Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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Ford had already laid an important foundation in this regard with his opening of the Outrigger Canoe Club in 1908.103 His inauguration of Mid-Pacific Magazine in 1911 should also be understood in this context. It was not for nothing that in 1910 one newspaper account identified Ford as an “arch promoter of surf riding exhibitions and other things for the good of Hawaii.”104 To be sure, he was not the first booster to employ surfing in marketing the islands. An 1898 pamphlet on Hawai‘i produced by the Canadian-Pacific Railway and the Canadian-Australian S.S. Line featured a photograph of a “native . . . with surf board.” The “recent acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States,” the pamphlet enticed would-be visitors, meant the opening “to the plea sure and health-seeking tourist [of] a delightful semi-tropical country of virgin beauty and unrivalled attractiveness—a new world to Americans and Europeans, in which the resources of modern civilization contribute materially to an easy and pleasurable exploration.”105 Surfing also appeared the following year in the History of the Hawaiian Islands and Hints to Travelers Visiting the Hawaiian Islands published by the Hawaiian Gazette Company.106 By 1915, surfing had made the cover of Ferdinand Schnack’s Aloha Guide, the “standard handbook” of Honolulu and the islands “endorsed” by the Chamber of Commerce and the Hawaii Promotion Committee.107 In Aloha from Honolulu, another 1915 piece of promotional literature, surfing—the “most popular of Hawaiian pastimes”—claimed a full-page photograph.108 Postcards abounded, and the archives are replete with materials from the first few decades of the twentieth century that feature wave riding as one of the islands’ principal draws.109 Nevertheless, probably no individual at the time more fully developed Hawaiian tourism—and used surfing as a marketing tool—than did Alexander Hume Ford.