Julia Flynn Siler

Join Mailing List

How an 1863 petition from Ni’ihau re-surfaced in San Francisco

by 5 Comments

The story begins in November of 1957. The chief photographer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Warren Roll, climbed into the passenger seat of a small plane in Kauai. The pilot took off, heading towards a 73-square-mile privately-owned Hawaiian island of Niihau.

The plane landed roughly, smashing its landing gear and splintering its propeller. Roll, carrying his camera gear, left the pilot and set off across the island in search of the island’s one village. The Robinson family, who by that time had owned the island for nearly a century, had restricted access to it for decades.  Roll, an unusually enterprising photojournalist, had successfully penetrated what was by then known as the “Forbidden Island.”

The late Warren Roll  in a photo taken on Midway Island, courtesy of Jonah Roll

Hot, thirsty, and exhausted after walking for hours, Roll finally reached the village. He called out to the first people he saw, “Hello! Will you help me?” And they did. In a pattern that began with the arrival of Captain James Cook, the British explorer who was the first westerner to reach this archipelago of volcanic islands long-isolated in the north Pacific in 1778, the Native Hawaiians of Niihau (pronounced Nee-ee-how) warmly welcomed Roll, who, like Cook, was a “haole” or foreigner to them.

Roll then took a series of photographs for his newspaper of the Native Hawaiians who lived on the island which were published in a two-page spread in the Star-Bulletin on November 16, 1957. Its headline was “Free Though Feudal. They’re Happy on Niihau: Iron Curtain Lifted For the First Time. Much of What You Hear About the Island Isn’t So.” His scoop caused a  sensation.

Warren Roll’s “crash” landing on Niihau in 1957, courtesy of Jonah Rolls

But what Roll didn’t reveal in the story how he also ended up with a crumbling, hand-written petition on bluish lined parchment paper with 105 signatures on it that remained buried in his files for years.  Whether he was given the petition during that first trip, or somehow acquired it on another occasion, is not clear. But the recent discovery of this 1863 document underscores the sometimes surprising ties between the Hawaiian islands and San Francisco.

Warren Roll eventually retired from the Star-Bulletin and returned to the mainland. He died in 2008. The  bulk of his archives, which included negatives from his decades of work on the islands as well as materials he collected for a possible book on Niihau, ended up in a small, wooden toy box with one of his sons, the fine arts painter Jonah Rolls. Jonah lives with his wife and two daughters in Project Artaud, an arts colony on the industrial edge of San Francisco’s Mission District.

Artist Jonah Roll in his studio in Project Artaud, San Francisco. Photograph by Katia Fuentes.

Jonah, who was born in the islands and raised aboard a 38-foot ketch named the Flying Walrus in Honolulu’s Ala Wai boat harbor, had begun having bad dreams about his father’s archives and worried that something would happen to them. “I love having it here, but it’s slowly taking its toll,” the painter said, noting the mana or power of the island of Niihau and the burden he felt keeping his father’s archives safe.

I first met Jonah after a longtime staff cameraman at KQED, Harry Betancourt, approached me in the green room after I’d been on Michael Krasny’s Forum show to talk about my book on Hawaii, Lost Kingdom. Harry suggested I reach out to Jonah, who had inherited some interesting materials on the islands from his father. I visited Jonah and his family and their home in Project Artaud twice, and Jonah ended up asking me to get in touch with the head of the Hawaii State Archives to translate the document from the Hawaiian into English and also to put it into its historical context. Within a day, Jonah had the translation.

Jonah had long suspected the document had something to do with the purchase of the island. Indeed, in early 1864, the Robinson family had bought the island for $10,000 in gold from Hawaii’s King, who had found it somewhat troublesome to own and thus wanted to sell. Located 17 miles off the coast of Kauai, Niihau suffered from regular droughts. What’s more, the king had some difficulties collecting rents from the Hawaiian tenants. The Robinsons, which had come to the islands from Scotland after a long stopover in New Zealand, moved to Niihau with the plan of raising cattle and sheep.

Early in the 20th century, when Hawaii was still an American territory and the archipelago had not yet become the 50th state, the Robinsons decided to restrict access to the island only to those already living there – mainly a few hundred Native Hawaiians. Outsiders could only visit with the family’s permission.

As the decades passed and the Hawaiian language was actively suppressed by the territorial government, Niihau became the only place in the world where Hawaiian was the predominant language spoken.  Legends and myths sprung up about the island, which is the geologically oldest of the seven inhabited Hawaiian Islands, and also said to be the birthplace of the volcano Goddess, Pele.

Roll, who had served in as an aerial photographer for the Navy during WWII and the Korean War had the knack for being in the right place at the right time and he wanted to see the place for himself. His son Jonah believes he intended to land there in search of a journalistic coup. (Click here to see some of Warren’s photographs.)

Long after that crash and trek in 1957, the memory of what Warren Roll saw on Niihau stayed with him. “He became completely obsessed,” his son Jonah recalls. He began collecting documents, newspaper clippings, and other materials – some of which ended up in what he called his “Unauthorized Niihau Scrap Book.” Upon retiring from the paper, he shipped a file cabinet with him to the mainland. It included background on the Robinson family and, according to Jonah, at one point had contact with an estranged member of the Robinson family about what he’d found. The crown jewel of his collection was the document in Hawaiian from 1863.

A petition from residents of Niihau dated 1863, first page. Courtesy of Jonah Roll.

Click here for a translation of the 1863 Niihau Petition

 

A petition by the residents of Niihau, dated 1863 — page 2. Courtesy of Jonah Roll.

After getting the translation done by a staffer at the Hawaii State Archives,  Jonah became even more concerned about the burden of taking care of it. It turned out to be a petition from virtually every single resident of the island at the time asking the King for a new lease of the island to the island. The petition came at the time that the Robinsons were negotiating to buy it from the king. Although there are similar letters between the island’s residents and the Minister of the Interior, the archive did not have this one — and there is no mention in the standard histories of nineteenth century Hawaii of an attempt by the native Hawaiian residents to maintain their grip on the island (with the exception of a fragment of this letter in an appendix to a book about Ni’ihau published in 1989.)

The ending to the story? Jonah Roll has offered to donate the petition to the Hawaii State Archives, sending it back to the islands along with his father’s photo archive. As for the mystery of how this document ended up in an artist’s studio in San Francisco, it’ll probably never be solved. “I can only wonder where the letter came from,” he says. “But I want to get it back to Hawaii, where it belongs.”

 

Lunching with One of Hawaii’s Real ‘Descendants’

by 10 Comments

By Julia Flynn Siler, first published in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog on 3/12/2012

Julia Flynn Siler and Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa.

A few days before heading to Honolulu on book tour for “Lost Kingdom,” I got a phone call from the assistant to Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the woman who is the most direct descendant of the last queen of Hawaii. If the monarchy had not been overthrown in 1893, Princess Abigail today might well have become Hawaii’s queen.

I’d interviewed Princess Abigail by phone for a page one story I’d written last year for the Wall Street Journal. The story was about how the Friends of Iolani Palace, a group of volunteers founded by Princess Abigail’s mother, had been on a decades-long search to recover lost furniture and artifacts that disappeared in the months and years after a small group of businessmen deposed Queen Liliuokalani at the end of the nineteenth century.

While I’d visited Iolani Palace many times in the course of researching Lost Kingdom (the palace is on the same grounds as the Hawaii State Archives) I had not met Princess Abigail. Known by her Hawaiian name “Kekau” (pronounced kay-kow) the Princess is in her eighties and divides her time between homes in Honolulu and California. The last time a journalist had interviewed or spent any time with the Princess was for a Life magazine profile of her in 1998.

I was thrilled – and also a little terrified – when her longtime assistant, Maggi Parker, invited me to join the Princess for lunch at the Mariposa, the restaurant in the Nieman Marcus at Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center. What would I wear? What gifts should I bring? How should I address her? I wasn’t such a hard-bitten reporter that I didn’t fret over the etiquette required – even though our luncheon was taking place not at a palace, but at an all-American shopping mall.

I chose a conservative light -grey pants suit, which turned out to be a good pick for the occasion. I’d raced to a nearby stationery store before the lunch to buy a bright orange gift bag and pink tissue to wrap a bottle of Robert Mondavi cabernet I’d brought her from California, as well as a signed copy of my first book, “The House of Mondavi.”

As I rode the escalator up several floors to the restaurant, past hundreds of gold-colored butterflies suspended from the ceiling, I was damp with perspiration and worried I’d be late. As it turned out, I arrived before almost everyone else. The table was still being decorated with cuttings of delicate black-stemmed ferns – Queen’s Ferns, as it turned out —  from a guest’s garden, along with fuschia-colored orchid lei.

We sipped on blood-orange spritzers as we waited for the Princess’s chauffeur, driving her deep blue Rolls Royce, to drop her off. When she arrived, a ripple of excitement passed through the restaurant, as the manager and staff made a fuss over her, escorting an elegant octogenarian with carefully coiffed blonde hair who was wearing a flowing, cream and white silk pants suit to our long table. We sat with our backs to the wall where a large mural portrayed of hula dancers in grass skirts were dancing on a beach behind us. (The Princess later commented that the dancers didn’t look particularly Hawaiian to her.) Our view through the Mariposa’s windows was of the vast Pacific.

Fox Searchlight
George Clooney as Matt King and Shailene Woodley as Alexandra in “The Descendants.”

The occasion, as it turned out, was a celebration of her assistant Maggi’s birthday, which she had modestly forgotten to mention to me on the phone. Luckily, I’d brought her a small gift too. But Maggi had very kindly seated me next to the Princess, where I had the treat of hearing about her days as a boarder at Notre Dame High School in Belmont, Ca., a Catholic girls’ school outside of San Francisco.

The Princess was not entirely pleased by the service at the Mariposa: more than once, she extended her index finger at the overworked waitress, arched her eyebrows, and commanded her to bring drinks and menus to the table right now! I was secretly pleased to see that the Princess acted like, well, a princess. Later, Maggi explained to me that the Princess typically demanded excellent service and, in turn, was known for tipping generously.

Before the slices of Valharona chocolate cake arrived, Maggi’s friend Ann McCormack gave us a nice surprise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ann had sung in the Honolulu nightclub that she had owned with her husband and toured with Frank Sinatra as his opening act in Las Vegas and elsewhere. At lunch, she sang a special birthday song for her long-time friend.

Ann and Maggi also swapped stories of appearing in small roles in the original “Hawaii Five-0″ and the movie “Hawaii,” based on James Michener’s 1959 novel. Ann and Maggi, it seems, were quite the girls-about-town in Honolulu during the 1950s and 60s. The funniest story involved Maggie once appearing onstage at the nightclub wearing a Playboy bunny’s outfit as a gag, and they reminisced over the filming of Hawaii, including one of the scenes shot at the Princess’s Honolulu home.

What a treat for me – and a big mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian) to Maggi for including me at such a lovely luncheon. After having spent the past four years digging through archives to write a book about the Princess’s family (she is the great-grand niece of King David Kalakaua and Queen Kapi’olani.) I was deeply honored by their interest in my book.

I couldn’t resist asking Kekau (yes, she invited me to call her that) whether she’d seen “The Descendants,” the Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney which is based on the novel by local writer Kaui Hart Hemmings (It’s out on DVD on March 13). She hadn’t – and while I offered to take her to the movies to see it – she was decidedly cool to the idea. It seemed that she hadn’t been to a commercial movie theater to see a film in a very long time.

To deepen the mystery, however, one of the other guests, Teri Stroud, seated to the other side of the Princess, leaned towards me. In a conspiratorial whisper, explained that the Princess was the real descendant  – in other words, the person upon whom the George Clooney character, Matt King, in “The Descendants” was based. In Kaui’s novel, Matt King was descended from Hawaiian royalty on one side and white sugar plantation owners on the other. The Clooney character describes himself as looking like a haole – the Hawaiian word for a foreigner, but generally used to describe a white person – even though he is part-Hawaiian.

Princess Abigail, likewise, does not resemble what  some think Hawaiian princess would look like. She told me at lunch that when she first arrived at her boarding school in California, she overheard some girls talking about her and wondering how fat and how dark-skinned she would be – not realizing they were being overheard. For the record, the Princess is light-skinned and slender with blue eyes. Like Matt King, she could easily be mistaken for a haole herself.

And like the Matt King character,  Princess Abigail is a member of a powerful family – the Campbells – which held many of their assets in a trust. Princess Abigail played a crucial role in 2007 in deciding what should happen to the Campbell Estate when it ran into a Hawaiian law, the rule against perpetuities, requiring it to wind down twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation.

The thirty beneficiaries of the trust are descended from James Campbell, an Irishman who immigrated to the islands in the mid-nineteenth century and who built his fortune as a partner in a Maui sugar plantation. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she was the largest beneficiary of the trust and her proceeds from it were close to a quarter of a billion dollars. She has used some of that wealth to help fund the Abigail K. Kawananakoa Foundation to support the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

That said, “The Descendants” author Hart Hemmings told me she’d based her fictional characters on a number of families and family trusts in the news at time she wrote her book – not just the Campbells. Another family that went through similar experiences were the Wilcoxes (whom the author Hart Hemmings is related to) according to friends that I met later in my trip and had drinks with at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the settings of Hart Hemmings’ novel. While the novel was based on an amalgam of powerful local families, it was still a great honor to meet Princess Abigail, who was born long before Hawaii became the 50th State and who’d lived through its tumultuous history.

How often, after all, does one have the chance to meet true American royalty?

Julia Flynn Siler is the bestselling author of “Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by the Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com

Retracing Lili‘u’s Footsteps…

by 2 Comments

Purely by chance, I found myself in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood where Hawai‘i’s last queen, Lili‘uokalani, had once lived.

I was in Washington, D.C. to deliver a talk to a group of Treasury executives about my new book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. I’d booked a hotel near Dupont Circle.

The evening after the Treasury talk, I was on my way to a dinner party thrown by a group of college friends and stopped at Cairo Wine & Liquor, a small shop a few blocks away from my hotel, to pick up a bottle of wine.

The shop’s name caught my eye and I asked the man behind the counter whether the Cairo apartment building was nearby.

“Sure is,” he answered, motioning across 17th Street, to 1615 Q Street, N.W. “It’s right around the corner.”

“That’s where Hawai‘i’s last queen once lived… “ I said, as I handed him my credit card.

Historic photo of the Cairo Hotel

I’d visited the building four years ago, early on in my effort to retrace Lili‘u’s steps. I hadn’t remembered where it was, but distinctly remembered the gargoyles on the outside and dramatic Romanesque entry arch.

“Before or after she was kicked off the throne?” he asked, shaking his head.

“Afterwards,” I said, a bit surprised that the man at the register, who was perhaps in his late forties, knew the history that had led to the end of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. I am about his age and this episode of American history was never taught in any of my classes growing up.

I walked out of the shop, having found a connection between a U.S. Marine-backed coup that had taken place 119 years earlier in a remote island kingdom and a Washington, D.C. liquor store.

Lili‘u had arrived in the nation’s capitol in January of 1897, where she moved into what was then a chic luxury hotel. In her suite of rooms, she penned her autobiography, Hawaii’s Story, working closely with the American journalist Julius Palmer in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to regain her throne by swaying public opinion and privately petitioning President Grover Cleveland.

The next morning, I decided to revisit the Cairo – the building, not the liquor store. When it was constructed in 1894, it was the tallest building in Washington, at a soaring 156-feet. Concerns over its safety led the city to pass local height restriction legislation and for many years, it remained the capital’s tallest residential building.

When Lili‘u moved there in 1897, it had 350 rooms, suites on every floor, a dining room, a grand ballroom, a nightclub, a billiard room, a barbershop, a bowling alley, and (best of all) a tropical garden on its rooftop terrace. In her suite of rooms, Lili‘u would work most mornings in front of an open fireplace with a gas log, translating the lyrics of the hundred of so songs she had composed into English, as well as completing her autobiography.

The Cairo went downhill in the decades after Lili‘u lived there. As the neighborhood around it decayed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it served as a student hostel, a temporary shelter for the needy, and finally, a flophouse. It closed in 1972, was sold and renovated into larger apartments over three years.

In 1993 – the centennial of the overthrow and the same year that President Clinton issued a formal apology to the people of Hawai‘i – the Washington Post described the Cairo as sitting like “some massive Byzantine dream” in the midst of a bustling urban neighborhood.

My quick trip to Washington was so much richer for having rediscovered the Cairo. A heartfelt thanks (or mahalo in Hawaiian) to my new friend at the other Cairo (where I bought the bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer) for pointing out this wonderful building.

Talking Story at the Outrigger Canoe Club

by 2 Comments

On my last night in Honolulu on tour for my new book, Lost Kingdom, I was invited for drinks at the Outrigger Canoe Club, which sits at the far end of Waikiki Beach, in the shadow of Diamond Head. The club is a key setting for the novel, The Descendants, which is now an Oscar-winning film starring George Clooney.

The Outrigger is a small, private club with an outsized history in Hawaii. Founded in 1908, it is the place where legendary surfer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, a five-time Olympics medalist who competed as a swimmer and water polo player for the U.S. in the 1912, 1920, 1924, and 1932 games. A photo of Duke is mounted on the wood-paneled wall as you enter the dining room, with the words underneath it, “Ambassador of Aloha.”

Duke Paoa Kahanamoku on the beach in front of the Outrigger Canoe Club

Our host for drinks that evening was Puchi Romig, the outgoing chairman of the Friends of Iolani Palace, the group that supports the National Historic Monument through fund-raising and other activities. The highlight of her tenure may well have been last fall’s Renaissance Ball – the first formal ball at the palace in more than a decade.

One of the guests that joined us that evening at the Outrigger was Marvin “Puakea” Nogelmeier from the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Hawaiian language. I’d had the opportunity to profile Puakea in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal and had come to like and admire him very much. He has volunteered as a docent at the Palace since the mid-1980s.

Puakea, who had just returned from a trip to New Zealand, had brought with him a copy of his new book, Mai Pa’a I Ka Leo, which is about translating Hawaiian-language newspapers from the nineteenth century into English. He’s now deeply involved in a project to do just that – with some 2,500 volunteers pulling together to unlock this potentially huge treasure chest of information, which offers a much deeper look into the Hawaiian perspective from the times than we have today. Even non-Hawaiian speakers can help out: for more information, please visit the Awaiaulu project’s website.

Puakea had helped me better understand some of the subtleties of the Hawaiian language and had read and commented on the Note on Language that is at the end of Lost Kingdom. He has spent decades studying Hawaiian culture, language and history and, as a relative newcomer, I was grateful for his help, though I recognize that Lost Kingdom, as a popular history, could have benefited from using even more of the new Hawaiian language materials that he and other scholars are uncovering every day.

Puchi’s other guest was another true descendant, in her own way similar to Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, with whom I’d had lunch when I first arrived. She was Robin Midkiff, a Punahou and Stanford graduate who was a descendant of one of the most prominent missionary families. She is related to Juliette and Amos Starr Cooke, a missionary couple who taught Liliuokalani and other royal students at the Chief’s Children’s School in the 1830s and 1840s in Honolulu.

Robin Midkiff, Julia Flynn Siler, and Puakea Nogelmeier at the Outrigger Canoe Club

Robin is also related to Paul Neumann, an attorney who began his career in California but moved to Honolulu in the early 1880s, quickly rising to the position of the kingdom’s attorney general under King David Kalakaua.  Neumann represented the last queen, Liliuokalani, at her military trial in 1895 and witnessed her forced abdication. To honor him, the deposed Queen and her lady-in-waiting had stitched his name into the Victorian era crazy quilt that they worked on together during Liliu’s eight months of house arrest at the palace.

In addition to working as a senior executive at the First Hawaiian Bank and serving as a member of the Atherton Family Foundation, Robin is deeply involved in preserving the history of Hawaii in her role as chairman of the Washington Place Foundation, the group formed to support the gracious, white pillared home in downtown Honolulu where Liliu spent most of her life. The deposed queen died at Washington Place in 1917 and it long served as the official residence for Hawaii’s Governor. In 2007, it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

We watched for a green flash as the sun sank into the Pacific. Puakea and Robin talked history about the early days of Kamehameha I and his bloody conquest of the island of Oahu. As I sat between them listening to their conversation, I thought to myself how I’d never known a place where history lies so close to the surface of daily life – with reminders every day in the street names reflecting the days when the islands were ruled by Hawaiian royalty.

Book Group Pick: Lost Kingdom

by 2 Comments

Mahalo nui loa –  Hawaiian for thank you very much! – to the dozen or so book groups I’ve heard from around the country that have picked Lost Kingdom as their monthly or quarterly read. I’m truly grateful to all of you – from Liz Epstein’s Literary Masters groups (10 book groups in the San Francisco Bay Area) to Catherine Hartman’s lovely group of Stanford alum and other book-loving friends in Chicago to Jason Poole (The Accidental Hawaiian Crooner) who also organizes a reading group in Pittsburgh. I’m especially grateful to Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs, who organizes book events and moderates book groups in Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles area, for choosing Lost Kingdom as one of her recommended reads. Here are some questions to discuss on Lost Kingdom that come from Liz Epstein at Literary Masters. Hope they’re helpful and if you have other questions, I’d be delighted to skype or phone into your book group for a chat if my schedule permits.

Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

  • Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a haole or white foreigner to the islands, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?
  • Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?
  • How do you feel about Lili’u?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?
  • How do you feel about King David Kalakaua?  How responsible was he for the course of events?
  • How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?
  • How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?
  • What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?
  • What were the motives of  the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?
  • What is the relevance of this history for us today?
  • Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?
  • This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?

 

 


Surf’s Up

by Leave a Comment

The famed Mavericks Surf Contest, which takes place in Half Moon Bay, California, is called each year by its organizers only when conditions are right. Last year, the waves were never big enough for the competition to take place. This year, it began on January 3rd, 2012, the same day as the publication date for my new book, Lost Kingdom.

That coincidence gave me some pleasure, since surfing, known as he‘e nalu or surf riding in the Hawaiian language, is one of the few aspects of ancient Hawaiian culture that have thrived beyond the reef – with Hawaiians themselves bringing the sport at the turn of the twentieth century to America. And one of the parts of my book I loved researching the most was the history of Hawaiian surfing, which was known as the sport of kings, also known as the ali‘i, or high chiefs.

Because commoners worked in the fields and tended the fish ponds, the ali‘i could devote themselves to sports. Their favorite pastime was surfing and they rode the waves on enormous, carved wood boards—some more than eighteen feet long and weighing 150 pounds. Both male and female chiefs also excelled at related sports such as canoe-leaping, in which the surfer would jump from a canoe carrying his or her board into a cresting ocean swell, and then ride the wave to the shore.

When the surf was high, entire villages rushed to the beach. Men, women, and children would paddle out to ride the rolling waves. While Tahitians and other Pacific Islanders also surfed, the Hawaiians took the sport to a higher level—standing fearlessly on their massive boards, often three times as long as those used elsewhere in Polynesia.

The Hawaiians were magnificent athletes. Some excelled at cliff- diving into the sea, from heights of many hundreds of feet. Even young women would strip naked and leap from the summit of high cliffs, diving headlong into the foaming water and bobbing up afterward. One can only imagine their dark hair streaming down their shoulders and their faces beaming with delight.

One of my finds in digging through archives was an engraving of ancient surfers, as well as nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs of the sport. But for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to visit the State Archives of Hawaii in Honolulu but want to learn more about the history of surfing, I’d suggest a wonderful book called Surfing: A History of the Ancient Sport, which was co-authored by Ben R. Finney and the late James D. Houston. I found a copy in our local library.  I also loved DeSoto Brown’s Surfing: Historic Images from the Bishop Museum Archives.

As for getting out on the water, I’m more of an stand-up paddle or kayak girl myself – and maybe a boogie boarder if conditions are just right. But I’m heading to Honolulu later this spring and hope to finally take the surf lesson I’d been promising myself while I sat in darkened archives. Cowabunga!