The Fatal Surf Lesson

In the early 1900s George Freeth was Hawai‘i’s first great waterman and Duke Kahanamoku’s predecessor in the waves. Acting as a sort of adventure tourism guide to the famous, he had a hand in popularizing surfing, as well as becoming a champion diver. Yet, as Patrick Moser shows in this excerpt adapted from his new book, Surf & Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture, he and other Native Hawaiians would be erased in the historical portrayal of the sport by the very celebrities and promoters they taught—a legacy perpetuated to this day in some histories and accounts. —D.W.

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Writer Jack London was at the height of his fame when his picture appeared in the sports section of the Honolulu Advertiser on September 9, 1906.

He’d sent a letter to Thomas Hobron of the Hawai‘i Yacht Club thanking him for the navigational charts that Hobron had sent of the islands. Hawai‘i would be London’s first stop on a planned seven-year voyage around the world. He indicated that the San Francisco earthquake several months before had delayed departure of the Snark, a fifty-five-foot ketch that London had designed himself, but he hoped to set off within a few months.

“The lure of the voyage has gripped me,” London wrote, “and I cannot get away too soon.” His short stories and adventure novels—The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf—had won him millions of fans. His magazine contracts to publish additional stories from the Snark’s travels promised to increase his readership even more.

Local waterman George Freeth’s name appeared on the same page as London’s picture—one column over, playing centerfield for the Punahous in a losing effort against the Oahus. The two men, with more in common than one might imagine, would meet at Waikīkī the following summer. And London’s account of their four-hour session in the waves—“Riding the South Seas Surf”—would help introduce surfing across the West.

According to the last famous mainland writer to tackle the sport, Mark Twain, none but natives ever mastered the art. But London had Freeth, a man whose mixed-race background allowed him to bridge those two worlds and whose transitional place between them was captured in London’s colorful prose—“a young god bronzed with sunburn.”

The Londons had arrived at Pearl Harbor two weeks before and were staying at the Hobron cottage. But they were soon charmed by the atmosphere of Waikīkī—in particular, the opportunity “to enjoy the surf riding.” London knew the manager of the Seaside Hotel, Fred Church, from their prospecting days in the Yukon. Church was happy to lodge the couple in a canvas tent by the hotel right on the beach. They all went canoe surfing that morning in rough waves.

Afterward, Alexander Hume Ford, a writer and promoter who’d arrived in the islands several weeks before the Londons, lent Jack London a surfboard and guided him to the outside reefs.

Ford himself had recently taken surf lessons from Freeth. The two men had also spent a couple of weeks together in May traveling with a group of U.S. congressmen and their families, who had arrived to survey the new American territory. Freeth had been hired as a lifeguard to help transport the honored guests through any rough surf they encountered on Kaua‘i or the Big Island. Freeth was acknowledged as the best all-around swimmer, diver, and surfer in the islands.

After the Londons arrived and Ford had talked up surfing, the famous adventure writer booked a tent at the Seaside Hotel and paddled out to meet this young marvel.

The description of the surf session that followed—written in bed as London recovered from painful sunburn blisters on the back of his legs—owes much to Freeth. We see Freeth the instructor behind London’s newfound knowledge of surfing as he describes for the reader how to slide under breaking waves with a heavy surfboard, where to paddle to catch a wave, and when to relax when one of “the big smokers” rolls you over the reef. We don’t need to strain too hard to hear Freeth’s advice as an experienced lifeguard when London addresses his readers: “When the undertow catches you and drags you seaward along the bottom, don’t struggle against it. If you do you are liable to be drowned, for it is stronger than you. Yield yourself to that undertow. Swim with it, not against it, and you will find the pressure removed. And, swimming with it, fooling it so that it does not hold you, swim upward at the same time. It will be no trouble at all to reach the surface.”

George Freeth sporting a period bathing suit that highlights one of his major contributions to the development of beach culture in early twentieth-century California: teaching swimming at bathhouses from Los Angeles to San Diego. Courtesy Los Angeles County Lifeguard Trust Fund, Witt Family Collection.

Freeth’s influence creates a fundamental contradiction in the essay: London wants to champion the idea of mastering the waves—“Get in and wrestle with the sea”—and yet, as all surfers know, the key to success lies in nonresistance: “Yield yourself to that undertow. Swim with it, not against it.” London was a game student, tirelessly throwing himself (and his ideals) at the waves until his burning skin finally drove him to the beach. According to his wife Charmian, his face and body were “covered with large swollen blotches, like hives, and his mouth and throat were closing painfully.”

The article, “Riding the South Seas Surf,” appeared in October that year in Woman’s Home Companion and later, with some alterations, in London’s book Cruise of the Snark (1911). Freeth’s fame as a surfer in the islands now spread across the continent and even abroad when the narrative appeared in the city of London’s Pall Mall Magazine under the title “The Joys of the Surfrider.”

Freeth’s English relatives could have been proud to see the family name associated with such a famous writer. London also used Freeth as the basis for his mixed-race character Stephen Knight in the short story “Aloha Oe,” which appeared the following year in Lady’s Realm magazine. Stephen is described as an “athlete, surf-board rider, a bronzed god of the sea who bitted the crashing breakers, leaped upon their backs, and rode them in to shore.”

Stephen is in love with Dorothy Sambrooke, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a U.S. senator. Dorothy shares Stephen’s love, but her father’s racism quickly scuttles the relationship. “No one had disapproved of his teaching her to ride a surf-board,” London writes about Stephen at the end of the story, “nor of his leading her by the hand through the perilous places of the crater of Kilauea. He could have dinner with her and her father, dance with her, and be a member of the entertainment committee; but because there was tropic sunshine in his veins he could not marry her.”

The story was evidently the brainchild of Alexander Hume Ford. He’d told London that he had “a lot of whacking good material” for stories and that London was welcome to them. Ford’s and Freeth’s experience with the U.S. congressmen back in May, several of whom had brought their daughters, had undoubtedly sparked Ford’s literary imagination. Dorothy first meets Stephen when he is giving them “their first exhibition of surf riding, out at Waikiki Beach,” where, in London’s dramatic prose, “he stood poised on the smoking crest of a mighty, mile-long billow, his feet buried in the flying foam, hurling beach-ward with the speed of an express train and stepping calmly ashore at their astounded feet.”

Though Freeth was a natural model on which to base a love story—known for his quiet strength, athleticism, and humility—his own love life remains a mystery. He was a lifelong bachelor and left no children. There are no direct references to him in any kind of romantic relationship, although what Ford observed on the tour and suggested to London raises conjectures.

Freeth himself was fair-skinned and race does not appear to have limited his subsequent employment opportunities in California. On the contrary, his Native Hawaiian background enhanced his appeal as a draw for tourists. Though cast in the story as one of London’s hypermasculine heroes (“in canoe, or on horse or surf-board . . . he had taken charge and she had rendered obedience”), Freeth embodied a more temperate role in his relationship with the ocean. He would not have understood the waves as London had depicted them—something to master or conquer—but rather as a force to respect and enjoy.

George Freeth’s maternal grandfather, Englishman William Lowthian Green. Courtesy Mary E. Williams.

London also had erased women from the sport in his essay “Riding the South Seas Surf”; they are recuperated only when Stephen Knight—as Freeth did in real life—includes them in the form of lessons for young Dorothy. We see competing versions (and visions) of surfing in London’s prose at this critical juncture in the sport’s history: one that pushes a masculine ideal of power and individuality, another that opens the sport up to pleasure and community.

Though badly sunburned, London did not give up surfing. By the time he recovered enough to venture into the waves again later that month, Freeth was working at the Seaside every day—9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.—giving lessons in surfing, diving, and swimming. In the latter half of June, Charmian wrote that she and Jack had been “swimming and surf-boarding under sun and moon.” With reference to Jack’s sunburn, she added, “very circumspectly under the sun!” By the end of that month, London was reported as being “quite an expert on the surf board.”

Because of their close proximity at the Seaside, London and Freeth at least had the opportunity to continue their lessons and for London to keep the promise he made at the end of “Riding the South Seas Surf ”: “I shall come in standing up, even as Ford and Freeth. And if I fail tomorrow I shall do it the next day, or the next. Upon one thing I am resolved: the Snark shall not sail from Honolulu until I, too, wing my heels with the swiftness of the sea and become a sunburned, skin-peeling Mercury.”

Freeth had clearly inspired London. And one can imagine that London inspired Freeth as well: a man not so much older than himself—seven years—who lived a life of travel and adventure, who had overcome poverty to make a name for himself in the world. Back in early May—about six weeks after the visit of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce—Freeth had approached H. P. Wood and the Hawaii Promotion Committee about traveling to Southern California to give surf exhibitions. He was on the lookout for adventure and opportunity himself, and that was likely how he ended up working at the Seaside. Freeth probably leveraged his day with London in the surf for a job at the Seaside, providing the kinds of services that would benefit both himself and the reputation of the hotel.

Alexander Hume Ford took up Freeth’s cause by writing an article about him for the Honolulu Advertiser, which included a photo of Freeth surfing at Waikīkī. The Hawaii Promotion Committee connected Freeth to their representative in Los Angeles, Lloyd Childs, but Freeth had to pay his own steamship fare (about sixty dollars one way). He had a job waiting giving surfing exhibitions at Abbot Kinney’s new resort, Venice of America, for twenty dollars a day.

But he was leaving Hawai‘i under stormy skies. His mother, Lizzie, was bankrupt again. Freeth’s father, George Senior, had abandoned the family in the late 1890s, and Lizzie had been struggling to support George Junior and his two younger sisters—Maggie and Dorothy—by taking in lodgers at their rented house by Saint Andrew’s Cathedral. By 1907, however, Lizzie had slipped too far into debt.

Freeth’s departure for California, then, may have been an opportunity for him to make some easy money in Venice to help out the family’s financial situation back home.

The society page of that same edition of the Honolulu Advertiser that printed Ford’s surfing photographs reported that the Freeth women—Lizzie, Marjorie, and Dorothy—had held a dance at their Emma Street house two nights before, receiving their guests on the lanai. One can’t help but think it was a farewell party for the Freeths. Ads for the house auction began appearing in the papers the following week—parlor table, chairs, beds, springs, mat- tresses, dressers, wardrobes, washstands, all of Lizzie’s plants.

But this time was much worse, because Lizzie and the family had to vacate the premises. Freeth left for San Francisco aboard the Alameda the day of the auction. He was twenty-three years old and had letters of introduction in his pocket from Jack London, Alexander Hume Ford, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee. The local press fêted him (“probably the most expert surf board rider in the world”), and news alerts about his arrival in California soon appeared in papers from San Francisco (“Champion Surf Rider Coming from Honolulu”) to San Diego (“George Freeth Responsible for Popularity of an Almost Lost Art—To Teach Californians the Sport”).

The championship football team of the Hawaiian Territory, 1904. Freeth sits in the middle row, fourth from right; his cousin, Archie Roberton, sits in the same row, second from right. Williams photo, The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, February 16, 1905.

With allowances for the hyperbole of boosterism, Freeth had in fact become the champion diver in the islands and the force behind surfing’s renewed popularity at Waikīkī. He’d been hired as a lifeguard—probably the first one to hold that position in the modern history of Hawai‘i. He gave surfing, swimming, and diving lessons at the Seaside Hotel, elevating the role of Native Hawaiians, mixed- race Hawaiians, and other locals who instituted the tradition of the Waikīkī beachboy. He was a teacher, a performer, a leader in every sport he played. Now he had the opportunity to bring surfing to California, along with local high school student Kenneth Winter (also of mixed-race, but predominantly white), who’d signed on to travel with him.

And yet, within a few years Ford would try to erase Freeth and Native Hawaiians in general from surfing’s timeline by stating, “On the Island of Oahu . . . the sport of surfriding is kept alive, not by natives, but by white men and boys who have learned the sport within recent years.” Ford was referring to himself and members of the Outrigger Canoe Club, a largely whites-only organization that he founded in May 1908. Ford often omitted from his articles that he and other haole actually learned the sport from Native Hawaiians. Jack London gave Ford, not Freeth, a boost as surfing’s savior when he wrote in 1916, “Not only did the Hawaii-born not talk about it, but they forgot about it. Just as the sport was at its dying gasp, along came one Alexander Hume Ford from the mainland.”

A second photograph that appeared in Ford’s article in the Honolulu Advertiser—this one of Ford himself—embodies the role that he and other haole often play in histories of surfing: Ford is able to stand on the surfboard only because Freeth swam underneath the plank and held it steady while the photographer snapped the picture. In essence we have a Native Hawaiian, rendered invisible, literally holding up a white man so that this latter can claim authority and expertise.

The visual was supposed to show how easy it was for a white man to surf, a message Ford would broadcast far and wide to induce more Caucasians to move to Hawai‘i and balance out the growing number of Japanese, a population that Ford and Honolulu haole considered a threat to their political dominance in the new American territory.

One of the unfortunate results of Ford’s and London’s racial propaganda was the mistaken but growing notion that Native Hawaiians had abandoned their national pastime. But the truth is, Native Hawaiians like Freeth, Duke Kahanamoku, and the beachboys at Waikīkī not only sustained the cultural practice of he‘e nalu, but are the ones who also made it possible for the rest of us to enjoy this exhilarating sport. As Freeth later stated, surfing was “an art that belongs to the natives of the Hawaiian islands.”

Given the systemic racism built into island politics and society at the time, we might question whether Freeth’s fair skin played a role in Ford’s eagerness to promote him and the promotion committee’s interest in sending him to the mainland. Did they feel that Freeth, as a hapa haole, would be more appealing to the white residents they were hoping to recruit? And how might Freeth have felt about being party to such a program?

Freeth left few writings, so we have to draw our conclusions from his actions. He never worked directly for the promotion committee, nor did he sustain a close relationship with Ford. One can imagine him leveraging whatever assets he owned, including his fair skin, to create opportunities for himself. He was light-skinned enough to pass as white in California, though we don’t have evidence that he ever actively pursued that goal. His light skin undoubtedly made it easier for him to move into communities and interact with the largely white population who frequented the plunges and the beaches where he worked.

Beyond his athletic skills and congenial nature, as a Hawaiian he was perhaps exotic enough to attract attention yet white enough so that Southern Californians felt comfortable around him. As a “bronzed Mercury,” in London’s words, Freeth embodied a hapa haole tradition that extended to female hula dancers touring the United States and later performing in Hollywood films: mixed-raced islanders whose tan skin and Anglo features appealed to the fantasies of white mainlanders.

But Freeth never distanced himself from his Native Hawaiian background in the few writings that he did leave. Very much like Duke Kahanamoku, a dark-skinned Native Hawaiian who was also promoted by Ford and the promotion committee, Freeth tended toward the humble and laconic. Whatever thoughts he had about race issues he kept to himself.

Twenty-one-year-old Freeth highlighted in the local press before his championship dive in Honolulu Harbor. The Honolulu Advertiser, April 9, 1905.

Those who sent Freeth off with accolades expected him to promote the islands. Freeth had little interest in being a Honolulu booster, but he did love to surf. He was always looking for the next opportunity, and he relished a challenge. He had reached the peak of excellence in so many sports in Hawai‘i. Why not see how far he could go in California?

George Freeth would die in San Diego at the age of 35 in the 1919 Pandemic that nearly claimed Duke Kahanamoku. He never made it back to Honolulu. Instead, he birthed lifeguarding and surfing in the Golden State, where he left a legacy of another kind—Beach Culture.

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From Surf and Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture by Patrick Moser. Copyright © 2022 by Patrick Moser. Used with permission of University of Illinois Press.

Banner image by Linus Nylund. Images courtesy of the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Trust Fund & Witt Family Collection, J. Williams & Co. & Bishop Museum Archives, Mary E. Williams, The Honolulu Advertiser, respectively.