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How Surfing Became American
THE IMPERIAL ROOTS OF MODERN SURF CULTURE
WHEN NATHANIEL B. EMERSON, the outgoing president of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, stood before an assembly of the organization in July 1892, he was full of praise for his missionary predecessors who had worked tirelessly to uplift the “infant race” populating “that fragment” of the Polynesian islands he now called home. Having overseen the “birth of a [Christian] nation,” it had devolved upon this earlier generation of missionaries, Emerson maintained, “to swathe the tender limbs of the newborn, to counsel as to the nutriment suited to its earliest needs, to direct its first tottering footsteps, to give it the alphabet of learning, to initiate for it such intellectual, moral[,] and religious tuition as becomes a candidate for admission into the fraternity of nations.” This was, to be sure, “a task beset with difficulties, imposing large responsibilities, and demanding great earnestness, devotion, and practical wisdom.” But, Emerson assured his audience, “success” had been “attained.”1 Christian civilization had taken root in the Hawaiian archipelago.