Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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These were questions of the gravest import. The answer to all of them, Bingham happily assured his readers, was an emphatic yes.15
When Bingham contemplated the “idolaters of reprobate mind” he encountered during his Polynesian crusade, he perceived a fertile crop of Hawaiians begging for religious conversion.16 But this would be about much more than Sunday worship. It would mean accepting the norms of white civilization, including modest (albeit impractical) dress, the abolition of gambling, and Christian notions of sexual propriety. All of these handicapped surfing, a sport best enjoyed free of sartorial encumbrance on which both Hawaiian men and women wagered.17 So, too, did the missionaries’ emphasis on constant work as a means of self-improvement. Recreational pursuits such as wave riding—the “most popular of all . . . pastimes with all ranks and ages,” according to a nineteenth-century historian of the islands—suffered.18 So would Hawaiians subscribe to these Christian precepts? Bingham and his contemporaries found, in time, a surprisingly receptive audience. They were undoubtedly aided by the ongoing decimation of the Hawaiian people. “Natives,” wrote Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, “perceived that missionaries might give them eternal life and, more immediately, save them from the impact of the foreign diseases that were sweeping the Pacific.”19 Acceptance of the Christian deity, in other words, promised rewards in both this life and the next. There was a practical benefit to conversion. Not surprisingly, many did accept the Christian faith. But the disavowal of cultural practices such as wave riding was an entirely different matter.