The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing was the royal olo, a wiliwili-made colossus used exclusively by the ruling alii class. Specs for the olo surfboard were almost cartoonish: 20 feet long by 2 feet wide, 200 pounds, and domed along both the deck and bottom so that the center thickness swelled out to as much as 8 inches.

  Modern surfing’s fascination with the olo began in the mid-1920s, when Tom Blake, America’s first surfing champion, visited Hawaii and restored a pair of weather-beaten olos that for too long had been hanging on an exterior wall at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Blake was the first surfer of his generation to take a real interest in ancient surf history and lore, but part of his response to the olos was a simple wide-eyed awe, like a rural schoolboy seeing his first skyscraper. A few years later, Blake and Hawaiian surf icon Duke Kahanamoku each made themselves a 16-foot olo replica, more than half again longer and heavier than the average board of the time—Duke’s olo weighed a full 130 pounds. Both surfers reported that the “long boards” worked especially well in large waves. “During our last big surf, which only comes three or four times a year,” Blake wrote in 1935, “the Duke did some of the most beautiful riding I have ever seen on his new long board.”

  While just a handful of examples survived into the twentieth century, the olo has nonetheless come to be viewed as the showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing. Replicas stand in museums and are sold to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the olo has about it a kind of grand absurdity, like a stretch limousine or a floor-dragging ceremonial robe. There are no eyewitness accounts of olo surfing, but it seems likely that the boards were used for the sole purpose of riding unbroken waves. “It is a good board for a wave that swells and rushes shoreward,” nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar John Papa Ii said of the olo, “but not for a wave that rises up high and curls over.” Huge, heavy, and finless, the olo would have been nearly impossible to guide or steer—less a surfboard than a small canoe, which was also used by the Hawaiians to ride waves, but with the operational advantage of a paddle. The kapu laws that prevented commoners from using the olo may have been a matter of public safety, given that a loose olo would blast through the wave zone like a log through rapids.

  Some surf historians have suggested that the olo may have been designed for big surf. Large waves move faster through the ocean and are much harder to catch than small waves, and the olo had a great paddling advantage over other types of boards. Even more so in big surf, however, it seems likely that the idea would have been to steer clear of breaking waves. Many Hawaiian surf spots have a deep-water channel adjacent to the break, allowing the surfer to paddle out without running into any whitewater. Some of these breaks, too, have a broad shoaling area beyond the surf zone, where open ocean swells first begin to tilt. This may have been the intended field of play for the olo.

  Tom Blake also used the olo as a design starting point for his magnificent high-speed paddleboards. It’s a more prosaic idea, and there’s nothing in the records saying as much, but it may be that the Hawaiians regarded the olo as more of a paddleboard than a surfboard.

  * * *

  Surfing as the world knows it—stand-up riding on a wave that curls and breaks—was for all practical purposes invented on the alaia, a thin midsize board about half the size of an olo. The alaia was round at the nose, tapered and squared-off at the tail, and slightly convex along the bottom. Most were 6 or 7 feet long and weighed about 45 pounds. Although similar in width to the olo, the alaia was much leaner; most were less than 2 inches thick, and some were pared down to a very breakable half inch. It “vibrates against the rider’s abdomen, chest, [and] hands,” a nineteenth-century Hawaiian noted, describing the sensitive ride of such a thin craft. The alaia was the Hawaiian standard, used by monarchs and villagers alike; it paddled well enough to catch unbroken swells on the intermediary offshore reefs, but was responsive and maneuverable enough to let the surfer ride in the steep, fast, curling section of the wave.

  Unlike the hulking olo, an alaia board could be paddled directly through the wave zone to the lineup—the surfer’s ready area, located just beyond the breaking waves. A modified crawl was sometimes used in the early going, with the rider floating alongside his board, one arm locked across the deck of the board, near the nose, the other stroking forward; the front of the board was pulled underwater as each broken wave passed by. Once in the lineup, the surfer either sat on his board or remained prone, eyes to the horizon, and watched the incoming swells for a likely wave. When it came, the board was quickly wheeled around and aimed shoreward, centered beneath the rider—some knee-paddled into waves, but most went prone—and with a few churning strokes the wave was caught. Timing, more than speed, was essential. The idea wasn’t so much to match the wave’s speed as to be positioned on the swell’s upper slopes just as it tilted up, allowing gravity to do the work.

  Without a stabilizing fin, the alaia provided only limited control, which meant that performance was judged less on the route taken across the wave, as with today’s surfing, and more on the rider himself. The best surfers moved smoothly from position to position: belly-down, kneeling, sitting, and hardest of all, standing. They also rode at an angle to the wave face, just ahead of the whitewater, doubling or even tripling their speed compared to the novice surfer heading straight for the beach. There were other ways to demonstrate expertise. At the south end of Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island, where lava outcroppings spill off the beach into the water, part of the game was to finish off a ride by shooting through gaps in the nearshore rocks. Pulling back at the last moment, as one early Western observer noted, was not only “reckoned very disgraceful,” but often led to “the loss of the board, which I have often seen, with great horror, dashed to pieces at the very moment the islander quitted it.”

  Bodysurfing was its own separate form of wave-riding, and was also done ad hoc as the fastest way to chase down a loose board. Canoe surfing was popular, too. Forms were sometimes combined. Using the royal prerogative, King Kamehameha would load his board into a canoe, paddle into a swell, stand, pick up his board, and jump from the canoe into the wave, leaving the unmanned craft stalled in his wake while he rode to shore.

  LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY BIG ISLAND SURFERS WITH ALAIA BOARDS.

  FIRST PUBLISHED SURFING IMAGE, 1831.

  Myths and chants describe heroic performances in big waves. “Big,” though, has always been a relative term in the sport. Without a stabilizing fin, and a half dozen or more not-yet-invented design features, the ancient surfboard would have been a truly unwilling partner in bigger surf—anything above, say, eight or ten feet. If larger waves were ridden, they must have been smooth, gently sloped, and top-spilling, breaking near a deep channel; to maintain control, even on a ten-footer, a surfer likely would have had to take the most cautious route possible toward shore. That said, there is evidence that oversized surf was ridden, and not just in myth. Under certain conditions, a big-wave spot on Oahu’s North Shore called Sunset Beach offers the kind of rolling, broad-based wave described above. Ancient Hawaiians called the break Paumalu and regarded it as surfing’s ultimate challenge.

  Mostly, surfing was spirited good fun. But not always. Umi-a-liloa, the son of a ranking fifteenth-century Big Island chief, once traveled incognito to a festival near Hilo, where he bragged about his surfing skills and was called out by a local royal named Paiea. Their initial penny ante stakes quickly doubled and redoubled, until finally the wager was set at four racing canoes. Competition rules for this event were probably typical for the period; the two surfers would take off on a wave together and both aim for a nearshore finish line consisting of a pair of tethered floats. “Umi and Paiea paddled [into] the high surf, pushing their boards through heavy breakers until they reached the open sea,” one early Hawaiian scholar later wrote. “They spent considerable time maneuvering for best position, [then] selected a large wave and paddled madly toward shore. They stood up simultaneously, feet firmly placed on the convex deck of the boards, [and
] came with great speed.” Paiea was first to cross the finish line, but along the way he railroaded his opponent, causing Umi to lose a bit of skin on a rock. It was a dirty trick, and not forgotten. When Umi came to power years later, he ordered Paiea’s capture and—depending on what version of the story is being told—had him either slow-baked in an oven or splayed and gutted on a stone altar.

  When surfing was exported from Hawaii to the rest of the world, centuries later, it never failed to present itself beautifully. Introduced as the exciting and romantic Sport of Kings, it won converts at every stop. But the germ of violence was passed along as well. All that passion noted by early-contact Westerners—the habit among native surfers, as one nineteenth-century observer put it, for “waving their arms and uttering exultant cries”—was bound to be redirected and perverted now and then. Of course, it’s been centuries since aggrieved surfers could resort to eviscerating or slow-roasting their fellow riders. But like the olo board and the dramatic big-wave tale, bad behavior in one form or another has its own long and unbroken history in surfing.

  The New God Doesn’t Surf: Explorers and Missionaries Sail to Hawaii

  Captain James Cook, the lowborn son of a Yorkshire farmhand who had risen to become the era’s greatest seagoing explorer, was crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. The year was 1778, and Cook was nearing the end of his third and final Pacific voyage. Having failed, yet again, to find a channel linking the Pacific to the Atlantic, Cook directed his HMS sloops Resolution and Discovery away from the Alaskan coast and set a south-southeast course for the tropics.

  Ten months earlier, Cook and his 150-plus crew had become the first Westerners to make contact with Hawaii, spending three days ashore on the islands of Kauai and Niihau, where natives had worshipfully dropped to their knees in greeting, filled the ships’ holds with pigs and breadfruit and water in exchange for a handful of sixpenny nails and a few pieces of iron, and tended fully to the visitors’ sexual needs, unaware that half of the sailors had what Cook described in his journal as “Venereal distemper.”

  Now, having sailed directly from Alaska to Hawaii, Cook meandered around the islands for nearly eight weeks without going ashore. He eventually circled the Big Island, where the Makahiki festival was underway, and natives, marching in procession from town to town, may have viewed the mast and spars from the distant ships as a sign of godly surveillance. Indeed, when Cook finally ordered the Resolution and Discovery to drop anchor in the north end of Kealakekua Bay, the event was likely interpreted by the Hawaiians as nothing less than the return of Lono himself. Thousands of natives paddled or swam out to the boats, enough of them climbing the shore-facing side of the Resolution that the entire boat tilted, and a thousand more lined the rocky beaches. A group of priests immediately draped Cook in red cloth and escorted him to a skull-lined platform at a waterfront temple, while gathered onlookers, prostrate with foreheads touching the ground, chanted “Lono.”

  The goodwill didn’t last. A few weeks later, for reasons that are still hotly debated by academics—although, clearly, the Lono charade was over—Cook was mobbed by natives in the shallows of Kealakekua Bay, clubbed and stabbed to death, and taken ashore for dismemberment. Entrails were thrown into the sea, but most of the remains were burned, then handed out like prizes to ranking chiefs and priests. Two days later, in a retaliatory frenzy, Cook’s sailors fired their cannons into a crowd on the beach, then went ashore for slaughter and arson; heads were severed, lodged on pikes, and waved mockingly in the direction of a nearby hill, where some of the natives had retreated.

  It’s hard to imagine two more culturally divergent groups of people than the Hawaiians and the first-contact Westerners: the grimy canvas sailor’s outfits and the islanders’ casual nudity; the solitary white-bearded God in Heaven and the natives’ crowded soap-opera cast of spirits and deities. Cook’s violent end itself is perhaps less startling than the lateness of its arrival. Wave-riding was also very much caught up in the difference between the two groups. The Western experience with the beachfront hadn’t been a complete disaster, especially around the Mediterranean. Romans invented the beachfront holiday, and the Bible’s Book of Matthew notes that “Jesus went out of the house and sat by the seaside” to begin a life of sermonizing. By Cook’s time, therapeutic “sea bathing” had even become a minor health craze among Great Britain’s upper classes, where strong-armed “dippers” were paid to thrust clients into the nearshore waters and bodily hold them beneath the surface for a few seconds.

  Nevertheless, for the overwhelming majority of Westerners, the sea was nothing more than a vast communal repository for fear and dread. Oceans were stocked with enormous open-mouthed monsters, both real and imagined. The sea floor, as Shakespeare wrote, was littered with “dead men’s skulls” and “a thousand fearful wrecks.” Piers and docks were a mournful place of departure for the dispossessed and the vanquished, and an entry point for disease and plague. The surf, with its fearful noise and rhythm, also tapped into these dire feelings. Waves were often described in language suited to a Visigothic charge over the city walls—roaring, tearing, smashing, destroying. “Those who go to sea for pleasure,” a British proverb went, “would go to hell for pastime.”

  For all his extraordinary seagoing accomplishments, Captain Cook remained a product of his water-adverse generation, and like virtually all of his fellow British mariners, he didn’t know how to swim. Also, in accordance with Old Testament teachings on nature in general, Cook viewed the ocean as a dangerous force badly in need of conquering. Few things in his worldwide travels likely surprised him more than the idea of playing in the surf.

  Cook has long been credited with the first written description of wave-riding, which appeared in a 1777 journal entry that was published, posthumously, in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. But historians recently determined that the passage, although written in a first-person voice meant to be read as Cook’s, in fact belongs to Resolution surgeon William Anderson. While the ships were anchored in Tahiti’s Matavai Bay, Anderson walked along the bay’s northern point and came upon a lone Tahitian “paddling in a small canoe with such eagerness . . . as to command my attention.” Getting past any cultural and personal aversions to breaking waves, Anderson has nothing but curiosity and appreciation for this strange new “amusement.”

  FIRST CONTACT: THE HMS RESOLUTION AND DISCOVERY LAND AT KEALAKEKUA BAY.

  He went out from the shore till he was near the place where the swell begins to take its rise; and, watching its first motion very attentively, paddled before it with great quickness, till he found that it overlooked him, and had acquired sufficient force to carry his canoe before it without passing underneath. He then sat motionless, and was carried along at the same swift rate as the wave, till it landed him upon the beach. Then he started out, emptied his canoe, and went in search of another swell.

  Anderson summarizes in an almost poetic voice: “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.”

  Not until 2006 did surf historians pick up on the fact that Joseph Banks, the Resolution’s botanist during Cook’s first transpacific journey, had written about Matavai Bay wave-riding almost eight years before Anderson. Banks watched from the beach as a dozen or so “Indians” rode waves “just as our holiday youth climb the hill in Greenwich park for the pleasure of rolling down it.”

  The multivolume series of books documenting Cook’s three Pacific Ocean expeditions were the Star Wars of Napoleonic Europe. Thanks in large part to Cook’s grisly death in Hawaii, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean was by far the most popular installment: the 1784 first edition sold out in just three days, and fourteen more British reprints, plus six foreign-language editions, were published before the turn of the century.

  No description of surfing that followed over the next hundred years would match Anderson’s lovely “supreme pleasure” observation. Soon after, in 1
779, the Resolution’s Lieutenant James King wrote a detailed but choppy two-page journal entry on board-riding. Recalling an afternoon spent on the beach at Kealakekua Bay, shortly before Cook’s death, King wrote of the surf zone’s “prodigious violence,” the “great violence” that seemed to befall a surfer being caught in a breaking wave, and the “great horror” of watching an islander wipe out. “The [natives’] boldness and address . . . was altogether astonishing, and is scarcely to be credited.” King’s passage set the tone for those looking to write about surfing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of the few dozen descriptions of the sport that were published during this period—most no longer than two or three paragraphs, written almost exclusively by British and American explorers, merchants, missionaries, and wealthy adventure-seekers—mild bombast and polite disbelief were the rule.

  “BOTH SEXES SWIM BY NATURE. CHILDREN RIOT IN THE WAVES FROM INFANCY. I SAW FAT MEN WITH THEIR HAIR STREAKED GREY, RIDING WITH AS MUCH ENJOYMENT AS IF THEY WERE IN THEIR FIRST YOUTH.”

  —Isabella Bird, travel writer

  There was some confusion, too, starting with the name of the craft itself. Hawaiians referred to it as papa he’e nalu, or “board for wave-sliding.” English-speakers at first tried “floatboard,” “sharkboard,” “broad-board,” and “bathing-board,” with “surf-board” first used sometime in the 1790s. The terms “surfer” and “surfing” didn’t take until the early twentieth century, which replaced “surf-swimming,” “surf-boarding,” “surf-bathing,” “surf play,” and “surf sport.”