Of Surfboard Riding

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Decline, Fall And Revival Of Surfboard Riding

The numerous and increasing devotees of surfboard riding throughout the world already have an ample literature of the how-to-do-it variety. But it is only now that a book has been produced which thoroughly examines the colourful history of the sport.

CALLED Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, the book was written by two Californians, Ben R.

Finney, an instructor in anthropology at the University of California, and James D. Houston, a freelance writer.

Surfing, the authors say, has long been popular along the West African coast and it was widely practised throughout Oceania particularly Hawaii —in pre-European times.

It reached its peak in Hawaii because that territory’s climate and Wave shapes favoured it most; and it was there that Europeans first witnessed it in 1778.

Lieutenant James King, who was with Captain Cook on that occasion, thought that the “boldness and address” of the Hawaiians in per forming their difficult and dangerous manoeuvres was “altogether astonish ing” and “scarcely to be believed”.

Several decades later, the mis sionary William Ellis described how the Hawaiians would desert their daily tasks en masse to enjoy them selves in a rising surf.

Women Adept

Women were as adept on a board as the men, and this was important to surfing’s widespread popularity, for, “if a man and woman happened to ride the same wave together, custom allowed certain intimacies when they returned to the beach”.

More formal courtship was also carried out in the surf, when a man or woman tried to woo and win a mate by performing on the waves.

Of all the Hawaiians who surfed, it was the ali’i, or chiefs, who were the most proficient at it, for they had the most leisure to practise it.

The surf-riding chiefs usually had a personal surf chant that proclaimed their glory and skill; and as the chiefs did not deliver the chants themselves, they kept chanters in their retinues to do so.

The chiefs also had special rights in certain surfing areas, as well as special boards called 010 on which they were probably able to perform prodigious feats as yet unmatched by modern surfers.

To handle an 010 was a feat in it self in that it might be up to 18 ft in length and 150 lb in weight.

Surfing was completely woven into the religion, language, festivals, love, songs and story of ancient Hawaii.

Yet within half a century or so of Captain Cook’s arrival, the sport had almost completely disappeared along with all other pastimes and customs of the ancient Hawaiians.

Religion Abandoned

As Europeans and Americans ar rived at their islands, as explorers, traders, missionaries and settlers.

Western culture penetrated the life of Hawaii and eventually disorganised and overwhelmed the old social system.

The most important factor in this social upheaval was the abandon ment of the Hawaiian religion, which immediately stripped surfing of “much of its cultural plumage”.

Almost simultaneously, the first Western missionaries arrived, and before long their puritanical teachings had struck a further blow.

It was not that the missionaries were opposed to surfing in itself. But they took a dim view of the things that went with it—betting, scanty costumes, and sexual freedom.

Without these accompaniments, the Hawaiians lost interest in surfing and took to other more acceptable pastimes.

But surfing never died out com

pletely—as it did in other Polynesian centres, such as Tahiti and New Zealand —and several circumstances combined to revive it again round the turn of the century.

First, there was the enthusiasm of a couple of insatiable surf addicts, George Freeth and Alexander Hume Ford, the first of whom took surfing from Hawaii to California in 1907.

TTien there was the visit to Hawaii in 1907 of the famous American writer Jack London, who wrote an impassioned article on “The Royal Sport” for a national American magazine.

Finally, the surfing promoters in Honolulu leased an acre of beach and founded the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club for the purpose of “pre serving surfing on boards and in Hawaiian outrigger canoes”.

Jack London

From here on, interest in surfing in Hawaii spread at a prodigious rate, and when Jack London returned on a visit in 1915 he was amazed to find that the Outrigger Club had I, members, “with hundreds more on the waiting list, and with what seems like half a mile of surf-board lockers”.

Except for a lull during World War 11, interest in surfing has been spreading ever since, and besides Hawaii and California, there are now large numbers of devotees of the sport in Australia, New Zealand, Peru, South Africa, Israel, France, Uruguay, Japan, England and Venezuela.

New skills and new surfboards are constantly being developed, and it now seems that the only thing likely to impede the spread of the sport still further is lack of waves to ride on.

In Sydney, at any rate, surfboard riding has become so widespread that at least one shire council has had to limit surfers to certain sections of its beaches so that non-surfers can bathe in boardless peace.

Surfboard riders are not taking these prohibitions lying down.

“I agree that something has to be done about protecting the bathers,” one of them said in a letter to the Sydney Daily Telegraph on October 11, “but do surfboard riders have to be shunted off to a part of the beach where there are no waves at all?”

If other Sydney surfers should take up this cry in a big way, it could provide Messrs. Finney and Houston with some interesting material for a future edition of their book.—RL.

(Surfing: The Sport Of Hawaiian

KINGS. Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.

Rutland, Vermont. U 553.25.)