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 in the twentieth century, they may have needed new myths that presented themselves as the inheritors of Hawaii’s favorite pastime.
NEW SURFING: THE REINVENTION OF HEʻE NALU
Tensions between the Hawaiian monarchy’s and foreign industry’s control of Hawaiian resources came to a head in 1893, and with the support of the U.S. Marines, Queen Liliʻuokalani was deposed, Hawaiʻi was made a republic, and then it was illegally annexed as a U.S. territory in 1898.33 Haoles were taking over Hawaiʻi; why not surfing?
With U.S. business and military interests effectively in control of Hawaiʻi, in the first half of the twentieth century many material and cultural aspects of the islands were transformed to accommodate the growing capitalist demands of the United States. Heʻe nalu, or what was increasingly referred to by the English-language term surfing, was not excluded. Walker’s convincing argument that surfing remained essentially and defiantly Hawaiian—that the surf zone was the one area where Hawaiian men were able to resist colonial control (though as he notes, the prominence of women surfing in the twentieth century declined)34—is a crucial counterpoint to the story of reinvention that I tell here. Surfing was and is not one thing. While on the one hand the surf zone remained an arena where Hawaiian men strove to preserve agency beyond the reach of colonial domination, on the other hand the practice of surfing was simultaneously being reinvented to suit the purposes of non-Hawaiian practitioners both in Hawaiʻi and abroad. This reinvented, reinterpreted, revalued surfing is what I call New Surfing.
Alexander Hume Ford and Jack London were key figures in the reinvention of what became New Surfing. Ford was a wealthy world traveler who in 1907 moved to Waikīkī and adopted it as his home. He took to surfing with a passion and founded the Outrigger Canoe Club in 1908 in Waikīkī with the express intention of encouraging wave riding on boards as well as in canoes. The membership was almost exclusively white, and women were not admitted until 1926. The exclusion of Hawaiians was not written into the club’s charter, but the idea of their inclusion did not mesh with Ford’s greater agenda: the promotion of tourism and development in Hawaiʻi.35 The Outrigger Canoe Club was for Honolulu’s elite men, who at that time were predominantly white.
One of Ford’s early converts to surfing was Jack London, who sailed to Hawaiʻi in 1907 with his wife, Charmian, shortly after Ford settled there. Where Ford was a wheeler-dealer man of action, London was a man of words. Through his writerly pen we see the transformation of surfing into a hypermasculine “royal sport for the natural kings of the earth.”36 A Hawaiian surfer whom London witnesses becomes: “[A] Mercury—a black Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea. . . . [H]e is a man, a natural king, a member of the kingly species that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation.”37 Here, in the first years of surfing’s reinvention, London introduces the notion of man’s mastery over nature—strikingly different from earlier Hawaiian approaches that suggested working with natural forces for sustenance and pleasure. In an unintentionally backhanded way, linking surfing to Hawaiian
