Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  The Pacific is a liquid place, and on most of its inhabited coastlines this liquid is warm and ultramarine and inviting. It is also by its very nature ceaselessly in motion. For centuries native peoples who lived on many of the islands of the ocean’s tropical interior have made great use of all this motion in ways that provided them with the purest joy imaginable. They rode out on long wooden boards through the beachside surf and spume and waited, floating, for a wave to lumber in from the ocean, and then stood up on the boards, toes gripping the leading edge, and from the wave’s summit crest, rode the boards down its steep green face, all the way back into shore.

  This wave riding, as it was initially called, seemed to be practiced only on the Pacific. On other oceans, the shore dwellers merely swam, or dived, or else ventured out in boats, and very little more.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, European travelers came to the Pacific, most notably to the islands of Hawaii, and many of them observed, mostly with amazement, some few with shocked horror, this strange and unfamiliar kind of ocean-derived pleasure. A few enthusiasts then attempted to emulate what they had seen, and dabbled: some made crude facsimiles of the boards and tried to do what the islanders did, on wave-battered beaches in California, in Australia, in South Africa.

  For half a century, this wave-riding, wave-gliding phenomenon was no more than an arcane pursuit, a mysteriously joyous pastime pursued only by a corps d’élite of a very few. But in the late spring of 1959, everything changed. The world beyond became fully aware of this curious ocean-side magic—and it did so because of a cheerfully unexceptional Hollywood movie named Gidget.

  The original Gidget was Kathy Kohner, whose teenage exploits in Malibu prompted her father to write his blockbuster novel. Sandra Dee and Sally Field starred in screen adaptations, spawning huge worldwide interest in surfing.* [Sony Pictures.]

  Few imagined that this little film (based on a true story of a youngster named Kathy Kohner, and a novel written by her father) had much of a future. This lack of confidence on the part of its makers likely explains why Columbia Pictures didn’t open it in any major American cities, but only in their suburbs. It was released during the cool prelude to the last summer of the decade.

  There it might well have languished, largely unviewed and entirely unremembered—except that Howard Thompson, then film critic at the New York Times, was savvy enough and curious enough to venture out to see it. On April 23, 1959, in the Thursday edition of the newspaper read then as now by most East Coast Americans who mattered, there appeared one of his characteristically snappy and quick-fire top-of-the-page reviews—and a positive one, to boot.

  To the surprise and undoubted relief of all involved, Thompson very much liked what he had seen. Moreover, with what passed for wild enthusiasm in the generally sobersided writings of the Times of the day, he declared that Gidget was, in his view, really quite enough “to make anybody light out for Long Island Sound.” Go out there, he was urging his readers—stimulated by the film to learn of something quite new that was, in his view, “the ideal way to usher in the beach season”—get out of the sweltering city and to the ocean!

  The movie that so excited Thompson was unashamedly slight; this was no Citizen Kane, to be sure. To compensate, it was highly color-saturated, and shot for grand effect in CinemaScope. It was frothy and faintly sexy, a love story of sorts, with a defined plot and a firmly fifties moral stance. Its cast was made up of handsome young men and women in swimming costumes—worn as brief as was allowed at the time, with female navels concealed to the point of nonexistence. Almost all in the cast were under thirty. In the title role was a pert and wholesome teenage newcomer named Sandra Dee.

  Gidget’s limited artistic merits are of little matter, since today’s historians of the field regard the film as having an impact well beyond the merely cinematic. It is, by their general agreement, the single greatest influence on introducing surfing, the Pacific Ocean’s most sublime and lasting gift to playtime, into the mainstream of life in America.

  So the little shrimp of a girl, a pint-size emblem of determination, courage, and adventure, was seen by millions as she learned the sport. They watched as Gidget paddled out to sea on a surfboard as large as she was and then knelt on the slick flatness of its upper surface. After this, the audiences learned as Gidget learned: how to find an incoming wave and recognize it for what it offered; how to stand up on the board and, probably as with all beginners, wobble and hesitate and almost fall; but then, in one moment, how to keep standing and to balance upright; and then how to lean and steer, with arms spread-eagle like balancing wings, and then be blissfully captured by and swept up into the previously invisible onrush from behind. Then there were the moments when the board and its tiny rider began to gather and rise with the wave’s own rising waters, and then to slip onto and over the lip curl of its breaking top1—and the moment when the board and rider started to slide downward and forward with the wave as if they were becoming a part of it, heading toward the shore edge at an ever-increasing speed and with a swelling, joy-filled grace quite unimaginable in all prior experience, before finally crashing exhilarated into the ragged mass of white foam at the wave’s end.

  Of course, this is not the end. Instead, Gidget recovers, catches her breath, turns back, and paddles happily out into the water once more. There she and other like-minded devotees wait, bobbing idle and cold on the sea surface, gazing to the near horizon for that next curling green uplift of water, for the next wave that might allow them to do it all over again, only better. For next time—and there will be a score of next times in the film as in the life of this particular calling—promises a new wave with still more grace and power than before, which they can ride in and slide in faster than before.

  Thus was seen here in this little movie, with its lithe little heroine, the birth of a young girl’s love affair with pleasure and purity and the possibility of serene wave-riding grace. In the weeks that followed the film’s release, the thousands and then millions who saw it were inspired to do the very same, to ride and slide the waves with Gidget, to adopt a sport that seemed so uncomplicated and joyous and so very democratic—perhaps this last being the greatest joy of all, because the water and the waves were always free, were always there, and were available to all who ever went in search of them.

  If Thor Heyerdahl was right, and if his famous voyage in the deliberately unsteerable balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki2 ever had serious scientific meaning, it might be possible to believe that surfing began in Peru, and that it spread west across the Pacific from there.

  Surfboard-like creations are to be found in Peru, for sure. When the anchovy fishermen of the pretty little coastal town of Huanchaco venture out each misty morning to examine their nets, they ride through the surf not in boats, but by sitting astride small and very graceful one-man rafts called caballitos de totora and paddling with oars of bamboo. Their craft (which in a dim light and with a powerful imagination resemble the bulkier old-fashioned surfboards) are hand-built, made by lashing together hundreds of bundled bulrush reeds. Locals like to say that these light, buoyant, and rather awkwardly mobile little craft have been built in Huanchaco for more than three thousand years. If so, they are fully a part of Incan culture, and are almost as ancient as the strikingly similar papyrus reed rafts that were once sailed on the ancient Nile.

  But just as Heyerdahl’s belief that the Pacific was settled from the east was eventually debunked, so the Peruvians’ claim to being the originators of surfing has also been dismissed. Genetics and linguistics did in both theories, showing that the Polynesians were born, essentially, from an original human stock in what is now Taiwan, coming eastward to their islands by way of the Bismarck Archipelago in Papua New Guinea; and that Peruvian Incas have no proven genetic or cultural connections with Polynesia, and are descendants of those Native Americans who came from the Arctic north, across the Bering Land Bridge.

  This is a shame for Peru’s impoverished anchovy fishermen, who had long clung
to this claim, their one amulet of worth. The anchovy men are in any case a vanishing breed, as their skills and their will to continue an economically unrewarding pursuit are fast evaporating with time. A poignant sight to be seen often these days on cold Huanchaco mornings is that of an elderly fisherman making his way back from his net inspection, gamely half-standing on his caballito as it lumbers home sluggishly through the waves. Beside him, and zipping past at great speed, are groups of young men, out playing before school starts, weaving and curling through the waves on proper modern polyurethane surfboards, taking advantage of the waves in a manner that the old caballitero beside them never can achieve, nor probably ever could.

  No, not Peruvian. The surfboard and the craft of surfing are, by all modern accounts, purely Polynesian inventions, and surfing is a sport born in Tahiti and the islands of southern Polynesia—perhaps as far south as New Zealand. The written record is incomplete; all certainty is fragile. Given that caveat, “wave riding,” which is the literal translation of a pan-Polynesian phrase he’e nalu, is said to have begun as a children’s pastime, maybe as long as four thousand years ago. It became more of a pan-Pacific phenomenon only when settlers moved north to the Hawaiian Islands perhaps twelve hundred years ago. It was probably one of the many skills brought in by these newcomers, along with all the food and utensils and other necessities of colonization brought when they navigated their way across the ocean in the great long-sea canoes in which they explored its outer reaches.

  When surfing reached Hawaii, it flourished, and fast became a popular obsession. The combination of latitude, weather, and topography made these islands a natural place for the calling to mature—and to become, as it soon did, the island’s principal recreation. The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands’ lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves. Depending on the scale of the barrier reefs; on the depths of shoreline sea; on the presence of rocks, spits, and headlands—all these by-products of the geology of the hot-spot volcanoes that first formed the islands—the Hawaiian waves can be either grand or modest, challenging or lethal. They can present long sweeping swells or short, sharp, massive ship-destroying monsters. They can form high walls that break with curling overtops; or they can present themselves as long hollow tubes of water, roofed with millions of tons of green and translucent sea. In the season of storms (January and February, in particular) they roar ceaselessly in line toward the shore before breaking in vast explosions of foam and spume. This is the liquid Pacific personified.

  To all precontact Hawaiians, a people pious and shamanistic by nature, such wildly roiling seas were the playgrounds of the gods—but gods with whom, if conditions were right, the seas also could be shared and enjoyed by those humans who lived under their divine care. The actual process of surf sharing, however, was intricate and scrupulously regulated.

  This being Hawaii, a place that in antiquity was bound by ceremony and rigid class distinctions, a complex surfing hierarchy was soon established. There were strict rituals relating to the selection and felling of board-suitable trees—a red kumu fish was offered to the spirit gods once the timber had been hauled away—and then other rituals concerned with the making, blessing, and storage of the boards, and with precise directives for the rubbing of coconut oil and the wrapping of tapa cloth. The methods of surfing—standing up on the liquid or lying prone as it swept inshore, surfing with clothes on or not, surfing silently or reciting chants and letting out exultant cries—all these were subject to age-old codes and precedents. And social hierarchies dictated the use of different kinds and sizes of boards, and by different kinds and classes of users; they also led to beach restrictions familiar as a kind of apartheid, with this section of a surfer beach reserved for commoners, but the best of the wave-rich breaks reserved for the ruling aristocrats.

  These last, often gigantically fleshy men whose physiques had been stoked on the consumption of the well-pounded taro paste colloquially called three-finger poi, traditionally surfed quite naked, and used the longest of all surfboards, known as the olo. Nineteenth-century British explorer Isabella Bird, that most epic Victorian wanderer, passed through Hawaii: “I saw fat men with their hair streaked grey riding with as much enjoyment as if they were in their first youth.”

  Some of these long boards were improbably twenty feet tall and two feet wide, and though made of the lightweight wiliwili wood normally used for canoes, they still weighed as much as a good-size man. On these absurdly large planks, the Hawaiian royals—fat maybe, but strong as oxen, their physiques more sumo-chubby than beer-blubbery—would sluice through the surf as if shot on cannonballs. Their boards were keelless, and so impossible to steer; this made the ride all the more exciting and dangerous. Today, ceremonial olo are much prized and copied. There is a trade, akin to that in antique Hawaiian shirts, with five-figure prices happily paid by true believers.

  The Hawaiian commoners—and surfing involved everyone, “farmers, warriors, weavers, healers, fishermen, children, grandparents, chiefs and regents,” according to one historian of the sport—would engage in their passion on more manageable but rather less magisterial boards. These were the so-called alaias, ten feet long and made of the wood of the breadfruit tree; most modern boards are sized and styled after these. Children used tiny round-nosed boards known as paipos, which were often a little longer than the child, and which provided space for hordes of them to scoot around on the water with enviable speed and nimble-footedness.

  The swashbuckling adventure writer Jack London first encountered a swarm of these peskily cheerful Hawaiian surfer children in Waikiki on a hot summer’s day in 1907. He was swimming along in shallow water, blissfully minding his own business, when he was suddenly overtaken by an infestation of youngsters streaming past him on their boards. He was astonished, and on reaching the beach, London persuaded one of the boys to let him try his paipo. The result was less than distinguished, no matter how many attempts he made. “We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker. Away our feet would churn like the stern wheels of a river steamer, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.”

  London’s main legacy is his literature, of course: White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and dozens of short stories, with “To Build a Fire” eminent among them. But his discovery of the pleasures of surfing, and his subsequent preaching of its glories and virtues, exerts a powerful pull still today, more than a century later. London, with the help of two other formidable, half-forgotten figures he met in Hawaii, first managed by his writings and his enthusiasm to resurrect this most kingly of Hawaiian sports from the threat of near extinction.

  When Jack London arrived on his forty-five-foot ketch, the Snark, two fast-metastasizing assaults were being leveled against surfing. First, diseases brought into Hawaii by foreigners had reduced the islands’ population in the nineteenth century to a mere tenth of what it had been in the days before Cook’s first encounters in the eighteenth; and such islanders as remained had more on their minds than beachfront frolicking. Second, Protestant missionaries, whose pious hypocrisies condemned any public displays of the human body, had compelled previously contentedly near-naked islanders to don all-enveloping Mother Hubbard modesty dresses, to stop performing hula dances and rituals, and to maintain a dignified and sackcloth reverence while bathing in the sea. This had forced surfing deep into the shadows. London had to confront a century of views like those that had been expressed years before by the preacher-father of modern Hawaii, Hiram Bingham,3 a man who was convinced he was bringing Christian civilization to an utterly savage people.

  “Can these be human beings?” Bingham infamously asked on his first arrival, as his church-sponsored boat was mobbed by swimmers and surfers and men in canoes. “The appearance of destitution, degradation and barbarism, among the chattering and almost naked savages was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle.” To Calvinis
ts, surfing was a sinful exercise, leading only to unbridled licentiousness and godless impiety. Go surfing, they pronounced from their pulpits, and eternal flames awaited.

  But Jack London saw firsthand the unbridled delight of those kanaka—“native locals,” the word being used also for all Polynesians—who still embraced the surfing life. He realized how, as one Los Angeles newspaper had it, life in the rainbow days on the Hawaiian seas “seemed a-flutter with enjoyment.” So he vowed to learn how to become a surfer himself. “The Snark shall not sail from Honolulu until I, too, wing my heels with the swiftness of the sea.” He was quite determined: he would win any future races with those sea-skimming jackanapes who had so bested him on their wretched paipos, and then, if he became halfway competent, he would write about it.

  Two remarkable men bent him to the task.

  The first was the man who taught him: a moneyed flâneur named Alexander Hume Ford, a Honolulu social butterfly and promoter, the son of a Dixie plantation owner who had drifted into Hawaii society on his way to Asia, had discovered surfing, discovered he was good at it, and had stayed, a confirmed addict at the age of thirty-nine. Ford’s mission was unashamedly one of public relations: he wanted to sell the idea of Hawaii to the public, and surfing was the vehicle by which he would achieve it. Jack London’s wife, Charmian, said of Ford that “he swears he is going to make this island’s pastime one of the most popular in the world.”

  Ford was no sun-browned hulk, in no sense the surfing archetype. He was small and slight, bespectacled and donnish, with a tiny goatee and a vegetative mustache, and pale and perpetually sun-afflicted skin. But his own experience in learning the craft of high-speed surf riding (which he would pass on to Jack London, and so to millions of London’s readers in the outside world) speaks to the sport’s most significant aspect in those heady prewar days: it was poised to cross the color line.