Archive Note
Joseph Banks (1743 to 1820) was the naturalist on HMS Endeavour during Captain Cook's first Pacific voyage, paying his own way aboard, and his journal of the ship's stay at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, from April to July 1769 gave educated Britons their first extended description of Polynesian tattooing as a technique and a social practice. His journal entry of 5 July 1769 contains the first known written use of "tattow" in English, adapted from the Polynesian word tatau, which gave European languages a single term for a practice they had previously described as pricking, marking, or staining. The artist Sydney Parkinson documented it visually on the same voyage. Banks returned to England a celebrity, later served as President of the Royal Society for forty-one years, and acted as the unofficial director of Kew Gardens; the published account of his voyage carried Polynesian tattooing into the imagination of artists, sailors, and the curious for generations.