Which Westerner saw surfing in Hawaii for the first time is a matter of debate. But it seems that the first written reference to the activity appeared in the journals of Lieutenant James King, ship’s astronomer on the voyages of Captain James Cook. In the journals published in 1779, he described a common leisure activity on Hawaii as follows, “The men sometimes 20 or 30 go without the swell of the surf and lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plan about their size and breadth, they keep their legs close on top of it and their arms are used to guide the plank. They wait the time of the greatest swell that sets on shore … ”
Certainly the activity of surfing had been observed quite frequently. Mark Twain, an inveterate traveller visited Hawaii in 1866 and saw a large company of naked natives indulging in surf-bathing.
Almost 200 years later California musicians such as the Beach Boys would describe the activity in less formal language, and their words and music became an essential part of the soundtrack of American life in the 1960s. Today there are some 23 million people worldwide who surf at least once a year, and the surfing industry generates revenues of over USD 6 billion per annum.
