A Fine Little Revival

Jack London Loves Purple

California: The New Frontier

Beachboy Life

Duke Kahanamoku

Surf Shooting Down Under

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

Surfing in the Jazz Age

Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

What Depression?

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

Surfboard as Woodcraft

Palos Verdes Surfing Club

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

Riding the Hot Curl

Enter Makaha

Death at Waimea

The Overwhelming North Shore

Gliding Return

Visitors to Hawaii almost all became surfing advocates to one degree or another. “Surf Board Riders,” a two-minute reel produced by the Thomas Edison Company in 1906, showed a group of surfers riding at Waikiki; it played in nickelodeons as far east as New Jersey. One year later, Jack London, living high on royalties from his adventure novels like 

, and every bit Teddy Roosevelt’s equal as a hale celebrity outdoorsman, sailed his home-designed ketch 

 from San Francisco to Honolulu. Not long after arriving, he sat on a piece of beachfront grass in the shade of the elegant new Beaux Arts-style Moana Hotel and watched “a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one’s feet.” London then lifted his gaze out to the lineup.

And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected on one’s vision. Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and supurb.

London first took to the surf on a paipo, then switched to a full-length board. After thrashing about ineffectively for most of an afternoon, he at last felt the “ecstatic bliss” of a long ride to the beach. His four-thousand-word essay on his Waikiki surfing experience, written longhand in a single morning’s rush of enthusiasm, brought surfing to the public’s attention like nothing before: it was published on the mainland as “A Royal Sport” in the October 1907 issue of the high-circulation 

, then reprinted the following year in England’s 

, and finally included as a chapter in London’s 1911 travelogue 

. Never before had surfing been treated at such length. The godfather of American he-man prose, London really let go in “A Royal Sport,” stamping nearly every paragraph with flexed-bicep adjectives and metaphors—the waves are “bull-mouthed monsters” and the wipeouts deliver “smashing blows.” London was a pro at the height of his powers, and he also provided an excellent short course on the physics of a breaking wave, along with a primer on how to paddle through the surf zone, manage a wipeout, pick up an incoming swell, and guide a shoreward-bound surfboard.

London, furthermore, helped undermine the belief that surfing required a race-based aptitude. This idea had been around since Westerners first arrived in Hawaii, and was given credence by no less a personage than writer Mark Twain. While visiting Hawaii in 1866, Twain gave surfing a try, failed, and dolefully closed out a short account of the experience by saying that “none but the natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” London himself was a true believer in differences between races and in the superiority of what he called “the Teuton”; he had a special loathing of the Chinese, and famously demanded that white heavyweight boxer Jim Jeffries come out of retirement in 1910 and take back the title from black prizefighter Jack Johnson, saying that the “the White Man must be rescued.” Hawaii seemed to modulate London’s racialist views. He was worshipful in his praise of Waikiki’s local surfers and didn’t give a second thought as to his own fitness for surfing—and by extension, the fitness of his race. “You are a man,” London tells himself, before heading into the surf for the first time, “and what that Kanaka can do, you can do yourself.”

London’s surfing experience, including the idea of racial equality in the lineup, was launched and guided by Alexander Hume Ford, a small pointy-bearded Honolulu gadabout who at times seemed to be singlehandedly directing the sport’s revival. The orphaned son of rich South Carolina plantation owners, Ford was a blur of motion in his early adult years, moving from Chicago to New York, traveling extensively in Russia and China as a magazine reporter, then finally sailing into Hawaii in early 1907, about six months before London and his entourage arrived on the 

. He was thirty-nine and unmarried, with a long résumé but with no real career to speak of. Ford took to the surf right away. To learn the sport, he spent four hours a day in the waves, every day, for three straight months. Deciding that Hawaii was a place worthy of his near-manic energies, Ford made the rounds in Honolulu, introducing himself to every notable in government, business, and society. He hoped to get ahead by promoting Hawaii to the rest of the world, and he would do that, in part, by promoting surfing. Jack London was his first project.

London and his wife, Charmain, were having dinner on their first evening in Hawaii when Ford darted up to their table, sat down, and barreled into a long extemporaneous pitch on the islands in general and surfing in particular. He concluded by telling London that they would go surfing the following day, adding that the adventure would make for a tremendous magazine article. In Ford’s presence, Charmain later wrote, “one had the sense of being 

. When he left, we were able to draw the first long breath in two hours.” The two men surfed together, as promised, and London wrote his 

Ford’s efforts continued. In 1908 he founded the Outrigger Canoe and Surfboard Club, surfing’s first organization, for the purpose of “developing the great sport of surfing in Hawaii.” At first little more than a surfboard depository and open-air lounge, the men’s-only club was located on a swampy one-and-a-half-acre beachfront plot between the Seaside and Moana Hotels, with a clubhouse built from a discarded grass shack carted over from a nearby zoo. Later upgrades included a wood-frame clubhouse and dance pavilion in 1910. The Outrigger was a sports-based social club, but it had another purpose. Hotel developers were in a land race for the best ocean-facing property, and Ford believed that if he didn’t build the Outrigger as a literal and figurative beachhead, the surfers’ access to breaks along Waikiki might be restricted. The club was a big hit. By the time women were admitted in 1926, membership was over 1,500.

Race was still an issue in the sport. The Outrigger Canoe Club wasn’t chartered as such, but it was a de facto whites-only organization. Ford’s “Riding the Surf in Hawaii” article appeared in a 1909 midsummer issue of 

, and after touching on all his usual selling points—Waikiki’s great waves, the “blinding speed” of a good ride, the healthy muscle development that comes from all that paddling—Ford addresses the sport’s changing demographics: “At the recent surfing carnival . . . practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the dark-skinned Hawaiian.”

Since Hawaiians often didn’t bother to enter surfing competitions (or weren’t invited; the record is unclear), Ford’s implication that white surfers had caught or surpassed them is ridiculous. Yes, whites had made their way into the lineup. But not yet in great numbers, and few, if any, were on par with the top Hawaiian riders. Better evidence as to the two groups’ relative place in the surf comes from period photographs, which often feature a Hawaiian riding along with bent-knee nonchalance, while nearby, on the same wave, another local steers an outrigger canoe filled with two or three grinning but inert white passengers.

Still, Ford was encouraging all comers to pick up a board and give the new sport a try, which could only be good for surfing's growth and development. When Ford and Jack London together named surfing the Sport of Kings, Hawaiians no doubt appreciated the designation. It did nothing to make up for the fact that their culture had been stepped on and dragged around for more than a century. It didn’t keep the locals from rolling their eyes at Ford’s vaporings about “white boys and girls” being “most expert” in the water. But everybody knew that “Sport of Kings” meant 

 kings. Gestures mattered, and this was a nice one.

Class and wealth also played a part in Waikiki’s burgeoning surf scene. The Outrigger Canoe Club had two or three dozen hardcore surfers and canoeists, but its membership roll was filled with hundreds of wealthy surf dilettantes who mostly used the club for weekend brunching. In contrast, when a group of local Hawaiian surfers launched Hui Nalu (“Club of the Waves”) in 1911, membership was small and talent-based. A sheltering 

 tree in the middle of a beachfront vacant lot served as the Hui Nalu clubhouse, and the hotel next door allowed members to use its basement as a changing room. Hui Nalu and the Outrigger were located just a hundred yards apart from each other, and a mostly friendly rivalry developed between the two. Yet racial mistrust and class resentment wafted almost visibly across the beach between the 

 tree and the Outrigger’s terrace-bordered clubhouse and adjacent dance pavilion.

 [whites], and downtown businessmen,” one Hui Nalu member later recalled in a dismissive voice. “We remained under the 

 tree, dried ourselves off in the sun, and won the surfing contests. There were no dues with our club. And all the money in the world couldn’t get you in if we didn’t think you belonged.”

But money ruled Waikiki. After World War II, developers bought the property upon which Hui Nalu had been located for more than three decades, cut down the 

 tree, graded the lot, and poured the foundation for a new hotel.

The godfather of he-man prose, London really let go in his article, with plenty of flexed-bicep adjectives and metaphors—waves are “bull-mouthed monsters” and the wipeouts deliver “smashing blows.”

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

Jack London Loves Purple

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