Empire in Waves. Scott Laderman

barbarity that rings almost otherworldly to twenty-first-century ears. And wave riding was most certainly an element of that savagery. Surfing, wrote haoles in the Hawaiian-language newspapers they employed to achieve their social aims, was “immoral.” It was “the reason,” claimed an article in Ke Kumu Hawaii, “people become indolent and [was] the root of lasciviousness.”²⁴ It made Hawaiian men “lazy,” insisted another, as they “would spend all their time surfing.”²⁵ And the same was said to be true more broadly. The residents of La‘ie did not like attending the missionaries’ religious ser vices because they “would rather surf,” one report indicated in 1835.²⁶ Another equated surfing with sin, instructing readers to “remember the words of the Lord when he said, ‘Go and sin no more.’”²⁷ As Richard Armstrong’s Ka Nonanona revealed, the message could be distilled to three words: “[s]urfing is wrong.”²⁸

      No, it was not necessary for the missionaries to prohibit surfing. It was tightly enough “hemmed in by ‘blue laws’ against gambling and nudity, both of which had been nearly as important to the sport as riding itself,” concluded historian Matt Warshaw.²⁹ When this assault on Hawaiian customs is combined with the Protestant emphasis on industriousness and the physical devastation of the Hawaiian population, it is little wonder that surfing entered a period of decline. As early as the second half of the 1830s, the transformation was already apparent. William S. W. Ruschenberger, a surgeon on a round-the-world voyage, commented at that time on the “change [that] has taken place in certain customs, which must have influenced the physical development of the islanders. I allude to the variety of athletic exercises, such as swimming, with or without the surf-board, dancing, wrestling, throwing the javalin [sic], &c., all of which games, being in opposition to the severe tenets of Calvinism, have been suppressed, without the substitution of other pursuits to fill up the time.” Ruschenberger was dubious of the missionaries’ denials of responsibility. “Would these games have been suppressed had the missionaries never arrived at the islands?” he asked.

      It is fair to presume that they would have continued in use. Can the missionaries be fairly charged with suppressing these games? I believe they deny having done so. But they write and publicly express their opinions, and state these sports to be expressly against the laws of God, and by a succession of reasoning, which may be readily traced, impress upon the minds of the chiefs and others, the idea that all who practice them, secure to themselves the displeasure of offended heaven. Then the chiefs, from a spontaneous benevolence, at once interrupt customs so hazardous to their vassals.³⁰

      While a significant number of Hawaiians continued to resist the assault on their cultural traditions, as scholars from Noenoe Silva to Isaiah Helekunihi Walker have ably demonstrated, the missionaries, by convincing some Hawaiians that surfing contributed to their moral turpitude, were able to achieve many of their desired objectives without the need to issue a blanket prohibition on wave riding.³¹

      In light of this ideological offensive, it seems disingenuous for a number of missionaries to have absolved themselves of any responsibility for surfing’s decline. To be sure, there were visiting whites, including missionaries, who celebrated the sport and hoped it would survive what Nathaniel Emerson, in his 1892 speech to the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, innocuously called “the new civilization.”³² The German-born journalist Charles Nordhoff, for instance, extolled the wave riders of Hilo in 1873, maintaining that those Americans fortunate enough to be there on a “rough day” with “heavy surf” would be witness to “one of the finest sights in the world.”³³ Among the islands’ missionaries, there was none more enthusiastic than the Reverend Henry T. Cheever. Writing in 1851, Cheever unequivocally praised the “surf-players” he would see enjoying the waves along the Hawaiian coast. Their pastime, he opined, “is so attractive and full of wild excitement to Hawaiians, and withal so healthful, that I cannot but hope it will be many years before civilization shall look it out of countenance, or make it disreputable to indulge in this manly, though it be dangerous, exercise. Many a man from abroad who has witnessed this exhilarating play, has no doubt inly wished that he were free and able to share in it himself.” Admitting publicly what he suspected others thought privately, Cheever confessed: “[f]or my part, I should like nothing better, if I could do it, than to get balanced on a board just before a great rushing wave, and so be hurried in half or quarter of a mile landward with the speed of a race-horse, all the time enveloped in foam and spray, but without letting the roller break and tumble over my head.” As“[b]oth men and women, girls and boys,” together found time to indulge in this enviable “diversion,” however, Cheever was perhaps naïve in suggesting that civilization had not already “look[ed] it out of countenance” or otherwise “ma[d]e it disreputable.”³⁴

      Certainly the missionary leader Hiram Bingham seemed to recognize as much, though without offering the hope for the sport’s survival displayed by Reverend Cheever. “The adoption of our costume greatly diminishes [the Hawaiians’] practice of swimming and sporting in the surf,” Bingham observed in his 1848 tome, “for it is less convenient to wear it in the water than the native girdle, and less decorous and safe to lay it entirely off on every occasion they find for a plunge or swim or surf-board race. Less time, moreover, is found for amusement by those who earn or make cloth-garments for themselves like the more civilized nations.” Bingham acknowledged the declining number of Hawaiians participating in what he identified as “the favorite amusement of all classes,” though he appeared adamant that the missionaries had nothing for which to apologize. “The decline or discontinuance of the use of the surf-board, as civilization advances,” he wrote, “may be accounted for by the increase of modesty, industry[,] or religion, without supposing, as some have affected to believe, that missionaries caused oppressive enactments against it. These considerations are in part applicable to many other amusements. Indeed, the purchase of foreign vessels, at this time, required attention to the collecting and delivering of 450,000 lbs. of sandal-wood, which those who were waiting for it might naturally suppose would, for a time, supersede their amusements.”³⁵ Given the central importance placed by missionary ideology on the sanctity of labor, it was only natural, that is, that the Hawaiian people—a people who, in Bingham’s telling, unreservedly embraced Christian civilization—would emphasize industriousness over the “many . . . amusements” that were central to Hawaiian cultural life.³⁶

      As in North America, a fair number of those advocating the racial uplift of the indigenous Hawaiian population found themselves materially rewarded as they came to dominate the economic life of the islands. During the nineteenth century, land was divided and passed into haole hands.³⁷ With the physical decimation of the native population, tens of thousands of laborers were imported from the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific. Commodity agriculture—especially sugar—proved increasingly important, and the descendants of a number of missionaries came to control its trade. In time, the haole elite sought political power to match its dominance of the export-oriented economy. This meant undermining the sovereignty of the native kingdom. When Queen Lili‘uokalani attempted in 1893 to restore the authority of the Hawaiian monarchy following the 1887 imposition of a constitution favored by powerful haole interests, her government, after the U.S. minister in the islands sent in a contingent of American troops, grudgingly “yield[ed] to the superior force of the United States of America” and the haole leaders that the American minister, John L. Stevens, was supporting. Lili‘uokalani did so, she wrote at the time, “under . . . protest” and “until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”³⁸

      That day would never arrive. In 1898, five years after the haole-led coup d’état that ultimately brought about the Republic of Hawai‘i—a coup that even the United States president, Grover Cleveland, recognized as unlawful—Washington annexed the islands in the face of overwhelming opposition by the Hawaiian people.³⁹ The annexation was clearly unconstitutional. Customary international law required land to be annexed through a treaty. This presented a problem for the United States, however, because its constitution mandated that treaties be ratified by a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate. Such a majority was not possible. Congress thus bypassed this