Three Places, Separately
Surfing does not have one point of origin. It appeared in several parts of the world that had nothing to do with each other.
In ancient Peru, fishermen rode reed craft back to shore three to five thousand years ago. The Moche people used a vessel called the caballito de totora, or little horse of reeds, with archaeological evidence from around 200 AD. A Jesuit missionary described Inca fishermen riding the rough water at Callao in a book published in 1590.
West Africans developed the skill independently. A German account from the 1640s describes children on the Gold Coast being tied to boards and put in the water. In 1679 another observer wrote of children at Elmina in Ghana learning to swim on bits of board, and in 1834 a visitor to Accra watched boys paddle out with light boards under their stomachs and come back rolling in on the surf.
In Polynesia the history runs to about AD 400, when settlers carried the practice of playing in the waves on belly boards toward Hawaii.
Standing Up
Ancient surfers generally rode on their bellies or knees. It was in Hawaii that the art of standing upright on a board was invented, and that is the form the modern sport takes.
European visitors kept noticing it. British explorers may have seen surfing at Tahiti as early as 1767. Lieutenant James King was the first to write about it in Hawaii, while completing Captain Cook's journals after Cook's death in 1779.
Herman Melville described the equipment in a novel of 1849, drawing on his own time in Polynesia. The board, he wrote, was about five feet long and the width of a man's body, convex on both sides, highly polished and rounded at the ends. It was valued highly, oiled after every use, and hung in a prominent place in the owner's home.
Surfing also existed in Samoa and Tonga before contact with Europeans, where it had its own names, predating the practice in Hawaii and eastern Polynesia by over a thousand years.
The Revival
Surfing declined sharply in Hawaii during the second half of the 19th century. Its comeback happened largely in California, and it started with three teenagers.
In July 1885, three Hawaiian princes attending boarding school in San Mateo took a break in Santa Cruz and surfed the mouth of the San Lorenzo River on custom redwood boards. Twenty years later George Freeth, of English and Native Hawaiian descent, did more than anyone to revive interest at Waikiki, and in 1907 a land developer brought him to California to give exhibitions. Another developer promptly hired him as a lifeguard to draw visitors to his resort.
Then came Duke Kahanamoku, who spread surfing across the United States and Australia on the strength of the swimming that won him Olympic gold in 1912 and 1920.
Women shaped the sport too. Mary Ann Hawkins won California's first women's paddleboard race in 1936 and became a pioneer of tandem surfing. A professional tour began in 1975, the year Margo Oberg became the first female professional surfer.
Boards and Breaks
The earliest boards were solid wood, often up to 12 feet long and weighing as much as 70 kilograms. Balsa boards in the late 1940s and early 1950s were a huge improvement in both portability and handling.
Most modern boards are foam wrapped in fibreglass with a wooden strip called a stringer down the middle. Newer ones use a lighter foam and epoxy resin, which floats better and paddles faster, though many experienced surfers say it gives less feedback and prefer the older materials.
The shortboard arrived in the late 1960s and settled into the three-finned thruster design, invented by the Australian shaper Simon Anderson and usually 6 to 7 feet long. A longboard runs 9 to 10 feet. Beginners are usually put on soft boards, which are safer, faster to paddle and steadier.
Where the wave breaks matters as much as the board. A surf break is anything that makes a wave break, and the main types are point breaks at headlands, beach breaks, river mouth bars, reef breaks and ledge breaks.
