“Surf-Board Riding,” 1870s: This drawing appeared in Reverend J. G. Wood’s exposé The Uncivilized Races of Man in All Countries of the World. They may have been lacking a Westerner’s concept of “civilization,” but those wave-riders sure looked happy. (Bishop Museum)
Hawai’ian Surfer Girl, 1920s: A label from Hawaiian Girl canned pineapples depicting a surfing girl of days past. (Voyageur Press Archives)
“Surf Swimming by Sandwich Islanders,” 1870s The Reverend J. G. Wood included many illustrations of naked Islanders enjoying their wave-riding in his 1871 tome, The Uncivilized Races of Man in All Countries of the World. In fact, there were so many such images, one began to wonder at the good minister’s own desires to ride the surf. (Voyageur Press Archives)
All this surfing sensation—the culture and fashion, the movies and music, from Gidget to the Beach Boys and those bushy, bushy blond hairdos—goes back as far as the 1770s. And beyond.
Captain James Cook was sailing the HMS Discovery on his third voyage into the Pacific when, on January 18, 1778, he discovered an uncharted Polynesian archipelago. The natives called their home Owhyhee—later transliterated as “Hawai’i”—but Cook christened them the Sandwich Islands in honor of his friend and supporter, John Montague, first Lord of the Admiralty and fourth Earl of Sandwich. The Islanders greeted Cook with reverence, believing the Englishman was a white-skinned, red-bearded god. Cook traded iron nails and other geegaws for supplies and was in turn offered the chieftain’s daughter, whom the good captain politely accepted. Yet these Hawai’ian Islanders would soon prove Cook’s undoing. Returning to the Big Island of Hawai’i in January 1779, Cook found the natives restless. In the midst of ritual warfare for their god Lono, the Islanders stole one of Cook’s precious “cutters,” a small sailboat essential for exploring in advance of the main ships. Cook retaliated by kidnapping a chief. The result was a mêlée, leaving Cook and two of his marines dead.
Cook’s discovery of Hawai’i may not have been fortuitous for the good captain, but it did lead to the world-at-large’s discovery of the sport of surfing.
Lieutenant James King took over the Discovery and the task of completing the ship’s journal. Before fleeing Hawai’i, King devoted two full pages to describing his bizarre findings as practiced by the Islanders at Kealakekua Bay on the Kona coast:
Whenever from stormy weather or any extraordinary swell at sea the impetuosity of the surf is increased to its utmost heights, they choose that time for their amusement, which is performed in the following manner: Twenty or thirty of the natives, taking each a long narrow board, rounded at the ends, set out together from the shore. The first wave they meet they plunge under, suffering it to role over them, rise again beyond it, and make the best of their way, by swimming out into the sea. The second wave is encountered in the same manner with the first;…as soon as they have gained by these repeated efforts, the smooth water beyond the surf, they lay themselves at length on their board, and prepare for their return. As the surf consists of a number of waves, of which every third is remarked to be always much larger than the others, and to flow higher on the shore, the rest breaking in the intermediate space, their first object is to place themselves on the summit of the largest surge.
By the time of King’s observations in 1778, riding waves lying down or standing on long, hardwood surfboards was an integral part of Hawai’ian culture. Surfboard riding was as layered into the society, religion, and myth of the Polynesian islands as baseball is in the modern United States. Chiefs and kings proved their royalty and earned their leadership by their surfing skills, and commoners made themselves famous—and infamous—by the way they handled themselves on the waves.
I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so smoothly by the sea…
— Captain James Cook on seeing a Tahitian native riding waves in a canoe, Journals, December 1777
Anthropologists can only make educated guesses at the origin and evolution of wave-riding and surfboard construction in Polynesian culture, as there’s no certainty about the timeline and movements of the Polynesians. The migration of humans out of Asia and into the eastern Pacific began around 2000 BC, and Polynesians established themselves within a large triangle from Aotearoa (New Zealand) at the south, Tonga and Samoa along the west, and Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands to the east. Migrating due to the push of population and the pull of the horizon, the first Polynesians arrived in the Hawai’ian Islands in the fourth century AD.
Polynesians who made the arduous journey from Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands across more than 2,500 miles of ocean to Hawai’i were necessarily exceptional watermen and -women, and they brought with them a deep love and knowledge of the waves. They also carried along their customs, including playing in the surf on paipo (belly) boards. Although Tahitians were reported to have occasionally stood on their boards, the art of surfing upright on longboards was certainly perfected, if not invented, in Hawai’i.
Ancient Hawai’ian Olo: The long olo boards were reserved for royalty—surfing kings and queens. Olo were usually crafted from solid koa or wiliwili. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 16' LONG; 18" WIDE; 6" THICK; 170 POUNDS
Ancient Hawai’ian Alaia: A typical alaia used by Hawai’ian Islanders, the style dates back hundreds if not thousands of years. These thin planks were shaped from solid ulu (breadfruit tree) or koa, and measured 6 to 12 feet in length. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 12' LONG; 22" WIDE; 1 1/2" THICK; 50 POUNDS
Hawai’ian Lore Postcards, 1910s–1920s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club, circa 1910: Surfers and canoeists stand by their craft in front of the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club headquarters on Honolulu’s Waikiki Beach. Founded on May 1, 1908, the club was the first modern group dedicated to the perpetuation of the ancient sport of wave- riding. (Bishop Museum)
But a diversion the most common is upon the Water, where there is a very great Sea, and surf breaking on the Shore. The Men sometimes 20 or 30 go without the Swell of the Surf, & lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plank about their Size and breadth, they keep their legs close on top of it, & their Arms are us’d to guide the plank, they wait the time of the greatest Swell that sets on Shore, & altogether push forward with their Arms to keep on its top, it sends them in with a most astonishing Velocity, & the great art is to guide the plank so as always to keep it in a proper direction on the top of the Swell…
— Lieutenant James King, logbook of the HMS Discovery, 1778
Cook and King arrived in Hawai’i thirteen centuries after the first Polynesians, and found surfing deeply rooted in centuries of Hawai’ian legend and culture. Around the islands, places were named for famous surfing incidents. The kahuna (surfing experts) intoned special chants to christen new surfboards, bring the surf up, and give courage to riders who challenged the big waves. Hawai’ians had no written language until the haole (white-skinned people) arrived, so their genealogy and history were remembered in songs and chants: There were legendary stories of love matches made and broken in the surf, lives risked on the waves, and heroic ocean deeds performed by chiefs and commoners alike.
Wave-riding played a role in the annual three-month celebration the Hawai’ians named Makahiki, ruled over by the great god Lono. As James D. Houston and Ben Finney describe in Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport, during Makahiki from October through January, the Islanders halted all work to spend their days dancing, feasting, and surfing. Thousands gathered to watch tournaments where a special god of sport—akua pa’ani—presided. At Kahaluu Bay on the Kona coast, a heiau (ancient shrine) was erected of black lava rock and known as a “surfing temple” where one might pray for good waves. Anthropologist Kenneth Emory explains, “No important contest was engaged in without approaching the gods with prayers and offerings to win their favor. Some god presided over every sport. When a man felt he was in harmonious relations with the mysterious forces about him he was quite likely to accomplish superhuman feats of strength and skill.”
Down through the ages surf-riding probably varied in it’s degree of popularity. It is most certainly a sport of peace and prosperity and we definitely know that after the invasion of Oahu by Kamehameha I in 1795 the practice of surf-riding declined, so that around 1900 the long board was a lost art.
— Tom Blake, Hawaiian Surfboard, 1935
Before contact with Cook’s crew, Hawai’i was ruled by a code of kapu (taboos) regulating most everything, from where to eat and how to grow food to building surfboards and predicting when the waves would be good—or convincing the gods to make them good. Hawai’ian society was stratified into royal and common classes, and these taboos extended into the surf zone. There were reefs and beaches where the ali’i (chiefs) surfed and reefs and beaches for the commoners. Commoners rode waves on paipo and alaia standing boards as long as twelve feet, while the ali’i rode waves on olo, standing boards stretching an incredible twenty-four feet in length.
Several of Hawai’i’s most famous chiefs—including Kaumuali’i, the ruling chief of Kaua’i, and Kamehameha I—were renowned for their surfing ability. Ali’i could prove their royalty by showing courage and skill in big waves, and woe betide the commoner who crossed into surf zones reserved for them. On the south shore of Oahu at Waikiki, the surf spot now known as Outside Castles was called Kalehuawehe (the Removed Lehua) to commemorate an incident in which a commoner dropped into the same wave as a female chief—a taboo punishable by death. To save his skin, he offered her his lehua wreath. The gift worked, and he lived to surf another day.
By the time Captain Cook and his ships reached Hawai’i in 1778, the art, sport, and religion of surfing had reached a sophisticated peak. But what Lieutenant King described was the crest of wave-riding in Old Polynesia; in the wake of the Resolution and Discovery’s voyages, Hawai’i—and Hawai’ian surfing—fell into decline for more than 125 years.
European contact was not good for the Islands. After the publication of Cook and King’s journals, the Sandwich Islands became a destination of choice for adventurers, brigands, missionaries, and other opportunists. Haole and Hawai’ian cultures collided at the end of the eighteenth century, and within the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Hawai’i was changed forever. The haole brought new technologies, languages, and gods—along with vices and diseases that ravaged a society that had evolved in paradisiacal isolation over more than a millennium. In 1819, less than fifty years following Cook’s contact with the Islanders, the old system of taboos was dying away due to the haole’s influence.
As the kapu system crumbled, so did surfing’s ritual significance within Hawai’ian culture. This brought the demise of the ages-old Makahiki festival, and now a commoner could drop in on a chief’s wave without fear for his life, or even of giving up his lehua. Now that the Hawai’ians had been set adrift from the old ways, their culture fell into chaos; as Houston and Finney wrote, “For surfing, the abolition of the traditional religion signaled the end of surfing’s sacred aspects. With surf chants, board construction rites, sports gods and other sacred elements removed, the once ornate sport of surfing was stripped of much of its cultural plumage.”
Duke Kahanamoku, circa 1930: Hawai is greatest surfer and swimmer, Duke Kahanmoku stands with his long longboard in front of the Ala Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach. One of the founders of the Hui Nalu club, Duke became the first ambassador and star of surfing, inspiring interest in the sport from Australia to California, and beyond. (Tai Sing Loo/Bishop Museum)
Greg Noll Builds Ancient Surfboards the Old Hawai’ian Way
Greg Noll’s Thoroughly Modern Olo: The Noll ohana in their woodshed along California’s Smith River. From left, son Jed, wife Laura, and Greg. The ancient Hawai’ians had koa and wili wili, stone adzes and coral; the Nolls use a variety of hardwoods from tropical to temperate and tools from draw knifes to power sanders. (Photos © Jorge Salas)
In old Hawai’i, before the haole washed ashore and whitened the social order, the Hawai’ian kapu system controlled everything—including surfing and surfboards. The surfing kapu were a combination of localism and apartheid, delegating the mass of commoners to ride the shorter alaia boards while the royal ali’i rode olo boards as long as twenty-four feet. Commoners could only surf at certain beaches while the ali’i hogged the best reefs. If a commoner was caught riding an olo board, the punishment was decapitation.
Severing a head for riding a surfboard might seem a little severe today, but Greg Noll has a personal angle on the whole business and understands why a Hawai’ian king might get edgy if a commoner ripped his personal stick.
Noll is a renowned surfer who made his name in the 1950s. He was the Pied Piper who led a group of surfers in 1956 to break an old kapu on surfing Waimea Bay, and later became famous for bulling his way into big waves at Pipeline and Makaha. Now in his sixties and living on the Smith River in Crescent City, Noll is the John Wayne of surfing, a retired tough guy who has a lucrative hobby carving recreations of ancient Hawai’ian surfboards from exotic hardwoods.
Noll travels to great lengths to collect rare hardwoods in Hawai’i, ship them home, cure and dry them, and then carve classic olo and alaia using plan shapes that go back to the Adam and Eve of all surfboards. He puts a tremendous amount of care and work into his boards, yet has all the advantages of the modern world on his side. He can only imagine what the ancients went through: “If I were a Hawai’ian prince and put all that work into a board and someone came along and snagged it off the beach and rode it, I might get a little cross myself,” he says.
Noll has worn a lot of hats in his day—Olympic-class paddler, surf star, surfboard-manufacturing mogul, movie maker, brawler, troublemaker, commercial fisherman—but underneath it all he is really a woodshop geek with a great love for the Hawai’ian culture and people. He began making surfboards in the days of redwood and balsa, honing his woodworking by reshaping planks down to something a skinny kid could drag to the beach and ride. While still in high school, he moved to Hawai’i from his Los Angeles home and attended some of the roughest schools on Oahu. “I learned the Four R’s in Hawai’i: Reading, writing, right crosses, and running,” Noll says. His troubles all evened out when he helped a mammoth Hawai’ian named Bongo Alapai get an A on a woodshop project. “After that I had an island full of cousins,” Noll grins.
Through the 1960s, Noll supported his surfing habit by making movies and selling boards. Greg Noll Surfboards operated out of a twenty-thousand-square-foot building in Hermosa Beach, and in its 1960s heydays was producing 150 boards weekly, from blowing foam at one end to finished product at the other.
Noll is one of the men who put the “industry” in surfing, but he also played hard. In winter, he went surfing, mostly in Hawai’i. In 1969, he rode one of his own creations—an eleven-foot four-inch, thirty-five-pound monster—on one of the biggest days ever attempted at Oahu’s Makaha. He wiped out, survived, and became legend.
There are three manipulations of nature that are fundamentally pleasing to humans—carving rock, channeling water, and smoothing wood—and you will find all three within the Noll compound. He works in a Geppetto-class woodshop overflowing with drying hardwoods, tools, plan shapes, sawhorses, and a great deal of surfing history. Hanging from the rafters is the big-wave gun Noll rode at Makaha, and a similar yellow moose that Noll famously piloted at Outside Pipeline. Scattered among the different boards are some of his recreations carved from exotic hardwoods and polished to a glistening finish. Since 1991, he has spent hundreds of hours in the woodshed, gluing, tractioning, smoothing, and sanding works of art from raw blocks of wood.
Noll’s recreations span time from surfing prehistory to the 1960s. There are Hawai’ian big-wave boards, balsa “beach boards” from the 1950s, and a redwood recreation of Duke Kahanamoku’s favorite board from the 1920s. There are hardwood recreations of boards by Bob Simmons, Mickey Dora, and Jose Angel, but his favorites are the ancient olo boards made from Hawai’ian koa: “I get chills working with that wood because it is so beautiful and rich in Hawai’ian culture, but it is a bugger to get,” Noll says. “It is kapu in Hawai’i to harvest live koa, so I have to wait for a tree to fall down or die. Then I fly to the Big Island, pick out some wood, and get it roughed into planks. Then I ship it from the Big Island to Oahu and then from Oahu to Oakland and then truck it up to Smith River.”
Noll roughs out the planks using templates drawn from boards found in ancient burial mounds in Hawai’ian lava tubes. Those priceless boards are hidden away in locked vaults in Hawai’i’s Bishop Museum: “They let me BS my way into a room where they usually allow only graduate students,” he explains. “I had to wear gloves and used special pencils to draw the plan shapes, but the hair was standing up on the back of my neck the whole time, thinking about who had made these boards and how they had made them and where they had ridden them.”
Once the board is roughed out, the koa has to dry, sometimes for two years; there are koa slabs stored away in the rafters and racks all around his woodshed. Once he gets down to shaping and finishing, he has modern advantages at his fingertips. “I use my favorite Skill 100 planer and boxes of sandpaper to shape and smooth the boards,” Noll says. “And again, these boards are a bugger to make. The Hawai’ians made their boards with stone adzes and coral. To finish the boards, the Hawai’ians dipped them in pig slop or coconut oil to seal them. I oil my boards or occasionally fiberglass them.”
Noll has averaged eight boards a year since 1991, and has orders lined up into the next decade. He has made olos as long as fourteen feet and sold them for fifteen thousand dollars. He regularly gets five to ten thousand dollars for a board, but sometimes can’t bear to part with a special beauty and keeps it for his family. He knows his boards are mostly collector pieces, although some of his hardwood recreations have actually been baptized in the briny and slid along waves. “A few guys have paddled them out, ridden a couple of waves, and then hung them on the wall.”
Noll feels that building these boards isn’t as much about making money as it is about payback to the Hawai’ians for their incredible gift to the world for the sport of surfing. “Making these boards as a tribute to the ancient Hawai’ians keeps me busy and puts a little food on the table,” he says, “but mainly it just makes me feel good.”
Christian missionaries were largely to blame for surfing’s demise in Hawai’ian culture, but in truth they only sped up decay that began earlier with the Islanders’ contact with other haole. The first Calvinist missionaries arrived from England in the 1820s and quickly set about converting Hawai’ians from polytheism to their own one true God. Priests sought to straighten out the heathens, establishing new kapus that forbid drinking, gambling, ship visits by native women, and horseback riding on the Sabbath. The Calvinists taught the Hawai’ians to read and write a twelve-letter alphabet, putting the Hawai’ian language on paper. They also banished that lascivious form of native dancing called “hula” and insisted the Hawai’ians wear more clothes. The Hawai’ian chiefs resisted this new God and His messengers for a time, but within a decade the Christians’ strict moral code was replacing the Hawai’ians’ sensual way of life. Above all, the Calvinists insisted the Hawai’ians work more and play less; restrictions on play included a ban on that wicked sport of surfing.
We came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and he would come whizzing by like a bombshell. It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed.
— Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872
Those who knew Hawai’i before and after the missionaries’ arrival denounced the churchgoers for ruining what was unique and good about the Islands. One of the first haole to point a finger was W. S. W. Ruschenberger, who wrote in his 1838 Narrative of a Voyage Around the World, “A change has taken place in certain customs…. I allude to the variety of athletic exercises, such as swimming, with or without the surfboard, dancing, wrestling, throwing the javelin, etc., all of which games, being in opposition to the strict tenets of Calvinism, have been suppressed. Can the missionaries be fairly charged with suppressing these games? I believe they deny having done so. But they write and publicly express their opinions, and state these sports to be expressly against the laws of God, and by a succession of reasoning, which may be readily traced, impress upon the minds of the chiefs and others the idea that all who practice them secure themselves the displeasure of offended heaven. Then the chiefs, from a spontaneous benevolence, at once interrupt the customs so hazardous to their vassals.”
Duke Kahanamoku, Surfing Hero: Duke appeared on everything from this 1920s travel brochure to a 1933 gum card and magazine ads promoting varnish. (Voyageur Press Archives)
Harsh words, which drew a response from Hiram Bingham, one of the staunchest defenders of the missionary position. In his A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands from 1847, Bingham righteously proclaimed: “The decline and discontinuation of the use of the surfboard, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry and religion, without supposing, as some have affected to believe, that missionaries caused oppressive enactments against it.”
Duke Kahanamoku Postcard, 1910s: Duke became an image of Hawai’i, promoted on postcards such as this to be sent home to lure others to the Islands. As the flipside promised, “He is generally in the surf at Waikiki Beach Honolulu every afternoon.” (Voyageur Press Archives)
Duke Kahanamoku 1930s Waikiki Surfboard: Typical of the boards popular at Waikiki in the 1930s, this California redwood plank belonged to Duke Kahanamoku. (© Malcolm Wilson)
SPECIFICATIONS: 10' LONG; 24" WIDE; 3 1/2" THICK; 70 POUNDS
I shall never forget the first big wave I caught out there in the deep water…I heard the crest of the wave hissing and churning, and then my board was lifted and flung forward. I scarely knew what happened the first half-minute. Though I kept my eyes open, I could not see anything, for I was buried in the rushing white of the crest. But I did not mind, I was chiefly conscious of ecstatic bliss at having caught the wave.
— Jack London, “A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki,” 1907
Yet the “oppressive enactments” of the missionaries were those very things—modesty, industry, and religion. Calvinists forbade wearing the native loincloths and frowned upon the intermingling of the sexes on land and sea. Surfing, naturally, was one of the arch evils, and the missionaries’ enforced modesty and morality was quickly applied to wave-riding. Sadly, many Hawai’ians set their surfboards aside.
Surfing wasn’t the only thing dying out in Hawai’i; the Hawai’ians themselves were being killed off. After 125 years of European contact, conquest, and contamination, the haole controlled just about everything Hawai’ian—the Islanders’ gods, culture, magic, land, and their lives. The estimated population of Hawai’i at the time of Captain Cook’s arrival was four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand. Within a hundred years, the population was down to a mere forty thousand.
Control over the people was not enough, however; the outsiders wanted it all. In 1893, sugar was Hawai’i’s number one export and it had made a number of families rich. But because Hawai’i was still a sovereign foreign nation, the United States imposed a hefty import tariff on its sugar. Now, a cabal of businessmen, plantation owners, and missionaries assisted by U.S. Marines plotted to overthrow the Hawai’ian monarchy led by Queen Lili’uokalani. When the queen fought back against haole domination of her Islands, the foreigners imprisoned her. U.S. President Grover Cleveland declared the coup “not merely wrong, but a disgrace,” yet his words came too late. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawai’i as a territory.
If all this was inspired by the outraged spirit of Captain Cook, then he had certainly gotten his revenge.
Once surfing gets into your soul, it keeps its hold: Wave-riding hadn’t disappeared from the Hawai’ian Islands by the dawn of the twentieth century, but the traditions were being lost. Honolulu had become Hawai’i’s largest city, home to one out of every four Hawai’ians, but surfing on the bay’s reefs was now a rarity. Most of the enduring wave-riding took place at isolated spots like Kalehuawehe on Oahu’s south shore, with a few surfers on Maui, Kaua’i, and the other islands. Several famous photographs from the early 1900s survive of native surfers wearing loincloths with Diamond Head—and little else—in the background. These were solitary men, most likely posing for the camera, surfing alone where once hundreds had cavorted.
At times, even an adventurous visitor caught a wave to sit on top of the world—and then told the world all about it. Reverend Henry T. Cheever celebrated the surfing he witnessed at Lahaina, Maui, in his 1851 journal, Life in the Hawaiian Islands, or, The Heart of the Pacific, As It Was and Is: “It is highly amusing to a stranger to go out to the south part of this town, some day when the sea is rolling in heavily over the reef, and to observe there the evolutions and rapid career of a company of surf-players. [The sport of surfing] is so attractive and full of wild excitement to the Hawai’ians, and withal so healthy, that I cannot but hope it will be many years before civilization shall look it out of countenance, or make it disreputable to indulge in this manly, though it be dangerous, pastime.”
Fifteen years later, Mark Twain sailed to Hawai’i and attempted wave-riding. He described his misadventures in his 1866 book Roughing It: “I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me.”
Ironically, it was three haole who led the rebirth of surfing in the Hawai’ian Islands, and a fourth man—a native Hawai’ian—who was instrumental in pollinating surfing around the world.
In 1907, Jack London came to Hawai’i a literary lion, having already published three best-selling adventure novels: The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and White Fang. London and his wife Charmian were celebrities when they stayed on Waikiki Beach where the Ala Moana Hotel now stands. There were still a few surfers at Waikiki at that time, a loose clique of Hawai’ians and part-Hawai’ians who formed a group called the Waikiki Swimming Club. London met the crew and was introduced to the joy of surfing by Alexander Hume Ford, an eccentric journalist and wanderer. Here, London met the most celebrated Waikiki beach boy of the time, twenty-three-year-old Irish Hawai’ian George Freeth. London was a renowned writer, Ford a habitual organizer, and Freeth a great waterman. What they had in common was a love of surfing, and their combined talents breathed life into the dying-yet-beautiful Sport of Kings.
London penned a tribute to wave-riding, “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” published in the October 1907 Lady’s Home Companion and again in 1911 as part of The Cruise of the Snark. His evocation was pure poetry: “Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full statured, not-struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands. He is a Mercury—a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.”
London continued, describing George Freeth riding upon the crests: “I saw him tearing in on the back of [a wave] standing upright with his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” Such was London’s power of prose that Freeth was invited in 1907 to California by railroad and real estate magnate Henry Huntington to demonstrate wave-riding to promote the Redondo–Los Angeles Railway. Freeth caught a wave in front of an astonished crowd and earned the title of “The First Man to Surf in California.”
Meanwhile, Alexander Hume Ford was campaigning on behalf of surfing in Hawai’ian waters. In 1908, he petitioned the Queen Emma Estate trustees to set aside a plot of land next to Waikiki’s Ala Moana Hotel for a club to preserve the ancient Hawai’ian pursuits of surfing and outrigger canoeing. Ford’s fundraising manifesto promised the fraternity would “give an added and permanent attraction to Hawai’i and make Waikiki always the Home of the Surfer, with perhaps an annual Surfboard and Outrigger Canoe Carnival which will do much to spread abroad the attractions of Hawai’i, the only islands in the world where men and boys ride upright upon the crests of waves.” The trustees accepted Ford’s plan and on May 1, 1908, the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club was founded, the first modern group dedicated to the perpetuation of wave-riding. The clubhouse offered facilities for dressing and a grass hut for board storage right on the beach.
Native Hawai’ians launched in 1905 the informal Hui Nalu—literally “Club of the Waves”—revitalizing Islander interest in the sport. Hui Nalu and the Outrigger Canoe Club began friendly competitions, and by 1911 when the Hui Nalu was formalized, there were as many as a hundred surfboards on Waikiki Beach. In 1915, Jack London returned to Hawai’i and was shocked to find the Outrigger Canoe Club had 1,200 members, “with hundreds more on the waiting list, and with what seems like half a mile of surfboard lockers,” as he happily noted.
My boys and I, we showed them how to go surfing.
— Duke Kahanamoku
One of the Hui Nalu founders was a teenager named Duke Kahanamoku. He and his friends began to gather under a hau (lowland tree) at Waikiki Beach, spending their days surfing and swimming. According to legend, Duke was sitting on his board with others offshore of Waikiki one afternoon waiting for a rideable swell; Duke pointed seaward and said, “The name of our club is out there. The swells coming in spill into a hui (a gathering) and nalu (surf) is what we ride. Add them up and you get hui nalu—the surf club!”
Hawai’i Travel Brochures and Posters, 1910s–1920s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Duke soon won fame as a swimmer; credited with developing the flutter kick to replace the scissor kick in freestyle swimming, he became the three-time world record holder in 100-meter freestyle competition. As a surfer, Duke was one of Hawai’i’s best ocean watermen, a beach boy and a fine figure of Polynesia—slim, muscular, built for speed, and blessed with extraordinarily long hands and feet. He was a natural.
In 1912, Duke passed through Southern California en route to the Olympic Games in Stockholm. He took time out from his travels to demonstrate his surfing style at Corona del Mar and Santa Monica, causing a sensation greater than Freeth. Despite oversleeping and almost missing his heat, Duke won Olympic gold in the 100-meter freestyle in Stockholm and again in Antwerp in 1920. Touted as the fastest swimmer alive, he toured constantly, giving swimming exhibitions around the world. Along the way, he also became a favorite of Hollywood directors, who cast him as an Aztec chief, Hindu thief, Arab prince—any exotic, dark-skinned role. On off days from the shady turf of the studio, Duke led his fellow Hollywood stars into the sunny surf.
Out of the water, I am nothing.
— Duke Kahanamoku
Everywhere he went, Duke rode atop his fame to introduce the world to the sport of surfing. Invited in 1915 by the New South Wales Swimming Association to give a swimming exhibition at the Domain Baths in Sydney, Duke spread the good word on wave-riding to Australia. At the time, Australians were only vaguely aware of surfing, yet the ocean-crazed people thrilled when Duke fashioned an eight-foot six-inch alaia board out of native Australian sugar pine and rode it at Freshwater Beach in Manly in February 1915. Duke’s ride single-handedly put Australia on a path to superpower status in the surfing world.
Duke was a busy man into the 1920s, competing in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics, hobnobbing in Hollywood, and proselytizing for surfing around the globe. But it was back home in Hawai’i in summer 1917 that Duke made himself legendary—and with a single ride. He caught a wave of near-mythological size at Kalehuawehe, which was now called Outside Castles. The wave took him well over a thousand yards, from Outside Castles, through Elk’s Club, Cunha’s, Queen’s, and all the way to the beach. It was a wave and a feat that have never been matched.
Following in the wake of George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku, the population of surfers in California grew slowly but steadily. Surfboards were mostly made of heavy and unwieldy redwoods and hardwoods with designs adapted from Hawai’ian shapes to fit California conditions. By 1928, a Wisconsin-born surfing convert named Tom Blake organized the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships at Corona del Mar, the United States’ first wave-riding competition. The best surfers from all over California competed for the Tom Blake Trophy from 1928 to 1941, when World War II put an end to the event. Blake also became the first photographer to shoot surfing from the water.
Surfing was on its way to becoming more than just a sport in California; the lure of the waves was creating a lifestyle. One of the first Southern California men to become enamored with surfing in the 1920s and 1930s was John H. “Doc” Ball, a dentist who grew up near Hermosa Beach. Doc Ball got hooked by surfing as seriously as any man ever has, finding it “a great stress reliever” away from the confines of an office and the professional sadism of the dentist’s chair. He struggled with the early redwood surfboards until he developed the strength and agility to handle them. Like Blake, Doc Ball was also fascinated by photography and he became the second serious surf photographer, shooting wave-riding from the water via a waterproof camera housing. But he also was capturing something more. Doc Ball turned his camera to document the emerging surfing lifestyle as it existed before, during, and after World War II. He was truly catching a new wave.
Surfing had traveled over a millennium from Polynesia to Hawai’i and on to California and Australia. But the love affair was just beginning.
Tourist at Diamond Head, 1930s: Tourists began making the trek to Waikiki by the scores, and if they didn’t learn to wave-ride Hawai’ian-style, they at least posed with a surfboard for the folks back home. (Voyageur Press Archives)
The Long Happy Life of the SS Lurline
My first time to Hawaii was 1948. I took the Lurline out of San Pedro, and ate for four days straight. I got off the boat, bought trunks and shirts from Nat Norfleet Sr. and surfed Waikiki all summer. I was 17.
— Surf industry pioneer Walter Hoffman
Ask surfers of a certain age what they remember best about Hawai’i in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and their eyes will get misty as they speak the name of a girl—“Lurline.”
The SS Lurline was an elegant passenger liner, pride of the Matson Shipping Line. This was the slow boat to Hawai’i, but no one seemed to mind. From the early 1930s, the Lurline sailed the San Francisco–Palos Verdes–Hawai’i route, transporting tens of thousands of people to paradise. Some of the passengers were surfers bound for the promised land. Others became surfers after their first trip and the experience of riding waves with the beach boys at Waikiki.
Hawai’ian “Zest,” 1937: Hawai’i’s “superb zest” awaited mainland travelers, as this Matson Line ad promised. (Ben Marcus Archives)
The Matson firm was founded by Swedish immigrant William Matson in 1882. Coming to San Francisco, he sailed the bay and rivers, becoming acquainted with the wealthy Spreckels family, who asked him to skipper their family yacht, Lurline. The Spreckels helped Matson finance his first ship, the Emma Claudina, which made its premiere passage to Hawai’i in 1881. The Islands were producing one hundred thousand tons of sugar annually, and reliable shipping was essential. Matson hauled sugar to California, returning with cargo, machinery, and building materials to help fuel the growth of Hawai’i.
The innovation of safe, comfortable passage to Hawai’i sparked the first boom in travel to the South Pacific in 1910, and William Matson died with fourteen ships in his fleet and a near-monopoly on Pacific trade and passenger travel.
The firm was taken over by William Phillip Roth, the husband of Matson’s daughter Lurline. With business booming, the company ordered three glamorous new sister ships between 1930 and 1932—the Mariposa, Monterey, and Lurline.
The Lurline was a beauty, gleaming white and sleek of hull. She was 632 feet long, built for style and speed, accommodating 475 first-class passengers and 240 surfer-class passengers with a crew of 359. She began regular service to Honolulu in 1934.
Amelia Earhart became the first to fly from California to Hawai’i, in 1935. The following year, a Martin M-130 flying boat called the Hawaii Clipper made its premiere commercial flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. The plane boasted private compartments, sleeping berths, and gourmet dining, and the seven customers paid $360 each way for what must have been a sketchy twenty-one-hour thirty-three-minute flight. But why bother, when you could take the Lurline instead?
In 1935, Earhart was one of many celebrities who cooled their heels in the Islands. During the 1930s, a Hawai’ian voyage aboard the Lurline was chic, and the likes of William Powell, Carole Lombard, Jimmy Durante, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, and Shirley Temple all made the trip, hanging out on the beach—often to be photographed with Duke Kahanamoku, Hawai’i’s official greeter for several decades.
By 1941, Pan Am’s California Clipper and five other Boeing B-314s were taking seventy-four passengers each on daily flights to Honolulu. But Lurline was still the queen of the Hawai’i run.
During World War II, the Lurline and other Matson ships served the country, carrying some 750,000 troops around the Pacific.
After the war, Matson sold the Mariposa and Monterey but kept the Lurline, which returned to service in 1948 after a twenty-million-dollar makeover. Matson continued to expand its operations and in 1951, built the Surfrider Hotel on Waikiki beach. Now Lurline passengers had a destination of the same luxurious class.
Postwar, the Douglas DC-4 became the plane of choice for crossing the big water, yet despite increasing competition, the Lurline was still operating at 97 percent capacity in 1955. In 1958, the Boeing 707 opened Hawai’i to international travel and in 1959, statehood brought a construction boom that saw the swamps of Waikiki disappear under a concrete jungle.
Statehood and jet service to the Islands spelled doom for Matson and the Lurline. In 1963, the ship suffered massive damage to its turbine engines, and repair costs forced Matson to lay up the original Lurline and pass her name on to the Matsonia.
S. S. Lurline, 1940s: The Matson Line’s S.S. Lurline became the mainland’s connection to Hawai’i— and surfing at Waikiki. (Voyageur Press Archives)
Passenger cruises to Hawaii struggled along until 1970, when Matson announced it was selling its flagship Lurline to Greek shipping operators. On June 25, 1970, Lurline arrived in San Francisco for the last time under the Matson flag. There was a bon voyage party, but it was not a happy farewell.
