Archive Note
HMS Endeavour anchored at Matavai Bay in Tahiti from April to July 1769, and the expedition's naturalist Joseph Banks (1743 to 1820) recorded detailed observations of Tahitian tattooing, including its technique, its social meaning, and the practitioners. His journal entry of July 5, 1769 contains the first known written use of the word in English, adapted from the Polynesian tatau, while the botanical artist Sydney Parkinson documented the practice in drawings. Before this, European languages had no single word for it, describing it instead as pricking, marking, or staining. Banks's account is the first extended European description of tattooing as a technical and cultural practice, and it gave the West a shared vocabulary for what would become a global exchange.