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

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 watery link from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Cook directed his HMS sloops 

 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 visitor’s 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 without going ashore for nearly eight weeks. 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 

 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 

 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 loom-woven 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 in Great Britain’s upper classes, where "bathing machines"—small wooden changing rooms—were wheeled from the shore to the water, and strong-armed “dippers” were paid to thrust clients into the ocean 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 mournful places 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 bad 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 

 But historians later determined that the passage, although written in a first-person voice meant to be read as Cook’s, in fact belongs to 

 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 on each side, 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.”

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 

’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 multi-volume series of books documenting Cook’s three Pacific Ocean expeditions were the 

 of Napoleonic Europe. Thanks in large part to Cook’s grisly death in Hawaii, 

 was by far the most popular installment: the 1784 first edition sold out in just three days, and fourteen more British reprints, and 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 

’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.

There was some confusion, too, starting with the name of the craft itself. Hawaiians referred to it as 

, 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.”

Some 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. 

 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.”

To the average Westerner, the sea was nothing more than a vast communal repository for fear and dread, littered with, as Shakespeare wrote, "dead men's skulls," and "a thousand fearful wrecks."

Chapter: 1

Out of the Blue

Lono Wept

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History of Surfing

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