contests.13 Thus in this mele, as well as in others, surfing is clearly associated with Hawaiian nobility and rituals that reaffirmed the power of the royalty, as well as with the geography of the Hawaiian Islands and beyond. Surfing was clearly integral to Hawaiians’ self- and social conceptions, and to their sense of place both geographically and socially.
Today New Surfing is strikingly male dominated, despite the increasing numbers of female surfers during the first decade of the twenty-first century.14 This is doubly striking and troubling when we realize that ancient Hawaiian mele concur with other sources to show conclusively that women, too, surfed (and were sometimes praised for surfing better than men). These few lines from the surfing mele for Queen Emma, the queen consort of King Kamehameha IV during the latter half of the nineteenth century, reveal several interesting images of Hawaiian surfing at that time (audio example 2):
He nalu ka holua no Waiakanonoula,
He nalu ka lio me ke kaa i uka o ka aina,
He nalu ke olaʻi naueue ka honua
He nalu ke anuenue me ka punohu i ka moana,
He nalu ka awa kau a ka manu iluna o ka laau
He nalu ka popolo me ka laulele,
E kaha ana ke kane me ka wahine,
E hee ana ka luahine me ka elemakule,
Pae aku, pae i ka nalu o Mauliola.
The hōlua sledding is the surfing of Waiakanonoula
The horse and buggy are surfing upon the land
The earthquake is surfing that shakes the earth
The rainbow is surfing and so is the low-lying rainbow on the ocean,
The awa planted by the birds on a tree is a “surf,”
The popolo and the laulele weeds are “surfs,”
Upon which men and women glide,
The old women and old men surf,
And land on the surf of Mauliola.15
I selected this fragment from the long mele in honor of Queen Emma because it starts with a mention of a ho-lua, a wooden sled used for sliding down the sides of volcanoes, reaching speeds upward of fifty miles per hour.16 The passage continues with other metaphors of surfing on land that provide insight into the modernizing Hawaiʻi of the mid–nineteenth century; horses had been introduced to the islands only in the first years of that century. The mele then extends the metaphors of surfing to create an atmospheric image of Hawaiʻi—earthquakes, rainbows, foliage, and fowl—before returning to the liquid waves we usually associate with surfing. There we are reminded that women did surf, even old women who “land on the surf of Mauliola”—literally, “the breath of life” or “life and healing.” Queen Emma’s mele shows us that, among many other things, at least some nineteenth-century Hawaiians understood the health benefits of surfing, and they considered it integral to many aspects of their ancient and modernizing lives—perhaps even a metaphor for life and movement itself.17
Queen Emma’s mele illustrates another key quality of surfing mele: the naming of places, especially prime surfing locations. Mele effectively create poetic maps of the Hawaiian Islands. Queen Emma’s surf mele begins on the island of Hawaiʻi, mentioning in line 6 “beautiful Waipio, whose surf is ridden by visiting chiefs. . . .” Waipio is on the northern shore of Hawaiʻi Island and contains an ancient surfing spot.18 In the passage reproduced above, sledding on Waiakanonoula, not far from Waipio, is compared with surfing. Later in the mele, places like Kapohakau (now the name of a mountain summit on Kauaʻi, but possibly the name of a surf beach in the past), Wahinekapu (a bluff near Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi, the taboo residence of a god), Puaenaena (probably Puaʻena, an ancient surfing area on Oʻahu),19 and many other significant locations are named. As noted above, Naihe’s name chant mentions the surfing spot Kahaluʻu, which is overlooked by a surfing temple, and his chant includes other named locations. Finney and Houston note that old Hawaiian stories and mele mention more named spots for surfing on the Hawaiian Islands than were commonly surfed in the mid-1960s.20 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
