Eulogy for a Waterman

Before Duke Kahanamoku there was George Freeth, Hawai‘i’s first great modern waterman, whose legacy is much less well-known. Dapper, personable and, crucially, light-skinned, he arrived on the scene in the 1900s to help create what would one day be known—and studied by academics like author Patrick Moser, a professor at Drury University—as Beach Culture. 

Carving the tracks for future Beach Culture boys and girls, and men and women, to follow, Freeth changed the course of surfing and lifesaving. He also changed the history of Hawai‘i—never more so when he gave a surf lesson to Jack London, who wrote rapturously about the experience. (See Moser’s The Fatal Surf Lesson.)

Moser chronicled Freeth’s short life of celebrity and calculated ambiguity in his book Surf & Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture. He followed up with Waikīkī Dreams: How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture. Now he’s written a novel about Freeth, Eulogy for a Waterman, which imagines his days, including where, ironically, his legacy probably looms largest: Southern California. Spotted surfing in 1907 by billionaire Henry Huntington at Redondo Beach, he picked up the first surf sponsorship and became known as “the man who walked on water.” 

Later he became a lifeguard and is credited with professionalizing the service, but even more so for his lifesaving feats, including rescuing seven Japanese fishermen by racing out to the tip of Santa Monica Pier, diving in, taking them to shore, and racing back out to the tip of the pier and diving in all over again. He was credited with more than 200 rescues in his career. 

In this excerpt, however, we skip ahead to the end of Freeth’s short life, dying young at 35 from complications of the Spanish influenza, recalling the tragedy of his youth, old Hawai‘i, San Francisco, and the splendors of the Hawaiian Kingdom before the Overthrow. 

Eulogy for a Waterman is the first in an ongoing series of Hawai‘i Historic Fictions that will be running in The Hawai‘i Review of Books with the hope that they will stimulate local and Hawai‘i-centric writers to take back their history from the slapdash appropriations of authors to whom the Islands are merely “material.” 

If you’re inspired to rewrite a little history of your own—no matter how great or small a subject or personage (in fact, the smaller the better)—and can apply a greater sensitivity to the culture and, especially, the facts, we’d love to hear from you. —D.W.

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April 7, 1919
Agnew Sanitarium, San Diego

“I have a history,” George said, “and it’s worse than my father abandoning the family, believe me. What I did. My strongest memory of him as a child—not my first memory, but the one that crowds my mind—is of his anger. And my mother sitting in the shore break at Waikīkī cradling my younger brother Alexander and weeping as the surf rolled up and back over her dress. I knew it was my fault. He died because I wasn’t watching him. He was three years old.”

Maud didn’t know what to say. She wished for a nurse to interrupt them, but they were alone in the roof garden on top of the Sanitarium, undisturbed. She did not think it was the healthiest conversation to have with George in his current temper. His health had deteriorated in the past week since he’d caught pneumonia. He could barely breathe at times but seemed intent on speaking. She didn’t have the heart to interrupt him, or to make an excuse and leave him lying there alone. At one point in the middle of his story, she didn’t think she could take anymore. She prayed, Please, Lord, let him run out of breath. Of course, she felt awful for thinking such a thing.

She set her hand on his shoulder. “You should rest, George. It’s the best medicine for you right now. You’re going to be fine. You’ve had a setback, that’s all, a bad spell.” She busied herself rearranging the compress on his forehead. He was so hot, his face flushed.

George propped himself higher on the bed as if he hadn’t heard her. “Alex loved to follow me around. I was five, and I spent much of my free time trying to get away from him. I wanted to play with my two older brothers, Charlie and Willie. One day I complained to my mother how I couldn’t have any fun in the ocean when Alex was around; he couldn’t swim or do anything, and I’d have to stay onshore to watch him. My mother told me that was fine. ‘You don’t have to take Alexander with you,’ she said. I was happily surprised, my feet already moving toward the door. ‘The two of you can stay right here. There’s plenty of chores around the house that need doing.’

“‘Auwe!’ I moaned. In response to my bellyaching, my mother laid down the law: I wasn’t going to the shore, or anywhere else, if I didn’t bring Alex along. ‘He’s your brother,’ she said. ‘Teach him how to swim and you can both play in the ocean.’ She had planted her hands on her hips and was leaning down at me, so I knew not to trifle with her. Just before I closed the front door, with Alex running ahead of me, I called out, ‘I taught myself how to swim.’”

Waikīkī, the way George described it, sounded like an oasis to Maud: a large grove of coconut trees surrounding streams that rushed down from the mountains and filled the lowlands with basins of water where farmers grew rice and bananas, and the taro plant. The royal family and well-to-do had built vacation homes around the waterways where local children played along the shorelines.

“We stopped at the mouth of the stream,” George said. “The water was chilled, coming down from the mountains, so we didn’t go in. We found shells to skim across the surface, and flipped sticks into a current that had broken a wide path through the sand and watched them float down into the shore break. Alex began to gather larger sticks to build a small hale to hide in, a warrior’s fort. Charlie and Willie were swimming in the waves with their friends. I heard their shouts from where we stood. I helped Alex for a while but kept looking through the trees toward the ocean, where I longed to be. Since I could see my brothers, I figured that I would be able to see Alex from the surf. So I told him, ‘Sit tight’—it was an expression my father used on us—‘I’ll only be gone a few minutes. I’m going to tell Charlie and Willie we’re here in case they want to help us build the fort.’ Then I skipped off. I checked on Alex before I jumped into the ocean. He was exactly where I’d left him, building his hale.

“It was true, I had taught myself how to swim and dive. It was easy for me, I don’t know why. I watched the older Hawaiians in the water, the way they kicked and winged their arms, and I imitated them. I loved being in the ocean, tumbled by the waves. I never worried because I could hold my breath for a long time. I stroked out to the first line of breakers where my brothers and a group of children played—ducking each other under the waves and kicking into the larger breakers so that they might ride the foam. When I reached Charlie, he pushed me down, and I had to fight my way out of his clutches and back to the surface. I was the youngest one out there, and the older kids took turns pushing me down as far as they could, with their hands and feet, often two or three of them at a time. I enjoyed it. I knew if I dove deep enough, they’d run out of air and let me go, and I’d swim back to the surface. It was all a game. Being ducked was the only way my brothers would let me play with them. Otherwise, I’d get the same treatment that I gave to Alex.

“When I checked for Alex again, I didn’t see him. I stared along the bank of the stream, wondering if he’d slid down to gather more pieces of wood. I searched among the coconut trees. Then he appeared, dragging a branch that was bigger than he was. He was walking backwards, bent over halfway, tugging it with both hands. He’d stop to rest a moment, drag the thing another foot, then stop again. I started laughing, seeing his struggles, though I was impressed with his strength. It was like watching a dog on its haunches, a rope in its teeth, yanking to win a tug-of-war contest.

“Fingers took hold of my head, and I sucked in a quick breath before going under, a pair of hands pushing me toward the bottom.

“Back on the surface, hearing shouts and laughter, being bumped and prodded, I kicked off into a wave but missed catching it. Alex meanwhile had finally reached the edge of the bank and dropped the branch. He straightened up and turned around to his half-built hale. The ground beneath him suddenly gave way, and he and the whole fort disappeared in a cloud of dust.

“Alex, you dummy, I remember thinking. Turn around next time. You ruined all your work.

“I waited for him to crawl back up. I started kicking into shore. The next thing I knew, Alex was coming at me. He was holding onto the branch—it had gotten swept into the current and was racing down the stream toward the ocean. The first wave he hit flipped the branch, and Alex rolled underwater. I could only see his hands and fingers gripping the bark.

“Hold fast, I told him in my mind. I put my head down and swam as hard as I could. Hold fast until I can reach you. I was already prepared to be mad at him, to tell my mother that I’d been right all along—Alex never listened. I’d told him to stay where he was, that I’d be back. He only had himself to blame.

“I wasn’t far from him. I’d taught Alex how to hold his breath on land. I practiced for my dives, and he imitated me. We held staring contests, sitting across from one another. It was no contest at all because I’d make a funny face, or pop my cheeks out, and he’d laugh and lose all his air.

“I was a body length from Alex—one of his hands still held onto the branch—when a wave passed me by and rolled him back toward shore. ‘Let go!’ I yelled as I lunged for him. He couldn’t hear me. When I finally reached him, I pulled him up by his arm. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving at all. I had to pry his fingers off the bark. I wrapped an arm around his chest and used my other arm and my legs to get us to the beach.

“‘Alex!’ I kept calling to him as I swam. We reached land, and I pulled him out of the water. I shook his shoulders. ‘ALEX!’ I didn’t know how to get him to open his eyes—to start breathing—except to keep shaking him. I tried rubbing wet sand on his cheeks, thinking it would wake him up. He hated when I did that to him. I don’t remember what anybody was doing around me—my brothers, the other kids. I don’t know how long I kneeled there next to him, pushing him harder, yelling at him to breathe.

“Someone must have raced to our house because I heard my mother yelling before I saw her running toward me. That scared me: I’d never seen her run before. She was five months pregnant with my sister Maggie. My father wasn’t far behind. I stood back, trying to put distance between myself and what I had done.

“I can still see her holding Alex, shaking him as I had done, crying, screaming. My father pressing on Alex’s chest, his stomach, slapping his cheeks. Then shouting at me, ‘What happened here?’

“Only one thought occurred to me: I cannot tell them the truth. I said, ‘I was teaching him how to swim. Mama told me to, so we could play together.’

“‘No, No, No, No, No’, cried my mother, cradling Alex now, her face buried in his. No doctor lived in Waikīkī, no nurses. This was back in 1888. The closest hospital was miles away in Honolulu. It would have been half an hour by horse and buggy, if we could find one. I had moved next to my mother, grabbed onto her dress as she rocked up and back. My father brushed me off her: ‘Get home.’

“I didn’t budge. As long as I stood there, as long as I didn’t have to leave without Alex, everything might still be okay. He might wake up.

“‘Get Home!’ my father yelled and gave me the back of his hand. He didn’t hit me hard—a cuff across the face. It knocked me down, put sand in my mouth. I thought he did it because he knew I was lying. My punishment for getting caught in a lie. Now I’m sure he had no idea at the time. He probably didn’t know what else to do. Alex was gone.”

George let his head drop and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he said in a calmer voice: “Years later, I became aware of other things that were happening with my parents. They were in the middle of a bankruptcy. My father had borrowed money to build a saloon in Honolulu—the Cosmopolitan—and to expand a liquor business he’d started several years before with a man named Peacock. They invested in a brig that imported merchandise from Hong Kong, and that failed miserably. My mother had put up her family property as collateral—two lots in Waikīkī where we lived that she’d inherited from her father—and one lot on Fort Street in Honolulu that her father had purchased from the royal family. She lost it all after they defaulted on the loan. When we were older, if my mother had business downtown, she’d walk us by that lot, point to it and say, ‘I bought this land off my father with my own money.’ Alex and the land formed part of the same loss to her, both happening at the same time, and she wanted us to remember. I could only think of the part I played in his death, and I avoided that street like the plague.

“My father got into the guano business not long after, and we spent time on Laysan Island as a family, healing some of the wounds. It was a hard place to live for my mother, without the least comforts, but at least we were all together every day. We had to depend on one another for everything, and that brought us closer. My father was in charge of everything on the island, and there wasn’t a problem he couldn’t fix. If the workers had a complaint, he talked to them man-to-man. If a machine broke down, he knew how to get it running again. We all relied on his expertise, living, as we did, on a barren outpost in the Pacific. He was physically strong, and anybody who crossed him risked tangling with a man who didn’t hesitate to enforce his authority with his fists. He was the captain of any deck under his boots, and his word was law. I admired him to no end.

“Until he abandoned us a decade after Alexander’s death. Then I couldn’t get far enough away from him. I spent years running.” George faced Maud, a hard look in his eyes: “Now look at me. I’m going to die in this hospital, away from home, far from my family. I turned out just like him.”

“I can’t believe that, George. Your mother wouldn’t have made the effort to come visit after your father’s death if she thought you were just like him.”

“Maybe that’s why she came.” George laughed dryly, and it turned into a cough. “To warn me.”

“Tell me about her, would you?” Maud was desperate to move George into a more positive frame of mind.

George rested a minute, staring out beyond the San Diego Bay to the Pacific. “My father had willed her a regular income. A belated gift, I suppose, for the years of neglect. She used the money to come to San Francisco. This was three years ago now, in February of 1916. The Panama-Pacific Exhibition had just closed down after a year. I took the train up from Los Angeles to meet her. I’d quit my lifeguarding job in Redondo Beach six months before and hadn’t worked since. I fell ill after my father died. I couldn’t seem to pull myself together. I couldn’t even drag myself into the ocean, that’s how low I felt. She found out somehow.”

“Mothers know,” Maud said.

“I won’t argue with that.” George shifted position on his bed, propping himself up farther and crossing his arms. “She was sixty-two years old and hadn’t visited California for quite some time. The first thing she said to me when I greeted her on the dock—after she stopped crying and holding my face in her hands—was that I looked pale. It was true. I hadn’t been in the ocean since the previous summer. After settling into our hotel downtown, we took a taxi out past the Presidio battlements to the Marina where some of buildings from the Exposition still remained until they could auction off the finery that had been displayed within. The French Pavilion, near the Palace of Fine Arts, recalled to my mother the visit of the Prince and Princess de Bourbon in the hundredth anniversary year of the French Revolution, nearly thirty years before in Honolulu. She and my father had been invited to the royal ball at ʻIolani Palace. My grandfather, William Lowthian Green, had worked in the king’s cabinet as Minister of Finance and secured the invitation for them. My parents joined the procession through the throne room and paid their respects to King Kalākaua and Queen Kapiʻolani, to the ministers of the Crown, and then to the Bourbons and their suite.

“I had heard my mother describe the evening many times before. It was one of her fondest memories. My sister Maggie was seven months old. My father had finally cleared bankruptcy and started a contracting firm, building boat landings around the islands. This was before his guano-mining ventures began so it was a happy time for our family. He was home more often. I was nearly six. I always enjoyed listening to my mother speak of that night because her voice grew excited describing the royal carriages pulling up to the palace, which glowed at every door and window with colored lanterns; in the gardens surrounding the palace, rose-shaped lamps shimmered in the night. There was a great crush of people in the throne room as the Royal Hawaiian Band played and the guests danced waltzes and polkas. The men looked elegant in their military uniforms and the ladies shone in their finest gowns. ‘Refreshments were served at midnight,’ detailed my mother, ‘and we continued dancing until two-thirty in the morning! I complimented the Princess de Bourbon on her choice of gowns. She returned the favor, lovely lady, and do you know what she said our palace looked like?’

“‘Fairyland,’ I repeated.

“My mother tightened her grip on my hand and gave it a shake to scold me for stealing her punchline. ‘I couldn’t have agreed with her more,’ my mother continued, refusing to let me spoil the moment. ‘The king especially loved to show off his palace, and we were always invited.’

“Sounds like a magical night,” Maud said.

“She held onto it. I think it’s what got her through living on Laysan Island for a year with all of us. Certainly a spare life compared to what she was used to, though my brothers and sisters, we all loved the place. A mile-long lagoon at the center took up nearly the whole island. I was only eight, but I could hold my breath and dive to the very bottom, nearly thirty feet; neither of my brothers dared the depths. They preferred to roam the surrounding dunes, rising forty feet above the water, the sand as white as any nurse’s dress and glowing brightly under a full moon. On clear nights, you felt that every star in the universe had come out to show off its light, nature’s own palace rivaling the king’s.

“Perhaps I’ll visit Honolulu one day and get the chance to see it. Play tourist myself.”

“It’s worth the trip. Our second day together in San Francisco, my mother and I made a pilgrimage to the Palace Hotel where Kalākaua died of Bright’s disease fifteen months after his royal ball for the Bourbons. He was Episcopalian, as my family was. We stopped into nearby Trinity Church, where they’d held his funeral service, and offered him a prayer as well as one for his sister, Queen Liliʻuokalani, who had succeeded him and was still living though she had been deposed two years after he died by the Americans. That’s what my mother always called them.’

“‘We’re Americans,’ I reminded her.

“‘We’re English,’ my mother insisted. ‘My father was English, your father was English, his father was English, and you’re English. And you’re Hawaiian.’ She pinched me hard to end the conversation, and we sat down in a pew toward the back. My mother was haipule, as we say—very devout—and she took her time reciting prayers.” George lifted his eyebrows at Maud. “I was careful to sit up straight and keep my movements to a minimum. It was mid-afternoon, only a few visitors in the church, some praying like my mother. Others strolled along the sides and admired the stained-glass windows flanking the pews, which filled the church with a soft winter light: the stations of the cross; Jesus blessing the children, his hands placed on their heads; and several scenes I couldn’t name or remember. I had not been a regular churchgoer for some time.

“When she finished her prayers, we lit candles for the dead: Kalākaua and Kapiʻolani; my mother’s parents, who died within a year of each other and a year before the king; Alexander, and finally my father.

“We left the church. Over the next few days we took in the sights. We hired a two-horse carriage to Chinatown so she could shop at the Sing Fat Company for my sisters. We looked into nearby curio stores and bazaars, saw an exhibit of Siamese cats in their cages, and stayed for lunch. We visited the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park, passing by the buffalo and elk paddocks. My mother had never seen either animal up close before, and she was quite impressed. On another day we rode the Sutter Street car out to the Cliff House for an early dinner but didn’t stay for the dancing. Instead, we explored Sutro Baths down below. I had swum there in competitions years before while attending school and showed her the artifacts that Sutro had brought back from his world travels to create a museum: Egyptian mummies, wildcats of Asia and Africa in glass cases, European paintings and sculptures. My mother took my arm, and we made our way up into the gallery facing the west facade, made entirely of glass. It was the best seat in the city to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. The gallery was not crowded mid-week, so we enjoyed the view in peace. Swimmers practiced in the main tank below for an upcoming tournament. I watched a group of five young men leap into the water for a half-mile race; only one of them knew how to get off the starting block properly. I wasn’t used to sitting so far from the action. I leaned forward to watch them bob their way through turns. No one seemed to be coaching them, or at least not effectively. My mother patted my arm. ‘Go down, if you want. I’ll just sit here and rest.’

“‘No, I’m done with coaching,’ I told her. I sat back and took her hand.

“‘That would be a shame. You love the water, you always have.’ 

“‘Not so much anymore.’

“‘Maybe it has to do with your father,” she suggested. “You were angry after he died.’ She was recalling my letters. Without anyone to talk to in Redondo Beach who’d known him, I found myself writing more often to friends and family back home.

“‘I was angry with myself,’ I told her. ‘Do you think that’s why Papa left us, and why he stayed away? Because he was angry at himself? Too ashamed to face the family he left behind?’

“My mother’s gaze took in the stained glass of the massive arched roof above us—all hundred thousand feet of it—along with the iron girders that supported the entire pavilion, its upper three floors decorated with balconies and balustrades. ‘Your father was always happiest at sea,’ she said finally. ‘It was bred into him. He was raised among men and ships. When he lost all his ships and his commands, he probably didn’t know what else to do but keep moving. But he made a choice to stay away from his family, that’s hard for me to understand. When he left you here at school, he thought he’d done his duty by his three sons. His daughters, he didn’t know what to do with. Women baffled him. He had fixed you, Willie, and Charlie up with vocations, the way his father had done for him. And then he left for good.’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘He didn’t follow through with you, Georgie. But I don’t think he was angry.’

“‘Did you know he was leaving, when he picked me up that summer and dropped me in San Francisco?’

“She shook her head. ‘I thought he was coming back.’

“In the silence that followed between us, the moment came that I had been waiting for for three days, ever since I’d first seen her walking down the gangplank. I had the opportunity in Trinity Church after we lit candles for Alexander and my father, but I couldn’t summon up the courage then. I squeezed her hand. ‘I shouldn’t have stayed away from home for so long,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just like Papa.’

“I stared out the west window, aware of people down below yelling for the swimmers as they raced the final lap. I thought I might feel relieved once I told my mother, but I didn’t. I felt hollow, like that enormous bathhouse with random voices bouncing off its walls.

“‘I remember,’ she said slowly, ‘on Laysan, your sister Maggie stomping around that clapboard house without a stitch of clothing on—she was three—complaining about you: GEORGE made me swim all the way back to the shore by myself. I told him I needed help, and I didn’t know how to get back through the waves because they were too big and he told me, Why don’t you go back the way you came? And I said I couldn’t do it and he pointed to the flagpole and said, Swim toward that. And he didn’t help me at all and made me do it ALL BY MYSELF.’

“I gave a laugh. I probably hadn’t thought about that day since it’d happened, but I did remember the moment. My mother said, ‘I tried not to laugh, believe me, because there sure wasn’t much to laugh about on that island. But you used to watch her like a hawk when she was out in the water, protect her like her ʻaumakua. You taught her and Dorothy both how to swim. Your father never would have done that, and your older brothers didn’t have the patience. You were good with them—tough on them, because you wanted them to learn to take care of themselves in the ocean—because you loved them. You were a good brother. I never worried about them when they were with you, that’s the truth. I knew you’d take care of them.’

“‘I didn’t want anything to happen to them.’

“‘Of course you didn’t. You were thinking of Alexander.’

“I closed my eyes, unable to look at her and to say what I needed to say. My mother’s scent was strong upon me, a light perfume of pua melia—the plumeria that was her favorite, especially the red petals she wove into her dark hair. The smell reminded me of ripe apricots. ‘That was my fault, Mama.’

“I counted three breaths—a dozen full heartbeats—before she said, ‘It was an awful thing.’ She leaned into me. ‘We were all responsible for him. Things were happening between your father and me that you couldn’t have known. We were losing ourselves as a family—coming apart—and Alexander slipped into that little puka that shouldn’t have been there. I knew it as soon as I saw him lying on the ground. He fell into a hole and never made it back out.’

“‘I’m the one who left him behind on the bank to go swimming. I knew I should have stayed.’

“‘No,’ she said. She gave my arm a shake, and I opened my eyes to look at her. ‘You might have died with him. You could have been buried beneath earth, or you might have drowned, too. You don’t know. None of us knew how to save Alexander. You’re the only one who took that responsibility after his death. You’ve been saving him for most of your life, over and over. That’s you, Georgie. That’s not your father.’

The compress had fallen to George’s side. Maud folded it carefully, and George used it to wipe his eyes. 

“I couldn’t talk,” George said, his voice now coming out like a wheeze. “I just leaned against my mother. I felt terrible for having asked her to take the train down to Los Angeles when she arrived in San Francisco. I’d sent her a cablegram with the suggestion several weeks before, told her I’d hop a trolley into downtown and meet her there. I had no desire to make a long trip, that’s how morose I was feeling after being out of work for so long. But she was arriving from Vancouver after having spent several weeks with her sister, and she had no plans to travel farther south before returning home. She told me if I wanted to see her, I’d have to come up. Right that moment sitting in the gallery at Sutro’s, I thought, That was the best decision you’ve made in a long time. I also told myself: that’s something else my father wouldn’t have done.

“After another day of sightseeing, the two of us held each other tight onboard the ship before it was time for me to debark. ‘Come home when you can,’ she said finally, her hands pressing my cheeks. ‘And find your way back to the water, it’s where you belong.’ She gave me another kiss. ‘Aloha, Georgie.’”

Maud was about to suggest a glass of water and some rest for George, but he had suddenly fallen asleep, his chest lifting slightly under a ragged breath, his fingers gripping the compress.

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Image by Nakul.

Excerpt from Eulogy for a Waterman, a novel by Patrick Moser. Copyright © 2023 by Patrick Moser.