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

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The Protestant missionaries of nineteenth-century Hawai‘i never directly prohibited surfing. Such a prohibition was not necessary. In the missionaries’ effort to impose an entirely new worldview on the Hawaiian people, it was made abundantly clear that surfing and other traditional pastimes would only hinder the heathens’ moral progress. And moral progress was imperative, they believed. Arriving on the Big Island in 1820, Lucia Ruggles Holman, the wife of missionary-physician Thomas Holman, was promptly greeted and welcomed by the Hawaiian royal family, which offered her and her companyions “cocoanuts, bananas, plantains, breadfruit, sweet-potatoes, tarrow[,] and 2 hogs.”²⁰ Still, notes historian Patricia Grimshaw, the young woman found herself horrified by “volcanic Kailua, where the chief attraction for Hawaiians, the surf, held no joy for the Americans.”²¹ The local people, Holman wrote to her sister, were deplorable “beyond description,” having “sunk to the lowest depths of sin and depravity.” They “appear to glory in what should be their greatest shame,” she insisted. “There is no sin, the commission of which, disgraces them—indeed, there is nothing that disgraces them but work.” Hawai‘i seemed to lack any redeeming qualities. Even the fruits and vegetables “taste heathenish,” complained the young missionary. Perhaps, Holman said hopefully, the “pleasant sunshine of the Gospel” could turn things around.²²