“have their face, breast, and arms covered with black figures of various shapes, so that they present the appearance of a Turkish carpet.”  “This savage ornament is purchased with blood and many groans.”

The thorns used to puncture the skin are poisonous, and after the operation the girl has her eyes, cheeks, and lips so horribly swelled that she “looks like a Stygian fury.”  If she groans while undergoing the torture, or shows signs of pain in her face, the old woman who operates on her exclaims, in a rage:  “You will die single, be assured.  Which of our heroes would think so cowardly a girl worthy to be his wife?” Such courage, Dobrizhoffer explains further, is admired in a girl because it makes her “prepared to bear the pains of parturition in time.”  In some cases vanity supplies an additional motive why the girls should submit to the painful operation with fortitude; for those of them who “are most pricked and painted you may know to be of high rank.”

Here again we see clearly that the tattooing is admired for other than esthetic reasons, and we realize how foolish it is to philosophize about the peculiar “taste” of these Indians in admiring a girl who looks like “a Turkish carpet” or “a Stygian fury.”  If they had even the rudiments of a sense of beauty they would not indulge in such disgusting disfigurements.

MUTILATION, FASHION, AND EMULATION

Grosse declares (80) that “we know definitely at least, that tattooing is regarded by the Eskimo as an embellishment.”  He bases this inference on Cranz’s assertion that Eskimo mothers tattoo their daughters in early youth “for fear that otherwise they would not get a husband.”  Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is.  A favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to drag her from her tent by the hair.  This young woman, moreover, has never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth.  Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the beauty of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl’s dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them!  Like other champions of the sexual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his eyes.  That reason is fashion.  The tattoo marks are tribal signs (Bancroft, I., 48) which every girl must submit to have in obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object of scorn and ridicule all her life.