The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

XII DECORATIVE ART 273
of Ling Roth's book [7] as tatu designs are in our
opinion very probably not tatu designs. They were
collected by Dr. Wienecke in Dutch Borneo, and appear
to be nothing but drawings by a native artist of such
objects in daily use as hats, seat-mats, baby-slings, and
so on. We communicated with Dr. J. D. E. Schmeltz of
the Leyden Museum, where these "tatu" marks are
deposited, and learnt from him that they are indeed actual
drawings on paper; there are ninety-two of them, apparently
all are different isolated designs, and they are evidently
the work of one artist.^ There is not a tribe in Borneo
which can show such a variety of tatu design, and indeed
we doubt if ninety-two distinct isolated tatu designs could
be found throughout all the length and breadth of the
island. Moreover, as can be seen by reference to the cited
work, the designs are of a most complicated nature, not
figures with the outlines merely filled in, as in all tatu
designs known to us, but with the details drawn in fine
lines and cross-hatching, which in tatu would be utterly
lost unless executed on a very large scale.
V. Sea Dayak Tatu,
The Sea Dayaks at the present day are, as far as the
men are concerned, the most extensively tatued tribe in
Borneo, with the exception of the Bakatans, Ukits,
Kahayans, and Biajau ;
nevertheless, from a long-continued
and close study of their tatu, we are forced to the conclusion
that the practice and the designs have been entirely borrowed
from other tribes, but chiefly from the Kayans. For some
time we believed that there were two characteristically
Sea Dayak designs, namely, that which is tatued on the
throat (Figs. 75 and jG) and that on the wrist (PL 143,
Fig. 7), but when later we studied Bakatan tatu we met
with the former in the gerowit pattern on the throat of
men, and the latter in the lukut design on the wrist of the
women. A Sea Dayak youth will simply plaster himself,
so to speak, with numerous isolated designs ; we have
counted as many as five of the asu design on one thigh
^ Dr. Schmeltz has kindly furnished us with an advance sheet of his forthcoming
catalogue of the Borneo collection in the Leyden Museum ; he
catalogues these drawings as tatu marks, but in a footnote records our opinion
of them made by letter. Dr. Nieuwenhuis apparently adheres to the belief
that they really are tatu marks.
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