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important in this respect, setting in motion the transformation of surfing from a uniquely Hawaiian cultural activity into a pastime enjoyed by millions of people on every continent. Of these two early emissaries, Freeth remains the least well known. This is surprising, as it was Freeth, a mixed-blood Hawaiian regarded as perhaps the most skilled wave rider of his generation, who firmly planted the seeds of what would become California’s renowned surf culture.¹¹⁴ In 1907, he left Hawai‘i for the Golden State with letters in hand from Ford, Jack London, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee. His objective, wrote the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, was to “give exhibitions of Hawaiian water sports to the people of that section.”¹¹⁵ Within months of his arrival, the media bestowed upon Freeth a national reputation through the work of London, the celebrated author who took to the pages of Woman’s Home Companion that fall to excitedly relate his experiences months earlier in Waikiki. There, London watched Freeth “tearing in on the back of [a wave], standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.”¹¹⁶ London appreciated not only the young Hawaiian’s wave-riding skills but also his generosity in providing the celebrated author with a number of pointers when he himself took to the surf. Freeth’s reputation only grew when London’s article was reprinted the following year in England’s Pall Mall Magazine and then, in 1911, as a chapter in London’s travelogue The Cruise of the Snark.

      The aquatic skills that had so enamored London, Ford, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee were the same skills Freeth brought with him to California, where he found work for two of the major developers of the period, Abbot Kinney and Henry Huntington. Kinney was the force behind the faux Italian development of Venice, just south of Santa Monica, while Huntington poured his energies into creating what he envisioned as “the great resort of [the] region” in nearby Redondo Beach.¹¹⁷ Both Kinney and Huntington paid Freeth—dubbed “the Hawaiian Wonder” while under Huntington’s employ—to give surfing exhibitions to the thousands of curious residents flocking aboard Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway to the sandy shores of Santa Monica Bay.¹¹⁸ There, one contemporaneous account reported, “[m]any people daily gather to watch the Hawaiians in the surf . . . showing their skill in aquatic exercises.”¹¹⁹ Such dexterity in the waves, demonstrating how the ocean was a space that could be enjoyed rather than simply feared (as had until then been the case), marked the beginning of Southern California’s beach culture.

      Duke Kahanamoku, who graced the 1914 Mid-Pacific Carnival poster mentioned earlier, is by far the better known of surfing’s early ambassadors. A five-time Olympic swimming medalist, the inspiration for the Duke’s chain of restaurants in Hawai‘i and California, and a man who has been immortalized in statuary from Australia to the American Midwest, Kahanamoku took surfing Down Under, offering beachside demonstrations in Sydney in 1914 and 1915 (as well as in New Zealand weeks later) that helped set in motion the creation of what is probably the world’s most vibrant national surf culture.¹²⁰ Though subjected early to “wisecracks” by white American mainlanders about being “a Red Indian without feathers,” Kahanamoku demonstrated the seriousness with which he would have to be taken when, in August 1911, he shaved multiple seconds off the existing records in the 50-, 100-, and 220-yard swimming races.¹²¹ He would go on to win a handful of medals, including three golds, at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, in the process upending many of the white-supremacist beliefs of the era.¹²²

      Still, as with Freeth, surfing remained Kahanamoku’s greatest passion. His 1914 and 1915 demonstrations in Australia, while not in fact the first instances of board riding in that country, nevertheless marked what Grady Timmons called “the real beginning of the sport Down Under.”¹²³ When Kahanamoku first took to the Australian waves in late December 1914, the Sun newspaper could not help but be taken by the “thrilling spectacle.” To the Sydney Morning Herald, it was a “magnificent display.” The Sunday Times was perhaps most effusive. “Nothing more remarkable in the way of a natatorial exhibition has ever been seen locally,” the paper declared without equivocation.¹²⁴ People flocked to the beach to witness Kahanamoku’s “wonderful water feats.” The crowd that gathered for one exhibition “was the biggest that has ever congregated at Dee Why since the inland aboriginals came down to spear fish in the lagoon and dance corroborees round their shell-fish naps on Long Reef”; the estimated four thousand spectators gave Kahanamoku an ovation.¹²⁵ While by no means solely responsible for the rise of Australian surfing, the Hawaiian went some distance in popularizing it. His wave-riding skills were in fact quickly exploited as a marketing spectacle: an advertisement for two carnivals sponsored by the Queensland Amateur Swimming Association proudly featured Kahanamoku poised on his board.¹²⁶

      Kahanamoku’s surf riding was met with similar enthusiasm in New Zealand. At New Brighton, a coastal community outside the South island city of Christchurch, the Hawaiian was welcomed by a “great gathering of people, the pier and beach being lined with spectators, and the champion got a great reception.” Unfortunately for those present, Kahanamoku had to limit his exhibition to body surfing instead of “standing on the board,” as “the calm day had flattened the sea.”¹²⁷ Conditions in Wellington were more advantageous. There, recorded the New Zealand Times, an “unprecedented crowd” appeared at Lyall Bay “in anticipation of seeing the world’s champion swimmer . . . perform some of his famous feats on the surf-board. It was estimated that over 5000 were present, and the beach was black with people.” The Wellingtonians were not disappointed, “loudly applaud[ing]” Kahanamoku’s unusual aquatic “feat.”¹²⁸ Another display a week later left the “hundreds of onlookers” who had gathered to watch Kahanamoku “astounded . . . with his exhibition of surf-board riding.”¹²⁹ “There are numbers of high-class surf-shooters in Honolulu, and some white people among them,” Kahanamoku told an Australian journalist, “but, as with every other game, a few can do better than the great majority. It was with the few I delighted to be.”¹³⁰ In Australia and New Zealand, he in fact stood alone.

      The young Hawaiian, who also gave surfing demonstrations on both American coasts and would go on to tout surfing’s exhilaration and health-giving qualities to America’s youth, received considerable press coverage during his wave-riding displays.¹³¹ More than anything, however, Kahanamoku, like his contemporary George Freeth, allowed his body to serve as his media. While operating within the racial constraints of a brown-skinned athlete in a white-dominated world, Kahanamoku demonstrated what it meant to be a surfer at a time when a common vernacular for the pastime did not exist.¹³² Some media would speak of “surf-board swimming.” Others would refer to “surf bathing” or “surf shooting.” What ever the term, Kahanamoku and Freeth demonstrated, through their skills in the water, that their ancestral pastime not only had survived the missionary onslaught of the nineteenth century but, spearheaded by these same supposed racial inferiors, would again thrive in the twentieth.

      Though not at first. It would not be until after World War II that surfing really began to enjoy explosive international growth. Given the crippling nature of the Great Depression, the slow global expansion of the sport during the interwar period is hardly surprising. Still, in Hawai‘i, people continued to find joy in the waves. This was true during World War I, when the letterhead of the Hawaii Promotion Committee, which was dominated by an image of surfers at Waikiki, happily pronounced that the islands were “Out of the War Zone,” and it remained true in the years that followed.

      By the latter half of the 1920s, wrote Jane Desmond, “surfing was an established part of tourist iconography and tourist itineraries,” and the covers of national magazines began to feature smiling surfers screaming down waves.¹³³ Visitors who witnessed these water-bound athletes along the Hawaiian shores exclaimed it “hard to find a more graceful or exhilarating sight.”¹³⁴ Even British artists and small-town New England newspapers saw fit to address this “most fascinating” and “picturesque phase of the island life.”¹³⁵

      

      FIGURE 5. How central was surfing to the marketing of Hawai‘i? The letterhead used by the Hawaii Promotion

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