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

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Certainly the missionary leader Hiram Bingham seemed to recognize as much, though without offering the hope for the sport’s survival displayed by Reverend Cheever. “The adoption of our costume greatly diminishes [the Hawaiians’] practice of swimming and sporting in the surf,” Bingham observed in his 1848 tome, “for it is less convenient to wear it in the water than the native girdle, and less decorous and safe to lay it entirely off on every occasion they find for a plunge or swim or surf-board race. Less time, moreover, is found for amusement by those who earn or make cloth-garments for themselves like the more civilized nations.” Bingham acknowledged the declining number of Hawaiians participating in what he identified as “the favorite amusement of all classes,” though he appeared adamant that the missionaries had nothing for which to apologize. “The decline or discontinuance of the use of the surf-board, as civilization advances,” he wrote, “may be accounted for by the increase of modesty, industry[,] or religion, without supposing, as some have affected to believe, that missionaries caused oppressive enactments against it. These considerations are in part applicable to many other amusements. Indeed, the purchase of foreign vessels, at this time, required attention to the collecting and delivering of 450,000 lbs. of sandal-wood, which those who were waiting for it might naturally suppose would, for a time, supersede their amusements.”³⁵ Given the central importance placed by missionary ideology on the sanctity of labor, it was only natural, that is, that the Hawaiian people—a people who, in Bingham’s telling, unreservedly embraced Christian civilization—would emphasize industriousness over the “many . . . amusements” that were central to Hawaiian cultural life.³⁶