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Clothed in tattoos: cultural fluidity in George Vason's Authentic Narrative of Four Years' Residence at Tongataboo

George Vason arrived on the island of Tongatapu in 1797, as part of the London Missionary Society's first foray into the Tongan Islands. Instead of creating converts, Vason embraced the Tongan way of life. Overtly framed as a narrative of reclamation, of a “missionary seduced abroad and reclaimed at home”, his travel account in fact seeks to imagine an identity unbound by any culture, including his own. Focusing particularly on Vason's account of his tattooing in relation to contemporary depictions of Polynesian tattooing, this essay will suggest that Vason refuses to invest his tattoos with either exotic value (rendering him a curiosity) or moralistic value (a shameful reminder of his lapse). While Vason's description of Tongan tattoos as a form of clothing has often been read as a means of justifying his tattoos to a European audience, this essay suggests that Vason reads his tattoos as a productive amalgamation of Tongan and European values. For Vason, Tongan tattooing allows cultural values to be embodied in a way that European clothes cannot, effectively uniting body and culture.