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

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The young Victorian then made his way to Spain and Portugal. He rode small waves in San Sebastián with traveling companion Rennie Ellis, a fellow Australian and an agent for Severson’s Surfer magazine, and he scored solid surf at the Portuguese beach of Guincho.¹² The locals were impressed. “Amazed spectators stared at us from the beach,” Ellis reported in Australia’s Surfing World. “Afterwards a local approached us and in halting English and raptured tones he told us that until then he had thought Christ was the only person who could walk on the water.”¹³ The Spanish and Portuguese—both at that time living under right-wing dictatorships—struck Troy for different reasons. In Spain “the people generally were lethargic, apparently not politically minded, poor[,] and mostly unkempt in appearance.” But the Portuguese “were very anti-communist (and didn’t dare speak their own views on politics and government to a fellow countryman in fear that he may be a secret agent of a rival party—we heard of many so-called stories to back these accusations), hard working, industrious[,] and of a general western world standard.”¹⁴ There was little doubt which country he viewed more favorably. But Troy intended to see far more than the Europe an Atlantic. Together with Ellis, he volunteered aboard an Indonesian-made ketch that took the two Australians to the Americas.