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

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Except that it did. While the number of Hawaiian surfers dropped precipitously as the nineteenth century unfolded, wave riding, as historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker reminds us, did in fact continue.⁹ It is true that surfing was witnessed by haoles much less frequently as the decades passed.¹⁰ Given the economic changes that upended Hawaiian customs and the physical decimation of the Hawaiian people following the 1778 arrival of Captain James Cook, this is understandable. After all, the sandalwood, whaling, and sugar industries fundamentally reshaped Hawaiian society and leisure practices—there was far less time for surfing—while a population in the islands that David Stannard conservatively estimated as 800,000 prior to contact had been reduced, largely through the introduction of foreign pathogens for which Hawaiians enjoyed no immunity, to approximately 135,000 by 1823.¹¹ By the 1890s, the number of Hawaiians stood at fewer than 40,000.¹² Even if one were to accept that Stannard’s pre-contact estimate is too high, as Andrew Bushnell has argued, this still represents a staggering loss of life.¹³ Under such circumstances it seems obvious that the number of surfers would have decreased. Those that continued to ride the waves were survivors of not only the biological onslaught introduced by white contact but also a radically different labor system and the concerted efforts of at least some white missionaries to demonize a pastime they associated with barbarism and sexual indecency.