The History of Surfing

By Matt Warshaw

This in-depth, photo-packed look at the history and culture of surfers is “meticulously researched, smartly written . . . required reading” (Outside Magazine).

Matt Warshaw knows more about surfing than any other person on the planet. After five years of research and writing, Warshaw, a former professional surfer and editor of Surfing magazine, has crafted an unprecedented, definitive history of the sport and the culture it has spawned.

With more than 250 rare photographs, The History of Surfing reveals and defines this sport with a voice that is authoritative, funny, and wholly original. The obsessive nature of Warshaw’s endeavor is matched only by the obsessive nature of surfers, who are brought to life in this book in many tales of daring, innovation, athletic achievement, and the offbeat personalities who have made surfing history happen.

“The world’s most comprehensive chronicler of the surfing scene.” —Andy Martin, The Independent

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452100944

Book preview

Introduction

By Matt Warshaw

This was always going to be a big double-thick slab of surf book. By definition, it had to circle the world and move through the centuries. I wanted to clean and jerk the entire gorgeous sprawling mess of a sport—hoist it up where surfers and nonsurfers alike could see it anew and in full—and that wasn’t going to happen in any kind of abbreviated form.

Nonetheless, the list of goals I set out with (and held to) was fairly short. First, I wanted to insert the bits and pieces of data that usually go missing from the sport’s historic record. This meant a lot of sifting through the archival alluvium, but the information was all there: sales records and board specs, production costs for a first-generation surf movie, the number of annual surf-boom-era graduates at a Sydney surf school. The sport’s history doesn’t live or die on these little pushpins of information. By fixing them into place, however, the story doesn’t flap around so much; it’s better grounded. Here’s what I mean. Remember those beautifully lacquered solid-wood Depression-age surfboards? For decades, received wisdom was that they weighed a knee-buckling one hundred pounds. Pick up a hundred pounds of anything and walk from one end of the block to the other. Now imagine doing the same thing before and after every surf session. Equipment that heavy might not have killed the sport outright, but it would have dragged things down considerably. As it turns out, the average board made in the 1930s weighed about fifty pounds. Does it change anything, or lessen the narrative zing, to deflate little surf-world myths like this? Maybe, sometimes, but it’s the truth. And even so—fifty pounds is still pretty damn heavy.

Demythologizing the sport, in fact, was another goal of mine. I couldn’t wait to sledge away at the cheerleading and boosterism and perjured nobility layered onto most works of surf history. Pulling down shoddy historiographic handicraft is, by itself, I admit, pretty satisfying. But the real purpose—and the real pleasure—comes from the fact that the mortal, ground-level version of events is, almost without exception, more compelling than the legend or the myth. Surfing history has time and again been presented for two reasons: to convince nonsurfers that riding waves is an honest-to-goodness sport, rather than a beachfront novelty, and to reassure surfers themselves that their days and years spent chasing down swells is not only justified but virtuous—that their chosen recreation is in fact more of a calling. The rest of the world now thinks surfing is great. And that’s fine. No harm there. The second part, though, has done the sport a disservice. Let’s revel in surfing’s grace and beauty, and applaud the surfer’s bravery, innovation, and humor. Absolutely. But let’s also acknowledge the sexism, the pettiness, the hubris, and all the other messy human qualities that are stitched and glued into the sport’s fabric. Leave room for second thoughts. One of my favorite quotes about the surfing life comes from Hawaii’s Ken Bradshaw. Invariably portrayed as a brash, disciplined surf-warrior—and celebrated in the late 1990s as the man who’d ridden the biggest wave in the sport’s history up to that point—Bradshaw mused late in his career about all the opportunities I missed because I’m so obsessively addicted to surfing. He then added: Don’t be me. I don’t have what most human beings want.

Not for a moment do I think that Bradshaw, if given the chance, would really change his life or career. His ride has been long and thrilling, and steeped in glory. Only when he reckons the cost of his all-encompassing pursuit, though, does he becomes a three-dimensional human being, rather than a two-dimensional stock character. What’s true for Bradshaw is true for the sport in general. Surf history is better when it’s not moonlighting as surf advocacy. Surfing is more clearly seen, and more authentically honorable, when it steps off its pedestal.

* * *

I turned in a final draft of this book in mid-2009, after four years of research and writing. Throughout, I was half-waiting for a surf-world epiphany or two to land on me. It never happened. My biases and preferences, though, all came through intact. The mechanics of surfboard design, and all the attendant hydrodynamics, still bore me just as much as the forces behind design change—the rivalries, the spark of an idea, trial and error, dumb luck—still fascinate me. It’s the same with surf competition. While I consider 90-some percent of surf contests to be silly distractions, the best events and the top competitors can distill a moment in the sport like nothing else. Nat Young’s amazing performance in the 1966 World Championships in San Diego was like hearing the thunder from the impending shortboard revolution almost a full year before it came into view. In the end, board design and competition were both given prominent roles in this book because, as often as not, they’re the quickest, most efficient route to the sport’s most interesting places.

What really attracts me, though, is tracing and understanding the jagged fault line between surf culture and culture at large. It’s running down simple things like the etymology of dude, as well as following longer, episodic storylines: how Kathy Gidget Kohner went from an unknown fifteen-year-old Malibu mascot to the subject of a hit movie, which in turn put an entire generation of new surfers in the water—most of whom decided to hate Gidget as a surf-Eden destroyer until they later came to love it as a memento of their beachgoing youth. Almost every inch in this particular acre of surf history is deliciously fraught with morality plays, from the small and personal—Malibu antihero Mickey Dora selling out to the Beach Blanket Bingo franchise, for example—to the socially charged, like the pro surfing tour’s decision to hold contests in apartheid-era South Africa.

The nonsurfing world has shaped and formed the sport more deeply than surfers care to admit. Surf culture, in turn, has traveled and settled over mountains, plains, and cities, from coast to coast, nation to nation. Watching these two forces react to each other, for me, never gets dull: the circling and grinding and ignoring and ridiculing—and, these days, more often than not, collaborating.

Former world champion Fred Hemmings’ belief is that surfing, for the most part, is nothing more than "a clean, healthy S-P-O-R-T. I wouldn’t argue the point. A version of surf history can in good faith be told mostly in terms of athletic achievement and the sport’s advances in equipment and technique. But that makes for a flat, narrow portrait. So many other narratives—equally important and a lot more colorful—have to be accounted for, most of them having little or nothing to do with sport. They involve Hollywood, politics, music, fashion, and the great digital vastness. (Surf the fucking net indeed, an Australian surfer wrote with righteous disdain in 1999, the nonsurfing world having gone one appropriation too far. Give us back our verb!") Mostly, though, athletic terms alone could never adequately explain the abiding fanaticism—from mild to deranged, ridiculous and sublime—that to such a large degree has defined the character and history of surfing. Hemmings is right. Surfing is a sport. But it’s not just a sport. To one degree or another, I can also be persuaded by all those who cast their view of wave-riding into the near and far regions of art, religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. Hemmings’ sport is somebody else’s return to the briny comfort of the womb. Or their mortal imitation of Jesus’ walk on water. Or meditation. Or modern dance. At the very least, this rush to load a pretty straightforward recreational act with meaning puts a light on the towering level of devotion surfing inspires. Except it often feels like more than that. Veteran surf journalist Matt George, a friend of mine for over thirty years, once said that our drive to ride waves re-creates the amoebic sea-to-land dash through the Paleozoic shorebreak and allows us to touch the elemental magma of our souls. My response in the late eighties, when I first read that, was to laugh out loud. Now I smile and shrug and think it’s just an alternative (if slightly purple) way to express something I feel as well.

The last and most important thing I hoped to accomplish with this book was to make room for all the different kinds of people who’ve been attracted to wave-riding through the decades; to let a full cast of characters each have their turn front and center. Stretch it out to comfortably include everyone from the diehard sportsman to the soul-magma proselytizer—and that pretty much gets you to five hundred pages, right there.

A Note On Wave Measurement

Purposely downplaying wave height became a common surf-world practice in the late 1960s. Before that, surfers generally tried to give an honest appraisal, measuring from crest to trough at the wave’s peak height. If anything, they exaggerated. Once the trendsetting Hawaiians began to reduce their estimates, however, particularly with regard to large waves—showing a dismissive cool toward an environment that was pretty much terrifying to everyone else, non-Hawaiian surfers included—it was just a matter of time before the rest of the sport fell in line. Soon, a wave described as eight feet on the Hawaiian scale was more than double the height of what surfers from 1959 would have called an eight-footer. You could still describe a wave’s actual size, but you had to preface the number with face height or on the face to signal that it wasn’t the real height. It was all pretty silly.

Meanwhile, a lot of numbers were dropped from the wave-height measurement altogether. There was no such thing as a nine-foot wave. Or an eleven-, thirteen-, or fourteen-foot wave. Starting at twenty feet, the heights came only in five-foot increments. These were all surf-world traditions by the early 1970s.

In the nineties, after big-wave riders began using Jet Skis to catch waves half-again bigger than anything previously ridden, the trough-to-crest measurement made a comeback. The idea now was to quantifiably dramatize the difference between old- and new-generation big-wave surfing, and estimates were once again made to the foot. After much deliberation, a panel of surfing experts declared Makua Rothman’s winning wave in the 2002 XXL Big Wave competition to be precisely sixty-six feet. Also, online surf reports and forecasts, hoping to standardize the metric, began reporting face height.

Both systems are in use as of 2010, but most surfers—so far resisting the efforts of surf forecasters—still measure waves at somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of their face height. This book, too, defaults to the Hawaiian scale. When a trough-to-crest measurement is used, the change is noted. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to make the whole thing a little easier by skipping numbers altogether and using terms like waist-high, head-high, or double-overhead, and so on.

Chapter 1: Out of the Blue Pre-1900

SURFING IN 1000 B.C.      THE PERUVIAN THEORY      BUILDING AND RIDING THE CABALLITO      THE KON-TIKI CONNECTION      POLYNESIA BY CANOE      SURFING IN ANCIENT HAWAII      GODS, KINGS, PEASANTS: EVERY-ONE SURFS      KONA COAST      SURFING MYTHOLOGY      COMPETITION: WIN OR DIE      BOARDMAKING WITH WOOD AND STONE      THE ROYAL OLO      THE BELOVED ALAIA      CAPTAIN COOK      INTRODUCING THE MOST SUPREME PLEASURE      MISSIONARY RULE COMES TO HAWAII REVEREND HIRAM BINGHAM      MARK TWAIN GOES SURFING      A SPORT IN DECLINE      KING KAMEHAMEHA      RIDING OUT THE PESTILENCE

On a sunny fall morning in 1987, Felipe Pomar of Lima walked into the California offices of Surfer magazine, right on time for his scheduled meeting, ready to talk about a subject guaranteed to put a blank expression on just about any wave-rider’s face—surfing in ancient Peru. Hawaii, of course, has always been regarded as surfing’s birthplace, but Pomar wanted to propose an alternate theory of the sport’s origins. He was too smart to think he was going to waltz into Surfer and change surfing’s foundation story before lunch break. Still, the topic meant enough to him that he wanted to try. Smiling confidently, he shook hands with the editorial staff.

Pomar had a unique kind of highbred surf celebrity. He was the gracious and urbane son of a plantation owner, knew his way around a polo field, and owned a tuxedo. Twenty-two years earlier he’d charged his way to a surprise win in the 1965 World Surfing Championships, held in the powerful waves just south of his hometown. Surfer labeled him the Wild Bull of Punta Rocas, but the tag didn’t stick—there was nothing wild or animal-like about a man who wore pressed chinos, kept an appointment book, and dined at his beachfront club with bankers, industrialists, and Latin American presidents. Anyway, the Bull was already taken by hulking California big-wave leatherneck Greg Noll, who with his penchant for bar-fighting and X-rated banter, really earned the nickname.

For his Surfer meeting, Pomar carried with him a neatly crafted bundle of reeds, squared at one end, wickedly tapered and flipped-up at the other. This, he told the Surfer editors, was a scale-model caballito, or little horse. Villagers in Huanchaco, five hundred miles north of Lima, used the caballito for nearshore fishing and to ride waves for fun and sport. Pomar looked at the caballito for a moment. The Hawaiians, he asked with a little rhetorical tilt of the head, have been surfing for how long? One thousand years? Fifteen hundred? He nodded toward the caballito. Three thousand years, he said. That’s how long they’ve been riding waves in Huanchaco. Three thousand years—maybe longer.

Pomar’s visit to Surfer coincided with a new period of archaeological discovery in Peru that moved the country into the first rank of ancient civilizations. An irrigation canal in the north was estimated to be over six thousand years old. An unearthed 150-acre desert metropolis named Caral, with artifacts dating back to 2600 B.C., was filled with plazas and canals, amphitheaters, fitted-stone multifloor buildings, musical instruments, and pyramids older than those of Egypt—a few outré anthropologists had begun referring to Caral as The Mother of All Civilizations. Many of these finds underscore ancient Peru’s close relationship with the ocean: wave motifs decorate bowls and fabrics and are stamped into the gold crowns of warrior-priest headgear. Towering bas-relief courtyard walls feature the unmistakable horizontal lines of an incoming swell. Wave-riding, or the suggestion of wave-riding, appears as well. A two-thousand-year-old frieze shows a deity charging across the night sky on a crescent moon in the shape of a caballito. In a matched ceramic set, two Peruvians straddle their reed boats, heads low, hands and eyes forward, in a pose suggesting a fast ride toward shore. Both figures grin broadly.

Surfer let Pomar write a feature story on ancient Peruvian wave-riding. A fine bit of avocational scholarship, Surfing in 1000 B.C. (appearing in the April 1988 issue) was informed, serious, and well-researched. Launched into the vast Day-Glo-hued expanse of late-eighties surfing, however, it vanished almost without a trace. A subscriber from Florida wrote in to cite a zoological paper on the wave-utilizing properties of clams, and noted that prehistoric mollusks were undoubtedly ‘hanging valves’ long before man first dragged a tree branch into the shorebreak. Nobody else bothered to comment.

Surfing in Ancient Peru

For years afterward, Felipe Pomar continued to promote this new overture to surfing’s established history. He appeared on TV, gave newspaper interviews, and personally arranged visits to northern Peru with history-inclined surfers, showing them dig sites, museums, and the beach at Huanchaco. Three thousand years, he’d repeat, a polite urgency behind the words. Maybe longer.

Pomar was right. It’s a huge span of time. Before the slaughtering Spanish Conquest and the vast Inca Empire; before the Chimu and Moche and a few other aboriginal pre-Peruvian epochs. Wrestling is an older recreational activity than wave-riding. Same with gymnastics, archery, and swimming. But not much else. Skiing, golf, tennis, handball, team sports—all were invented centuries, even millennia, after man began riding waves.

This new surf-history prologue begins in the coastal salt marshes west of Trujillo, among the tall chlorophyll-green stalks of Schoenoplectus californicus—California bulrush to English-speakers, totora to Peruvians. The caballito reed boat was probably invented around 3000 B.C., as tiny coastal enclaves of northern Peru coalesced into larger, more complex villages and communities. Traders used the caballito to move goods short distances along the coast, while fisherman used it as a roving nearshore platform. Peru’s coastline is essentially barren, but the chilly eastern edge of the Humboldt Current—a massive nutrient-rich gyre moving counterclockwise through the South Pacific—is more or less a solid wriggling mass of anchovy and sardines. Fishing was, and remains, a Peruvian necessity.

The caballito is organic and decomposes quickly, so there are no examples from even fifty years ago, much less any from antiquity. Used daily, a caballito remains seaworthy for just two months, at which point the reeds turn mushy. The outer layers are then replaced, or the entire craft is thrown away. Nonetheless, today’s caballito is thought to be built along much the same lines, using the same techniques, as those made thousands of years ago. Fresh-cut totora bunches are spread out to dry for three or four weeks, during which time the reeds stiffen and change color from green to brown-speckled beige. Hundreds of reed pieces are lashed together into component parts, which form the long front-tapered mother pieces, two of which are then placed side-by-side and bound together. As the final set of girdling ropes are installed, the prow is given its familiar dagger-like lift, which allows the caballito to navigate through the surf without nosing under. A rectangular storage area for nets, floats, and the catch itself is hollowed out near the back. The paddle is made from a single thick piece of horizontally-cut bamboo. An average caballito is 12 feet long by 2 feet wide and weighs 90 pounds, and it has the same awkward portability of a full-sized canoe. The ancient Egyptian papyrus raft, which predates the caballito by a thousand years, was a surprisingly similar craft, with its multi-bundle reed construction and raised prow.

If today’s caballito closely resembles those of antiquity, the mechanics of its use are likely the same, too. In Huanchaco, a Conquistador-founded town north of Trujillo and Chan Chan, the caballito remains the fisherman’s craft of choice. Along with the rest of Peru’s west-facing coast, the beach at Huanchaco is almost always blanketed in a light salt-tinged haze, the result of the cool Humbolt Current surface water evaporating and condensing as it glides past a warm shoreline. A concrete boardwalk fronts the beach, and local fishermen now paddle out wearing polyester soccer jerseys and surf trunks, but the scene is often shrouded in a kind of grayish prehistoric gloom.

A CABALLITO-RIDING FISHERMAN RETURNS TO THE BEACH AT HUANCHACO, PERU.

GOOD LUCK SELLING THE IDEA THAT ANCHOVY-TROLLING PERUVIANS WERE THE FIRST WAVE-RIDERS. SURFERS CHOOSE THEIR COLLECTIVE PAST, AND WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO HAWAII OR PERU, THE TROPICS OR THE DESERT, THE SPORT OF KINGS OR THE SPORT OF FISHERMEN–WELL, THAT’S HARDLY A CHOICE AT ALL.

A caballito will flex slightly as its owner heaves it into the crook between head and shoulder and then grunts his way down the beach to water’s edge. Huanchaco has no harbor or breakwater, but the waves at the base of a long point in the middle of town are always smaller and gentler than the beaches to either side. This is where the fishermen put in. Kneeling or straddling the caballito, he grips the bamboo paddle and uses a kayak-style stroke to push through the incoming surf and out to the fishing groups just offshore. On the return trip, some paddle to the beach during lulls. Those who ride waves do so carefully and directly, dipping the paddle into the water to maintain balance as necessary. The flipped-up bow prevents the caballito’s nose from pearling under while being pushed to shore, and the motion is simple, smooth, and unvaried. Wipeouts are rare. Only in recent decades, as the caballito became a beachside attraction, have the Huanchaqueros put a bit of showmanship into the routine, raising the paddle overhead, or trimming at an angle across the wave, and occasionally even standing up.

The caballito is a tool designed for the serious, tedious business of feeding the community. At some point, though, in all likelihood sooner rather than later—perhaps even just after the first caballitos were launched, some five thousand years ago—the fluttery thrill of riding a wave became its own reward. This easily repeatable and wholly nonproductive act was then removed from the daily work routine and pursued for its own sake. A form of surfing began. The original form.

That’s how Felipe Pomar and the rest of the surf-world caballistas view it, anyway. Others aren’t so sure. None of the evidence proves that wave-riding in ancient Peru developed into an established, widespread form of recreation. Weather alone argues against it—for most of the year, beachfront air and water temperatures in Peru are prohibitively cold. This doesn’t mean that two hundred generations of pre-Columbian Huanchaco fishermen didn’t enjoy their daily free ride toward shore. Mid-Holocene man was wired just like us, and swift, semicontrolled motion always pays off with a boilermaker of adrenaline and dopamine.

In fact, it’s easy to imagine that wave-riding in one form or another likely took root on antediluvian beaches from Brazil to Senegal, Lebanon to Borneo. For any society living on a temperate coastline, riding waves would likely be a natural, if not intuitive act. Dolphins and pelicans and other animals seem to do it purely out of enjoyment, after all. When did the very first human wade into the shorebreak and try to imitate a dolphin? Or put another way—when did bodysurfing start? That probably goes back millions of years, not thousands.

* * *

Felipe Pomar, however, wasn’t content to just make the point that his ancestors were happily riding waves back in the nebulous depths of prehistory. In his Surfer article, he brought up Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki adventure—and this shifted Pomar’s alternative surf-narrative from an easily generalized proposal to something more pointed.

In 1947, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa-log raft, which he named the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in the South Pacific. The journey lasted 101 days, covered over four thousand miles, and was the greatest adventure sensation since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. Heyerdahl’s book on the expedition sold more than 20 million copies, and the 1951 movie Kon-Tiki won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Audiences thrilled to all the brave tales of sharks and lashing storms, but behind the heroics was Heyerdahl’s contrarian diffusionist idea of transpacific migration. Heyerdahl claimed that his Kon-Tiki journey showed that Polynesia was actually populated east to west, the result of pre-Inca sailors venturing out from the coast of Peru. If Heyerdahl was right, Felipe Pomar and other caballito surf-scholars argued, then Peruvian wave-riding didn’t just predate Hawaiian surfing, it actually spawned it.

Mainstream anthropologists regarded Heyerdahl as more stuntman than scientist and thought his ideas on Pacific migration were nonsense. The standing theory was that Polynesia had been colonized with voyagers originating from Southeast Asia. More recent DNA studies have confirmed this hypothesis. That being the case, wave-riding in ancient Peru remains a self-contained prelude to surf history, not the starting point.

The main story—the history of modern surfing—is directly and organically connected to ancient Polynesia. A simple lack of interest in obscure historical debate doesn’t fully explain the booming silence that greeted Pomar’s 1988 Surfer article. It was defensiveness, too. Surfers love the idea that their chosen activity was born in translucent blue water, next to palm-fringed beaches, and practiced by royalty on beautiful wooden surfboards. It’s the Sports of Kings, and even if the phrase was created by some early version of the Waikiki tourist board, most surfers nonetheless wear the designation with quiet pride. Good luck trying to sell the idea that reed-boat-straddling Peruvians trolling for anchovy off the grim brown coast of Peru were the real first wave-riders. Ours has always been a culture of storytellers, not historians, a surf journalist wrote in 2005. In other words, surfers themselves prefer to shape, design, and choose their collective past. And when it comes down to Hawaii or Peru, the tropics or the desert, the Sport of Kings or the Sport of Fishermen—well, that’s hardly a choice at all.

Surfing in Ancient Hawaii

Four thousand years ago, after a long migratory push out of Southeast Asia, settlers arrived in Tonga, Samoa, and eastern Fiji. All the basic forms of Polynesian society and culture were formed here. While regional political power consolidated in Tahiti, expansion continued. Parties of tattooed explorer-warriors and breedable girls loaded onto streamlined twin-hulled voyaging canoes, some up to 150 feet long, and sailed off in all directions, with stores of coconuts, yams, taro, dried fish, banana stalks, and water-filled gourds, plus dogs, pigs, penned chickens, assorted cultivable dirt-packed roots and cuttings, and other colonizing essentials.

A MISSIONARY-INFLUENCED BAN ON IMMODEST DISPLAY DIDN’T PREVENT HAWAIIANS FROM STRIPPING DOWN WHEN THEY ENTERED THE WATER.

Polynesians had no written language and no metals, and they hadn’t yet hit upon the wheel. But as sailors and navigators they were without equal—able to cross thousands of uncharted miles, settle a new island or island chain, then turn around and make a return trip across the Pacific to the original point of departure. Stars and constellations were their main navigational tools, but they used everything from flotsam to cloud tint to the flight patterns of passing birds. This was visceral precision sailing the likes of which the world would never see again. First-contact Westerners were astounded at how Polynesians, without the aid of maps or compasses, could range with such confidence and exactitude across what Ferdinand Magellan called a sea so vast the human mind can scarcely grasp it. In 1769, prior to sailing for New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, and Java, Captain Cook invited a Tahitian navigator onto the Endeavor, and at any given moment during the journey, the Polynesian could point toward home with unfailing accuracy.

Hawaii’s first inhabitants probably sailed up from the Marquesas around A.D. 300. This completed the vast triangular expanse of Polynesia, which was defined by New Zealand to the southwest, Easter Island to the southeast, and Hawaii—the world’s most isolated archipelago—to the north. Eight hundred years later, Tahitians conquered and resettled the Hawaiian Islands. Because the island chain was so remote, and because it was big enough for sustained population growth, within a few generations travel ceased completely between Hawaii and the rest of Polynesia. Still, almost everything now thought of as innately Hawaiian—the thunderous creation story, the melodramatic cast of gods and spirit forms, chant-based storytelling, the concept of manna, the kapu system of rule and law—originated in Tahiti.

Along with chickens, breadfruit, and animism, Polynesians also exported surfing to each new island colony. Before this, we can only guess at the start date for some rudimentary proto-Polynesian form of surfing, which may have begun as far back as 2000 B.C. But as pointed out by Ben Finney, the first university-trained historian to examine the sport, on most islands, surfing was primarily a children’s pastime. Finney defined the activity at this early stage as catching a wave on a float of any size, made of any material—usually a small flat piece of wood or a dried coconut frond stem. This was either held in front of the rider or placed beneath his chest and used as a planing surface.

Only on the main islands of what is called East Polynesia (Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand) was surfing practiced by adults as well as children. Of this group, just the Tahitians and Hawaiians used full-length boards and rode while standing. And of these two, only the Hawaiians, probably beginning around a.d. 1200, developed the sport into a communal obsession. This original surf-lust, as much as the islands’ accrued developments in board design and riding technique, is what marks Hawaii as surfing’s birthplace.

All thought of work is at an end, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar wrote, describing his ancestors’ wave-riding fervency in terms recognizable to any hardcore twenty-first-century surfer. The wife may go hungry, [and] the children . . . but the head of the house does not care. All day there is nothing but surfing.

Unlike ancient Peru, where wave-riding was a byproduct of work and probably limited to fishermen, surfing in Hawaii was both recreational and universal. The ruling class had special boards and exclusive breaks, but even so, the sport was the island nation’s great common denominator. Surfing was practiced with equal enthusiasm (and class-leveling nudity) by farmers, warriors, weavers, healers, fishermen, children, grandparents, chiefs, and regents. As one early Western visitor wrote, The entire population of a village would at certain hours resort to the sea-side to indulge in, or to witness, this magnificent accomplishment.

The Big Island’s west-facing Kona Coast was ancient Hawaii’s most populated region and home to more than half of the roughly one hundred identified premodern Hawaiian surf breaks. The impulse to give either playful or menacing names to surf spots begins with such popular Big Island breaks as Fish Eye, the Ghost, the Chicken, Taboo Drum, Mischief, and Two Bald Heads.

Warfare was a regular part of ancient Hawaiian society, and the governing kapu system authorized death sentences for trifling offenses like eating bananas or accidently stepping on a chief’s shadow. Still, day-to-day life was filled with languor and play and gift-giving. There was a looseness to the culture. Relationships between sport, religion, myth, work, war, family, and courtship were fluid—in this way, surfing came to be entwined with almost all aspects of life. Priests whipped the nearshore waters with long vines in order to bring the surf up. Artists carved petroglyph stick-figure images of surfers onto flat lava surfaces. Laborers built terraced oceanfront shrines where surfers could rinse off after exiting the water or pray for waves if the surf was flat.

Storytellers gave long public performances in verse and song, with surfing used as a backdrop for supernatural tales of love and vengeance, honor and disgrace. One of the tales describes a wave-riding Oahu chiefess named Mamala who surfed to the resounding applause of gathered onlookers, and was able to shapeshift into a giant black lizard. One day, Mamala was ordered to marry the island king, and her beloved surfer-husband Ouha was so heartbroken that he dropped his human form completely to become a shark god. There is my dear husband Ouha/There is the shaking sea, Mamala dolefully points out to herself in one of the best-known Hawaiian mele inoa, or name chants. There is a good surf for us/[But] my love has gone away.

Surfing in ancient Hawaii was touched by religion and fantasy, but it was practically fused to sex, competition, and gambling. A pair of would-be lovers riding side by side for more than two or three waves did so in the knowledge that they’d taken their flirtation to a level that practically demanded a beeline for the beach and a quick damp-skinned coupling in the nearest available hut or glade. Work and warfare were barred during the annual Makahiki harvest celebration, a three-month sports tournament and bacchanal in honor of the great Hawaiian god Lono, with surfing contests and other events scheduled more or less as diversions from a writhing shorefront sexual marathon.

During a big surfing competition among royals, crowds lined the beach and squinted out to the wave zone, many of them with that expression of rapture and dread common to hardcore gamblers everywhere. Hawaiians would stake anything from a fishing net and a chicken or two to swine, a canoe, or indentured servitude—life itself, in a rare few cases—on a contest’s outcome. Competitors all wore a special loincloth dyed brilliant red, and between rides they kept their strength up by snacking on roasted dog, specially prepared that day in an underground oven. Women surfed against the men, and as a nineteenth-century native-born writer noted, The gentler sex [often] carried off the highest honors. As the surfers took their place in the lineup, the roar that went up—a combination of shouts, taunts, laughter, and endless spontaneous wagering—made the event seem more like a boxing match than an afternoon at the beach. Or a sumo match: size equaled power to the Hawaiians, and rulers were often enormously fat.

* * *

The average Polynesian peasant-surfer likely banged together his new surfboard with no more godly thoughts than a wood-crafter making a door. At the royal level, however, board-making was a serious matter, filled with rites and rituals. A craftsman would search the highland forest for a suitable tree. Small and midlength boards were usually made of koa, a fine-grained hardwood, or the softer breadfruit. Longer boards were generally made from wiliwili, the same lightweight wood used for canoes. Once an appropriate tree was found, a red kumu fish was ceremoniously placed at the trunk, the tree was cut down, and prayers were made as the fish was then placed in a hole dug in the root system, as compensation to the spirits. (Canoe-building was a more serious undertaking; for a voyaging canoe, the root hole might be consecrated not with a kumu but a human sacrifice.)

Branches were removed from the trunk using a basalt-headed adze, and the trunk was cut to length, skinned, and hewn into a rough board-like form, then carried to a shaded beachfront work shed. All the channels and ruts left by the adze were smoothed out using coral heads of various textures; pumice stones were used for fine sanding. A glossy charcoalbased finishing stain was often added. Boards made from wiliwili were sometimes buried next to a freshwater spring so that mud filled the porous wood surface and, after drying, created a seal. All boards were waterproofed with a rubbed-in coat of nut oil. There were no stabilizing fins.

High-end boardmaking from start to finish took about a week, and more rites and prayers were performed over the finished product before it was launched into the water. (Commoners not only skipped most or all of the ceremony, but also the finishing work, which probably reduced production time by half.) After use, the board was left out to dry, again rubbed down with coconut oil, and usually stowed prominently in the rafters of the family house. Fastidious surfers kept their board wrapped in tapa cloth.

Because premodern Hawaii had a barter-based economic system, a surfboard was either presented as a gift or offered in exchange for goods or services. Either way, building one represented a real investment of time and energy, and as such it was expected not only to perform well in the surf but to reflect favorably upon its owner. Visiting British ship commander George Anson Byron, first cousin to the poet Lord Byron, dropped anchor in Hawaii in the early nineteenth century and, recognizing a status marker when he saw one, wrote that to have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a Sandwich Islander [Hawaiian] what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young English man.

Hawaiians developed three basic types of surfboard: the paipo, the olo, and the alaia. The round-nosed paipo was the smallest of the three and was used mostly by children in nearshore surf. A child’s paipo might be 3 feet tall, 16 inches wide, and a half-inch thick. An adult version could be as long as 6 feet. The best surfers could stand on a paipo board, and a kneeling position was used, too, but mostly it was ridden prone. Jack London put himself in the middle of a paipo-riding swarm at Waikiki during a 1907 visit to Hawaii: I joined some little Kanaka boys in more shallow water, where the breakers were well spent and small—a regular kindergarten school. When a likely-looking breaker came along, they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and rode the breaker to the beach. London tried but had no luck. We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker. Away our feet would churn like the sternwheels of river steamboats, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.

The showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing was the royal olo, a wiliwili-made colossus used exclusively by the ruling alii class. Specs for the olo surfboard were almost cartoonish: 20 feet long by 2 feet wide, 200 pounds, and domed along both the deck and bottom so that the center thickness swelled out to as much as 8 inches.

Modern surfing’s fascination with the olo began in the mid-1920s, when Tom Blake, America’s first surfing champion, visited Hawaii and restored a pair of weather-beaten olos that for too long had been hanging on an exterior wall at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Blake was the first surfer of his generation to take a real interest in ancient surf history and lore, but part of his response to the olos was a simple wide-eyed awe, like a rural schoolboy seeing his first skyscraper. A few years later, Blake and Hawaiian surf icon Duke Kahanamoku each made themselves a 16-foot olo replica, more than half again longer and heavier than the average board of the time—Duke’s olo weighed a full 130 pounds. Both surfers reported that the long boards worked especially well in large waves. During our last big surf, which only comes three or four times a year, Blake wrote in 1935, the Duke did some of the most beautiful riding I have ever seen on his new long board.

While just a handful of examples survived into the twentieth century, the olo has nonetheless come to be viewed as the showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing. Replicas stand in museums and are sold to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the olo has about it a kind of grand absurdity, like a stretch limousine or a floor-dragging ceremonial robe. There are no eyewitness accounts of olo surfing, but it seems likely that the boards were used for the sole purpose of riding unbroken waves. It is a good board for a wave that swells and rushes shoreward, nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar John Papa Ii said of the olo, but not for a wave that rises up high and curls over. Huge, heavy, and finless, the olo would have been nearly impossible to guide or steer—less a surfboard than a small canoe, which was also used by the Hawaiians to ride waves, but with the operational advantage of a paddle. The kapu laws that prevented commoners from using the olo may have been a matter of public safety, given that a loose olo would blast through the wave zone like a log through rapids.

Some surf historians have suggested that the olo may have been designed for big surf. Large waves move faster through the ocean and are much harder to catch than small waves, and the olo had a great paddling advantage over other types of boards. Even more so in big surf, however, it seems likely that the idea would have been to steer clear of breaking waves. Many Hawaiian surf spots have a deep-water channel adjacent to the break, allowing the surfer to paddle out without running into any whitewater. Some of these breaks, too, have a broad shoaling area beyond the surf zone, where open ocean swells first begin to tilt. This may have been the intended field of play for the olo.

Tom Blake also used the olo as a design starting point for his magnificent high-speed paddleboards. It’s a more prosaic idea, and there’s nothing in the records saying as much, but it may be that the Hawaiians regarded the olo as more of a paddleboard than a surfboard.

* * *

Surfing as the world knows it—stand-up riding on a wave that curls and breaks—was for all practical purposes invented on the alaia, a thin midsize board about half the size of an olo. The alaia was round at the nose, tapered and squared-off at the tail, and slightly convex along the bottom. Most were 6 or 7 feet long and weighed about 45 pounds. Although similar in width to the olo, the alaia was much leaner; most were less than 2 inches thick, and some were pared down to a very breakable half inch. It vibrates against the rider’s abdomen, chest, [and] hands, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian noted, describing the sensitive ride of such a thin craft. The alaia was the Hawaiian standard, used by monarchs and villagers alike; it paddled well enough to catch unbroken swells on the intermediary offshore reefs, but was responsive and maneuverable enough to let the surfer ride in the steep, fast, curling section of the wave.

Unlike the hulking olo, an alaia board could be paddled directly through the wave zone to the lineup—the surfer’s ready area, located just beyond the breaking waves. A modified crawl was sometimes used in the early going, with the rider floating alongside his board, one arm locked across the deck of the board, near the nose, the other stroking forward; the front of the board was pulled underwater as each broken wave passed by. Once in the lineup, the surfer either sat on his board or remained prone, eyes to the horizon, and watched the incoming swells for a likely wave. When it came, the board was quickly wheeled around and aimed shoreward, centered beneath the rider—some knee-paddled into waves, but most went prone—and with a few churning strokes the wave was caught. Timing, more than speed, was essential. The idea wasn’t so much to match the wave’s speed as to be positioned on the swell’s upper slopes just as it tilted up, allowing gravity to do the work.

Without a stabilizing fin, the alaia provided only limited control, which meant that performance was judged less on the route taken across the wave, as with today’s surfing, and more on the rider himself. The best surfers moved smoothly from position to position: belly-down, kneeling, sitting, and hardest of all, standing. They also rode at an angle to the wave face, just ahead of the whitewater, doubling or even tripling their speed compared to the novice surfer heading straight for the beach. There were other ways to demonstrate expertise. At the south end of Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island, where lava outcroppings spill off the beach into the water, part of the game was to finish off a ride by shooting through gaps in the nearshore rocks. Pulling back at the last moment, as one early Western observer noted, was not only reckoned very disgraceful, but often led to the loss of the board, which I have often seen, with great horror, dashed to pieces at the very moment the islander quitted it.

Bodysurfing was its own separate form of wave-riding, and was also done ad hoc as the fastest way to chase down a loose board. Canoe surfing was popular, too. Forms were sometimes combined. Using the royal prerogative, King Kamehameha would load his board into a canoe, paddle into a swell, stand, pick up his board, and jump from the canoe into the wave, leaving the unmanned craft stalled in his wake while he rode to shore.

LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIG ISLAND SURFERS WITH ALAIA BOARDS.

FIRST PUBLISHED SURFING IMAGE, 1831.

Myths and chants describe heroic performances in big waves. Big, though, has always been a relative term in the sport. Without a stabilizing fin, and a half dozen or more not-yet-invented design features, the ancient surfboard would have been a truly unwilling partner in bigger surf—anything above, say, eight or ten feet. If larger waves were ridden, they must have been smooth, gently sloped, and top-spilling, breaking near a deep channel; to maintain control, even on a ten-footer, a surfer likely would have had to take the most cautious route possible toward shore. That said, there is evidence that oversized surf was ridden, and not just in myth. Under certain conditions, a big-wave spot on Oahu’s North Shore called Sunset Beach offers the kind of rolling, broad-based wave described above. Ancient Hawaiians called the break Paumalu and regarded it as surfing’s ultimate challenge.

Mostly, surfing was spirited good fun. But not always. Umi-a-liloa, the son of a ranking fifteenth-century Big Island chief, once traveled incognito to a festival near Hilo, where he bragged about his surfing skills and was called out by a local royal named Paiea. Their initial penny ante stakes quickly doubled and redoubled, until finally the wager was set at four racing canoes. Competition rules for this event were probably typical for the period; the two surfers would take off on a wave together and both aim for a nearshore finish line consisting of a pair of tethered floats. Umi and Paiea paddled [into] the high surf, pushing their boards through heavy breakers until they reached the open sea, one early Hawaiian scholar later wrote. They spent considerable time maneuvering for best position, [then] selected a large wave and paddled madly toward shore. They stood up simultaneously, feet firmly placed on the convex deck of the boards, [and] came with great speed. Paiea was first to cross the finish line, but along the way he railroaded his opponent, causing Umi to lose a bit of skin on a rock. It was a dirty trick, and not forgotten. When Umi came to power years later, he ordered Paiea’s capture and—depending on what version of the story is being told—had him either slow-baked in an oven or splayed and gutted on a stone altar.

When surfing was exported from Hawaii to the rest of the world, centuries later, it never failed to present itself beautifully. Introduced as the exciting and romantic Sport of Kings, it won converts at every stop. But the germ of violence was passed along as well. All that passion noted by early-contact Westerners—the habit among native surfers, as one nineteenth-century observer put it, for waving their arms and uttering exultant cries—was bound to be redirected and perverted now and then. Of course, it’s been centuries since aggrieved surfers could resort to eviscerating or slow-roasting their fellow riders. But like the olo board and the dramatic big-wave tale, bad behavior in one form or another has its own long and unbroken history in surfing.

The New God Doesn’t Surf: Explorers and Missionaries Sail to Hawaii

Captain James Cook, the lowborn son of a Yorkshire farmhand who had risen to become the era’s greatest seagoing explorer, was crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. The year was 1778, and Cook was nearing the end of his third and final Pacific voyage. Having failed, yet again, to find a channel linking the Pacific to the Atlantic, Cook directed his HMS sloops Resolution and Discovery away from the Alaskan coast and set a south-southeast course for the tropics.

Ten months earlier, Cook and his 150-plus crew had become the first Westerners to make contact with Hawaii, spending three days ashore on the islands of Kauai and Niihau, where natives had worshipfully dropped to their knees in greeting, filled the ships’ holds with pigs and breadfruit and water in exchange for a handful of sixpenny nails and a few pieces of iron, and tended fully to the visitors’ sexual needs, unaware that half of the sailors had what Cook described in his journal as Venereal distemper.

Now, having sailed directly from Alaska to Hawaii, Cook meandered around the islands for nearly eight weeks without going ashore. He eventually circled the Big Island, where the Makahiki festival was underway, and natives, marching in procession from town to town, may have viewed the mast and spars from the distant ships as a sign of godly surveillance. Indeed, when Cook finally ordered the Resolution and Discovery to drop anchor in the north end of Kealakekua Bay, the event was likely interpreted by the Hawaiians as nothing less than the return of Lono himself. Thousands of natives paddled or swam out to the boats, enough of them climbing the shore-facing side of the Resolution that the entire boat tilted, and a thousand more lined the rocky beaches. A group of priests immediately draped Cook in red cloth and escorted him to a skull-lined platform at a waterfront temple, while gathered onlookers, prostrate with foreheads touching the ground, chanted Lono.

The goodwill didn’t last. A few weeks later, for reasons that are still hotly debated by academics—although, clearly, the Lono charade was over—Cook was mobbed by natives in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay, clubbed and stabbed to death, and taken ashore for dismemberment. Entrails were thrown into the sea, but most of the remains were burned, then handed out like prizes to ranking chiefs and priests. Two days later, in a retaliatory frenzy, Cook’s sailors fired their cannons into a crowd on the beach, then went ashore for slaughter and arson; heads were severed, lodged on pikes, and waved mockingly in the direction of a nearby hill, where some of the natives had retreated.

It’s hard to imagine two more culturally divergent groups of people than the Hawaiians and the first-contact Westerners: the grimy canvas sailor’s outfits and the islanders’ casual nudity; the solitary white-bearded God in Heaven and the natives’ crowded soap-opera cast of spirits and deities. Cook’s violent end itself is perhaps less startling than the lateness of its arrival. Wave-riding was also very much caught up in the difference between the two groups. The Western experience with the beachfront hadn’t been a complete disaster, especially around the Mediterranean. Romans invented the beachfront holiday, and the Bible’s Book of Matthew notes that Jesus went out of the house and sat by the seaside to begin a life of sermonizing. By Cook’s time, therapeutic sea bathing had even become a minor health craze among Great Britain’s upper classes, where strong-armed dippers were paid to thrust clients into the nearshore waters and bodily hold them beneath the surface for a few seconds.

Nevertheless, for the overwhelming majority of Westerners, the sea was nothing more than a vast communal repository for fear and dread. Oceans were stocked with enormous open-mouthed monsters, both real and imagined. The sea floor, as Shakespeare wrote, was littered with dead men’s skulls and a thousand fearful wrecks. Piers and docks were a mournful place of departure for the dispossessed and the vanquished, and an entry point for disease and plague. The surf, with its fearful noise and rhythm, also tapped into these dire feelings. Waves were often described in language suited to a Visigothic charge over the city walls—roaring, tearing, smashing, destroying. Those who go to sea for pleasure, a British proverb went, would go to hell for pastime.

For all his extraordinary seagoing accomplishments, Captain Cook remained a product of his water-adverse generation, and like virtually all of his fellow British mariners, he didn’t know how to swim. Also, in accordance with Old Testament teachings on nature in general, Cook viewed the ocean as a dangerous force badly in need of conquering. Few things in his worldwide travels likely surprised him more than the idea of playing in the surf.

Cook has long been credited with the first written description of wave-riding, which appeared in a 1777 journal entry that was published, posthumously, in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. But historians recently determined that the passage, although written in a first-person voice meant to be read as Cook’s, in fact belongs to Resolution surgeon William Anderson. While the ships were anchored in Tahiti’s Matavai Bay, Anderson walked along the bay’s northern point and came upon a lone Tahitian paddling in a small canoe with such eagerness . . . as to command my attention. Getting past any cultural and personal aversions to breaking waves, Anderson has nothing but curiosity and appreciation for this strange new amusement.

FIRST CONTACT: THE HMS RESOLUTION AND DISCOVERY LAND AT KEALAKEKUA BAY.

He went out from the shore till he was near the place where the swell begins to take its rise; and, watching its first motion very attentively, paddled before it with great quickness, till he found that it overlooked him, and had acquired sufficient force to carry his canoe before it without passing underneath. He then sat motionless, and was carried along at the same swift rate as the wave, till it landed him upon the beach. Then he started out, emptied his canoe, and went in search of another swell.

Anderson summarizes in an almost poetic voice: I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea.

Not until 2006 did surf historians pick up on the fact that Joseph Banks, the Resolution’s botanist during Cook’s first transpacific journey, had written about Matavai Bay wave-riding almost eight years before Anderson. Banks watched from the beach as a dozen or so Indians rode waves just as our holiday youth climb the hill in Greenwich park for the pleasure of rolling down it.

The multivolume series of books documenting Cook’s three Pacific Ocean expeditions were the Star Wars of Napoleonic Europe. Thanks in large part to Cook’s grisly death in Hawaii, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean was by far the most popular installment: the 1784 first edition sold out in just three days, and fourteen more British reprints, plus six foreign-language editions, were published before the turn of the century.

No description of surfing that followed over the next hundred years would match Anderson’s lovely supreme pleasure observation. Soon after, in 1779, the Resolution’s Lieutenant James King wrote a detailed but choppy two-page journal entry on board-riding. Recalling an afternoon spent on the beach at Kealakekua Bay, shortly before Cook’s death, King wrote of the surf zone’s prodigious violence, the great violence that seemed to befall a surfer being caught in a breaking wave, and the great horror of watching an islander wipe out. The [natives’] boldness and address . . . was altogether astonishing, and is scarcely to be credited. King’s passage set the tone for those looking to write about surfing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of the few dozen descriptions of the sport that were published during this period—most no longer than two or three paragraphs, written almost exclusively by British and American explorers, merchants, missionaries, and wealthy adventure-seekers—mild bombast and polite disbelief were the rule.

BOTH SEXES SWIM BY NATURE. CHILDREN RIOT IN THE WAVES FROM INFANCY. I SAW FAT MEN WITH THEIR HAIR STREAKED GREY, RIDING WITH AS MUCH ENJOYMENT AS IF THEY WERE IN THEIR FIRST YOUTH.

—Isabella Bird, travel writer

There was some confusion, too, starting with the name of the craft itself. Hawaiians referred to it as papa he’e nalu, or board for wave-sliding. English-speakers at first tried floatboard, sharkboard, broad-board, and bathing-board, with surf-board first used sometime in the 1790s. The terms surfer and surfing didn’t take until the early twentieth century, which replaced surf-swimming, surf-boarding, surf-bathing, surf play, and surf sport.

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