The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  From the moment Westerners “discovered” it, surfing took on the status of an outsider activity. In every surf-related log entry, journal passage, travelogue, and monograph, the division between the surfer and nonsurfers is always implied and often explicit. It couldn’t have been otherwise, given prevailing Age of Enlightenment ideas on racial hierarchy, which studiously ordered the peoples of the world—with the dark-skinned always ranked at the bottom. (“It is a serious question,” Voltaire said about Africans, “whether they are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them.”)

  But just as Western newcomers to Hawaii granted themselves a race-based intellectual and cultural superiority, the natives were understood to have a huge congenital advantage in the water. The visitors knew their place. And it was on the beach, fully dressed, in the shade, watching the local wave-riders with the same kind of rapt delight and disbelief they’d give to a circus high-wire act.

  There were exceptions. Some looked on with a wistfulness that bordered on envy. “Many a man from abroad who has witnessed this exhilarating play has no doubt wished that he were free and able to share in it himself,” a nineteenth-century American traveler wrote, “and for my part, I should like nothing better, if I could do it, than to get balanced on a board just before a great rushing wave.”

  An unknown number of visitors did in fact strip down and try it themselves. Most of Captain Cook’s noncommissioned Jack Tar sailors were illiterate and therefore all but invisible to history, but there are indications that at least a few, perhaps having already been fed and seduced by natives during shore leave, were persuaded into shallow water and launched into a few gentle rollers. Discovery midshipman George Gilbert wrote of the Hawaiian surfboard in 1779, saying that “the most expert of our people”—his crewmates—“could not keep upon them half a minute without rolling off.” The phrasing seems to suggest that Gilbert and his friends at least tried surfboard paddling, however unsuccessfully.

  In one of the first documented cases of a non-Hawaiian giving the sport a try, a handsome and athletic Yale University scientist named Chester Lyman, visiting Honolulu in 1846, wrote that he “had the pleasure of taking a surf ride towards the beach in the native style,” and that he found the experience “swift and very pleasant.” But in general, the vast majority of visitors, and even of first-generation Euro-American immigrants to Hawaii, gave surfing a wide miss. As a visiting whaler summed up in 1841, the sport simply had “too terrific an aspect for a foreigner to attempt.”

  A Sport in Decline

  From reading nineteenth-century surf literature, Hawaii seems nearly partitioned, with the natives “frolicking and gamboling” in the ocean while the foreigners watch on the beach and gasp in admiration. But there was contact, of course. Hawaiians nearly perished for it, along with their favorite sport. In 1895, anthropologist and missionary son Nathaniel Emerson wrote about surfing in something very close to the past tense. “We cannot but mourn its decline, [and] today is hard to find a surfboard outside of our museums and private collections.” Emerson’s essay was about Hawaiian sports and pastimes. But he was in effect doing a postmortem on an “ancient” culture that had been alive and thriving just 120 years earlier.

  FRENCH ENGRAVING, 1873.

  Most of the decline was from imported sickness and disease. After centuries of mid-Pacific isolation, the Hawaiian immune system was all but defenseless against the assorted germs, pathogens, and viruses brought by the Westerners. Less than a year after their first three-night stopover on Kauai and Niihau, Cook’s men landed in Kealakekua Bay to find that venereal disease had already traveled the length of the island chain; some of the natives who paddled out to meet them were covered in a syphilitic rash. Over the next few decades, further contact with outsiders brought cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, measles, flu, mumps, small pox, scarlet fever, dengue fever, bubonic plague, and leprosy, most of which moved unchecked through the local population. At the time of Cook’s arrival, an estimated four hundred thousand Hawaiians lived on the islands. By 1896 the number had been reduced to just over thirty thousand.

  “THE DECLINE AND DISCONTINUANCE OF THE USE OF THE SURF-BOARD, AS CIVILIZATION ADVANCES, MAY BE ACCOUNTED FOR BY THE INCREASE IN MODESTY, INDUSTRY, OR RELIGION.”

  —Reverend Hiram Bingham

  It wasn’t just the terrible new diseases that reshaped Hawaii. Native custom and culture were under attack as well, particularly with the arrival of American missionaries.

  On a brisk late-October afternoon in 1819, seven evangelical “Pioneer Company” Calvinists and their church-matched wives left Boston Harbor on the brig Thaddeus. Their assigned task was to both “civilize and save” the natives—or “savages,” to use the missionaries’ preferred term—and to “cover those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, and schools and churches.” It was an act of severance as much as it was a mission. American Protestants in general had taken steps toward reform and liberalization, and Calvinists, appalled at such moral compromise, were distancing themselves by various means from an America that they felt had become dangerously heretical.

  A HONOLULU-BASED AMERICAN MISSIONARY FAMILY, 1850.

  SERMON IN KAILUA, HAWAII.

  Five months and eighteen thousand miles later, Thaddeus arrived on Hawaii’s Kona Coast, not far from where Captain Cook had landed forty years before. Missionary leader Hiram Bingham wrote in his journals that the boat was immediately surrounded by an oceangoing throng “of every age, sex, and rank, swimming, floating on surf-boards, sailing in canoes.” Bingham continued with his first impressions: “The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering and almost naked savages, was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others, with firmer nerve, continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim, ‘Can these be human beings?’” Bingham’s moralizing tone largely defined the entire missionary experience.

  For their part, Hawaiians may well have wondered nearly the same about the missionaries, if for no other reason than their wardrobe, which couldn’t have been any less appropriate to the tropics: woolen frock coats and high-collar shirts for the men; stockings, corsets, flannel petticoats, neck-to-ankle long-sleeve gingham dresses for the women; and lace-up leather shoes for both. The newcomers were prone to heat rash and other skin ailments. “Our hair is so damp with perspiration,” one missionary wife wrote to her sister, in a note accompanying a daguerreotype image of her and her husband, “that it has a glossy appearance.”

  Thaddeus arrived at an unexpectedly fortuitous moment, at least for missionary work. King Kamehameha I, the island’s great unifier, had died just a year earlier, and his heir soon renounced Hawaii’s kapu system—the cornerstone for native religion, law, and culture for hundreds of years. With Hawaiian society in turmoil, and with the help of royal and governmental patronage, the missionaries quickly found themselves behind the scenes pushing and pulling the levers of power. Ultimately, fewer than 160 Protestant missionaries served in Hawaii before the project was decommissioned in 1853. None served in an official lawmaking capacity. But their influence on island policy and culture was so immediate and significant that islanders soon made reference to the “missionary monarchy.” Hundreds of small missionary-planned churches and schools were built across the island chain. Protestantism briefly became the nation’s religion. The Catholic church was even banned at one point. (After a dozen or so papists were rounded up and jailed, however, a French gunboat raced up from Tahiti, put a blockade on Honolulu harbor, and threatened to open fire on the town unless the ban was lifted and the prisoners released—which they were, quickly.)

  Meanwhile, a new code of missionary-backed laws and decrees were passed. Hula dancing—regarded by the prelates as carnality in motion—was banned. So was the heavenly scented flower lei necklace, which, as one missionary explained, could be worn in such a way among the natives as to have “a vicious meaning.” Surfing itself was never made illegal, but it was
tightly hemmed in by “blue laws” against gambling and nudity, both of which had been nearly as important to the sport as riding itself. Take away the sex and wagering and all of sudden the whole thing was a lot less attractive to most natives. Surfing also ran up against Calvinist standards of personal industry and enterprise, which left almost no time for recreation. Hiram Bingham saw this as a noble improvement, writing: “The decline and discontinuance of the use of the surf-board, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry, or religion.” Getting down to cases, Bingham noted that “the slate, the pen, and the needle, have in many instances been substituted for the surf-board, the bottle, and the hula.”

  Bingham made these changes sound voluntary. And to an extent, Hawaiians did willingly adapt or acquiesce to the missionary values—church attendance was high, and Christian converts included many Hawaiian leaders. But as Bingham and every other foreign-born clergyman soon learned, the natives were frequent and enthusiastic backsliders. A hardworking sandalwood laborer could drag a load off the hillside, catch a glimpse of the surf, drop everything, and make a sudden run for the beach. Or a devout Mother Hubbard–wearing wahine might leave church services and a half-hour later be nude and splashing water in the nearest bay. Hawaiians and the arrayed newcomers spent a lot of time locked in a cultural standoff. The “proneness of all [natives] to indulge in lascivious thoughts and actions,” a visiting American naval officer wrote, demanded a constant “watchfulness of the government, police, and missionaries.”

  The Hawaiian missionary project operated full strength for less than forty years; by the late 1850s, the whole campaign was winding down. But the effects lingered, and surfers would come to view missionaries with special contempt. As a rule, Protestant clergymen had been especially high profile in Hawaii: sermonizing, writing, organizing, and never straying too far from the idea that native indolence and leisure be replaced with industry, piety, and morality. The missionary, in other words, was surfing’s original authority figure. And that carries a lot of weight for a sport that in large part has defined itself through rebellion. Higher-ups wouldn’t voice concerns about the dangers and amorality associated with surfing for another fifty years, but surfers would not forget the first time.

  Meanwhile, as church influence waxed and waned, American-led business interests took over the Hawaiian economy, first with the sandalwood trade, then whaling and transoceanic provisioning, then finally—and most profitably—with the vast plantation system known as King Sugar, which ruled the islands’ trade until the mid-twentieth century. Missionary sons and grandsons crossed over to business. Young and ambitious entrepreneurs, speculators, and merchants, along with the families, flocked to Hawaii from the U.S. mainland and Europe. Hundreds of thousands of laborers from Japan, the Philippines, China, and Portugal were brought in to augment the disease-depleted native workforce in the cane fields. In Hawaii’s new wage-based plantation economy, you either worked or went hungry—another reason not to surf.

  Political fallout was inevitable. As planned by the mighty Honolulu business cartel known as the Big Five—with help by U.S. Navy gunboats and a few detachments of armed Marines—the monarchy was overthrown in 1893, and five years later the islands were formally annexed by the United States. The Hawaiian people and their culture reached a nadir. Queen Liliuokalani, their beloved head of state, had been put under house arrest. Business interests now held title to 90 percent of Hawaiian property. Honolulu, as one writer put it, was on its way to becoming “one of the liveliest and most dissolute complexes of grogshops and sailors’ whorehouses in the world.”

  Calculating the Damage

  Syphilis and cholera, new laws and prohibitions, endless work hours, overthrow and annexation—all these things conspired to remove wave-riders from Hawaiian lineups throughout the nineteenth century; the era came to be known as surfing’s own Dark Ages. But just how bad did things get? Modern sources almost all put the sport’s low point on a narrow continuum ranging from dire (“surfers had become an endangered species”) to defunct (“surfing had vanished”). Nineteenth-century reports, though, are more mixed.

  A LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY HAWAIIAN SURFER.

  A Lahaina source in 1848 wrote that “every little idle imp and lounger about the town devotes time [to] sporting in the surf,” and another Lahaina visitor noted that “both men and women, girls and boys, have time for this diversion . . . and the chiefs [also] take a turn or two.” An American observer four years later declared that surfing was “rapidly passing out of existence” and was now practiced “mostly by children,” but when writer Mark Twain visited a Big Island beach in 1872, he found “a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages” riding waves. In 1876, one report said that surfing was a “favorite game” of the natives, while another noted that surfing was “fast dying out.” In the mid-1880s, someone described seeing a dozen surfers riding a break in Hilo before a sizeable beach crowd, and a Hawaiian Almanac notice around that time declared that surfing had survived where other ancient native sports hadn’t, adding that there “are a few localities on each of the islands where this sport can be enjoyed equally by spectator and participant.”

  In 1891, the Journal of American Folk-Lore published an article titled “Some Hawaiian Pastimes,” which presented the sport as “once universally popular, and now but little seen.” The writer had asked six surfers to perform for him, but they hadn’t seemed very enthusiastic. “After standing for their photograph, the men removed all their garments, retaining only the malo, or loin-cloth, and walked into the sea, dragging or pushing their surf-boards.” A few children turned out on the beach to watch, but they were only “mildly interested in the sport.” Other written accounts from the period also suggested that the islanders’ skill level had dropped off; most riding was now done either prone or kneeling. “Old surf-riders,” one writer noted, “will tell you that none of the present generation have the skill and courage displayed by their ancestors.”

  Given the evidence, there’s no real way to make the case that surfing “vanished,” as later accounts would have it—not when six riders can be assembled together at short notice, on one beach, on one island. The sport indeed suffered a grievous loss in raw numbers. The Native Hawaiian population was cut by 90 percent in just over a hundred years, and the number of surfers was no doubt reduced by a similar amount and then some. But the sport was still pursued, especially in outlying areas less visited by missionaries, traders, and travelers. This impression is confirmed by a piece of mid-nineteenth century travel writing by Englishman Samuel S. Hill, who describes King Kamehameha III taking his surfboard and venturing out from the Western-influenced towns that had taken shape over the past few decades. The king did this, Hill wrote, to “quit the scenes which continually reminded him of the decrease of nationality among his subjects, and the loss of independence of his race.” Surfing was apparently still popular in small, out-of-the-way villages. But, as Hill concluded, it was “no longer played with the same spirit among the islanders wherever the Europeans are mingled among them.”

  By any measure, the nineteenth century was a disaster for surfing. By 1890, however, the worst was over. The Hawaiian immune system had toughened up. The missionaries were gone. The sport now entered a quiet but sustaining period, almost a second incubation. It lasted just a few years. There were no big changes in technique, or board design, or the number of participants. But the sport and its practitioners looked different somehow—at least to the world at large. Surfing had been described by Reverend Hiram Bingham in 1820 as the pastime of “chattering savages.” Now it was about to be reintroduced by swashbuckling writer Jack London as nothing less than “a royal sport for the natural kings of earth.”

  Chapter 2: Gliding Return 1900–1945

  THE GREAT REVIVAL WAIKIKI JACK LONDON “THE SPORT OF KINGS” OUTRIGGER CANOE CLUB ALEXANDER HUME FORD FREETH SURFING ARRIVES IN CALIFORNIA HAWAII’S BEACHBOY’S DUKE KAHA NAMOKU SURF-SHOOTING IN AUSTRAL
IA THE PACIFIC COAST SURF RIDING CHAMPIONSHIP’S TOM BLAKE PLANKS VS. HOLLOWS THE FIN SURFING THROUGH THE DEPRESSION SNOWY MCALISTER THE PALOS VERDES SURF CLUB STORM SURF: 1939 SAN ONOFRE PETE PETERS ON THE HOT CURL MAKAHA SUNSET BEACH WOODY BROWN DEATH ON THE NORTH SHORE

  Surfing’s revival in the early twentieth century made perfect sense. Seascape painters and poets had already done their part by rehabilitating the public’s regard for the ocean—what had been seen as a roiling vastness filled with sea monsters and splintered boats was now viewed as a place of beauty, self-discovery, sensuality, godliness, even comfort. “Where rolled the ocean,” dashing Romantic poet and enthusiastic ocean swimmer Lord Byron wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “thereon was his home.” Coastal architecture did an about-face, too, literally, with buildings now designed to face the sea, rather than inland.

  Among the world’s industrialized countries, a burgeoning middle class was eager to enjoy a little well-earned seaside vacation, thanks to a booming Gilded Age economy, the introduction of mandated public holidays, and the debut of the automobile, along with safe and relatively cheap transoceanic ship travel. Then there was Theodore Roosevelt, America’s burly new president. A sportsman who hunted and trekked, and occasionally swam nude in the Potomac River, Roosevelt was evangelical in his praise of robust outdoor activity, and this also helped fuel a growing interest in the beach. Throughout the United Kingdom and much of the British Empire, beaches had once been gender segregated, and modesty created a demand for the horse-drawn “bathing machine”—a kind of one-person locker room on wheels allowing the swimmer to enter and exit the water in privacy. By the early 1900s, newly legalized mixed-sex beaches doomed both the bathing machine and Victorian-era fashions. Women especially went in for more daring costumes—calves, forearms, and the décolletage were all in breathtakingly plain sight by the turn of the century. The shorefront wasn’t yet sexualized to the degree it had been in ancient Hawaii, but it was a big step in that direction.