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

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Forget Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lamentation for the closing of the frontier. As far as Ford was concerned, the frontier had presented itself again. In the wake of his courtship of the Homeseekers Association in Chicago and with white immigrants slowly trickling in to the islands, Ford recognized that his cause would benefit from additional visual enticements. “I wish Hawaii had some slides it could send for use in lectures in Chicago and working up interest in Hawaii for the white man,” he wrote to Governor Frear. Yet even without the slides, the “white man” appeared sold on the vision—or so at least Ford claimed. There was enthusiasm “[e]verywhere along the coast,” he reported of his travels, with people along the western seaboard, just like “the transportation companies,” wanting “to come in & help.”¹⁰² But Ford was onto something. Visual representations of Hawai‘i—images that spoke to the exotic splendor unique to the island chain—could go some distance in selling the Hawaiian dream. And nothing spoke more fully to what was uniquely Hawaiian than the indigenous sport of surfing.