THANKFULLY THEY HIT land, those hardcore Marquesan canoe sailors who headed into the endless blue Pacific in a time before humans inhabited Hawaii. If their navigators hadn’t skilfully pinpointed this tiny group of islands, the most remote landmass on earth, we probably wouldn’t have surfing today.
Maybe we would. Coastal dwellers worldwide have always caught swells in their fishing boats when they landed on wave-fringed beaches. In Peru and West Africa certain cultures even worshipped waves, and sometimes rode them on special canoes and rafts. But none of them rode waves with as much skill and passion or made it a central, enduring part of their culture.
Those early Hawaiians did, which is what made their type of wave riding so different. They probably arrived on the islands armed with knowledge of canoe surfing, like their brothers and sisters throughout Polynesia. But somewhere along the timeline they developed high-performance, twelve-foot wooden surfboards, designed for standing up on while riding big waves. How or why is not clear, but we do know that they really did surf, a lot, over a long period of time. Chiefs had a certain type of board, the Olo, which was the biggest, and made from wiliwili wood. They reserved certain spots, and the biggest waves, just for themselves. The lower classes, including women and children, rode the Alaia – a shorter board made from koa wood.
In this culture no one called surfing a waste of time. According to the earliest written records, which are consistent with the ancient legends of Hawaii, often, when the seas were going wild, daily life was put on hold and the people went surfing. At times like these there were fierce contests, heavy gambling and numerous rituals associated with the surf, performed to keep the hierarchy of gods happy and the universe in good order, or pono.
The first European explorers, who arrived more than a thousand years later, were quite simply amazed by surfing. Captain Cook had already seen people in Tahiti riding waves in canoes, but he’d never seen them ride these long thin boards, standing up. He devoted several pages to it in his diary.
Subsequent arrivals, Western churchfolk in particular, weren’t so impressed. They did their best to wipe it out, which wasn’t hard because the arrival of white men had set off an instant catastrophe in the islands anyway, as people died like flies from venereal diseases, influenza and other invisible genocidal weapons. The population plummeted in the years immediately after contact with the white men. By the time the missionaries started ordering people to wear clothes and build square houses, Hawaiians had already lost much of their culture anyway. So the ancient sport almost died out completely.
But the pulse never stopped. The heart of Hawaiian culture was still pumping, even in the late 1800s when a half-Irish, half-Hawaiian man named George Freeth made an old-style Olo board and began to ride it standing up in the mellow waves in front of Waikiki, the capital town of the islands. At the time, only a few Hawaiian families were still riding waves there, mostly on shorter Paipo body boards, as Hawaiians had since the days of King Kamehameha I, the great Hawaiian chief who took control of the whole island chain in the 1700s. The king, it is said, enjoyed surfing long into his sixties and was noted for riding enormous summer swells on the outer reefs of Waikiki.
As George Freeth and friends revived the Olo board, an increasing number of Hawaiians followed suit and surfing quickly became a major feature in Waikiki again. Full-time ‘beach boys’ did what their forefathers had done – hung out at the beach, surfed, fished and talked story amongst themselves. Only by now there were new spin-offs. Tourists. They loved watching these bronze watermen gliding with the waves, and as more and more arrived each year, more and more of them left with basic surfing lessons under their belt. The word was spreading to other lands. And Waikiki was emerging as something more than a busy port on a remote island. Its backdrop, Honolulu, was turning into an American city, and so popular was this seductive ‘island lifestyle’ that the authorities began using surfing, and the beach-boy image, to sell Hawaii as an exciting holiday spot for the super-rich of America.
One super-rich man, Henry Huntington, owned a little railway line back in southern California. He was so struck by the surfing he saw at Waikiki that he invited Freeth over to do a ‘Hawaiian surfboard riding’ display for the public. Freeth agreed, the people loved it, and Huntington left his name with the beach that some say still represents the heart of Californian surfing today. Much of what we call ‘surf culture’ these days originates, sometimes indirectly, from there. But it has never been a Californian thing, surfing. Hawaiians showed them how.
There were others in the islands who helped plant the seeds of the global surfing culture we inhabit today. Duke Kahanamoku, an Olympic swimmer, inventor of the front crawl and a Hawaiian respected around the world, decided he’d spread the knowledge of surfing to other nations whenever he possibly could. In the early days of the twentieth century, Duke covered a lot of miles – up the east and west coasts of the USA, and eventually across to Australia, putting on surfing displays wherever he went. And everywhere he went people were inspired by what they saw.
What Duke taught was a Hawaiian thing. He didn’t just show people how to stand up on a piece of wood; he taught them to fashion the right shape and make the correct equipment for the waves they had. But it wasn’t just practical. Duke also showed people a Hawaiian spirit of goodwill, which the islanders call aloha, and an attitude to life that is harmonised by the sea. As well as bringing the sport of his ancestors to these new countries, Duke was transmitting a ‘vibe’ from his own ancestral world.
Soon it went to Europe. The earliest known surfboard in this part of the world is a fine example of the Hawaiian spirit that comes in the package with surfing. It was a gift, sent in 1936 by members of the Waikiki Outrigger Canoe Club to an English dentist named Jimmy Dix, who lived in rural Somerset but holidayed in Cornwall each summer. He’d seen surfing in an encyclopaedia and written off to the club for information on how to build his own surf-board. One day some months later, a twelve-foot-long hollow wooden board made by Tom Blake arrived with the postman. There was a short note with it, which read: ‘From the surfers of Hawaii, to the people of Great Britain.’ With this one gesture of aloha many lives were to change.
French surf culture began soon afterwards, only this time through the prism of Hollywood when a film producer who’d surfed in Hawaii spotted similar, perfect waves in Biarritz. He shipped some boards over and made a few connections. Soon France too was tapped into Hawaiian energy, direct. And so it spread through Europe – in one country after another, people appeared on the beaches carrying long thin planks and playing the Polynesian way, in the most violent of seas.
Somewhere along the line the Americans had taken over Duke’s role as chief messenger of the surfing gospel, spreading the good news of wave riding around the world through magazines, books, films. Perhaps the most effective of all evangelists were their servicemen, who surfed and left boards in Japan, Africa, the Caribbean, and dozens of other locations where people didn’t yet know they could have fun in the ocean the way Hawaiians had done for centuries.
So too the Australians, who’d quickly become an expert water culture after the Duke’s early visits and the growth of the lifeguard system. Aussies spread the art to the deepest corners of the East and reintroduced it, Hawaiian-style, to Pacific islands that historically had never passed the canoeing stage. They went all over the world as lifeguards and heavily influenced the surf cultures of Europe and South Africa. Others went deep, like Australian Peter Troy, a wandering 1960s surf monk who found sublime waves in deepest Indonesia and other parts of South-east Asia. He and other hermit-like disciples recognised nirvana when they saw it, but only because, a couple of generations back, Hawaiians had told them what it looked like.
Thus the sport of the original Hawaiian culture became a sport of the whole world – rich, poor and even landlocked countries cultivated their own surf cultures. In Brazil, surfers today are national heroes; in Israel there’s a famous rabbi who surfs; in England you can do a university degree in Surf Science. In the Andaman Islands some local tribes saw surfing for the first time just a few years ago when a boatful of professional surfers explored the area; and Bulgaria’s surf team travels for fourteen hours to surf knee-high windy radioactive lumps of water, Hawaiian-style.
So the sweet fruit that early Hawaiians grafted and enjoyed for themselves over centuries produced the seeds of a new, global, surf culture. It is actually a sub-culture, which makes it less tangible, harder to understand for outsiders. Today, surfing is thick with diverse life forms and numerous mutations of the original pono-inspired play of ancient Hawaii. In fact, riding waves is probably the only thing we ‘sub-cult’ members have in common. That, and the way we do it, which in case anyone should ever forget, is wave riding, Hawaiian-style. Calls us bums, call us what you want, but hey, at least we’re helping keep the universe in good order.