Skilled tattooers of Marquesas Islands a generation ago—Entire bodies covered with intricate tattooed designs—The foreigner who had himself tattooed to win the favor of a Marquesan beauty—The magic that removed the markings when he was recalled to his former life in England.

TATTOOING, the marking of designs on the human skin in life, is an art so old that its beginnings are lost to records. It was practised when the Neolithic brute went out to club his fellows and drag in his body to the fire his mate kept ever burning. Its origin, perhaps, was contemporaneous with vanity, and that was in the heart of man before he branched from the missing limb of evolution. It perhaps followed in the procession of art the rude scratchings on bone and daubing on rock. In the caves of Europe with these childish distortions are found the implements with which the savage whites who lived in the recesses of the rocks tattooed their bodies. The Jews were forbidden by Moses to tattoo themselves, and the Arabs, with whom they had much converse, yet practise it. In 1066 William of Malmesbury said that the English “adorned their skins with punctured designs.” Kingsley, with regard for accuracy, makes Hereward the Wake, son of the Lady Godiva, have blue tattooing marks on wrists, throat, and knee; a cross on his throat and a bear on the back of his hand. The Romans found the Britons stained with woad. The taste for such marks existing to-day is evidenced by the pain and price paid by sailors and aristocrats of all white nations for them. Tattooing has faded under clothing which covers it and a less personal civilization which condemns it. In the Marquesas Islands it reached its highest development, and here was the most beautiful form of art known to the most perfect physical people on earth.

Until the overthrow of Marquesan culture, the island of Fatuhiva was the Florence of the South Seas. The most skillful workers at tattooing as well as carving lived in its valleys of Oomoa and Hanavave. During the weeks I have resided in them I delved into the history and curiosities of this most intimate of fine arts, now expiring if not dead. Nataro, the most learned Marquesan alive, took me into its intricacies and made me know it for the proud, realistic performance it was, a dry-point etching on a growing plate from which no prints were to be made. Nataro’s wife had one hand that is as famous and as admired in Fatuhiva as “Mona Lisa’s” portrait in Paris. A famous tuhuka wrought its design, a man equal in graphic genius, relatively, to DÜrer or Rembrandt. Age and work had faded and wrinkled the picture, but I can believe her husband that, as a young woman, when the art was not cried down, people came from far valleys to view it. I recalled the right leg of the late Queen Vaekehu, the most notable piece of art in all the Marquesas until it went with its possessor into the grave at Taiohae. In late years the former queen of cannibals and last monarch of the Marquesas would not show her limb—a modest attitude for a recluse who lived with nuns and thought only of death. Stevenson confessed he never saw it above the ankle, though the queen dined with him on the Casco. He had a poet’s delicacy, an absolute lack of curiosity, and Mrs. Stevenson was with him. But he expressed a real sympathy for the iconoclastic ignorance that was destroying tattooing here.

The queen, who had been the prize of bloody feuds and had danced at the feast of “long pig,” had gone to her reward after years of beseechment of the Christian God for mercy, but I could almost see her once glorious leg in the life because of the two of my Atuona mother, Titihuti, which for months have passed my hut daily. They are replicas of the Queen’s, said Nataro, with the difference that Titihuti’s, beginning at her toe nails, reached a gorgeous cincture at her waist, while Vaekehu’s did not reach her hip, being, indeed, a permanent stocking. Some of the Easter Island women had an imitation of drawers delineated upon them, giving weight to the theory that these perpetuated the idea of clothing they wore in a colder clime, but of which they had preserved not even a legend.

Women were seldom tattooed above the waist, except their hands, and fine lines about the mouth and upon the insides of the lips. This lip-coloring was, doubtless, the efforts of invaders to make the red lips of the Caucasian women, the first Polynesian immigrants, conform to the invaders’ inherited standards, as the Manchus put the queue on the Chinese. The Marquesan men like dark men. The last conquerors here were probably a darker race than the conquered, and they preserved their ideals of color, but, having come without women and seized the women they found, they let them preserve their own standards, except for red lips, which they tattooed blue. These latest comers thought much pigment meant strong bones, and after a battle they searched the field for the darkest bodies to furnish fishhooks and tools for canoe-making and carving. They thought the whites who first arrived were gods, and when they found they were men, with their same passions, they thought they were ill. That is the first impression one who lives long with Polynesians has when he meets a group of whites. They look sickly, sharp-faced, and worried. They pay dear for factories and wheeled vehicles.

Very probably the beginning of tattooing was the wish to frighten one’s enemy, as masks were worn by many tribes, and as the American painted his face with ocher. That state was followed by the natural desire of the warrior, as evident yet as in Hector’s day, to look manly and individualistic before the maidens of his tribe. And finally, as heraldry became complicated, tattooing grew, at least in Polynesia, into a record of sept and individual accomplishments and distinguishing marks. Here it had, as an art, freed itself from the bonds of religion, so that the artist had liberty to draw the Thing as he saw it, and had not to conform to priest-craft, a rule which probably hurt Egyptian art greatly.

In New Zealand, where the Polynesians went from Samoa, a sometime rigorous climate demanded clothing, and the head became the piÈce de rÉsistance of the tattooer. There was a considerable trade among whites in the preserved heads of New Zealanders until the supply ran out. White dealers procured the raiding of villages to sell their victim’s visages. Museums and collectors of such curios paid well for these tattooed faces, but the demand exhausted the best efforts of the whites. After the rarest examples were dead and smoked, there was no stimulating the supply. The goods refused to be manufactured. The Solomon Islands now supply smoked human heads, but they have no adornment.

Birds, fish, temples, trees, and plants—all the cosmos of the Marquesan—was a model for the tuhuka. He often drew his designs in charcoal on the skin, but sometimes proceeded with his inking sans pattern. He never copied, but drew from memory, though the same lines and tableaux might be repeated a thousand times; and always he bore in mind the caste, tribe, and sex of the subject. Thus at a glance one could tell the valley and rank of any one, much as in Japan the station, age, moral standing, and other artificial qualities of women are indicated by their coiffure and obi, or sash.

The craft did not require any elaborate tools. The ama or candlenut soot with water, a graduated set of bone-needles, of human and pig origin, and a mallet were all the requirements. The paint or ink was of but one color, black or brown, which on a dark skin looked bluish and on a fair skin black. The marking of the parts most delicate and sensitive to pain, as the eyelids, was a parcel of the endeavor to promote stoicism and to show the foe the mettle of his opponent. Man did not consent for thousands of years to share his ornamentation with women, and then insisted that the motif be beauty or the accentuation of sex.

The tattooers, in order to learn from one another, to have art chats, to discuss prices and perhaps dead beats or slow payers, had societies or unions, in which were degrees and offices, the most favored in ability and by patronage being given the highest rank, though now and again a white man, by his superior magic and force, though no tuhuka at all, held the supreme position.

A shark upon the forehead was the card of membership in the tattooers’ lodge, to which were admitted occasionally enthusiastic and discerning patrons of art.

At festival times, when tapus were to some degree suspended and the intertribal enmities forgotten for the nonce, thousands of men, women, and children gathered to eat, drink, and be merry, and to be tattooed, as one at country fairs buys new dresses and trinkets. It was to these fÊtes that the pot-boilers, fakers, and beginners among the talent came; men who would make a sitter a scrawl for a heap of pipi, shells and gewgaws, a few squealing pigs, a roll of tapa, or, most precious of all, a whale’s tooth. Like our second- and third-class painters, our wretched daubers who turn out canvases by the foot (though hand-painted), these tramps, who, by a dispensation of the priests and a mocking providence, were tapu, not to be attacked in any valley, strolled from tribe to tribe, promising much and giving little. Some worked largely on repair jobs, doing over spots where the skin had been abraded by injuries in battles, or by rocks or fire. The man who was well dressed in a suit of tattoo, or the lady who was clothed from toes to waist in a washable peau de femme, kept these garments in as good condition as possible, but when accident or the fortune of war injured the ensemble they hastened to have it touched up.

An artist of the first rank, one who in a Marquesan salon would have a medal of honor, disdained such commissions, but dauber and South Sea Da Vinci alike often had their work hung upon the line, when they were taken by the enemy and suspended at the High Place before being dropped into the pit for the banquets of the cannibal victors.

It was always of interest to me to wonder how men learned tattooing. Painters, carvers, etchers, and sculptors have material ever available for their lessons. They can waste an infinity of canvas, wood, copper, or marble if they have the money to spend, but how about the apprentice or student who must have live mediums even for practice?

Well, just as there are Chinese who, for a consideration, take the place of persons condemned to death (though they do not, as alleged, make a living out of it), and others who, though it exhaust and finally kill them, enter deadly trades or hire out for war, there were Marquesans who offered themselves as kit-cats for these students and sold their surface at so much an inch for any vile design or miserable execution. I can see these fellows, well covered with tapa, hiding whenever possible the caricatures and travesties that made them a laughing show. These Hessians had no pride in complexion. Their skins they wanted full of food, nor cared at all for their outside if the inside man was replete.

There were others who, too poor to pay even the itinerant wall-painters, let the students wreak their worst upon them, merely to be tattooed, good or bad, and many of these, like our millionaire picture buyers, were luckily denied any appreciation of art and did not know the imperfections of the skin pictures put upon them.

“Tattooing in these islands,” said Nataro, “was usually begun upon those able to pay for it at the age of puberty; but there were many exceptions of tattooing commenced upon boys soon after their infancy or deferred until mature manhood. Illness, poverty, or other obstacle might prevent, and the desire of parents might cause early tattooing. The father or other relative or protector of the youth or girl paid the tuhuka but at the festivals even the very poor orphans were given opportunities to be tattooed by a general contribution, or the chief of the valley paid the fee. Years were occupied at intervals in the covering of the entire body of men, which was the aim; but many had to be content with having a part pictured, and often elaborate designs were never finished. You see many bare places, meant to be covered when the tuhuka began his work. Queen Vaekehu was converted to Christianity with but one leg done and forewent further beautification to serve her new God. Though begun in boyhood, the full adornment of a man could hardly be terminated before his thirtieth year. During his lifetime of sixty years he might have it renewed twice, and as each pore could not be duplicated exactly the third coat would make him a solid mass of color, the goal of manly beauty.

“Though men usually sought to look terrible so that when they faced their enemies they would inspire fear, with women the sex motif was dominant,” said Nataro. “Girls with beautiful bodies and legs are much more attractive when tattooed, and we selected the best formed for the most elaborate designs. These were drawn so that, as the girls danced naked, the whole patterns were obvious, and those who were the most symmetrical won high honors in the great public exhibitions. If in the wide circle that chanted a utanui, while the old folks watched, a woman by exposing her beauty in a dance caused the voices of the young men to falter, or some one of them to become so entranced as to leap into the ring and seize her, she won a prize of acclamation for her parents which no other equaled. The dance stopped and all united in cheering the dancer. These beauties danced with their legs close together, so as to keep the design intact, lifting the heels backward and showing the shapeliness of figure and the fineness of tattooing.”

To analyze thoroughly the meanings of the different designs upon the bodies of the Maoris, or upon the canoes, paddles, and bowls, was impossible now. It might be compared to the study of heraldry. Tattooing in the South Seas was a combination of art and heraldry, racial and individual pride’s sole written or graven record.

In the Marquesas, the art reached its zenith. It was the Marquesans’ national expression, their art, their proof of Spartan courage, the badge of the warrior, and the glory of sex. In the man it marked ambition to meet the enemy and to win the most beautiful women. In the weaker vessel it was a coquetry, highly developed among daughters of chiefs and women of personal force; and it afforded those who had submitted to the efforts of the best craftsmen opportunities to display their charms in public to the most striking advantage.

Nataro said that when the law against tattooing was enforced here a few years ago a number went to prison rather than obey it, but that when it was abrogated the art was already dead. It is kept alive now, except in a few cases, only by the placing of names upon the arms of the girls. Many tuhukas were still living, but there was little call for their work.

“They were our highest class, next to the chiefs,” said Nataro. “We looked up to them as you do to your great. They were fÊted and made much of, and their schools were our art centers, teaching besides tattooing, the carving of wood, bowls, canoes, clubs, and paddles. Now we buy tin cans and china plates. Von den Steinen, the German philologist, connected with the Berlin museum, who was here ten years ago, copied every tattoo pattern he saw, and in many he found a relation to Indian or Asiatic and perhaps other hieroglyphics and figures of thousands of years ago.”

With the ridiculing of it by the missionaries, who associated it with heathenry, and the making of it a crime by the missionary-directed chiefs of Tahiti, tattooing vanished there almost a hundred years ago, but here the law against it was very recent. The law written by the English Protestant missionaries in Tahiti was as follows:

No person shall mark with tatau, it shall be entirely discontinued. It belongs to ancient evil customs. The man or woman that shall mark with tatau, if it be clearly proved, shall be tried and punished. The punishment shall be this—he shall make a piece of road ten fathoms long for the first marking, twenty for the second; or stone work four fathoms long and two wide; if not this, he shall do some work for the king. This shall be the woman’s punishment—she shall make two large mats, one for the king and one for the governor; or four small mats, for the king two, and for the governor two. If not this, native cloth twenty fathoms long and two wide; ten fathoms for the king and ten for the governor. The man and woman that persist in tatauing themselves successively four or five times, the figures marked shall be destroyed by blacking them over, and the individuals shall be punished as above written.

To achieve a fairly complete picture upon one’s body meant many months of intense suffering, the expenditure of wealth, and a decade of years of very gradual progress toward the goal after manhood was attained; but for a man in the former days to lack the Stripes of Terror upon his face, to have a bare countenance, or one not yet marked by the initial strokes of the hammer of the tattooer was to be a poltroon and despised of his tribe.

Such a one must expect to have no apple of love thrown at him, to awaken no passion in womankind, nor ever to find a wife to bear him children. He was as the giaour among the Turks. He had no honor in life or death, no foothold in the ranks of the warriors, or place among the shades of Po.

So when white men were cast by shipwreck in those isles, or fled from duty on whalers or warships, and sought to stay among the Marquesans, they acceded to the honored customs of their hosts, and adopted their facial adornment and often in the course of years their whole bizarre garb. The courage that did not shrink from dwelling among cannibals could not wilt at the blow of the hama.

The explorer in the far North, who lets his face become covered with a great growth of hair, when he intends to return to civilization can with a few strokes of a razor be again as before. But once the curious ink of the tattooer has bitten into the skin, it is there forever. It is like the pits of smallpox; it can never be erased. Through all his life, and into the grave itself, the human canvas must bear the pictures painted by the artist of the needles. It was a chain as strong as steel, riveted on him, that fastened him to these lotus isles. So men of America or Europe did not return to their native land from the Marquesas, but died here. The whorls and lines in the ama dye wrote exile forever from the loved ones at home.

Is that wholly true? Had not science or sorcery nepenthe for the afflicted by such a horror—horror if unwanted? Is there not one who has escaped such a fate when life had become fearful under it?

I asked that question of all, and in the valley of Hanavave was answered. I had rowed to Hanavave in the whaleboat of Grelet, and, when he returned to Oomoa, stayed on a month for the fishing with Red Chicken and discussions with PÈre Olivier.

“There is a sorcerer in the hills near here,” said the old French priest, thirty-five years there without leaving, “who was said to be the best tattooer on Fatuhiva. He is still a pagan, and has a wonderful memory. Take some tobacco and a pipe, and go to visit him. He may be in league with the devil, but he is worthy an hour’s journey.”

Puhi Enata was still vigorous, though very old. The designs upon his face and body were a strange green, the verde antique which the ama ink becomes on the flesh of the confirmed kava drinker. I greeted him with “Kaoha!” and soon, with the chunk of tobacco beside him and the new pipe lit, I led him to the subject. The story is not mine but his, and it has all the weird flavor of these exotic gardens of mystery. It is true without question, and I have often thought since of the American concerned in it, and wondered at his after fate.

We were seated, Puhi Enata and I, upon the paepae of his home, the platform of huge stones on which all houses in the Land of the War Fleet are built.

In the humid air of that tropic parallel he made pass before me a panorama of fantastic tragedy as real as the life about me, but as astounding and as vivid in its facts and its narration as the recital of a drama of ancient Athens by a master of histrionics. I laughed or shuddered with the incidents of the story. He spoke in his native tongue, and I have given his words as they filtered through the screen of my alien mind, not always exactly, but in consonance with the cast of thought of that far-away and unknown land.

“We had no whites here when he came, this man of your islands. Other valleys had them, but Hanavave, no. Few ships have come to this bay. Taiohae, a day and a night and more distant, they sought for food and water and now for copra, but Hanavave was, as always, lived in by us only. Yet we ever welcomed the haoe, the stranger, for he had ways of interest, and often magic greater than ours.

“He came one day on a ship from far, this white man I tell about, and of whom even now I often meditate. He was not of the sea, but on the ship as one who pays to move about over the waters, looking for something of interest. That thing he found here. He brought ashore his guns and powder, his other possessions of wonder, and let the ship go away without him. He had seen Titihuti, and his koekoe, his spirit, was set aflame.”

I needed no description by the tuhuka to bring before me Titihuti, to see that maddening, matchless child-woman, nor to know the desperate plight of a white who fell in love with her. She must have been the Helen of these Pacific Greeks, for men came from other islands to woo her, fought over her, and embroiled tribes in bloody warfare at her whim. Her affairs had been the history of her valley for a brief period, and were immortalized in chants and in legends though she still lived. Many had related to me stories of her beauty, her spell over men, and her wicked pleasure in deceiving them.

She was the daughter of a chief, of a long line of hakaiki, of noble mothers and of warriors, and an adept in the marvelous cult of beauty, of sex expression, which to the Marquesan woman was the field of her dearest ambition, the professional stage and the salon of society.

“The day he came to this beach,” said the sorcerer, “was the day she first danced in the Grove of the Mei, at the annual gathering of the tribe. All the people of the ship were invited, and not least he who had no duties but his desires, and who brought from the vessel a barrel of rum as his gift to the people. It was as rich as the full moon, as strong as the surf in storm, and in every drop a dream of fortune. It made that foreigner of note at once, and he was given a seat at the Hurahura, the Dance of Passion, in which Titihuti for the first time took her place as a woman and an equal of others. She was then thirteen years old, a moi kanahau, her form as the bud of the pahue flower, her hair red-gold, like the fish of the lagoon, and her skin as the fresh-opened breadfruit. The Grove of the Mei you have been in, but you cannot imagine that scene. A hundred torches of candlenuts, strung on the spine of the palm-leaf, lit the dancing mead. The grass had been cut to a smoothness, and all the valley was there. As is usual in these annual dÉbuts of our girls, at the height of the breadfruit season, a dozen were allowed to show their beauty and skill. These danced to the music of drums and of hand-clapping and chanting before the entire tribe seated on the grass.”

The old man lit the pipe, which had gone out, and puffed out the blue clouds of smoke as if they were recollections of the past.

“Finally, as the custom is, the plaudits of the crowd narrowed the contest to three. Each as she danced appealed for approval, and each had followers. By the judgment of the throng all had retired but three after a first effort. These began the formal titii e te epo. This is the dance of love, the dance we Marquesans have ever made the test of the female’s fascination.

“Before the first of the three danced, the rum was passed. It was drunk from cups of leaves, and each in turn drew from the cask. It ran through our veins like fire through the pandanus. The great drum then sounded the call.

“Tahiatini came from the shadow of the trees. She wore a dress of tapa, made from the pith of the mulberry-tree, and as the dance became faster she tossed it off until she moved about quite nude. For this, of course, is part of the test. A hundred men, mostly young, stood and watched her, and watching them were the judges, the elders of the race, men and women. For, Menike, in the expression, the heat, or the coolness of those standing men was counted the success or failure of the dancer. And they were taught by pride and by the rules of the event to conceal every feeling, as did the warrior who faced the launched spear. They were to be as the stones of the paepae.

“Tahiatini passed back into the trees, and Moeo succeeded her. She seemed to feel that Tahiatini had not scored heavily. She danced marvelously for one who had never before been in the Grove of Mei, and the shrewd judges reckoned more than one of the silent hundred who could not restrain from some mark of approval. There was, when she fell back, a shout of praise from the crowd, and the judges conferred while the rum was handed about for the second time.

“Then Titihuti was thrust out from the darkness, and from her first step we realized that a new enchantress had come to torment the warriors. I have lived long, and many of those dances in the Grove of Mei I have seen. Never before or since that night have I known a girl to do what she did. Her kahu of tapa was as red as the sun when the sea swallows it, and hung over one shoulder, so that her bosom, as white as the ripe cocoanut, gleamed in the light of the burning ama.

“Her hair was in two plaits of flame, and the glittering ghost flowers were over her ears. You know she had for months been out of the day and under the hands of those who prepare the dancers. Her body was as rounded as the silken bamboo, and her skin shone with the gloss of ceaseless care.

“She advanced before the silent hundred, moving as the slow waters of the brook, and as she passed each one she looked into his eyes and challenged him, as the fighting man his enemy. Only she looked love and not hatred. Then she bounded into the center of the line and, casting off her kahu, she stood before them, and for the first time bared her beautiful body in the titii e te epo, the Dance of the Naked. She fluttered as a bird a few moments, the bird that seeks a mate, the kuku of the valley. On her little saffroned feet she ran about, and the light left her now in brilliancy and now in shadow. She was searching for the way from childhood to womanhood.

“Then the great pahu, the war-drum of human skin, was struck by O Nuku, the sea-shells blew loudly, and the Hurahura was proclaimed. You know that. Few are the men who resist. Titihuti was as one aided by Veinehae, the Woman Demon. She flung herself into that dance with madness. All her life she and her mother had awaited that moment. If she could tear the hearts of those warriors so that their breasts heaved, their limbs twitched, and their eyes fell before her, her honor was as the winner of a battle. It was the supreme hour of a woman’s existence.

“The judges seized the flambeaux and scrutinized closely the faces of the men. First one yielded and then another. Try as they might to be as the rocks of the High Place, they felt the heat and melted. A dozen were told off in the first few minutes of Titihuti’s dance, though Tahiatini and Moeo had won but two or three. Faster grew the music, and faster spun about her hips the torso of Titihuti. The judges caught the rhythm. They themselves were convulsed by the spell of the girl. The whole line of the silent hundred was breaking when, as the breadfruit falls from the tree, suddenly sprang upon the mead the foreigner who had come but that day. Though others of the ship tried to hold him, he broke from them, and, clasping Titihuti in his arms, declared that she was his, and that he would defend his capture. The drums were quieted, the judges rushed to the pair, and, for the time of a wave’s lapping the beach, spears were seized.

“But the ritual of the rum began, and in the crush about the cask the judges awarded Titihuti the Orchid of the Bird, the reward of the First Dancer. She stood in the light of the now dying torches, and when the foreigner would embrace her and lead her away she turned her laughing eyes toward him and called out so that many heard:

“‘You are without ornament, O Haoe. Cover your face as do Marquesan lovers, or get you back to your island!’

“Then she hurried away to receive the praise and to taste the glory of her achievement among her own family.”

The Taua took his long knife and with repeated blows hacked off the upper half of a cocoanut to make ready another drink. I had a very vivid idea of the situation he had described. That handsome young man of Europe, belike of wealth, seeking to surrender to his vagrant fancies in this contrasting environment, and finding that among these savages he had position only as his rum bought it with the men, and was without it at all among the women. One could fancy him all afire after that dance of abandon, ready on the instant to yield to the deepest of all instincts, and surprised, astounded, almost unbelieving at his repulse. He might have learned that such repulse was not even in the manner of the Marquesans, but solely the whim of Titihuti, the beginning of that career of whimsical passion and insouciance which carried her fame from island to island and fetched other proud whites from afar to know her favor. He himself had come a long way to be the unwitting victim of the most prankish girl and woman who ever danced a tribe to death and destruction, but who withal was worth more than she who launched the thousand ships to batter Ilium’s towers.

“And did he cover his face?” I demanded, hurrying to follow the windings of fate.

“E!” said the sorcerer. “He gained the friendship of chiefs. He let his ship sail away with but a paper with words to his tribe, and he stayed on. He hunted, he swam, and he drank, but he could not touch his nose to the nose of Titihuti, for his nose was naked. Weeks passed, but not his passion. He hovered about her as the great moth seeks the fireflies, but ever she was busied with her pomades and her massage, the ena unguent and the baths, the omi omi and the combing of her red-gold tresses. She had set him aflame, but had no alleviation for him.

“And then when the moon was at its height she danced again, this time alone, as the undisputed vehine haka of Fatuhiva. The foreigner sat and gazed, and when Titihuti glided to where he was and, planting her feet a metero away, addressed herself to him, he shook with longing. She was perfumed with the jasmine, and about her breasts were rings of those pink orchids of the mountains. The foreigner felt the warmth of her presence as she posed in the attitudes of love. He bounded to his feet and, clasping her for the second time to him, he shouted that he would be tattooed, he would be a man among men in the Marquesas.

“There was no delay; I myself tattooed him. As always the custom, I took him into the mountains and built the patiki, the house for the rite. That is as it should be, for tattooing is of our gods and of our religion before the whites destroyed it. I was and am the master of our arts. I did not sketch out my design upon his skin with burned bamboo, as do some, but struck home the ama ink directly. My needles were the bones of one whom I had slain, an enemy of the Oi tribe. I myself gathered the candlenuts and, burning them to powder, mixed that with water and made my color. My mallet, or hama, was the shin of another whom I had eaten.”

Such a man as Leonardo, who painted “Mona Lisa” and designed a hundred other beautiful things, or Cellini of the book and a vast creation of intricate marvels, would have understood the exactness of that art of tattooing in the Marquesas. Suppose “Mona Lisa” herself, an expanse of her fair back, and not mere linen, bore her picture. What infinite pains! Not more than took the taua in such a task. In his mind his plan, he dipped his needle in the ama soot, and, placing the point upon a pore of the flesh, he lightly tapped the other extremity of the bone with his hama of shin and impressed the sepia into the living skin, for each point of flesh making a stroke.

Followed fever after several hours of frightful anguish. The dentist is the ministrant of caresses, his the loved hand of pleasure, compared with the suffering caused to the quivering body by the blows of those needles. A sÉance of tattooing followed, and several days of sickness. He had not the strength of the natives in the pain, and often he cried out, but yet he signed that the tattooing should go on.

“Across his eyes upon the lids, and from ear to ear, I made a line as wide as two of your teeth, and I crossed lines as wide from the corners of his forehead to the corners of his chin. As he was to be admitted to the Lodge of Tattooers, I put upon his brow the sacred shark as big as Titihuti’s hand. I was four moons in all that, and all the time he must lie within his hut, never leaving it or speaking. I handed him food and nursed him between my work. Upon our darker skin the black candlenut ink is, as you know, as blue as the deep waters of the sea, but on him it was black as night, for his flesh was white.

“He was handsome as ever god of war in the High Place, that foreigner, and terrible to behold. His eyes of blue in their black frames were as threatening as the thunders of the ocean, and above the black shark glistened his hair, as yellow as the sands of the shore. A breadfruit season had passed when we descended the mountain, and he was received into the tribe of Hanavave. We called him Tohiki for his splendor, though his name was Villee, as we could say it.”

There is a curious quibble in the recital of the Polynesian. He arrives at a crisis of his tale, and avoids it for a piece of wit or an idle remark. Perhaps it is to pique the listener’s interest, to deepen his attention, or it is but the etiquette of the bard.

“Titihuti?” I interposed.

“Tuitui!” he ejaculated. “You put weeds in my mouth. That girl, that Titihuti, had left her paepae and vanished. Some said she dwelt with a lover in another valley. Others that she had been captured at night by the men of Oi Valley. It was always our effort to seize the women of other tribes. They made the race stronger. But Titihuti was not in Oi or with a lover. Her love was her beauty, and soon we learned that she was gone into the hills herself to be tattooed. You, American, have seen her legs, and know the full year she gave to those. They are even to-day the hana metai oko, the loveliest and most perfect of all living things.”

“And Willie, the splendid Tokihi, what said he?”

“Aue! He dashed up and down the valleys seeking her. He offered gifts for her return. He cried and he drank. But the tattooing is tabu, and it would have been death to have entered the hut where she was against the wish of the artist. Then he turned on me and cursed me, and often he sat and looked at himself in the pool in the brook by his own paepae. That foreigner lost his good heart. No longer was he kind and gentle. It was he who led us against the valley of Oomoa, and with his gun wrought great harm to those people. It was he who was ready to fight at but the drop of a cocoanut upon his roof. He took no women, and he became the fiercest man of Hanavave. When the year had gone, and Titihuti came back, he would not see her in the dance, though in it she showed her decorative legs for the first time. He cursed her, too, and said she was a sister of the feki, the devilfish. He dwelt among us for several years as one who leads the tribe, but is not of it. Often he but missed death by the breadth of a grain of sand, for he flung himself on the spears, he fought the sea when it was angered, and he drank each night of the namu, the wine of the cocoanut flower grown old, until he reeled to his mat as a canoe tossing at the fishing.

“Then one day came a canoe from Taiohae, with words on paper for him from his own people. A ship from his island was there and had sent on the paper. That was a day to remember. There were with the paper tiki, those faces of people you make on paper. Villee seized those things, and, running to his paepae, he sat him down and began to look them over. He eyed the words, and he put the tiki to his lips. Then he lay down upon his mat and wept. For much time he was like a child. He rolled about as if he had been struck in the body by a war-club, and at last he called me. I went to him with a shell of namu.

“‘Drink!’ I said. ‘It will lift you up.’

“He knocked the shell from my hand.

“‘I will drink no more,’ he cried. ‘My father is dead, and my brother. I am the chief of my tribe. I have land and houses and everything good in my own island, but, alas! I have this!’

“He pointed to the black shark upon his forehead, and then he shouted out harsh words in his own language. I left him, for he was like one from whom the spirit has gone, but who still lives. I thought of the strangeness of tribes. In ours he was a noble and honored man for that shark, and yet in his own as hateful as the barefaced man here. Man is, as the wind cloud, but a shifting vapor.

“Often, a hundred times, I saw him sitting by the pool and gazing into it as though to wash out by his glances the marks on his countenance. He was as deep in the mire of despair as the victim awaiting the oven. Nature’s mirror showed him why he could not leave for his land and his chieftaincy. And, American, for a woman, too. I saw him many times look at that tiki and read the words. Maybe he had fled from her in anger. Now he was great among his people, and she called him. Maybe. My own heart was heavy for him when he fixed his eyes on that still water.

“After weeks of melancholy he summoned me one day.

“‘Taua,’ he said, ‘is there no magic, no other ink, no bones, that will quit me of this?’

“He swept his hand over his face.

“‘I will give you my gun, my canoe, my coats, and I will send you by the ship barrels of rum and many things of wonder.’

“He took my hand, and the tears followed the lines of the tattooing down his cheeks.

“‘Tokihi,’ I replied, ‘no man in the Marquesas has ever wanted to take from his skin that which made him great to his race, yet there is a legend that wanders through my stomach. I will consult the lodge. It would be magic, and it may be tapu.’

“The next day I found him lying on his paepae, his face down. He was a leaf that slowly withers.

“‘Villee,’ I said, and rubbed his back, ‘there is for you perhaps happiness yet. I have talked with the wise old men of the lodge.’

“He raised himself, and fixed his dull eyes on me.

“‘One Kihiputona says that the milk of a woman will work the magic. I can not say, for it is with the gods.’

“The foreigner sprang to his feet.

“‘Come, let us lose no time!’ he cried. ‘It is that or the eva.’

“Marquesans, when tired of life, eat the eva fruit. I made all ready, and, taking my daughter and her babe, with food, and the things of the tattooing, we again went to the hut in the mountains. Together we built it over, and made all ready for the trial.

“‘Remember, foreigner,’ I said, ‘this is all before the EtuÁ, the rulers of each one’s good and evil. I have never done this, nor even the wisest of us has ought but a faint memory of a memory that once a white man thus was freed to go back to his kin.’

“‘E aha a—no matter,’ he said. ‘There is no choice. Begin!’

“I warned him not to utter a word until I released the tapu. I made all ready. Then I had him lie down, his head fixed in a bamboo section, and I began the long task.”

The sorcerer sighed, and spat through his fingers.

“Two moons he was there, silent. I worked faster than before, because I had no designs to make. I only traced those of the years before. But the suffering was even greater, and when I struck the bone-needles upon his eyelids he groaned through his closed mouth. Every day I worked as long as he could endure. Sometimes he all but died away, but the omi omi, the rubbing, made him again aware, and as I went on I gained hope myself. His own skin was by nature as that of the white orchid, and the weeks in the patiki out of the sunlight, with the oil and the saffron, made it as when he was child. The milk was driven into a thousand little holes in the flesh, and by magic it changed the black of ama to white. I think some wonder made it do so, but you should know such things. I left the shark until the last, but long before I came to it the gods had spoken. Faded slowly the candlenut soot, and crept out, as the silver-fish in the caves of Hana Hevane, the bright color of that foreigner.

“Many times his eyes, when I let loose the lids, lifted to mine in inquiry, but I was without answer. Yet nearer I felt the day when I would possess that gun and canoe and the barrels of rum.

“It came. A week had gone since I had touched with the needles his face, and most of it he had slept. Now he was round with sleep and food, and one morning when he awoke, I seized him by the hand and said, ‘Kaoha!’ The tapu was ended; the task was done.”

“And he?” I said greedily.

“He was as a man who wakes from a dream of horror. He said not a word, but went with me and with my daughter and the babe down the trail to this village. Here he stole silently to his pool, and, lying down, he looked long into it. Then he made a wild cry as if he had come to a precipice in the dark and been kept from falling to death by the mere gleam of fungus on a tree. He fell back, and for a little while was without mind. Awake again, he rushed about the village clasping each one he met in his arms, rubbing noses with the girls, and singing queer songs—himenes to e aave—of his island. His laughter rang in the groves. Now he was as when he had come to us, gay, kind, and without deep thought.

“The gods had for that moon made him theirs, for soon came a canoe with news that a ship of his country was at Taiohae. Never did a man act more quickly. He made a feast, and to it he invited the village. A day it took to prepare it, the pigs in the earth, the popoi, the fish cooked on the coral stones, the fruits, and the nuts. To it he gave all his rum, and he handed me his gun, the paddles of his canoe, and his coats.

“But Po, the devil of night, crouched for him. The canoe to take him to Taiohae was in the water, waiting but the end of the koina kai. Plentifully all drank the rich rum, but Tokihi most. Titihuti even he had greeted, and she sat beside him. She was now loath to have him go; you know woman. She leaned against him, and her eyes promised him aught that he would. She was more beautiful than on that night when she had spurned him, and she struck from him a spark of her own willful fancy. He took her a moment to his bosom, held her as the wave holds the rock before it recedes, and then, as the madness she ever made crept upon him, he drew back from her, held her again a fierce moment, and, dashing his cup to the earth, he turned upon her in fury.

“It was the evil noon. The eye of the sun was straight upon him, and as he cursed her, and shouted that now he was free from her, the blood rushed into his face, and painted there scarlet as the hibiscus the marks of the tattooing. The black ama the magic had erased now shone red. The stripes across his eyes and face were like the scars a burning brand leaves, and the shark of the lodge was a leper’s sign upon his brow.

“‘Mutu!’ I cried, for I saw death in the air if he knew, and all the gifts lost to me. ‘Silence!’ And the tribe heeded. No quiver, no glance showed the foreigner that one had seen what he himself had not. Titihuti fastened her gaze on him a fleeting second, and then began the dance of leave-taking.

“We raised the chant:

“To the canoe we bore him, and thrusting it into the breakers, we called the last words, ‘E avei atu!’

“He was gone forever from Fatuhiva. And thus I got this latter name I have, Puhi Enata, the Man with the Gun.”

The old sorcerer rolled a leaf of pandanus about a few grains of tobacco.

“And you never had word of him?”

“Aoe, no,” he said meditatively. “He went upon that ship at Taiohae. But, American, I think often that when that man who was Tokihi came to dance in his own island, to sit at his own tribe’s feasts, or when the ardor of love would seize him, always he tried to be calm.”