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THE HAWAIIAN GLOBALIZATION OF SURFING

At roughly the same time that Ford was enacting his vision of white global leadership, surfing began, with Ford’s assistance, to slowly creep beyond the warm Hawaiian shores. Just as it was Hawaiians who spearheaded surfing’s turn-of-the-century resurgence—a resurgence that has since been attributed to Alexander Hume Ford—it was Hawaiians who served as the most notable diplomats for their ancestral sport. Two young men who had distinguished themselves at Waikiki, George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku, were particularly important in this respect, setting in motion the transformation of surfing from a uniquely Hawaiian cultural activity into a pastime enjoyed by millions of people on every continent. Of these two early emissaries, Freeth remains the least well known. This is surprising, as it was Freeth, a mixed-blood Hawaiian regarded as perhaps the most skilled wave rider of his generation, who firmly planted the seeds of what would become California’s renowned surf culture.¹¹⁴ In 1907, he left Hawai‘i for the Golden State with letters in hand from Ford, Jack London, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee. His objective, wrote the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, was to “give exhibitions of Hawaiian water sports to the people of that section.”¹¹⁵ Within months of his arrival, the media bestowed upon Freeth a national reputation through the work of London, the celebrated author who took to the pages of Woman’s Home Companion that fall to excitedly relate his experiences months earlier in Waikiki. There, London watched Freeth “tearing in on the back of [a wave], standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.”¹¹⁶ London appreciated not only the young Hawaiian’s wave-riding skills but also his generosity in providing the celebrated author with a number of pointers when he himself took to the surf. Freeth’s reputation only grew when London’s article was reprinted the following year in England’s Pall Mall Magazine and then, in 1911, as a chapter in London’s travelogue The Cruise of the Snark.