of the early nineteenth century, according to this narrative, were a “dispensation of light” that had “wing[ed] its way as a new Lono [a Hawaiian deity] across the waters.” They filled a “vacuum in Hawaii’s social and religious institutions” following the death of Kamehameha in 1819, and the people embraced the Western arrivals with “enthusiasm.”5 The seeds of Christianity were planted, and, as they sprouted, “the old life, its worship, festivals, public games, and festivities with all the abuses that gathered about them” began to dissipate.
Surfing was among the casualties, Emerson said regretfully. Or so it appeared. “The sport of surf riding possessed a grand fascination,” he noted, “and for a time it seemed as if it had the vitality to hold its own as a national pastime. There are those living, perhaps some present [in the audience], who remember the time when almost the entire population of a village would at certain hours resort to the sea-side to indulge in, or to witness, this magnificent accomplishment. We cannot but mourn its decline.” So great had been the retreat from this noble tradition that, Emerson continued, “today it is hard to find a surf-board outside of our museums and private collections.”6 While Emerson’s accounting was perhaps an exaggeration, it is nevertheless true that the number of practitioners of the sport had fallen tremendously by the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Yet Emerson’s lamentation for surfing’s diminished popularity seems misguided. The problem had not been wave riding per se, he suggested. Rather, it was that surfing had “felt the touch of the new civilization.” For those perplexed by the meaning of this message, Emerson offered clarification. “[A]s the zest of this sport was enhanced by the fact that both sexes engaged in it, when this practice was found to be discountenanced by the new majority, it was felt that the interest in it had largely departed—and this game too went the way of its fellows.”7 Emerson, in essence, wanted it both ways. Surfing was a healthy pastime, but it was one whose scantily clad practitioners, both male and female, horrified many proponents of “the new civilization,” particularly in that wave riding served not only as a pleas ur able endeavor in its own right but also as a form of sexual courtship.8 For those being tutored in the modest ways of the missionaries’ Christian deity, surfing was certain to meet with divine disapproval. Its practitioners were much too licentious. Wave riders thus faced a stark choice: immediate gratification—though with eternal damnation—or the immeasurable bounties of a heavenly future. Put that way, surfing would not have appeared to stand a chance.
Except that it did. While the number of Hawaiian surfers dropped precipitously as the nineteenth century unfolded, wave riding, as historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker reminds us, did in fact continue.9 It is true that surfing was witnessed by haoles much less frequently as the decades passed.10 Given the economic changes that upended Hawaiian customs and the physical decimation of the Hawaiian people following the 1778 arrival of Captain James Cook, this is understandable. After all, the sandalwood, whaling, and sugar industries fundamentally reshaped Hawaiian society and leisure practices—there was far less time for surfing—while a population in the islands that David Stannard conservatively estimated as 800,000 prior to contact had been reduced, largely through the introduction of foreign pathogens for which Hawaiians enjoyed no immunity, to approximately 135,000 by 1823.11 By the 1890s, the number of Hawaiians stood at fewer than 40,000.12 Even if one were to accept that Stannard’s pre-contact estimate is too high, as Andrew Bushnell has argued, this still represents a staggering loss of life.13 Under such circumstances it seems obvious that the number of surfers would have decreased. Those that continued to ride the waves were survivors of not only the biological onslaught introduced by white contact but also a radically different labor system and the concerted efforts of at least some white missionaries to demonize a pastime they associated with barbarism and sexual indecency.
In this the Hawaiian people shared experiences similar to those of American Indians. This is hardly surprising. Most of the Protestant missionaries who arrived in Hawai‘i in 1820 came from the United States, a polity occupying a considerable landmass whose indigenous population required decades of military pacification. Accompanying this imperial expansion was, more oft en than not, Christian proselytization. Indian peoples were assumed by the white invaders to be racial inferiors. The Americans thus set out to racially uplift the savages in their midst. This meant an effort to eradicate those cultural traditions that were a presumed mark of indigenous barbarism and replace them with Christianity. When Indian people were not simply killed outright, the invaders, nearly always projecting an image of unquestioned benevolence, sought to eliminate the use of native languages, the practices of native spirituality, and many of the basic structures of native society. Frivolity was frowned upon while industriousness was expected. These pious white Christians were, they insisted, only doing God’s work. It was true that the settler population found itself greatly enriched as Indian peoples were dispossessed of most of their native lands.14 But this was just a coincidence. Or so the story goes.
In Hawai‘i it was much the same. Hiram Bingham, probably the most prominent leader of the missionary movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, was, as someone reared in New England, a product of that American worldview. Indeed, his detailed account of his experiences with the Hawaiian people closely mirrors the North American imperial literature of the era. Recalling his memorable “first intercourse with the natives,” for example, Bingham, sounding much like those who first made contact with the Indian peoples of North America, found that
the appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked[,] savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins, were bare, was appalling. 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! How dark and comfortless their state of mind and heart! How imminent the danger to the immortal soul, shrouded in this deep pagan gloom! Can such beings be civilized? Can they be Christianized? Can we throw ourselves upon these rude shores, and take up our abode, for life, among such a people, for the purpose of training them for heaven?”
These were questions of the gravest import. The answer to all of them, Bingham happily assured his readers, was an emphatic yes.15
When Bingham contemplated the “idolaters of reprobate mind” he encountered during his Polynesian crusade, he perceived a fertile crop of Hawaiians begging for religious conversion.16 But this would be about much more than Sunday worship. It would mean accepting the norms of white civilization, including modest (albeit impractical) dress, the abolition of gambling, and Christian notions of sexual propriety. All of these handicapped surfing, a sport best enjoyed free of sartorial encumbrance on which both Hawaiian men and women wagered.17 So, too, did the missionaries’ emphasis on constant work as a means of self-improvement. Recreational pursuits such as wave riding—the “most popular of all . . . pastimes with all ranks and ages,” according to a nineteenth-century historian of the islands—suffered.18 So would Hawaiians subscribe to these Christian precepts? Bingham and his contemporaries found, in time, a surprisingly receptive audience. They were undoubtedly aided by the ongoing decimation of the Hawaiian people. “Natives,” wrote Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, “perceived that missionaries might give them eternal life and, more immediately, save them from the impact of the foreign diseases that were sweeping the Pacific.”19 Acceptance of the Christian deity, in other words, promised rewards in both this life and the next. There was a practical benefit to conversion. Not surprisingly, many did accept the Christian faith. But the disavowal of cultural practices such as wave riding was an entirely different matter.
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The Protestant missionaries of nineteenth-century Hawai‘i never directly prohibited surfing. Such a prohibition was not necessary. In the missionaries’ effort to impose an entirely new worldview on the Hawaiian people, it was made abundantly clear that surfing and other traditional pastimes would only hinder the heathens’ moral progress. And moral progress was imperative, they believed. Arriving on the Big Island in 1820, Lucia Ruggles Holman,
