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

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Surfing was among the casualties, Emerson said regretfully. Or so it appeared. “The sport of surf riding possessed a grand fascination,” he noted, “and for a time it seemed as if it had the vitality to hold its own as a national pastime. There are those living, perhaps some present [in the audience], who remember the time when almost the entire population of a village would at certain hours resort to the sea-side to indulge in, or to witness, this magnificent accomplishment. We cannot but mourn its decline.” So great had been the retreat from this noble tradition that, Emerson continued, “today it is hard to find a surf-board outside of our museums and private collections.”⁶ While Emerson’s accounting was perhaps an exaggeration, it is nevertheless true that the number of practitioners of the sport had fallen tremendously by the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Yet Emerson’s lamentation for surfing’s diminished popularity seems misguided. The problem had not been wave riding per se, he suggested. Rather, it was that surfing had “felt the touch of the new civilization.” For those perplexed by the meaning of this message, Emerson offered clarification. “[A]s the zest of this sport was enhanced by the fact that both sexes engaged in it, when this practice was found to be discountenanced by the new majority, it was felt that the interest in it had largely departed—and this game too went the way of its fellows.”⁷ Emerson, in essence, wanted it both ways. Surfing was a healthy pastime, but it was one whose scantily clad practitioners, both male and female, horrified many proponents of “the new civilization,” particularly in that wave riding served not only as a pleas ur able endeavor in its own right but also as a form of sexual courtship.⁸ For those being tutored in the modest ways of the missionaries’ Christian deity, surfing was certain to meet with divine disapproval. Its practitioners were much too licentious. Wave riders thus faced a stark choice: immediate gratification—though with eternal damnation—or the immeasurable bounties of a heavenly future. Put that way, surfing would not have appeared to stand a chance.