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

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.

Polynesians had no written language and no metals, and hadn’t yet hit upon the wheel. But as sailors and navigators they were without equal—able to cross thousands of uncharted miles across the Pacific, settle a new island or island chain, then turn around and make a return trip back 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 300 ad. 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 

 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 bc. 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 1200 ad, 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 

 system was filled with 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 leaving 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 Mamala’s beloved 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 

, 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 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.

Surfing in ancient Hawaii was touched by religion and fantasy, but it was fused to sex, competition, and gambling.

Chapter: 1

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

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