Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  This was George Freeth, the half-Hawaiian grandson of an Irish4 shipowner. A swimmer and Waikiki lifeguard, Freeth is thought by many to be the true godfather of the art. He was unusually adept at surfing standing up, for one thing. Vertical wave riding was a skill that barely survived the late nineteenth-century decline in surfing, when it fell victim to the twin scourges of fanaticism and fever: those few Hawaiians who still surfed employed a technique that involved merely speeding inward on their boards while lazily lying prone on top. The erotic, arching elegance of a standing surfer that had so entranced and shocked the first visitors a century before had now all but disappeared—until Freeth revived it, astonishing all who witnessed him. “I saw him tearing in,” wrote London, “standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” Young indeed—Freeth was just nineteen years old, champion of all islanders.

  So Freeth taught Ford, Ford taught London, and London made the first attempt to teach the world. And surfing’s transit across the color line can be seen vividly in this trinity’s progression, because Freeth was bronzed and half-Hawaiian, Ford was white and wellborn, and London was a caricature of a white man’s man—to such a degree that many think of him today as a casual racist, maybe even a deliberate one. “The White Man must be rescued,” he once wrote, demanding that a white heavyweight boxer come out of retirement to defeat the black man who then held the title, which London saw as an affront to his kind.

  London wrote about the surfing lesson that finally snared him. “Ah, delicious moment when I first felt that breaker grip and fling me. On I dashed, a hundred and fifty feet, and subsided with the breaker on the sand. From that moment, I was lost.”

  He wrote his essay for the October 1907 edition of the Woman’s Home Companion—then a vastly popular monthly, which had agreed to take all of London’s dispatches from the Snark. It appeared under the heading “A Royal Sport: Riding the South Sea Surf.” The essay created enough of a stir for it to experience the Edwardian equivalent of going viral, appearing in slightly amended form and titled “Joys of the Surf Rider” in England’s equally popular Pall Mall Magazine. Eventually a fleshed-out version appeared in London’s long-planned book The Cruise of the Snark, giving unprecedented book-length credibility to a sport that had hitherto been little more than marginal. Now it was potentially everybody’s—and lest there be any doubt about where London stood on the racial spectrum, “[W]hat a sport,” he declared it, “for white men.”

  Freeth was the “brown Mercury” of this chapter’s epigraph, the inspirational vision that set London’s mind racing, and his pen dipped in its customary purple. Freeth was properly flattered by all the oily references to him in the Woman’s Home Companion article, and asked London to write him a letter of introduction, so that he might try to peddle his wares (only his surfing skills were of value) on the American mainland. London obliged, and Freeth promptly took off for California, with a one-way ticket to plant a seed in what would turn out to be the most fertile of soils.

  Los Angeles in 1907 was a modest city of some 275,000 people, three-quarters of them newcomers. It was a place of eccentricity and abundance, a place of half-made mansions and modest migrant houses, of churches catering to a bewildering mix of beliefs, of sanatoriums and asylums, of endless orange groves, of forests of derricks and drilling rigs from a just-beginning oil boom, of small factories and stores, of a fledging movie industry, and with a vastness of beaches that were little more than windswept and half-deserted dunes. Local residents didn’t go to the beaches. For recreation, they preferred to head inland; a popular amusement was the potting of rabbits from streetcar windows. Few took much interest in the pleasures of the sea, which was seen as a wild and dangerous place, with enormous waves that could break a man to pieces. Moreover, there was no easy way to get to those dunes, nowhere in beach country where one might stay, no base for the beginning of any kind of beach culture.

  But there was money about, and there were local moguls—Henry Huntington, who ran streetcar lines; and Abbott Kinney, who made a fortune from his vast tobacco company5—who decided they could manufacture a beach culture. So they concocted plans to develop separate and competing portions of the coastline, each tycoon vying for the leisured pursuits of the new leisured classes.

  The undeveloped and untamed coast in question ran for twenty miles, a pristine stretch of sunset-facing Pacific oceanfront between the massif of the Santa Monica Mountains to the north and the old displaced schists of the crags of the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the south. Kinney claimed beaches up north, and at a site two miles from the small city of Santa Monica, he constructed a bizarre and very costly network of canals. There were six of them, gaslit, plied by gondoliers, and with arch-bridged stretches of freshwater reservoirs that ran along the shoreline, just in from the sea. With more imagination than commercial good sense, perhaps, Kinney placed antique-looking stores along them and then named his creation for the Venice that he had so admired in Italy. The canals were eventually filled in and replaced by roads, but Venice Beach remains.

  Henry Huntington, nephew of one of the backers of the transcontinental railroad, who was in amiable competition with this same uncle for the laying of rail links within Los Angeles, built his coastal experiment rather more modestly than Kinney, and well to the south. He arranged, presciently, that one of the lines for the red-enameled streetcars of his Pacific Electric railway company would terminate at his stretch of beachfront, bringing customers out of the city and to the ocean. And to give them a destination, a place to while away the hours, he began to build an immense hotel, with a saltwater plunge pool and a Moroccan-themed ballroom and innumerable restaurants. He named it for the previously little-known mile of coast that he had purchased: the Redondo Hotel, in Redondo Beach.

  City dwellers would come, in steadily swelling numbers, either to sit and take their ease beside the big Moorish arched windows of Huntington’s Redondo, or else at window-side tables in the chic faux-Italian espresso houses of Kinney’s Venice. Their eyes would invariably be drawn westward, and they would gaze, mesmerized by the view and the colors, out at the ceaseless rolling thunder of the wild Pacific waves.

  Until one day, in the late summer of 1907, there appeared in the waves off Venice Beach the figure of a man, who was doing what no rational Angeleno thought possible: he was walking on water.

  Or at least, he seemed to be walking, until the waves brought him in and crashed him down onto the sand directly in front of the astonished watchers—whereupon this vision of muscular manhood stepped lightly off the eight-foot-long board that had seemingly carried him, standing, all the way in from the breaking surf. He gave a cheery wave to the watchers, picked up his redwood board, walked it back out into the sea, leaped aboard, paddled it right out toward the horizon, to where the inrushing waves originated, and then stood and seemingly walked back in again on top of one of them, at great speed and with unimaginable grace and elegance; and after landing, he went back and did it again.

  This man was Freeth, the bronzed Mercury of Waikiki, putting on a show, a show that, just by chance, a local reporter happened to witness. On July 22, 1907, Henry Huntington read the resulting essay, “Surf Riders Have Drawn Attention,” and in an instant of commercial genius, he realized how best to promote his hotel, and have visitors flocking to Redondo Beach by rail from downtown.

  By the end of the year, Freeth found himself an official employee of the Pacific Electric railway, charged with a duty that would be the envy of all. Twice each weekend day, at 2:00 p.m. and again at 4:00 p.m., clad in a tight green woolen singlet and close-fitting green woolen shorts, he would paddle his board out to the surf line and, on cue to an announcement boomed from a Redondo Hotel megaphone, catch a wave, stand, and then soar effortlessly back onto the beach.

  For the surfers of the American mainland, Freeth is the sport’s acknowledged godfather; yet he is now almost forgotten. He was a quiet, patient, rather solemn and unremarkable man—in pictures, suffuse
d with an air of melancholy, never quite the bronzed Mercury of Jack London’s overheated first essay. He taught surfing skills to local youngsters, and he demonstrated the sport to thousands. He worked as a lifeguard, drove a motorcycle to the more distant rescues, and invented the paddleboard as a means of quickly reaching the distressed and the drowning.

  He lived on his own, frugally, quite without friends, and he never married. He died, alone, in the influenza epidemic of 1918–19. He was thirty-five years old. A bronze bust of him was erected as a memorial on the Redondo Beach boardwalk, with his back to the sea, his gaze directed toward a multistory parking garage. The plaque reads, THE FIRST SURFER IN THE UNITED STATES. (The original one was stolen, but it was replaced.) Few beyond the beach know his name. He is probably better known in Ireland.

  One final figure then set the capstone on what would come to be coastal America’s new obsession—but this man was charismatic and noble where Freeth was sober and unprepossessing. Moreover, this man was truly bronzed, because he was truly Hawaiian, albeit with a first name that was very much of the white man’s world. He was Duke Kahanamoku, a swimmer to beat all and a surfer to crown all, and if not the father of surfing, then the first true surfing icon, its greatest of ambassadors, to America and beyond.

  His father was a clerk with the Honolulu police who had also been named Duke, in honor of the British naval officer and son of Queen Victoria the Duke of Edinburgh.6 He passed on the name to his oldest child of nine, who promptly rose to fill the ducal image by being regally tall, utterly charming, and eternally polite, with good looks that drew crowds of admirers—“the most magnificent human male God ever put on this earth,” according to one of his fans. He dropped out of school to become a creature of the beach, endlessly swimming, playing beach volleyball and water polo, and taking surfing to a new level of graceful competence.

  The Hawaiian Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku, named by his policeman father for the Duke of Edinburgh, was the first true ambassador of surfing, touring the world to give exhibitions of graceful wave riding.* [Los Angeles Times.]

  Kahanamoku’s swimming first took him around the world. He won Olympic medals: a gold and a silver in 1912 in Stockholm, two golds in 1920 in Antwerp, and a silver in 1924 in Paris (where his younger brother Sam won the bronze, and the actor who would later play Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, won the gold). And if swimming took him places, then it was to these places that Duke Kahanamoku spread the message of surfing, far and wide.

  On his way back from Stockholm, for instance, this gentle giant of a man gave demonstrations of wave riding in Atlantic City, in Rockaway Beach, and in Sea Gate, at the Manhattan end of Coney Island. He did the same in California, at Long Beach—which had already somewhat caught the craze, thanks to the efforts of Freeth a little way to the north—and then set out to come full circle back across the Pacific to Hawaii.

  Two years later he was demonstrating his prowess in Australia. This world-famous Olympic swimmer, the best in the world in the 100-meter, showed off before thousands of swimming-obsessed Sydney-siders. He staged his performance at Freshwater Beach, displaying how he could ride effortlessly and for hours on a board that he had planed down from a hastily hewn slab of sugar pine bought from a local lumberyard. He had designed the massive sixteen-foot-long board to resemble the old olo once used by Hawaiian royalty; and since there was room for more than one on its aircraft carrier–scale flight deck, at one point he dazzled his Australian audience by taking along a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Isabel Letham, who stood just in front of him on the board as he veered and twisted and flew and spun around on the wave face, picking her up each time she tipped or stumbled, and never losing sight of bringing her safely back to shore. Miss Letham, who went on to teach swimming in northern California, lived until she was ninety-five years old, surfing well into old age and generally regarded as Australia’s First Lady of the sport.

  And by the end of the First World War it was indeed now becoming a proper, recognized sport. As it spread around the world—slowly, fitfully, initially in pockets and very much on the margins—it developed rules and standards, and there were contests and championships. Australia was the first country to hold regular competitions: the Surf Life Saving Association organized races, to see how fast a surfboard-mounted paddler could reach an imagined swimmer in difficulties—a fine demonstration of how a plank board could be used for the common good, if not perhaps quite the exercise in wave-bound joy that had been inspired in Hawaii and was now sweeping California.

  The first proper contests were held in Southern California, in 1928—and these squadrons of once car-crazy youngsters, infused with the cash and good cheer that marked the beginnings of the Jazz Age, had scouted the entire coastline for the best possible wave breaks. Redondo Beach and Venice may have looked good in the early days, but now Corona del Mar, south of Los Angeles, on the road to San Diego and Mexico, was decreed the Valhalla of the moment; it was there, with the dropping of an “aerial bomb” firework to kick things off, that the Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships got under way—with a “thrilling rough-water surf-board race” culminating the day’s water sports and setting in train the whole complicated business of judging who might be the best of the surfers around.

  Judging was never an easy business, and remains so. With the wind and water endlessly capricious, with differences of opinion over whether speed trumps style, whether grace trumps courage, the grading of surfing took many years to evolve. But contest rules were laid down, and a system of award points was established among those organizing in Corona del Mar. As the word spread, surfers from around the world arrived (from Peru, from France, from the Basque country) and, in later years, would transmute the Pacific coast of the United States into the premier international gathering place, the rule-setting headquarters, and the ultimate arbiter of a fast-growing pastime that was now on its way to becoming a very popular and profitable business.

  At first the money was being made by the ancillaries—by the owners of hot dog stands and the peddlers of beer, of suntan oil and beachwear. Then serious commerce started to take hold, and with it came commercial competition, and with that came the constant handmaiden of technology, the kind of technology that offered improvements to a surfer’s speed, and ways of augmenting his waterborne grace and elegance—and thus his chances of winning.

  As the century progressed, neither commerce nor technology ever lessened its grip. The core discoveries, which started to be made in the mid-1930s, had all to do with materials. How could a surfboard be made lighter, stronger, more flexible? Was wood—which floated, true, and thus had a natural advantage—the only suitable material? In 1935, Popular Science offered readers diagrams of how to build the ideal surfboard. It was made entirely of wood. It was eleven feet long, barely two feet at its widest point, with a core of lightweight balsa, ribs of spruce, and dowels and molding of redwood.

  Refinements were added: different shapes for the nose and tail, a fin here, a keel there, convexities, hollows, concavities, taperings, crowns. Some boards were covered with elaborate marquetry, fancy mahogany on the outside, quite empty inside. Then came the breakthrough discovery of resins, and of fiberglass, and Bakelite. The traditional woods were replaced or augmented by different kinds of resin shells, and their noses were armored with lightweight fiber, to prevent cracking and bruising from the constant beach sand hammering of a typical summer’s afternoon.

  Girl boards—the term would never be used today—were made and became vastly popular in the town of Malibu, where girl surfing truly took off on these smaller, nippier, and very fast inventions. The emergence of young and highly competent female surfers (no longer just decorative figureheads for the boys’ amusement) brought with it an erotically charged energy that enfolds Malibu still. Men claimed that competition with the crews of very good surfer women affected their own style, improved the water performance of all, and fueled the need for better and better equipment.

  There was a cer
tain 1950s fickleness to the sport, with sudden trends, sudden fashions. For a while everyone searched for boards of a down feather lightness, until technological advances allowed some to be made as light as twenty pounds, which resulted in some being tossed about on the sea like chaff, to their riders’ evident peril. Then (in reaction, no doubt) there came a new trend for heavier boards, with more stability, and with greater heft and purchase in the ever bigger waves to which these Californians were now being increasingly drawn.

  The quintessentially American desire for steadily more superlative experiences, in surfing as in just about everything, was fast pushing the sport to its limits—which is why technology was and still is so crucial. The languorous pleasure that had satisfied the Hawaiians for so many centuries was simply not good enough for mainland Americans—and whether that spoiled or enhanced the experience of surfing is a matter for debate to this day.

  For Hobie Alter, there was no question. To this quiet and sober young Californian, the son of a wealthy orange farmer, improvement and innovation were everything. He had started his teenage surfing life as a shaper—the word has little meaning beyond surfing—working in a tiny beachfront store, financed by his father, sculpting lengths of balsa wood imported from Ecuador into configurations suitable for the waves and riders on and near Manhattan Beach. He set up a shingle: Hobie Surfboards. He set up his board-making business just a mile or so south of where George Freeth had displayed his skills half a century before. Now the beaches in front of his shop were thronged by surfers, and his shop, which this twenty-one-year-old ran with scrupulous care, did well.