Surfing Hawaii. Leonard Lueras
sighting because he was killed in 1779 by a group of angry Hawaiian natives who attacked him and four of his marines in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii's Kona coast. However, Cook's second-in-command, Lieutenant James King, took quill in hand and charmingly described the spectacle that was surfing in "Stone Age" Hawaii. In Volume III of the British Admiralty's report on A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, King noted that in Hawaii, "Swimming is not only a necessary art, in which men and women are more expert than any people we had hitherto seen, but a favourite diversion among them."
Photo: Joe Carini
Photo: Art Brewer
Photo: Erik Aeder
Waves, waves and more waves is what surfing in Hawaii is all about, and the spectacularly beautiful islands are home to some of the finest and most challenging waves in the world. In this particular surfing triptych, we pause to contemplate the beauty of three entirely different Hawaiian wave moods as captured by three photographers on three different islands.
About surfing, an "exercise" which "appeared to us most perilous and extraordinary," King wrote: "The boldness and address with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous manoeuvres was altogether astonishing and scarcely to be credited." An accompanying engraving by a ship's artist includes a detail of a Hawaiian native paddling on a surfboard towards the ships that Cook had brought on his historic expedition. Even though this paddler is not actually surfing, he is part of the first artistic study ever done of a surfer and his surfboard.
Cook and King were the first (but not the last) author-explorers to become entranced by this "astonishing" activity. During the next hundred years and more, dozens of missionaries, adventurers and authors would visit Hawaii and record their impressions of this uniquely Hawaiian sport.
Unfortunately, many of the first and most influential reactions to surfing were penned by overly-zealous Christian missionaries who found many social phenomena associated with the sport to be un-Christian. They frowned upon surfing's semi-nudity and sexual connotations, and they did all they could to make the sport kapu (or taboo). The drinking, gambling and merry-making that usually took place at ancient-style surf contests, as well as the "lascivious" displays of hula-dancing, were all strongly discouraged.
Surfing also suffered along with the general decimation of the Hawaiian population during the years following the coming of the foreigners. When Cook "discovered" Hawaii in 1778, it was estimated that there were around 300,000 native Hawaiians living and thriving on the archipelago's six major islands. Within the first century of exposure to the West, however, thousands of Hawaiians died of both serious and minor diseases. By the 1880s, the Hawaiian population had shrunk to about 40,000 people. This fact alone explains why surfing diminished in Hawaii during the late 19th century.
In a different kind of vintage photograph, this one from the recent 1970s, local Pipeline surf artist Gerry Lopez strikes an authentic Country-style pose, complete with surf dog, chickens, ducks and what was then a newly-shaped, primo and then state-of-the-art Lopez Pipe Model surfing board. Photo: Dana Edmunds
"Destitution, Degradation, and Even Barbarism"
In 1847, Hiram Bingham, the leader of the first party of 14 Calvinist missionaries to arrive in Hawaii from faraway New England, wrote, "The decline and discontinuance of the use of the surfboard as civilization advances may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry or religion, without supposing, as some people have affected to believe, that missionaries caused oppressive enactments against it."
This was the same Bingham, however, who, upon arriving in Hawaii, had written from shipside: "The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt skins were bare, was appalling." He continues: "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?! . . . Can such things be civilized?"'
Hawaiians had to endure difficult and painful times indeed, but despite the terrible decimation of their people and the suppression of their traditions, other, more sophisticated visitors came to Hawaii and were charmed by what they saw on land—and at sea.
In 1825, for example, the British captain George Anson Byron, master of HMS Blonde (and a cousin of the great poet George Gordon, Lord Byron) reported that in Hawaii during the 1820s, a surfboard was a very fashionable part of a young male Hawaiian's estate: "To have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a sandwich islander what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young Englishman."
At about the same time, an open-minded missionary named William Ellis witnessed the act of surfing and noted (in marked contrast to many of his clerical colleagues) that for one "to see fifty or a hundred persons riding on an immense billow, half immersed in spray and foam, for a distance of several hundreds yards together, is one of the most novel and interesting sports a foreigner can witness in the islands."
By the 1860s, even the famed American author Mark Twain had visited Hawaii and succumbed to the siren call of the surf. In Roughing It, a humorous collection of newspaper articles published in 1866, Twain described his first and last surfing experience. "I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I had the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me."
Like most novice surfers, Twain was frustrated in his attempts to ride the waves, so he just watched in awe as a Hawaiian (or "heathen," as Twain called him) came "whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed," Twain exclaimed.
Heenalu, The "Royal Sport"
During the 1800s, there also emerged a number of prominent Hawaiian scholars who began recording the many fast-fading Hawaiian chants. Among them were Kepelino Keauokalani, Samuel Manaikalani Kamakau (1815-1876), John Papa Ii (1800-1870) and David Malo (1793-1853). From their voluminous accounts and records of Hawaiian events, the subject of surfing —in both a practical and historical context—emerges time and time again. Ii even describes in great detail how and from which indigenous woods various ancient surfboards were made as well as how board designs differed, depending on what kind of wave a person wanted to ride.
A poignant beachside memorial to the much-admired Hawaiian surfer, Eddie Aikau, who tragically died at sea in 1978 while attempting to secure help for his fellow crewmen who'd been stranded aboard a traditional Hawaiian sailing canoe named the Hokulea.
Photo: Jeff Divine
In these accounts, the Hawaiian word that was most often used to describe surfing was heenalu (or wavesliding), and a surfboard was known as a papa heenalu (or wave-sliding board).
As historians, these four men contributed a great trove of information for surfing historians to draw from, but despite their efforts, it wasn't until the so-called "popular press" and internationally famous authors began to write about this unusual Hawaiian sport that surfing really began to attract the attention of the outside world. Indeed, surfing's greatest publicity coup probably took place in 1907, when the popular American author Jack London wrote a widely circulated story entitled A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki.
London, who had attempted surfing during a holiday in Hawaii that summer, stood up on a moving surfboard, experienced what he described as "ecstatic bliss," and, in response to this waterborne euphoria, began to describe a Waikiki surfer as a "Brown Mercury" who emerged from an "invincible roar .