Empire in Waves. Scott Laderman

Atlantic Seaboard, surfed the warm waters of Hawai‘i, helped popularize his beloved sport in Brazil—now a competitive Surfing powerhouse—and explored the African coast. He did so by air, boat, foot, road, and rail. He toasted the children of Europe an diplomats, sweated through a South African gold mine, rode in stuffed freight cars with Peruvian peasants, and consumed his fill of cheap wine in Franco’s Madrid. Surfer christened him “one of the most effective roving ambassadors for the sport.”³ And the travel bug never left him. Troy would be back at it years later, discovering, in 1975, the world-class right-hander at Indonesia’s Lagundri Bay with two of his Australian compatriots. By the time he died in 2008, he had visited well over 140 countries.⁴ Troy’s travels are now the stuff of legend. In that long-ago era before blogs and YouTube, he wrote occasional dispatches for the monthly surfing press. This not only made him something of a minor celebrity but also situated him as an exemplar of Cold War surf culture.

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      Surfing had come a long way from its near extinction decades before in that cluster of small Pacific islands in which people rode waves while standing. A Hawaiian tradition that had almost disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century had become, by 1945, a minor global pastime; then, in the decades following the Second World War, surfing emerged not only as a sport enjoyed by millions of enthusiasts worldwide but, significantly, as a form of cultural encounter that might go some distance in bridging national or political divides. A variety of factors contributed to surfing’s phenomenal growth. Foremost among these was the sport’s embrace by the American culture industries. In films ranging from Gidget (1959) to the “beach party” pictures of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Hollywood appropriated surfing and its youthful, seemingly carefree lifestyle while designating Southern California the presumptive center of the surfing universe. Television likewise took to the sport. Gidget made her small-screen debut in 1965 with a young Sally Field in the series’ title role, while ABC’s Wide World of Sports, recognizing surfing’s striking visual qualities, had begun regularly pumping contests into American living rooms in 1962. Surf music became a popular genre, with performers such as the Beach Boys, Dick Dale, and Jan and Dean emerging as best-selling performers. Surfing even entered the world of American letters. Eugene Burdick published The Ninth Wave in 1956—Burdick would shortly thereafter coauthor the influential Cold War novels The Ugly American and Fail-Safe—and Tom Wolfe, that paragon of New Journalism, released his collection of essays The Pump House Gang in 1968.⁵

      Surfing—or at least some version of it—had entered the commercial mainstream. Yet the surf culture popularized in the 1960s was essentially a moneymaking artifice. For every Bikini Beach (1964) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) that purported to reveal the ways of the surfer, there was a shoestring-budget documentary—a traditional “surf flick”—relegated to high school and civic center auditoriums up and down the coast. This more organic community would itself soon reach the mainstream, but not before establishing a foundational element of contemporary surf culture: the primacy of travel to the modern surfing experience. Surfers, like waves, move across and along the oceans. If the first half of the twentieth century was marked by the revitalization and growth of Hawaiian surf culture and its first tentative steps into the wider world, the second half was characterized by widespread global interaction, with surfers ready participants in the rise of Cold War travel cultures. The expansion of the white middle class in the 1950s opened up new horizons for those afflicted with wanderlust. Places that were once only reached following weeks-long transoceanic voyages could, with the growth and increasing affordability of commercial air travel, welcome wide-eyed tourists after flights lasting mere hours.

      For no destination was this truer than Hawai‘i, where the tourism industry exploded in the fourteen years between the war’s end in 1945 and the establishment of statehood in 1959. But it was not just about plea sure travel. The growth of Hawaiian tourism coincided with the escalation of the Cold War, and Hawai‘i, which was already situated at the heart of American power in the Pacific, became even more militarized as Cold War tensions increased.⁶ If not for this militarization, however, surf history might have unfolded quite differently. The armed forces brought several major figures in the development of modern surf culture to Hawai‘i, including Bruce Brown, whose The Endless Summer (1966) made him surfing’s most influential documentary filmmaker, and John Severson, the founder of Surfer magazine. Both Brown and Severson further exposed the rich Hawaiian surf to California’s wave-obsessed youth.⁷ Yet even for those without military ties, Hawai‘i had become surfing’s mecca. It was the place mainlanders went to assert their wave-riding chops. By the 1960s, a surfer could not be said to have reached surfing’s heights unless he (or, far less frequently, she) had successfully ridden O‘ahu’s North Shore.

      And yet, for a number of surfers, the distant trip to Hawai‘i was not enough. Surfing was increasingly about the search, the journey, the discovery. In this vein, a number of young men (and it was almost exclusively men) set out to chart something of the littoral world. Their voyages were not the “Grand Tours” of previous centuries. Yes, they revolved around pleasure. And yes, they dripped with the trappings of empire. But those undertaking the journeys were not generally members of the landed elite, their itineraries were fluid, and the object of their gaze was not the patrimony of the West. These were young men looking for waves, most often in relatively untouristed destinations, and they relished their cultural exchanges along the way. The discoveries were undoubtedly important to them, but “the search”—as the wetsuit and apparel maker Rip Curl later designated an influential advertising campaign—was just as significant. These were essentially backpackers with boards, seeking out those quieter parts of the planet where they might be alone—or close to it—with the locals and the ocean. And like their backpacker counterparts, wandering surfers were, as Peter Troy put it, “always trying to enter the life of [those] locals.”⁸

      Troy’s early travels are illustrative. He began his global jaunt in 1963 by ship, making his way across the Indian Ocean and through the Mediterranean on his way to the British motherland. It might seem natural that a white Australian would begin his excursion in Europe, though Troy was there not to imbibe the art and architecture of Florence or the café culture of Paris. It is not that “culture” did not interest the Australian. It did. After passing through the Red Sea, for instance, he ventured inland to explore the antiquities of Egypt, and he wrote home about the magnificent paintings he saw in Europe an cities such as Seville.⁹ But Troy was traveling the world to surf, and the principal culture he sought was not the high culture of the Grand Tour but the subculture of modern surfing. He began his European adventure in the Channel Islands, finding surprisingly good waves in Jersey. While there, he saved an Italian waiter from a near drowning, which earned him notice in the English press, and he took surfboard orders from the locals and offered wave-riding lessons.¹⁰ From the United Kingdom he left for France, where he entered an international contest just hours after disembarking in Biarritz. Despite his exhaustion, he won. Troy, a recently arrived and still traveling Australian, was pronounced the Europe an surfing champion.¹¹

      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.

      Along