TATTOOING 



321 



trophy of the expedition, and this the Tushaua gave to 

 me. 



I saw very Httle of the other male Indians, as they were 

 asleep in their huts all the afternoon. There were two 

 other tattooed men lying under an open shed, besides the 

 old man already mentioned. One of them presented a 

 strange appearance, having a semicircular black patch 

 in the middle of his face, covering the bottom of the nose 

 and mouth, crossed lines on his back and breast, and 

 stripes down his arms and legs. It is singular that the 

 graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea Islanders, 

 are quite unknown among the Brazilian red men ; they 

 being all tattooed either in simple lines or patches. The 

 nearest approach to elegance of design which I saw, was 

 amongst the Tucunas of the Upper Amazons, some of 

 whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek, proceeding 

 from the corner of the mouth. The taste, as far as form 

 is concerned, of the American Indian would seem to be far 

 less refined than that of the Tahitian and New Zealander. 



To amuse the Tushaua, I fetched from the canoe the 

 two volumes of Knight's Pictorial Museum of Animated 

 Nature. The engravings quite took his fancy, and he 

 called his wives, of whom, as I afterwards learnt from 

 Aracu, he had three or four, to look at them ; one of them 

 was a handsome girl, decorated with necklace and brace- 

 lets of blue beads. In a short time others left their work, 

 and I then had a crowd of women and children around 

 me, who all displayed unusual curiosity for Indians. It 

 was no light task to go through the whole of the illustra- 

 tions, but they would not allow me to miss a page, making 

 me turn back when I tried to skip. The pictures of the 

 elephant, camels, orang-otangs, and tigers, seemed most 

 to astonish them ; but they were interested in almost 

 everything, down even to the shells and insects. They 

 recognized the portraits of the most striking birds and 

 mammals which are found in their own country ; the 

 jaguar, howling monkeys, parrots, trogons, and toucans. 

 The elephant was settled to be a large kind of Tapir ; but 

 they made but few remarks, and those in the Mundurucu 

 language, of which I understood only two or three words. 

 Their way of expressing surprise was a clicking sound 

 made with the teeth, similar to the one we ourselves use, 

 or a subdued exclamation, Hm ! hm ! Before I finished, 

 from fifty to sixty had assembled ; there was no pushing 



X 



