Fishermen of Siasconset

By the 1790s, the institution of slavery had ended in Massachusetts, and whaling towns like Nantucket had sizable mixed-ethnic populations.

Free African-Americans intermingled with sailors from ports around the world.

Yankee ships returning from the Pacific around the treacherous Cape Horn brought back crewmen from what Europeans had called the Sandwich Islands – now more properly known as Hawai’i.

By the 1820s, Hawai’ians and other Pacific Islanders were a common sight on Nantucket Island.

By 1850, around 1 in 10 crewmen of the hundreds sailing out of Nantucket were Polynesians (known locally as “Canacks”), with some putting-down roots and marrying into the local community.

This state of affairs was immortalized in 1851 in the first truly great American novel, “Moby Dick“, in which the protagonist Ishmael signs aboard a whaling ship called the Pequod, and becomes an unlikely friend of the heavily tattooed Polynesian harpooner Queequeg.

One such real life Hawai’ian, William Owen (obviously not his birth name), helped to found a men’s social club in 1887, and a journalist from New York reported that one of Owens’ fellow club members, George W. Rogers, was already making surfboards to order by that time.

As the reporter wrote: “…Bathers rest on them either on their breasts or backs, throw them aside and take to them again, ride with them over the wave crests, sit astride of them and indulge in various antics in sporting in the water”.

The first Hawai’ian workers recorded in California only show up there in the late 1830s, years after the first Polynesians arrived in Massachusetts.

The first reliable mention of surfing in California is from an 1885 report of three Hawai’ian “princes” catching some waves there.

All of these early Polynesians in North America presented a challenge to staunch upholders of America’s absurd binary racial caste system.

As a dark-skinned people sharing some phenotypal features with sub-Saharan Africans, yet obviously coming from a place as far from Africa as it is possible to be on this planet, census enumerators seemed uncertain about where to place these people within America’s “racial” hierarchy.

Pacific Islanders were variously recorded as “white”, “black”, and “mulatto”.

Whatever about irrelevant questions of skin color and “race”, one thing seems certain.

It is entirely plausible that Massachusetts, not California, is the earliest home of surf culture outside of Hawai’i.