January 17th, 2010. 3am PST
We are several hours into our flight out of Los Angeles to Fiji, en route to New Zealand. Bad weather was heading for southern California where we had been visiting Christine’s family, a convenient high time to seek out fresh rays of sunshine and culture. A perfect time to slip south of the equator, to flip the season from winter to summer and to return home when the days are again long, the summer plantings sown. I’ve been doing my homework for this trip, this thesis project, this lived dream – which in a nut shell is to explore a global surf travel model that gets the surfer more locally engaged; away from the pre-packaged, foreign invested, surf resort culture that is highly advertised, glamorized, and slowly, but increasingly, politicized in the surf media world – for the past year. One that isn’t so wave-centric, so wrapped up in pushing the frontier boundaries, needing exotic “others” and total isolation to validate oneself.
Right now, as I come out of a jumbo jet neck cramp doze off, my homework comes alive, and I unconsciously begin reflecting on surf culture histories, am reminded of the paths it has endured to become the globalized body that it is today. Across from me, a short haired, thick fingered American woman loudly reads bible stories to her son, whilst everyone else tries to sleep their way across the International Date Line aboard a cramped coach class Air Pacific airliner. I had been drifting into a dream state of Revelations and images of el Diablo in abstract 666 configurations. I slowly came out of my slumber, the airplane dark and calm, except for the ray of light illuminating the biblical horror stories to my left, explaining the R.E.M. images I was experiencing. The unconscious thoughts – now semi-conscious and no less unsettling – come from those readings I’ve been submerged in for the past year; from the surf history book resting on my blanketed lap. Skip Frye, legendary surfer and board shaper from San Diego mentions in regards to surf culture at the beginning of One California Day[1], “You got to look to the past, in order to see the future.” So that’s what we’ll do, look at the past, and see where surf culture today came from, as inspired by the bible readings of my oblivious co-passenger, 30,000 feet above the sea…
Beginning in the early 19th century, Christian missionaries made the long haul, wood ship pilgrimages to the many land masses that rise from underwater world of the South Pacific. These islands were ones that Polynesian explorers (and surfers!) had themselves colonized several hundred to thousands of years before European explorers had “discovered” these areas and began tumultuous relationships with the many different cultures that were thriving in places now known as Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji and further south to New Zealand; among many, many others. In Hawaii (the historical heart and soul of contemporary surf culture), after the explorers and traders established ports of call, drastically disrupting all aspects of life with the introduction of European diseases and very foreign cultural knowledge and value systems, Christians boarded wooden vessels and set out to enlighten and transform the uncivilized dark skinned savages to properly clothed, god fearing purveyors of Calvinist righteousness and morality[2].
In places such as Hawaii, the art of surf riding, which was a central component to the spiritual and social structures of Hawaiian culture – living not only in public oceanic performances put on by all members of Hawaiian society, but in the oral traditions, myths, legends, ceremonies, songs and dances (the histories!) – would be strongly discouraged by the missionary groups for its heathen and immoral influence on the native population, going as far as promising eternal suffering in the pits of hell for surfing on the Sabbath[3]. When greeted out in the water by a group of board paddling Hawaiians upon arrival to the islands, Hiram Bingham, leader of the first group of Calvinist missionaries to Hawai’i in 1820, wrote from his ship Thaddeus, “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. 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?[4]” Surf journalist and historian Drew Kampion, in his book, Stoked: A History of Surf Culture explains, “Not only did these missionaries impose a strict Protestant paradigm on an exuberant people while diseases destroyed their bodies, but they confined them to modest attire, forced them to speak in a new tongue, and discouraged them from casual sex, gambling, and playing in the ocean.” He goes on to explain that, “Surfing’s association with nakedness, sexuality, wagering, shameless exuberance, informality, ignorant joy, and freedom were counterproductive to the designs of the church fathers, who, curiously, wound up owning most of the land in the Islands.” Surf culture went into a rapid state of decline, all but disappearing from view of the missionary colonies for the greater part of the 19th century.
The Christian missionaries had very puritanical, monotheistic influences clouding their observations of Hawaiian surf culture and Hawaiian culture in general, which influenced their need to suppress all things Hawaiian. It is important to note that there were exceptions, and certain missionary figures had very different, far more humanistic views of this foreign island culture[5]. However, both the missionaries and explorers made numerous observations that would mark the end of an era in terms of how Western civilization perceived the sea and surf culture, and the new perceptions being brought to fruition in Europe would change the face of surfing forever. When Capt. James Cook’s expeditions landed on Polynesian shores there was on one hand, great awe and wonder published in the voyage journals by his crew and other expeditions[6]. There is the infamous quote by William Anderson, a surgeon’s mate and surgeon on the second and third Capt. Cook voyages to the Pacific during the late 18th century. While witnessing a Tahitian canoe surfer in Matavai Bay, Anderson wrote, “I could not help concluding, that this man felt the most supreme pleasure, while he was driven on, so fast and so smoothly, by the sea; especially as, though the tents and ships were so near, he did not seem, in the least, to envy, or even to take notice…” Tahitian dude was stoked, no doubt about it. William Ellis, a South Pacific missionary wrote of a Hawaiian beach scene in 1823, “To a spectator nothing can appear more daring, and sometimes alarming, than to see a number of persons splashing about among the waves of the sea as they dash on the shore; yet this is the most popular and delightful of the native sports.”
Europeans and Euro-Americans, at the end of the 18th and through the first half of the 19th century where still scared shitless by the unknown depths of the ocean and her powers, and both explorer and missionary accounts incessantly drew attention to the amphibious nature of the Pacific Island peoples they encountered, often stating how any Europeans who attempted to swim or surf as the natives did, that death would surely become them[7]. Thus, first hand Western stoke embodiment would have to wait, albeit for a very short time. The literatures of ancient Greece and the Bible, with regards to the ocean environment were ripe with tales of danger and death, with leviathans and lawlessness, and had engrained a mortal fear of sea bathing, or any sort of venturing out past the shoreline without the safety of a hulled and seaworthy boat for centuries and centuries within the affected “old world” societies[8].
However, poets and prose writers in Europe were revolutionizing these sensibilities of the sea at the same time back home. The Romantics embraced nature and human emotional responses to the sights and sounds and smells produced by submersion into the world away from newly industrialized societies[9]. The ocean to these intellectuals was a mirror of oneself, a landscape of spirituality, a place to commune with introspection and solitude, to find sensuality, to overturn puritanical fears and modesty, and to prove ones masculinity in heroic adventure formats like setting sail for the New World. The development of Oceanography began to debunk ancient myths of sea monsters and mysteries of the deep, and led to a greater understanding of the ocean as well[10]. In England, the sea suddenly became a landscape of curative properties, and inland city dwellers began taking advantage of better roads and rail transportation to escape the crowded trappings and stress of the city for the newly established health spas on their coastlines. As the working class grew, and affordable railway travel developed and became increasingly affordable, the seaside became a get-away destination for families to visit and have fun[11]. The weekend and holiday had been born, seascape tourism would spread across the continents and oceans, and surfing would soon come to the world, ruled by Romantic sensibilities.
Back in Hawaii, the second half of the 19th century saw a decreasing missionary influence, and a quickly growing tourist and settler movement from a young America, undoubtedly influenced by the new Romantic visions sailing across the seas, and further inspiring and pushing Western frontier movements to new and exotic lands. Literary figures with the surnames Melville and Twain travelled to the islands and incorporated surf riding observations into their bodies of work, peaking interest in the islands and surfing. They again glorified the danger of surf riding and amphibious qualities that the Hawaiians displayed in the water. However, Twain wrote about trying surfing himself in 1872, while on assignment for the Sacramento Union newspaper. He quickly ‘wiped out’, explaining how, “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,” concluding that, “None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” When Jack London arrived in Hawaii in 1907, he brought with him both the Romantic sensibilities and a Rooseveltian sense of adventure, white superiority, and “strenuous life” health regime, as he and his wife sailed themselves across the Pacific with their boat the “Snark”[12]. He rubbished Twain’s notion that only Hawaiians were capable of mastering the art of surfing, proclaiming to his readers, “you are a man, one of the kingly species, and what that Kanaka can do you can do yourself.[13]” London counters the puritanical missionary values and all previous notions of the ocean being a forbidden body for white terrestrial persons, and sets in place a new found interest and an interesting Hawaiian/colonial surf-riding revival that would soon take off on the beaches of southern California, and further tourism to the Hawaiian Islands. “THIS is what it is: a royal sport for the natural kings of the earth…Go to. Strip off your clothes, that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.[14]”
[1] One California Day is a 2008 surf film/documentary, directed by Jason Baffa and Mark Jeremias, that looks at the history of Californian surf culture, and how it has help mold the culture today.
[2] See Crawford, Kampion, Moser, Ford/Brown, Lueras.
[3] Moser, p.3
[4] Quoted from Lueras.
[5] See Moser, missionary writings.
[6] Ibid, explorer writings.
[7] See Moser, p.88
[8] See Ford and Brown, p.10
[9] See Urry, p.20
[10] See Ford and Brown, p.10
[11] See Urry, chapter two
[12] See Moser, p.137
[13] From “Riding the South Seas Surf” which first appeared in the magazines Woman’s Home Companion in the and Pall Mall Magazine.
[14] Ibid.
new surf dialogue 
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