Surfing in 1000 BC

Viva Caballito!

Out of the Blue

A Surfboard for Everybody

Lono Wept

The New God Doesn't Surf

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.

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 first 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 already 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.

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 

. 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.

Five months and eighteen thousand miles later, 

 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.”

The newcomers arrived at an unexpectedly fortuitous moment, at least for missionary work. The great unifying King Kamehameha I had died a year earlier, and the king’s heir soon afterward renounced Hawaii’s 

 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. Catholicism 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 

 might leave church services and a half-hour later time 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. Authorities 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 with 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 their families, flocked to Hawaii from the US 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 US 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.”

Hawaiians were brought down by syphilis and cholera, new laws and prohibitions, endless work hours, overthrow and annexation—the 19th century was truly the surfing's own Dark Ages.

Chapter: 1

Out of the Blue

The New God Doesn't Surf

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

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