BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. III
NEW ZEALAND TATTOOED HEADS.
Figure 37 is an illustration from Te Ika a Maui, etc., op. cit., facing page 378. It shows the “grave of an Australian native, with his name, rank, tribe, etc., cut in hieroglyphics on the trees,” which “hieroglyphics” are supposed to be connected with his tattoo marks.
Fig. 37.—Australian grave and carved trees.
Mr. I. C. Russell, in his sketch of New Zealand, published in the American Naturalist, Volume XIII, p. 72, February, 1879, remarks, that the desire of the Maori for ornament is so great that they covered their features with tattooing, transferring indelibly to their faces complicated patterns of curved and spiral lines, similar to the designs with which they decorated their canoes and their houses.
In Mangaia, of the Hervey Group, the tattoo is said to be in imitation of the stripes on the two kinds of fish, avini and paoro, the color of which is blue. The legend of this is kept in the song of Ina´. See Myths and songs from the South Pacific, London, 1876, p. 94.
Mr. Everard F. im Thurn, in his work previously cited, pages 195-’96 among the Indians of Guiana, says:
Painting the body is the simplest mode of adornment. Tattooing or any other permanent interference with the surface of the skin by way of ornament is practiced only to a very limited extent by the Indians; is used, in fact, only to produce the small distinctive tribal mark which many of them bear at the corners of their mouths or on their arms. It is true that an adult Indian is hardly to be found on whose thighs and arms, or on other parts of whose body, are not a greater or less number of indelibly incised straight lines; but these are scars originally made for surgical, not ornamental purposes.