be accepted as accurate. The picture does indicate, however, that Te Pou was extensively tattooed.
The general term for the tattooing process is ta tatau (ta, verb to strike or tap; tatau, results of the tapping). In Mangaia, the process is termed ta tipatipa. The coined English word of "tattoo" is evidently taken from the page 128Polynesian word "tatau", and it is amusing that some western writers have converted the word tattoo back into tatu to record what they imagined was the correct Polynesian term.
In Rarotonga, Aitutaki, and Mangaia, I was told that the tattooing comb was made from the bone of a bird, but Savage (57) states the bones of rats were also used. The bone was scraped thin (angiangi) and the lower end notched finely to form teeth. The notched bone was then tied at approximately right angles to a wooden handle. So far as I know, no old instrument from the Cook Islands has been preserved. The instrument was termed ivi (bone) and in Mangaia, the term was qualified by the process, ivi ta tipatipa. Savage gives the name of the instrument as "ui tatau"; but, as uhi is the name used in New Zealand and other islands, the Rarotongan term is probably u'i tatau.
The tapping instrument was a short piece of wood as thick as the little finger. In Aitutaki, it was termed rakau papa or rakau patupatu, wood for tapping or beating.
A swab termed 'oroi toto ('oroi, to swab; toto, blood) was a piece of bark cloth. The operator wound it around the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand and swabbed up the blood during the operation.
The pigment used throughout the islands was the soot caught under an inverted bowl or coconut-shell cup held over burning kernels of candlenut (tuitui). The soot was scraped into another coconut-shell cup and mixed with water to the required consistency. It then received the general name for charcoal or soot, ngara'u.
The points of the bone comb were dipped in the prepared pigment, placed on the skin and lightly struck with the tapping instrument. Any blood that oozed out from the punctures was swabbed up with the bark cloth. By successive punctures, the appropriate art motifs were applied to the various parts of the human body. When the tattooing was fairly extensive, the operation was conducted in stages with intervals to allow the patient respite from the pain. In olden days, honor demanded that the patient continue until the full pattern denoting his rank and social position was completed. In more modern times, tattooing was continued because of a certain amount of sentiment for the past, but pain limited the operation to a smaller area. With the waning sentiment and the passing away of tattooing artists, the art languished and died out. The abandonment of tattooing was also influenced by the missionary attitude of antagonism to what they considered a "