accounts about surfing. However, archeologists and art historians have discovered ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs (or pictures incised into volcanic stone) that depict cartoon-like surfers on surfboards. These petroglyphic surfers may or not predate the arrival of the white man (or haole) in Hawaii during the late 18th century. Ancient surfing scenes (as recounted in recorded chant sequences) were apparently fun, bitchy, fanciful, and sometimes even violent. Woe betide the weaker of two surfers in one chant who became entangled in a love triangle involving a powerful woman chief. Even worse was the plight of an enthusiastic surfer of lower caste who dared to ride waves that were kapu-e d (declared off-limits or taboo) by an avid surfing alii (high-caste chief).
This earnest-looking Hawaiian man poses with his family alongside a grass shack in what may well be the first known photo portrait of a surfer and his surfboard. This superb study was taken by a photographer named Theodo P. Severin around 1890. It is now in the archives of Honolulu's Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.
It was the legendary beach-boys of Waikiki who re-popularized and saved Hawaii's cultural heritage of surfing early this century, after it had endured years of discouragement and neglect. This early Hawaiian surfer was photographed by the Honolulu photographer Frank Davey at popular Waikiki Beach below the brow of Diamond Head around the 1900s. He is wearing a stylish loincloth and holding a short alaia surfboard that was the waveriding vogue in Old Hawaii.
A collection of these Hawaiian surfing stories—along with similar Polynesian lore from Samoa, Tahiti and New Zealand—would fill a medium-sized book. Such an anthology would firmly establish that surfing was indeed a very important part of day-to-day life in the middle and south Pacific islands inhabited by the seafaring Polynesians. Such accounts would also fuel speculation about the origin of surfing, since, despite the recorded oral history, nobody can quite pin down just where this maritime dance form was born. Who on this planet first meditated on the recreational use of gravity and moving-wave vectors? And who shaped the first surfboard, paddled into that first rideable wave, then actually stood up on that surfboard and rode it towards shore?
The First Surf Reporters
The great British explorer and navigator, Captain James Cook, wrote in his journal in 1777 about a curious Tahitian water sport called "choroee", in which Tahitians in small outrigger canoes paddled into and rode ocean waves. However, it wasn't until Cook visited Hawaii a year later that he saw actual stand-up boardsurfing.
Unfortunately, Cook did not get to write about this 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
