by Phil Jarratt
Well before his sixteenth birthday Paoa had developed the physique of a powerful, full-grown man, more than six feet tall and weighing more than 180 pounds. His intellectual and emotional development lagged behind a little, but Paoa let his physical prowess speak for itself. A joker and a raconteur amongst his own, Paoa tended to clam up when he felt intimidated by people or circumstances, but his saving grace was his perpetually sunny smile and an almost regal bearing that defied people to doubt his ability or his integrity.
As the beach culture of Waikiki grew beyond its simplistic origins, and what once were tribal rituals became competitive sports, Paoa found himself the first picked on every team; he was steersman of the best town team and he clocked the fastest time in swimming. Only in surfing did he find an activity that seemed beyond the mundane parameters of stopwatches and finishing lines. But even in surfing, the modern world seemed to be catching up, and as more people became aware of the ancient custom Paoa wondered how long it would be before it, too, became a competition.
On an early summer morning in 1907, Paoa rode a wave from outside Canoes all the way to the beach in front of the Moana Hotel. He felt exhilarated as he shouldered his board and carried it up the sand.
‘Paoa, come sit with us, brudda!’ The call came from George Freeth, who seemed slightly uneasy in the company of two men and a woman whose smart attire suggested they had newly arrived and had not yet acquainted themselves with the island climate.
‘This here is Mr and Mrs Jack London, all the way from San Francisco, and this here is Mr Hume Ford, a newcomer in Hawaii-nei,’ said George. Then pointing to Paoa he said, ‘This is Mr Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the best young surfer and swimmer in the entire Territory. Except maybe for me.’
Jack and Charmian London, Waikiki, 1907. Photo by Ray Jerome Baker, courtesy Outrigger Canoe Club.
Paoa observed the group, taking in the handsome couple the Londons made, although exposure to sunlight seemed to have rendered the man’s fair skin a bit blotchy. But they were full of eager smiles and clearly delighted in what they had seen so far on the beach of Waikiki. Mr Ford, on the other hand, was someone Paoa had already heard about, even though his arrival in town dated back only a matter of weeks, and it wasn’t all good news. Slightly built, with an enormous moustache waxed at its extremities, he exuded self-importance, and, although Paoa had yet to encounter him in the surf, from what he had heard from the beach boys, self-importance was the aura that the novice wave-rider carried into his new sport.
But the beach boys admired his pluck. One of them recalled:
We were out in a canoe one day, four of us, and we saw this fellow standing on the beach. He was in a bathing suit and we asked him if he wanted a ride somewhere. He said, yes, I’d like to go out surfing. We took him out and he was kind of game. He was dripping water from his whiskers down and we asked if he’d had enough, but he said no, this is great sport.
Ford was giving the Londons a surfing lesson. Paoa had no idea that Jack London was a celebrated writer, and wouldn’t until London’s return to Hawaii nearly a decade later. He would also remain oblivious to the fact that an account of the morning surf lesson that followed would be published in one of America’s leading magazines, and help to popularise the sport in the new century. He didn’t need to know any of that. He had the waves in front of him and a house to live in behind him. He had his mother putting food on the table and his father offering advice when he had time. He had his brothers, his cousins, the whole Kalia clan. He had some money in his pocket from odd-jobbin’ down at the harbour, and he was the fastest swimmer in town.
For Paoa, not yet seventeen, life was good and getting better. Last summer when they opened Cohen’s New Orpheum Theatre downtown on Fort Street at Hotel, and the first week’s shows were free, in the dark stalls he had cuddled a girl he hardly knew and felt a whole new world of possibilities awakening in him. And now, so the beach boys were sniggering, the Moana Hotel was full to bustin’ with young ladies who wanted but one thing before they steamed back to their real lives on the mainland. They wanted to be cradled in the arms of the most handsome young beach boy on the Waikiki sand and shoot a breaker with him all the way to the beach.
Waikiki Beach, c. 1905. Photo courtesy Hawaii State Archives.
Short of stature, wiry in build and with determination written in his eyes, Alexander Hume Ford presented as a man who should not be underestimated, despite the slightly ridiculous waxed walrus moustache that heralded the arrival of the rest of him, and the arty affectation of his goatee beard.
Patrolling his beachfront beat, Officer Duke Halapu Kahanamoku watched the haole’s progress from the edge of the water at Canoe Surf to his favoured position in front of the Moana Hotel, just past the stream that split the beach and kept the sand bars in place to cover the inshore coral. Halapu scratched his head as Ford struggled up the beach with his heavy alaia. He was not yet a surf shooter, this writer fellow from Back East, but Halapu had to give him points for sticking with it, having watched him hurled unceremoniously from the board his last two shoots. He had some guts, this one, that much was for sure.
Born in Florence, South Carolina in 1868, Alexander Hume Ford (who called himself Hume rather than Alex Ford, preferring to remind people of his matriarchal attachment to one of the well-known moneyed southern dynasties) had been reared by his maiden aunt, Ellen, following the death of his mother in childbirth, and his father, who had run more than a thousand slaves on his plantations up to the Civil War, four years later. The last of seven children, Ford’s childhood was one of privilege, despite the early tragedies. The sale of the family plantations funded his schooling at Porter Military Academy, Charleston and, seeking an adventurous life without a uniform, he forsook a military career and became instead a journalist on the Charleston News and Courier, before giving up the South in favour of New York City, where he was soon a noted freelance writer and playwright, winning the praise of Mark Twain with a stage adaptation of one of his lesser-known short stories.
In 1899, with the entire world seeming to be exploding into small wars and class struggles, Ford, 30 and unattached, took a tramp steamer for Europe and began the journey that would be the making of him as a journalist. For the next several years he spent time in places that his readers at Harper’s and his other New York publishing outlets could not have imagined: from Jerusalem and Abyssinia, across Eastern Europe to St Petersburg and beyond to the icy plains of Siberia, and into China and the Far East. While Ford was not much of a writer and was in awe of those who were, he had the ability, perhaps born of privilege, to engage on equal terms with the people who were in control of the places he visited, and this was the force of his despatches. Part travel writer, part sketch writer, Ford’s strength was his ability to explain how a place worked.
Weary from his travels, Ford returned briefly to New York, but found, as many travellers have, that you can’t go home again. The greatest city in the world lacked the frontier charm he had found in more primitive centres. Crossing the Pacific from Shanghai, he had stopped briefly in Honolulu and been charmed by the dramatic scenery and the innocence of its sugar and pineapple society. His lasting memory, however, was of an extraordinary sight, viewed from a tourist launch as it ferried passengers around the perimeter of Diamond Head for a closer view. Standing in the back of the boat with his eyeglass, Ford watched a young man take flight on an enormous ocean swell, then launch himself into an upright position on a wooden plank beneath him.
Ford could not believe the staggering beauty of the moment, as the rider passed across the bow of the tender and continued shoreward in the direction of the Moana Hotel along the Waikiki beachfront. This was a place he wanted to be, and what he had just witnessed was a moment he wanted to experience. Not many things in life are as simple as that, but Alexander Hume Ford had no wife, no children and plenty of money (although he seemed to have a knack for getting through it at a lively clip), so wi
thin the year he had quit New York and within weeks of his arrival in Honolulu in February 1907, his beach-boy fantasy was well on the way to becoming a reality.
Moana Hotel from Kalakaua side, c. 1905. Creator unknown.
By the early spring Ford had enlisted young George Freeth as his surfing coach. George was a good teacher, but he lacked the life experience of his pupil, Ford told himself, and he fully expected the student to overtake the teacher in a matter of months, perhaps less. Shooting the breakers was an art, not a sport, and while he doubted George could appreciate that, the full-bloods certainly did. Although he had yet to meet him, young Duke Paoa Kahanamoku was the embodiment of all that Ford had found so seductive and enthralling about surfing when he had first watched it.
Ford wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He got right up the nose of the Hawaiian Star’s ‘Town Talk’ columnist when he bounded up the gangplank of the Aorangi to welcome the newly arrived Earl of Dudley to ‘our town’, when it had only been ‘his’ for a matter of weeks. But, drawing on his uncanny ability to insinuate himself into the company of the powerful and privileged, Ford had soon found himself a position leading a US congressional fact-finding mission around the Hawaiian Islands. After the hundred or more delegates were welcomed at a garden party by former Queen Lili’uokalani (making a rare public appearance since the demise of the monarchy), Ford junketed from beach to mountain and back again across three islands, and at the end of the mission he had favours he could call in from most of the important visitors. In Honolulu less than half a year, he was already one of its most influential citizens.
‘Jack? Is that you?’ Hume peered into the shadows. ‘Mr Jack London?’ The man was stocky and dark-haired, although pale of skin, his female companion much the same. They were an attractive couple, at ease with public recognition, particularly when they had a few drinks on board. They laughed and the man stood and offered his hand. ‘Yes, that’s me,’ he said.
Charmian Kittridge London, the famed writer’s recently wedded second wife, would later write of their encounter with Ford at the Moana Hotel on 29 May 1907: ‘When he left we were able to draw the first long breath in two hours.’ But the Londons were taken with Ford’s enthusiasm for his new passion, surfing. Charmian Wrote: ‘… he is interested in reviving the old Hawaiian sport of surf-boarding on the breakers. [Jack] finds the man most stimulating in an unselfish enthusiasm to revive neglected customs of elder island days.’
Tough, gruff Jack London, a former sealer, prospector and hobo, who had leapt to fame with the 1903 publication of Call of the Wild, then followed it up with White Fang (1904) and The Sea-Wolf (1906), had travelled widely, boxed with his betters, hunted game and slept rough. He was not an easy mark, but if Ford had wanted to pose a challenge to his toughness, then surfing was it. There was a view at the time that none but the Polynesians could ever truly master riding the waves. There was a certain inverted racism to this baseless contention, but it was a popular romantic notion that London seemed willing to share, writing:
Tomorrow, ah tomorrow. I shall be out in that wonderful water, and I shall come in standing up. And if I fail tomorrow, I shall do it the next day, or the next. Upon one thing I am resolved: The Snark [London’s ketch] shall not sail from Honolulu until I, too, wing my heels with the swiftness of the sea, and become a sun-burned, skin-peeling Mercury.
That was exactly what he became, with a severe case of sunburn after several hours, sun protection not yet figuring on the beach-boy agenda. But London and Charmian treasured their surfing experience, despite the pain. She, too, rode a wave under Freeth’s instruction. Ford was at their side the whole time, prompting London to write: ‘What a sport he is!’ And prompting him also to revisit the theory that haole could not surf. ‘And what a sport for white men too!’
The Londons split their time that summer between a grass bungalow on the grounds of the Seaside Hotel at Waikiki and a home loaned to them at Pearl Harbor by the yachtsman, Thomas Hobron, where they could oversee repairs to their ketch before resuming their Pacific voyage. They also spent time with the publisher and annexationist, Lorrin A. Thurston, who arranged for them to accompany him on a horseback adventure at the Haleakala Ranch on neighbouring Maui, and visited the leper colony on the island of Molokai. Although the Thurstons and the Londons became firm friends, Jack London’s fictional account of life in a Hawaiian leper colony in a short story would later bring him into bitter conflict with Thurston and other leading proponents of Hawaiian tourism.
At summer’s end, the Londons sailed off on The Snark; George Freeth left for California and a new life performing surfing exhibitions up and down the coast on the payroll of Henry Huntington, the railway baron; Duke Paoa Kahanamoku settled into swimming training at the harbour most days and intermittent schooling in the blacksmithing arts; and Ford took passage once again to the other side of the Pacific, this time to Australia, New Zealand and the New Hebrides. It seemed strange to his new friends in Waikiki that Ford would leave his new home and his new passion for surfing for several months, not explaining where he was going or when he would return, but this was because they did not yet understand his strange, spontaneous march through life.
Chapter 3
Huge Deal
Hugh “Huge Deal” McIntosh, c. 1908. Photo courtesy National Library of Australia.
Alexander Hume Ford docked in Sydney in early December 1907, and spent several days exploring the city from the comfortable base of the Hotel Australia. Invited to a Millions Club businessmen’s luncheon by the hotel manager, John Ure Smith, Ford found himself engaging in conversation with one of the Australians in a mixed group at the table, a thickset, muscular fellow, impeccably dressed, with a disconcerting and unpredictable nervous energy that made Ford wonder what he would do next.
The man was Hugh D. McIntosh, hotelier, failed politician, entrepreneur, showman and adventurer. At just 30, McIntosh had already made big money out of selling his meat-pie business to the Sargent family, then multiplied that fortune through wise hotel investments in resort areas like Audley in the National Park, south of Sydney, and Jindabyne in the Australian Alps. So he was cashed up and looking to now make a killing out of the new phenomenon of arena sport. McIntosh loved both the sport of business and the business of sport, and he was happiest when he could combine them, as he had done just out of his teens when he parlayed his enthusiasm for competitive cycling into directorship of the NSW League of Wheelmen.
With the powerful governing body of the sport in his control, in 1902 McIntosh had teamed up with two enterprising young journalists, George Wynne and Percy Hunter, to launch a venture they called Summer Nights Amusements. Summer Nights’ first production was the inaugural Sydney Thousand, a one-mile handicap cycle race with a world-record first-place purse of 750 pounds. With that kind of life-changing money on offer, Australia’s best cyclists were lining up to enter, but McIntosh went one better than presenting the best local field, paying 1200 pounds to bring the world’s best cyclist, Major Taylor, to Sydney for the race. Taylor, also known as ‘the Ebony Streak’ or ‘the Colored Cyclone’ was only the second black world champion of any sport, and in White Australia his presence was sure to cause a stir. The Sydney Thousand was a major financial success, and Hugh McIntosh, who had played up the race card with shameless enthusiasm to promote the event, had come up with a formula he would use many times over.
At the Millions Club lunch, McIntosh wouldn’t shut up, which put Ford in the unusual position of not being able to get a word in. McIntosh had a big, big plan that Ford needed to hear about. As it turned out, virtually everyone at the lunch seemed to have a big new plan, but McIntosh had the ear of the visitor, and let up only briefly to introduce Percy Hunter, his former Summer Nights partner who was now the founding director of the NSW Government Immigration and Tourist Bureau. But for all his bluster, Ford found the ebullient Australian decent company, and two days later was happy to be invited to join McInt
osh—whom he now called Mac—and Hunter on a long cycle around Centennial Park. In fact, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, the three men became virtually inseparable, meeting up for lunch most days at Challis House, Sydney’s newest office building in Martin Place, where Mac’s Sports and Amusements Limited had spacious offices on the sixth floor, while Hunter’s Tourist Bureau occupied the fourth.
Left to his own devices over Christmas, Ford borrowed a bicycle from Mac and took the ferry to Manly, then rode through town to South Steyne. On a surprisingly fresh afternoon with a cool breeze flicking up whitecaps on the sea, there was only a moderate crowd out strolling, but there was no-one in the surf, despite an agreeable line of breakers more or less in front of the change rooms. Ford ducked inside and stripped to his woollens, hoping that if he made his intentions clear he might chance upon a local surfer whose board he could borrow. Although he could hear the constant chatter and laughter of people strolling past, he had the change room to himself, and when he emerged, he was a solitary figure on the sand.
Ford sat on his towel out of the wind for a while, hoping to feel the warmth of the sun before attempting a body-shoot. He was taking in the moment and was barely aware of the tap on his shoulder, followed in quick succession by a firmer indication that the long arm of the law was seeking his fullest attention. Ford later wrote of his introduction to Sydney’s beach culture:
I was arrested at Manly Beach before I had even dipped into the breakers. I had committed the un-pardonable offence of sitting in the warm sand in my bathing suit. The policeman who arrested me explained that I was subject to a fine of five pounds. Of course, I thought he was joking, and laughed pleasantly. He didn’t, and it was only my plea that I was a stranger within the gates that got me off with a warning.