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Cover Legend: "Portrait of a New Zealand Man," (c.1769); pen and wash by Sydney Parkinson (c. 1745-1771). At the behest of the Royal Society, London, and underwritten by John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, James Cook set out on a series of three monumental voyages between 1768 and 1780 to explore uncharted territories of the Pacific. His crew of 100 men was accompanied by noted naturalists (e.g., Sir Joseph Banks, FRS), astronomers, botanists, physicians and artists such as Sydney Parkinson and John Webber. Cook's team collected biological and botanical specimens, kept detailed written records and produced documentary drawings and maps from Tierra del Fuego to the northernmost regions of the Bering Strait. Cook's expeditions were the most profusely illustrated of any voyages before the advent of photography. Much of this material had never before been reported to the Western world: the novel and often anomalous specimens fueled a passion for taxonomy which became a main theme of 18th century science. The portrait on the cover is that of Otegoowgoow, the son of a chief of the Bay Islands, his face fully tattooed: lines were cut in the skin with a blunt edged iron tool and then stained with an indelible mixture of soot and oil. He wears greenstone ear pendants, a comb in his hair and a fish tooth around his neck. Both men and women were tattooed as a sign of social eminence and to disguise signs of aging. Darwin commented on this New Zealand tradition in his Beagle Diary, December 1835: "One object of the tattowing is to prevent a change of features after middle age." One native woman commented, "We really must just have a few lines on our lips; else when we grow old our lips will shrivel and we shall be so very ugly." One might consider this kind of tattooing an early form of cosmetic surgery. From an exhibition at the MBL/WHOI Library, curated by Ann Weissmann (http://www.mblwhoilibrary.org/exhibits/cook/).