Twain was 30 years old and virtually unknown when he arrived on Kona in 1866. As a $20-an-article travel correspondent for the Sacramento Union newspaper, a brief story of surfing took up just one paragraph in one dispatch. Twain's portrayal of the sport was deft and funny. Sadly during that era, surfing was looked down upon by visiting missionaries to Hawaii, like Hiram Brigham, who presented surfing as 'being in opposition to the strict tenets of Calvinism and against the laws of god'.Twain didn't think so, and went so far to give the stoke a try himself.
In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf- bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any
cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.Surfing seems to date as far back as 3000 BC, but surfing as it exits today is a Polynesian invention. Stand up surfing was deeply integrated into Hawaiian culture since around 1000 AD. I was told that there are more breech births in the Polynesians than in other groups: Hawaiian babies are ejected from the confines of the womb and land feet first right onto a surf board. Surfing spans across all sections of society in Hawaii: Commoners and politicians, young and old, men, women, and children.
A sense of history was most likely lost upon Brigham who, I imagine experienced a horrific wipe out and took a defeatist point of view:Now that would be against the laws of god?
