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

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It was a tall order. Sheldon Dibble, writing two decades after Holman, was repulsed by the “oppression, destitution, and ignorance” that greeted he and his fellow Christian soldiers. The Hawaiians’ “degrading practices, their social condition[,] and their catalogue of crimes” left him appalled. This included their sporting activities. The “evils” that resulted from “[p]laying on the surfboard” and other amusements were too legion to sufficiently describe. “Some lost their lives thereby, some were severely wounded, maimed and crippled; some were reduced to poverty, both by losses in gambling and by neglecting to cultivate the land; and the instances were not few in which they were reduced to utter starvation. But the greatest evil of all,” Dibble suggested, “resulted from the constant intermingling, without any restraint, of persons of both sexes and of all ages, at all times of the day and at all hours of the night.”²³

These were decidedly colonialist views. The white missionaries of Hawai‘i, like the armies of self-styled saviors that people imperial history, saw their charges in racially inferior terms, ascribing to them a barbarity that rings almost otherworldly to twenty-first-century ears. And wave riding was most certainly an element of that savagery. Surfing, wrote haoles in the Hawaiian-language newspapers they employed to achieve their social aims, was “immoral.” It was “the reason,” claimed an article in Ke Kumu Hawaii, “people become indolent and [was] the root of lasciviousness.”²⁴ It made Hawaiian men “lazy,” insisted another, as they “would spend all their time surfing.”²⁵ And the same was said to be true more broadly. The residents of La‘ie did not like attending the missionaries’ religious ser vices because they “would rather surf,” one report indicated in 1835.²⁶ Another equated surfing with sin, instructing readers to “remember the words of the Lord when he said, ‘Go and sin no more.’”²⁷ As Richard Armstrong’s Ka Nonanona revealed, the message could be distilled to three words: “[s]urfing is wrong.”²⁸