The Cook Myth: Common Tattoo History Debunked

Tracking the origins of tattoo-history myths is a favorite pastime of mine. So many abound and continually get perpetuated — the church banned tattooing in the middle ages, you can’t get buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have a tattoo, tattoos were once just for sailors and criminals…the list goes on. Perhaps the most pernicious is what I call the “Cook Myth”–that modern Western tattooing has its roots in Captain James Cook and company’s visits to Polynesia in the late 18th century.

Polynesian roots for modern Western tattooing are patently untrue, and I spent some time tracing the origins of the myth in mid-20th-century secondary sources (mostly glossy popular publications that were then used as sketchy sources by certain late-20th-century academics). I have some ready-to-go unpublished material from my dissertation, Tattooed Transculturites: Western Expatriates Among Amerindian and Pacific Islander Societies, 1500–1900 (University of Chicago, 2012), [which you can read in full here] that resoundingly debunks this myth. I thought I’d excerpt and publish it here for broader distribution.

Sydney Parkinson’s classic illustration of a tattooed Maori from Cook’s first voyage

Debunking the “Cook Myth”

In addition to demonstrating that tattoos were often seen in a positive, or at least neutral, light, a crucial subsidiary aim of this dissertation is to debunk what can be termed the “Cook myth”: the…