Put another way, a tattoo could stamp such strong social or cultural affinities that it needed to be scrubbed from the body’s record.

***

1698, Brest, France: Interrogation notes outline a conversation between an Intendant Desclouzeaux and two brothers, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste Talon. The tattoos upon the Talons’ bodies were one of the topics of discussion.

A remarkable set of journeys had brought the Talons back to France, which they had left 14 years earlier as members of the final, disastrous La Salle expedition. They were young children when their parents had joined the venture, which was intended to locate the mouth of the Mississippi and then establish a colony some distance inland. Failing to spot the river, the expedition dissolved in the wake of La Salle’s assassination by some of his own disgruntled colonists and an attack by Karankawas on the expedition’s settlement at Fort St. Louis. Pierre and Jean-Baptiste, along with their three siblings, were some of the group’s only survivors.

Pierre was taken in by the Hasinai, another local Native American community, while Jean-Baptiste and the other children were adopted by Karankawas. A few years later, Spanish parties searching for evidence of their French rivals found the Talon children, and they were taken to Mexico City, where they became servants in the viceroy’s household. The oldest brothers then entered into Spanish military service until the ship they served on was captured by the French. Surprised to find survivors from La Salle’s voyage on a Spanish ship, French officers escorted the brothers to France, questioning them closely about the lands along the Gulf Coast, the Indian societies they had lived among, and what Spanish intentions toward the area were.

The report said little about how the siblings looked after years living in coastal Indian communities and then in New Spain, except for this:

the said Talons … fell into the power of the savages, who first tattooed them on the face, the hands, the arms, and in several other places on their bodies as they do on themselves, with several bizarre black marks … These marks still show, despite a hundred remedies that the Spaniards applied to try to erase them.

There are no portraits of the Talons, nor any more detailed accounts of their “bizarre black marks,” but we can get an idea of their appearance from a 1687 description of another Gulf Coast castaway. Enríquez Barroto, one of the Spanish captains searching the coast for the French ‘interlopers,’ had instead found a Spanish child named Nicolás de Vargas living with Atákapas along what is now the Calcasieu River in southwestern Louisiana. Barroto reported that the boy had “a black line that goes down the front to the end of his nose, another from the lower lip to the end of the chin, another small one next to each eye and, on each cheek, a small black spot. Like the nose, the lips also are blackened, and the arms are painted with other markings.” The Talons would likely have had similar tattoos.

Desclouzeaux’s notes say nothing more about the “hundred remedies” that the Talons had been subjected to. One suspects that some of them were painful, or at the very least unpleasant—perhaps as much as the original process of being tattooed. Why had the Talons’ Spanish hosts (or captors, depending on one’s perspective) tried so hard to scrub away the traces of the children’s pasts?

As the viceroy’s family scoured the Talons’ skins in Mexico City, their efforts might have been influenced by stories of Gonzalo Guerrero, a Spaniard who famously landed in Yucatán in 1511 as the result of a shipwreck. Stories about the castaway were more legend than fact, but all agreed that Guerrero had joined the Maya and refused to rejoin Spanish society despite efforts by the Cortés expedition and others to recover him. A key reason he supposedly gave to Spanish messengers for his permanent transculturation? His tattoos. Chronicler Bernal Díaz claimed Guerrero told an envoy: “I am married and have three children, and they have me as a lord and captain … go yourself with God, for my face is tattooed and my ears are pierced. What will those Spaniards say of me if they see me like this?”

Rolena Adorno has argued that the Guerrero tales reflected Spanish fears of hidden heretics or conversos undermining religious purity. In turn, Guerrero’s decision to stay with the Mayas may have reflected his fear of those fears. The stories also registered concern that appearance, behavior, and identity were all easily mutable: Guerrero’s tattoos might transform him, irrevocably, into a Mayan warrior.