Kunapipi XXVII:1

ANNIE WERNER
Savage Skins: The Freakish Subject of Tattooed Beachcombers

When the first beachcombers started to return to Europe from the Pacific, their indigenously tattooed bodies were the subject of both fascination and horror. While some exhibited themselves in circuses, sideshows, museums and fairs, others published narratives of their experiences, and these narratives cumulatively came to constitute the genre of beachcomber narratives, which had been emerging steadily since the early 1800s. As William Cummings points out, the process of tattooing or being tattooed was often a ‘central trope’ (7) in the beachcomber narratives.

Tattoos represented for the white spectator an instant signifier of the savage otherness of the inhabitants of the South Seas, and the practice was increasingly deployed in colonial literature as an immediately visible example of the exotic primitivity of the Pacific ‘savages’. In light of this, tattooed white men symbolised a problematic straddling of racial identities. As Judith Butler points out, a disruption or renegotiation of the accepted norms and practices in regards to bodily boundary ‘disrupts the very boundaries that determine what it is to be a body at all’ (Butler 169). A ‘white’ body, indelibly inscribed and transformed by a ‘savage’ text, created in the minds of the European public a sense of unease and confusion that ultimately led to the common perception of beachcombers — and especially tattooed beachcombers — as untrustworthy rogues. The Indigenous tattoo perfectly highlights the notion of the skin as boundary or border, and the tattoo itself as that which crosses that border, yet simultaneously resides within it. The beachcombers both crossed borders (in Greg Dening’s terminology, the beach) and lived within them. Likewise, their tattoos were symbols of the crossing, embodied on and in the corporeal self.

In this essay, I explore the representation of tattoos, tattooed bodies and the practice of tattooing in beachcomber narratives of the nineteenth century. The presence of tattooing in these narratives, I argue, responds to, engages with and reiterates the notions of otherness and savagery that surrounded tattooing since its reappearance1 in Europe in the late 1700s. Captain James Cook was responsible for re-introducing the practice of tattooing to Europe after visiting Polynesia and bringing back several ‘specimens’ of the Indigenous people he had encountered, many of whom wore tattoos. These tattooed bodies were exhibited as exotic and primitive curiosities, and this context significantly impacted the way that the corporeal markings were perceived. Cook’s reintroduction of the practice of indelibly marking the skin, and his naming of the phenomenon — tattoo, taken from the Polynesian, ta-tau — meant that tattooing was intrinsically and invariably linked to themes of racialisation and othering that were fundamentally linked to the colonial agenda.