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It is fair to presume that they would have continued in use. Can the missionaries be fairly charged with suppressing these games? I believe they deny having done so. But they write and publicly express their opinions, and state these sports to be expressly against the laws of God, and by a succession of reasoning, which may be readily traced, impress upon the minds of the chiefs and others, the idea that all who practice them, secure to themselves the displeasure of offended heaven. Then the chiefs, from a spontaneous benevolence, at once interrupt customs so hazardous to their vassals.30
While a significant number of Hawaiians continued to resist the assault on their cultural traditions, as scholars from Noenoe Silva to Isaiah Helekunihi Walker have ably demonstrated, the missionaries, by convincing some Hawaiians that surfing contributed to their moral turpitude, were able to achieve many of their desired objectives without the need to issue a blanket prohibition on wave riding.31
In light of this ideological offensive, it seems disingenuous for a number of missionaries to have absolved themselves of any responsibility for surfing’s decline. To be sure, there were visiting whites, including missionaries, who celebrated the sport and hoped it would survive what Nathaniel Emerson, in his 1892 speech to the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, innocuously called “the new civilization.”32 The German-born journalist Charles Nordhoff, for instance, extolled the wave riders of Hilo in 1873, maintaining that those Americans fortunate enough to be there on a “rough day” with “heavy surf” would be witness to “one of the finest sights in the world.”33 Among the islands’ missionaries, there was none more enthusiastic than the Reverend Henry T. Cheever. Writing in 1851, Cheever unequivocally praised the “surf-players” he would see enjoying the waves along the Hawaiian coast. Their pastime, he opined, “is so attractive and full of wild excitement to Hawaiians, and withal so healthful, that I cannot but hope it will be many years before civilization shall look it out of countenance, or make it disreputable to indulge in this manly, though it be dangerous, exercise. Many a man from abroad who has witnessed this exhilarating play, has no doubt inly wished that he were free and able to share in it himself.” Admitting publicly what he suspected others thought privately, Cheever confessed: “[f]or my part, I should like nothing better, if I could do it, than to get balanced on a board just before a great rushing wave, and so be hurried in half or quarter of a mile landward with the speed of a race-horse, all the time enveloped in foam and spray, but without letting the roller break and tumble over my head.” As“[b]oth men and women, girls and boys,” together found time to indulge in this enviable “diversion,” however, Cheever was perhaps naïve in suggesting that civilization had not already “look[ed] it out of countenance” or otherwise “ma[d]e it disreputable.”34