Referat Roots Of Surfing

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Roots of Surfing Surfing is one of the oldest continuously practiced sports on the planet. The art of wave riding, itself, is a mixture of sensitivity to being in the environment at a given moment and sheer athleticism. Uniquely, surfing is also one of the few sports or arts that creates its own culture. Non-surfers and beginning surfers divide the question about surfing s origins in two parts: "When were the first surfboards ridden?" and "Who were the first surfers?" A surfer who has been into it for a while might put it more in terms of: "When was the first stoke?" In Hawaiian, the term is hopupu, but it means the same thing: to be high on life, especially riding waves. Riding with a board to catch the power of an ocean swell originated in Western Polynesia between three and four thousand years ago. The first surfers were Polynesian and began standing up on wooden boards in the surf of the Pacific Ocean sometime between 1500 B.C. and 400 A.D. Somewhere in that period -- probably early on -- the first surf stoked surfer began the surf culture many of us around the world practice in our own ways, today. Surfing s Origins Riding the ocean s waves began with seamen who rode the waves of the open ocean in outrigger and double-hulled canoes. That surfing stems from a nautically-based culture with a legend-filled history of outstanding watermen is undeniable. The first surfers were watermen who initially became noted for their finesse with outrigger and double hulled canoes before taking to mere slabs of wood. Very possibly, these island fishermen first envisioned a more recreational use for waves when they used them as the fastest means for getting their canoes over the coral reefs and on to the beach with their catch. At some undefined stage, catching waves developed from being part of the everyday working skill of the fisherman to being a sport. Instead of work it became play. This change revolutionized surfing. "For thousands of years," wrote 1960s world champion surfer Fred Hemmings, "cultures living and prospering on the coastlines of the world s great oceans viewed waves as an adversary of nature." Where these people all saw difficulty, it took the Polynesians to see the fun in it. Yet, the way of the surfer was not the same as that of the ocean-traversing voyager, sailor or ocean fisherman. As 1960s world champion surfer Mike Doyle pointed out in his autobiography Morning Glass, "The tradition of the waterman comes from Polynesia and is different from the tradition of the sailor. The waterman s skills include surfing, paddling, rowing, and rough-water swimming. He might also be skilled at diving, fishing, spear fishing, tandem surfing, lifeguarding, and handling outrigger canoes. But he isn t necessarily skilled at sailing or navigation. The difference is that a waterman focuses on the coastal waters, while the sailor s realm is the deep water. By reading about the early days of surfing, I learned that the watermen who came before me didn t just go to the dive shop or the surf shop and buy the latest thing on the rack. They designed their own boards, their own dive gear, and their own outrigger canoes. They were constantly thinking and experimenting with other watermen about ways to perfect their gear. Nobody knew then how a surfboard should be designed. The only way to find out what worked and what didn t was to try it." Unfortunately, "wave sliding," a.k.a. surfing -- what was termed he`e nalu, in old Hawaiian -- cannot be traced to its exact beginnings. How it developed in its infancy can only be surmised. Yet, there is some hope that future archaeological work in the Pacific will reveal some answers over time. Meanwhile, much of what we know of early surfing is what was recorded by the first Europeans to land in Polynesia in the late 1700s, hundreds of years after The Long Voyages had ended. At the time of the first Polynesian/European contact on the island of Tahiti, in 1777 -- British Navigator Captain James Cook described how a Tahitian caught waves with his outrigger canoe just for the fun of it: "On walking one day about Matavai Point, where our tents were erected, I saw a man paddling in a small canoe so quickly and looking about him with such eagerness of each side, as to command all my attention... He went out from the shore till he was near the place where the swell begins to take its rise and, watching its first motion very attentively, paddled before it with great quickness, till he found that it overlooked him, and had acquired sufficient force to carry his canoe before it without passing underneath. He then sat motionless and was carried along at the same swift rate as the wave, till it landed him upon the beach. Then he started out, emptied his canoe, and went in search of another swell. I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea..." References to the art of surf riding are scattered throughout traditional Polynesian meles -- chants or oral history related told through song. By the end of The Long Voyages, surfing had become one of the most widespread of the Polynesian sports. He`e nalu was practiced in one form or another throughout the Pacific region, from New Zealand to Hawai`i, and from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to New Guinea. Board surfing became most advanced on islands within the Polynesian Triangle bounded by Hawai`i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). In Western Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, surf sports like board surfing were mainly a children s pastime, usually limited to boys. By contrast, on most main islands of Eastern Polynesia, surfing became a sport for both sexes and all ages. The epicenter of board skill was Hawai`i, where he`e nalu developed its highest expression. Assuming that, like most things, surfing started simply and then grew to be more complex, a likely sequence in the origin of Hawaiian surfing would go something like this: 1) From basic canoe surfing there followed simple body surfing, called he`e umauma (Hay-ay oo-MAU-ma) in the Hawaiian language. 2) Then came a rudimentary form of surfing, mainly a children s activity practiced with small body boards, which spread throughout the Pacific. This type of simple surfing with a body board, -- we commonly call it "body boarding" or "boogie boarding," today -- may be several thousand years old; as old, perhaps, as the settling of the Pacific islands. 3) From the body board, in Eastern Polynesia, sprang an adult sport practiced with bigger boards (papa he`e nalu). 4) Afterward, in Hawai`i, surfing reached its peak and "found its noblest expression." Off the Coast of Africa & South America Various surf historians -- like early 1900s surf pioneer Tom Blake, scholar Ben Finney and James Houston, as well as Leonard Lueras -- have all noted that there were other spots on the planet where forms of surfing were practiced. One was the mid-western coast of Africa and the other was Peru. Off the coast of western Africa, "in areas of Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Near Dakar, Senegal," wrote Finney and Houston, "... African youths and young fishermen regularly body-surf, ride body-boards and catch waves while standing erect on boards about six feet long. These Atlantic skills seem in no way connected with the Pacific, either historically or prehistorically. Evidently, it s an old pastime in west Africa; young Africans were seen riding waves while lying prone on light wooden planks as long ago as 1838, long before surfing began to spread from Hawaii." This was a reference to the British explorer Sir James Edward Alexander observing surfing by natives in Equatorial West Africa in 1835. Volumes one and two of Alexander s Narrative of a Voyage of Observation Among the Colonies of Western Africa, published in 1837, are remarkable in their scope and detail. The often poetic accounts of every detail of West African life in the early 1800s -- sex, murder, slavery, war, passion, drunkenness, death, revolt and a note on surfing -- are impressive. James Edward Alexander was anchored off the island of Accra, off the Cape Coast not too far from the "yellow sands" of what used to be called Guinea. On November 16, 1835, while describing native island life, Alexander noted that, "from the beach, meanwhile, might be seen boys swimming into the sea, with light boards under their stomachs. They waited for a surf; and then came rolling in like a cloud on the top of it. But I was told that sharks occasionally dart in behind the rocks, and yam them." Meanwhile, off the coast of Peru, wave riders constructed papyrus reed flotation devices which they would use to ride waves close to shore. That this practice went rather far back in time is substantiated by ancient clay pots that have drawings of Peruvians standing up while riding waves on these bundled reed floats. The papyrus "boards" were similar to modern ones in that the wide point was just behind the middle of the boards and they also had nose and tail lifts. Surfing as we know it, however, stems from Polynesian origins and primarily from the Hawaiian development of the sport. As part of the general marine adaptation pioneered by the first people to enter the open Pacific, papa he`e nalu became a recreational activity that was most highly developed by the Hawaiians. The first Polynesian settlers to land in Hawai`i were probably already skilled in simple surfing, and perhaps after a few hundred years of riding Hawai`i s waves the uniquely Hawaiian form of the sport emerged. So, actually, that first ride or first stoke could have been as early as 2000 B.C., at the outset of Polynesian migration from the Malay archipelago. 쥁@