The early Spanish explorer Mendaña “discovered” the Fenua Enana Islands in 1595 and baptized this archipelago Marquises Islands.
But the first descriptions of Polynesian tattooing were written almost 2 centuries later by English Captain Samuel Wallis, French explorer Bougainville and English Captain Cook.
In 1767, Wallis had noticed that it was a “universal custom among men and women to get their buttocks and the back of their thighs painted with thin black lines representing different figures”.
The next year (1768) Bougainville reported in that "the women of Tahiti dye their loins and buttocks a deep blue”.
Height year later (1774), Captain Cook returning from his trip to the Marquises Islands, wrote in his diary “they print signs on people’s body and call this tattow”.
Ma’i (called by the English Omai), the first Tahitian to travel to Europe (with Captain Cook) became rapidly famous partly because of his tattoos.
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