Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
We do not know if surfers today yet appreciate all the potential surfing breaks that Hawaiians enjoyed on the islands centuries ago.
Extending place naming beyond the Hawaiian Islands, relatively modern mele, such as Queen Emma’s surfing mele, remind us that Hawaiʻi was part of the globalizing world. These lines are heard near the end of Queen Emma’s surf chant (audio example 2):
He kulana hee nalu o Farani,
He huʻa o ka nalu o Maleka,
He ika no ka nalu o Rusini,
He paena na ka nalu o Beretane
A place to surf is at France,
The last of the “surfs” is America,
The force that carries the “surfs” along is Russia,
The place where the surf lands is England21
During Queen Emma’s lifetime, none of these places were surfing destinations, though they all are now, including most recently Russia.22 All were also empires with aspirations to colonize Hawaiʻi. Rather than being literally about surfing, these lines remind us that, as the wife of King Kamehameha IV, Queen Emma was a player on the world stage.
Close readings of surfing mele also show us that pre-revival Hawaiians rode waves in ways that many surfers in the New Surfing era thought were possible only with recent advances in surfboard technologies. For example, riding obliquely across the face of a wave just ahead of the break where the top of the wave pitches over or topples down to form what surfers call “whitewater” is the skill foundation of modern surfing. It was assumed that without fins or skegs on their surfboards, ancient Hawaiian surfers would have had very limited directional control of their boards, and would have typically ridden more or less straight in with the direction of the swell—certainly not obliquely, nearly parallel to the swell itself. Fins were added to surfboards in the early twentieth century, and there is no evidence that pre-contact surfboards ever had fins. However, these lines from a pre-revival mele, “He inoa no Naihe,” reveal that Hawaiian surfers were able to ride across a wave obliquely (audio example 1):
Lala a kou ka nalu a pae i Oahu
Auau i ka Waiuli, Wailena
Ride in obliquely till you land at Oʻahu
To bathe in the living waters, the waters of life.23
Royalty generally used long, narrow, thick, heavy boards called papa olo (fig. 5). They ranged from fourteen to sixteen feet, or even longer. Commoners used the more typical papa alaia (fig. 6), ranging from six to nine feet, flat on the deck and bottom, and much lighter.24 This mele was for a surfer of the Hawaiian chiefly class, so it is assumed that he was riding a board fit for his class—a long, narrow, heavy olo board, which would be much easier to catch waves with, but much more difficult to hold in an oblique angle across a wave’s face.
While it is likely that modern surfers have come up with moves that are new, it is also presumptuous to assume that surfing is fundamentally more advanced today than it was in pre-contact Hawaiʻi. After compiling and translating the earliest references to surfing by Hawaiians, Hawaiian surfer and historian John Clark concluded that “traditional Hawaiian surfers were as at home in the ocean and as skilled in riding waves as any surfer today. While they rode solid wood boards without fins, boards that limited the extent of their maneuvers, they still did all the basics that surfers do now.”25 This included riding inside barreling hollow waves, and riding very large waves. Surfers today do not know or fully appreciate the full extent of pre-revival Hawaiian surfing skills, but mele contain hints that ancient Hawaiian surfers were far better than we have imagined.
FIGURE 5. Engraving from 1825 depicting a domestic scene in Hawaiʻi, with a papa olo surfboard thirteen to fifteen feet long prominently displayed. Iles Sandwich: Maison de Kraimoku, Premier Ministre du Roi; Fabrication des Etoffes. By Villeroy, after A. Pellion. Image courtesy of the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi (www.bishopmuseum.org).
FIGURE 6. Man holding a papa alaia surfboard at Waikīkī Beach, with Diamond Head in the background, ca. 1890. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi (www.bishopmuseum.org).
THE DEMISE OF SURFING?
The surfing mele referenced above span the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century—a period of increasing contact with Europeans and North Americans, as well as with sailors and explorers from the rest of the world. This was a time of rapid change in Hawaiʻi, and of a corresponding decline of surfing. I include a question mark in the subheading for this section because the decline of surfing tends to be both exaggerated and misattributed in surfing histories. In an article that he titled “The Reports of Surfing’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Patrick Moser traces the often repeated notion that surfing was on the verge of dying out to a 1854 article by one George Washington Bates, whose words are then repeated in histories of surfing up through the twentieth century and still now in the twenty-first.26 Careful not to cast blame, and recognizing his own European heritage, Moser tactfully points out that the reports of surfing’s demise are all by Europeans and Anglo-Americans, or what Hawaiians call collectively haole (“foreigner,” usually implying white). Many Hawaiians in touch with their own surfing heritage know better; the rest of us just have not been listening.
Hawaiian surfer and historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker hopes to set the record straight. Drawing from hitherto inaccessible or ignored Hawaiian-language newspapers published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and from his ethnographic research among Hawaiian surfers, Walker shows that surfing did not die out among Hawaiians, despite all odds.27 Surfing—along with everything else Hawaiian—did, however, go through a tough patch in the nineteenth century. Missionaries had dramatic intended and unintended impact on Hawaiian society beginning in the 1820s. Some of them discouraged and disparaged surfing, usually for its associations with gambling, sex, and, perhaps worst of all, inutility,28 but missionaries never directly legislated against surfing as is sometimes claimed. They didn’t need to. The establishment of labor-hungry plantations on the islands and a shift by the royalty toward European signifiers of status (instead of traditional Hawaiian signifiers of status such as surfing prowess), together with new ideas about gods introduced by missionaries, destabilized just about everything in Hawaiian society.29 Added to this social, spiritual, and economic upheaval was the decimating effect of disease on the formerly isolated islanders. The population of the Hawaiian Islands was estimated to be between five and eight hundred thousand when Captain Cook arrived in 1778, but disease introduced by Cook and his men and subsequent visitors reduced the population of native Hawaiians to 134,925 at the 1823 census,30 and their numbers continued to diminish to the end of the century. By the 1890s Hawaiians were a minority people on the Hawaiian Islands.31 Of course there were fewer Hawaiians surfing by the end of the century: there were fewer Hawaiians, period.
The impact on surfing of social upheaval and decline in the native Hawaiian population was most noticeable at centers of colonial influence, such as Honolulu—especially that former hotbed of surfing, Waikīkī. Yet if one moved away from the centers of foreign influence, it became much more likely that one would encounter substantial groups of surfers out on a good day. Such was the firsthand account of traveler Samuel S. Hill, who in 1849 visited the remote village of Keauhua, Hawaiʻi, only to find it empty of people. When his party finally encountered a few women, they were informed that everyone else from the village was down at a nearby bay surfing.32 Hawaiians never gave up on surfing despite their hardships, but as more and more haoles began to learn surfing themselves