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robert
frothingham
: surfing at waikiki, 1925
Robert
Frothingham :
Surfing at Waikiki, 1925. Frothingham, Robert: Around the World;
a friendly guide for the world traveler Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1925. Hathi Trust https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015062202828
Introduction Page 10
The piece
de resistance, however, of a visit to Honolulu is
far-famed Waikiki Beach about six miles from the city.
An afternoon spent in those booming billows will furnish
memories for a lifetime.
Perhaps some of my older readers may hark back to the
'Geography' of their school days and visualize a 'Scene in
the Sandwich Islands,' consisting of a crude illustration of
an athletic Kanaka balancing himself on a surf-board perched
on the crest of a mighty comber rushing shoreward at
race-horse speed.
It is a picture that must be seen to be appreciated and
Waikiki is the only place to see it.
For the flabby-muscled tourist who is unequal to the
management of the surf-board, even a la 'belly-whopper,'
they provide a native-manned outrigger dugout-
Page 11
canoe which will furnish all the excitement necessary.
With a bronze Apollo in the bow and another in the stern, we
paddle out beyond the bar and wait for a 'real one.'
Soon it comes racing in like a tidal wave.
When about one hundred and fifty feet distant, the two
'boys' bend to their paddles with all their strength in
order to hook on to the monster at the precise moment when
the speed of the canoe approximates that of the wave.
Result - the paddlers rest while the dugout is carried in
shore like a chip balanced on the crest instead of being
left behind, which latter is exactly what happens to the
amateur on the surf-board.
It is a stunt calling for more dexterity than any white man
has ever succeeded in acquiring and strangely suggestive of
that
... tide In the
affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads
on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their
life Is bound in shallows and in
miseries.
