BC Cook
“IT was not much of a living, but taking money from people just so they could look at my tattoos seemed like an easy way to get by. But the markings were nothing compared to the story of how I got them. Have you ever heard of Pohnpei?”
Whatever we say about the life of James O’Connell, we cannot say it was boring. He was an Irish drifter, world traveler, sailor, beachcomber, convict in a dozen countries and a circus act for P.T. Barnum. That was just the first half of his life.
O’Connell wrote a book about his experiences, but as with a lot of memoirs we need to be choosy about what we believe. By his account, somewhere around the year 1827 he was shipwrecked on Pohnpei. The islanders did not take well to strangers at that time, since most of them had brought misery and death with them. But O’Connell and a fellow sailor submitted to the locals and even allowed themselves to be tattooed according to local custom.
O’Connell withstood the procedure like champ, silencing his screams and choking down his tears. It hurt like the devil to be tattooed from head to toe by a team of Pohnpeian women, but he endured it. His shipmate, not so tough, squealed like a baby as soon as the first needle pierced his arm. After only a few minutes he begged them to stop, so his only artwork was a hastily completed design on one arm, hardly enough to win membership into the island family.
It was obvious from that moment that O’Connell had earned the respect and acceptance of the islanders, while his friend had not. O’Connell married the daughter of a clan chief and rose to prominence while his friend became increasingly isolated.
Five years later a whaling ship stopped at Pohnpei, which allowed O’Connell to make his escape, but freedom eluded him, for the ship captain suspected he was a criminal and had him arrested and jailed in Manila.
He soon broke out of jail and made his way to China, where he drifted for some years. O’Connell next surfaced in Canada, trying to work his way east so he could re-settle in the Atlantic portion of the United States. Thanks to a cholera epidemic in Canada, he quickly descended into America, where he was hired by Barnum’s famous circus as part of the freak show, a group of entertainers who marveled crowds with their unusual talents or features. Since nearly the entire surface of O’Connell’s body was covered in tattoos, people came from miles around to see his exotic markings and hear the story of how he got them. By all accounts it was quite a show.
It is a tale, full of danger, exotic locations, strange customs and desperate running, and we have only skimmed the surface of O’Connell’s adventures. Scholars have tried to piece together his life and separate the fact from the fiction, and this much we know: while he may have added a little detail from time to time, he seems to have genuinely been to all of the places he claims, and his knowledge of local customs and languages shows that he had more than a surface knowledge. In fact, his stories of the life on Pohnpei tell us much about that culture before the large-scale intrusion of westerners. Those portions alone make his memoirs worth reading.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for over 30 years. He is a director and historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org).
