Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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Emerson was speaking before the congregated guests not to celebrate this heavenly victory, however. His immediate concern was of a much more worldly nature. He took to the podium that July day to defend his missionary predecessors—many of them the fathers and mothers of those assembled in the room—from charges that they had engineered the demise of a number of “noble” Hawaiian sports. The “children of nature” whom the proselytizers saw as their charges had developed a number of pastimes “worthy of perpetuation,” Emerson believed. The fitness of “surf riding” and other activities to “develope [sic] and invigorate the frame and to impart and maintain a virile courage and endurance” was one, the outgoing president insisted, that “should be cultivated in every race.”² Emerson was certainly right about surfing’s invigorating qualities. But, to Hawaiians, it was about much more. From the selection of a tree out of which a board might be shaped to the interactions of the wave riders and spectators, surfing, which involved all strata of society—young and old, commoners and royalty, men and women—represented a ritualized set of practices at the core of what it meant to be Hawaiian. How shamefully misguided, therefore, that certain critics had seen fit to blame the missionaries for the decline of surfing and other sports, Emerson continued. He, for one, would have none of it. His predecessors “exercised no direct or appreciable influence” in “the death and retirement of Hawaii’s ancient sports and games,” he assured the audience. On the contrary, “they were utterly powerless to arrest the tendency towards the substitution of imported and foreign games for the worthy sports and exercises indigenous to the soil and race.”³ The Hawaiian people, that is, had collectively chosen to no longer indulge their traditional pursuits. It was their choice. Prohibitions had not been imposed on them.