Skin Deep

Man of New Zealand. By William Hodges, 1771
Missionaries arrived in the Pacific in 1797. They first tried to convert Tahitians and then moved to other island groups including the Cook Islands, Samoa and the Marquesas. By 1850, many Polynesians had converted to Christianity. Missionaries saw tattooing as a sinful practice and tried to suppress it. In some instances, they tried to scrub tattoos from the wearers' bodies, though they also used tattooing as a form of punishment, to 'brand' criminals. In most of Polynesia tattooing was eventually suppressed. Today, therefore, it is not always easy to recover information about the origin of tattoo designs and meanings.

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