The History of Surfing Read online

  If today’s caballito closely resembles those of antiquity, the mechanics of its use are likely the same, too. In Huanchaco, a Conquistador-founded town north of Trujillo and Chan Chan, the caballito remains the fisherman’s craft of choice. Along with the rest of Peru’s west-facing coast, the beach at Huanchaco is almost always blanketed in a light salt-tinged haze, the result of the cool Humbolt Current surface water evaporating and condensing as it glides past a warm shoreline. A concrete boardwalk fronts the beach, and local fishermen now paddle out wearing polyester soccer jerseys and surf trunks, but the scene is often shrouded in a kind of grayish prehistoric gloom.

  A CABALLITO-RIDING FISHERMAN RETURNS TO THE BEACH AT HUANCHACO, PERU.

  GOOD LUCK SELLING THE IDEA THAT ANCHOVY-TROLLING PERUVIANS WERE THE FIRST WAVE-RIDERS. SURFERS CHOOSE THEIR COLLECTIVE PAST, AND WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO HAWAII OR PERU, THE TROPICS OR THE DESERT, THE SPORT OF KINGS OR THE SPORT OF FISHERMEN–WELL, THAT’S HARDLY A CHOICE AT ALL.

  A caballito will flex slightly as its owner heaves it into the crook between head and shoulder and then grunts his way down the beach to water’s edge. Huanchaco has no harbor or breakwater, but the waves at the base of a long point in the middle of town are always smaller and gentler than the beaches to either side. This is where the fishermen put in. Kneeling or straddling the caballito, he grips the bamboo paddle and uses a kayak-style stroke to push through the incoming surf and out to the fishing groups just offshore. On the return trip, some paddle to the beach during lulls. Those who ride waves do so carefully and directly, dipping the paddle into the water to maintain balance as necessary. The flipped-up bow prevents the caballito’s nose from pearling under while being pushed to shore, and the motion is simple, smooth, and unvaried. Wipeouts are rare. Only in recent decades, as the caballito became a beachside attraction, have the Huanchaqueros put a bit of showmanship into the routine, raising the paddle overhead, or trimming at an angle across the wave, and occasionally even standing up.

  The caballito is a tool designed for the serious, tedious business of feeding the community. At some point, though, in all likelihood sooner rather than later—perhaps even just after the first caballitos were launched, some five thousand years ago—the fluttery thrill of riding a wave became its own reward. This easily repeatable and wholly nonproductive act was then removed from the daily work routine and pursued for its own sake. A form of surfing began. The original form.

  That’s how Felipe Pomar and the rest of the surf-world caballistas view it, anyway. Others aren’t so sure. None of the evidence proves that wave-riding in ancient Peru developed into an established, widespread form of recreation. Weather alone argues against it—for most of the year, beachfront air and water temperatures in Peru are prohibitively cold. This doesn’t mean that two hundred generations of pre-Columbian Huanchaco fishermen didn’t enjoy their daily free ride toward shore. Mid-Holocene man was wired just like us, and swift, semicontrolled motion always pays off with a boilermaker of adrenaline and dopamine.

  In fact, it’s easy to imagine that wave-riding in one form or another likely took root on antediluvian beaches from Brazil to Senegal, Lebanon to Borneo. For any society living on a temperate coastline, riding waves would likely be a natural, if not intuitive act. Dolphins and pelicans and other animals seem to do it purely out of enjoyment, after all. When did the very first human wade into the shorebreak and try to imitate a dolphin? Or put another way—when did bodysurfing start? That probably goes back millions of years, not thousands.

  * * *

  Felipe Pomar, however, wasn’t content to just make the point that his ancestors were happily riding waves back in the nebulous depths of prehistory. In his Surfer article, he brought up Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki adventure—and this shifted Pomar’s alternative surf-narrative from an easily generalized proposal to something more pointed.

  In 1947, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa-log raft, which he named the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in the South Pacific. The journey lasted 101 days, covered over four thousand miles, and was the greatest adventure sensation since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. Heyerdahl’s book on the expedition sold more than 20 million copies, and the 1951 movie Kon-Tiki won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Audiences thrilled to all the brave tales of sharks and lashing storms, but behind the heroics was Heyerdahl’s contrarian “diffusionist” idea of transpacific migration. Heyerdahl claimed that his Kon-Tiki journey showed that Polynesia was actually populated east to west, the result of pre-Inca sailors venturing out from the coast of Peru. If Heyerdahl was right, Felipe Pomar and other caballito surf-scholars argued, then Peruvian wave-riding didn’t just predate Hawaiian surfing, it actually spawned it.

  Mainstream anthropologists regarded Heyerdahl as more stuntman than scientist and thought his ideas on Pacific migration were nonsense. The standing theory was that Polynesia had been colonized with voyagers originating from Southeast Asia. More recent DNA studies have confirmed this hypothesis. That being the case, wave-riding in ancient Peru remains a self-contained prelude to surf history, not the starting point.

  The main story—the history of modern surfing—is directly and organically connected to ancient Polynesia. A simple lack of interest in obscure historical debate doesn’t fully explain the booming silence that greeted Pomar’s 1988 Surfer article. It was defensiveness, too. Surfers love the idea that their chosen activity was born in translucent blue water, next to palm-fringed beaches, and practiced by royalty on beautiful wooden surfboards. It’s the “Sports of Kings,” and even if the phrase was created by some early version of the Waikiki tourist board, most surfers nonetheless wear the designation with quiet pride. Good luck trying to sell the idea that reed-boat-straddling Peruvians trolling for anchovy off the grim brown coast of Peru were the real first wave-riders. “Ours has always been a culture of storytellers, not historians,” a surf journalist wrote in 2005. In other words, surfers themselves prefer to shape, design, and choose their collective past. And when it comes down to Hawaii or Peru, the tropics or the desert, the Sport of Kings or the Sport of Fishermen—well, that’s hardly a choice at all.

  Surfing in Ancient Hawaii

  Four thousand years ago, after a long migratory push out of Southeast Asia, settlers arrived in Tonga, Samoa, and eastern Fiji. All the basic forms of Polynesian society and culture were formed here. While regional political power consolidated in Tahiti, expansion continued. Parties of tattooed explorer-warriors and breedable girls loaded onto streamlined twin-hulled voyaging canoes, some up to 150 feet long, and sailed off in all directions, with stores of coconuts, yams, taro, dried fish, banana stalks, and water-filled gourds, plus dogs, pigs, penned chickens, assorted cultivable dirt-packed roots and cuttings, and other colonizing essentials.

  A MISSIONARY-INFLUENCED BAN ON “IMMODEST DISPLAY” DIDN’T PREVENT HAWAIIANS FROM STRIPPING DOWN WHEN THEY ENTERED THE WATER.

  Polynesians had no written language and no metals, and they hadn’t yet hit upon the wheel. But as sailors and navigators they were without equal—able to cross thousands of uncharted miles, settle a new island or island chain, then turn around and make a return trip across the Pacific to the original point of departure. Stars and constellations were their main navigational tools, but they used everything from flotsam to cloud tint to the flight patterns of passing birds. This was visceral precision sailing the likes of which the world would never see again. First-contact Westerners were astounded at how Polynesians, without the aid of maps or compasses, could range with such confidence and exactitude across what Ferdinand Magellan called “a sea so vast the human mind can scarcely grasp it.” In 1769, prior to sailing for New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, and Java, Captain Cook invited a Tahitian navigator onto the Endeavor, and at any given moment during the journey, the Polynesian could point toward home with unfailing accuracy.

  Hawaii’s first inhabitants probably sailed up from the Marquesas around A.D. 300. This completed the vast trian
gular expanse of Polynesia, which was defined by New Zealand to the southwest, Easter Island to the southeast, and Hawaii—the world’s most isolated archipelago—to the north. Eight hundred years later, Tahitians conquered and resettled the Hawaiian Islands. Because the island chain was so remote, and because it was big enough for sustained population growth, within a few generations travel ceased completely between Hawaii and the rest of Polynesia. Still, almost everything now thought of as innately Hawaiian—the thunderous creation story, the melodramatic cast of gods and spirit forms, chant-based storytelling, the concept of manna, the kapu system of rule and law—originated in Tahiti.

  Along with chickens, breadfruit, and animism, Polynesians also exported surfing to each new island colony. Before this, we can only guess at the start date for some rudimentary proto-Polynesian form of surfing, which may have begun as far back as 2000 B.C. But as pointed out by Ben Finney, the first university-trained historian to examine the sport, “on most islands, surfing was primarily a children’s pastime.” Finney defined the activity at this early stage as “catching a wave on a float of any size, made of any material”—usually a small flat piece of wood or a dried coconut frond stem. This was either held in front of the rider or placed beneath his chest and used as a planing surface.

  Only on the main islands of what is called East Polynesia (Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand) was surfing practiced by adults as well as children. Of this group, just the Tahitians and Hawaiians used full-length boards and rode while standing. And of these two, only the Hawaiians, probably beginning around a.d. 1200, developed the sport into a communal obsession. This original surf-lust, as much as the islands’ accrued developments in board design and riding technique, is what marks Hawaii as surfing’s birthplace.

  “All thought of work is at an end,” a nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar wrote, describing his ancestors’ wave-riding fervency in terms recognizable to any hardcore twenty-first-century surfer. “The wife may go hungry, [and] the children . . . but the head of the house does not care. All day there is nothing but surfing.”

  Unlike ancient Peru, where wave-riding was a byproduct of work and probably limited to fishermen, surfing in Hawaii was both recreational and universal. The ruling class had special boards and exclusive breaks, but even so, the sport was the island nation’s great common denominator. Surfing was practiced with equal enthusiasm (and class-leveling nudity) by farmers, warriors, weavers, healers, fishermen, children, grandparents, chiefs, and regents. As one early Western visitor wrote, “The entire population of a village would at certain hours resort to the sea-side to indulge in, or to witness, this magnificent accomplishment.”

  The Big Island’s west-facing Kona Coast was ancient Hawaii’s most populated region and home to more than half of the roughly one hundred identified premodern Hawaiian surf breaks. The impulse to give either playful or menacing names to surf spots begins with such popular Big Island breaks as Fish Eye, the Ghost, the Chicken, Taboo Drum, Mischief, and Two Bald Heads.

  Warfare was a regular part of ancient Hawaiian society, and the governing kapu system authorized death sentences for trifling offenses like eating bananas or accidently stepping on a chief’s shadow. Still, day-to-day life was filled with languor and play and gift-giving. There was a looseness to the culture. Relationships between sport, religion, myth, work, war, family, and courtship were fluid—in this way, surfing came to be entwined with almost all aspects of life. Priests whipped the nearshore waters with long vines in order to bring the surf up. Artists carved petroglyph stick-figure images of surfers onto flat lava surfaces. Laborers built terraced oceanfront shrines where surfers could rinse off after exiting the water or pray for waves if the surf was flat.

  Storytellers gave long public performances in verse and song, with surfing used as a backdrop for supernatural tales of love and vengeance, honor and disgrace. One of the tales describes a wave-riding Oahu chiefess named Mamala who surfed to the “resounding applause” of gathered onlookers, and was able to shapeshift into a giant black lizard. One day, Mamala was ordered to marry the island king, and her beloved surfer-husband Ouha was so heartbroken that he dropped his human form completely to become a shark god. “There is my dear husband Ouha/There is the shaking sea,” Mamala dolefully points out to herself in one of the best-known Hawaiian mele inoa, or name chants. “There is a good surf for us/[But] my love has gone away.”

  Surfing in ancient Hawaii was touched by religion and fantasy, but it was practically fused to sex, competition, and gambling. A pair of would-be lovers riding side by side for more than two or three waves did so in the knowledge that they’d taken their flirtation to a level that practically demanded a beeline for the beach and a quick damp-skinned coupling in the nearest available hut or glade. Work and warfare were barred during the annual Makahiki harvest celebration, a three-month sports tournament and bacchanal in honor of the great Hawaiian god Lono, with surfing contests and other events scheduled more or less as diversions from a writhing shorefront sexual marathon.

  During a big surfing competition among royals, crowds lined the beach and squinted out to the wave zone, many of them with that expression of rapture and dread common to hardcore gamblers everywhere. Hawaiians would stake anything from a fishing net and a chicken or two to swine, a canoe, or indentured servitude—life itself, in a rare few cases—on a contest’s outcome. Competitors all wore a special loincloth dyed brilliant red, and between rides they kept their strength up by snacking on roasted dog, specially prepared that day in an underground oven. Women surfed against the men, and as a nineteenth-century native-born writer noted, “The gentler sex [often] carried off the highest honors.” As the surfers took their place in the lineup, the roar that went up—a combination of shouts, taunts, laughter, and endless spontaneous wagering—made the event seem more like a boxing match than an afternoon at the beach. Or a sumo match: size equaled power to the Hawaiians, and rulers were often enormously fat.

  * * *

  The average Polynesian peasant-surfer likely banged together his new surfboard with no more godly thoughts than a wood-crafter making a door. At the royal level, however, board-making was a serious matter, filled with rites and rituals. A craftsman would search the highland forest for a suitable tree. Small and midlength boards were usually made of koa, a fine-grained hardwood, or the softer breadfruit. Longer boards were generally made from wiliwili, the same lightweight wood used for canoes. Once an appropriate tree was found, a red kumu fish was ceremoniously placed at the trunk, the tree was cut down, and prayers were made as the fish was then placed in a hole dug in the root system, as compensation to the spirits. (Canoe-building was a more serious undertaking; for a voyaging canoe, the root hole might be consecrated not with a kumu but a human sacrifice.)

  Branches were removed from the trunk using a basalt-headed adze, and the trunk was cut to length, skinned, and hewn into a rough board-like form, then carried to a shaded beachfront work shed. All the channels and ruts left by the adze were smoothed out using coral heads of various textures; pumice stones were used for fine sanding. A glossy charcoalbased finishing stain was often added. Boards made from wiliwili were sometimes buried next to a freshwater spring so that mud filled the porous wood surface and, after drying, created a seal. All boards were waterproofed with a rubbed-in coat of nut oil. There were no stabilizing fins.

  High-end boardmaking from start to finish took about a week, and more rites and prayers were performed over the finished product before it was launched into the water. (Commoners not only skipped most or all of the ceremony, but also the finishing work, which probably reduced production time by half.) After use, the board was left out to dry, again rubbed down with coconut oil, and usually stowed prominently in the rafters of the family house. Fastidious surfers kept their board wrapped in tapa cloth.

  Because premodern Hawaii had a barter-based economic system, a surfboard was either presented as a gift or offered in exchange for goods or services.
Either way, building one represented a real investment of time and energy, and as such it was expected not only to perform well in the surf but to reflect favorably upon its owner. Visiting British ship commander George Anson Byron, first cousin to the poet Lord Byron, dropped anchor in Hawaii in the early nineteenth century and, recognizing a status marker when he saw one, wrote that “to have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a Sandwich Islander [Hawaiian] what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young English man.”

  Hawaiians developed three basic types of surfboard: the paipo, the olo, and the alaia. The round-nosed paipo was the smallest of the three and was used mostly by children in nearshore surf. A child’s paipo might be 3 feet tall, 16 inches wide, and a half-inch thick. An adult version could be as long as 6 feet. The best surfers could stand on a paipo board, and a kneeling position was used, too, but mostly it was ridden prone. Jack London put himself in the middle of a paipo-riding swarm at Waikiki during a 1907 visit to Hawaii: “I joined some little Kanaka boys in more shallow water, where the breakers were well spent and small—a regular kindergarten school. When a likely-looking breaker came along, they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and rode the breaker to the beach.” London tried but had no luck. “We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker. Away our feet would churn like the sternwheels of river steamboats, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.”