Believe it or not, many places describe themselves as "the birthplace of surfing." The thing is, they aren't all making the same claim.
Some mean the birthplace of surfing itself; others mean the birthplace of modern surfing, the birthplace of surfing in a particular country, or simply the place where surfing culture began locally.
The truth is there is no universally accepted single birthplace of surfing.
Surprised? Don't be. Sadly, or maybe not, historians have never found the necessary proof that this or that place holds that grand honor.
The historical picture is actually pretty much complicated. All research, academic review, and studies lead to an inconclusive conclusion.
No one knows where the act of riding a wave and standing up began, or why it happened. We have hints, some more solid than others.
And they all leave a glimpse of imagination for those curious and interested in the genesis of such a magical, spiritual, and entertaining practice.
Some even put it on a metaphysical, quasi-religious level.
Let's look at the places that make the strongest claim to where this ancient outdoor desire first saw the light of day.
Hawaii: the classic “birthplace of surfing”
This is by far the most established modern claim.
Hawaii's own tourism authorities describe surfing as having literally begun as the "Sport of Kings," with ancient Hawaiian royalty surfing at Waikiki and elsewhere.
Surfing existed elsewhere in Polynesia and possibly independently elsewhere, but Hawaiians developed wave riding into an extraordinarily elaborate cultural practice.
Different boards were associated with different types of riding and social status, and surfing was embedded in Hawaiian religion, politics, competition, and daily life.
Academic historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker's work on Hawaiian surfing emphasizes that the practice has centuries-old roots in Hawaiian culture and challenges the old popular narrative that surfing simply disappeared and was later "resurrected" by Westerners.
The University of Hawaii's educational material makes the same important distinction: the exact origin of surfing is unknown, but European explorers documented wave riding throughout Polynesia, including Tahiti, the Marquesas, New Zealand, Micronesia, and Hawaii.
So the strongest historically defensible formulation is probably that Hawaii is the birthplace of modern surfing culture, rather than necessarily the birthplace of the first human ever to ride a wave.
Hawaii itself, however, officially embraces the broader claim.
The Hawaii Tourism Authority currently describes Hawaii as the "birthplace of surfing."
Waikiki: the birthplace of modern surfing
This is a more precise claim than saying the entire Hawaiian Islands invented surfing.
Waikiki Beach became the great bridge between ancient Hawaiian he'e nalu and the global sport.
Public Hawaiian documents state that historians regard Waikiki as the "birthplace of modern surfing," while noting that surfing already existed at hundreds of locations throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
Waikiki was particularly important because it became the meeting point between traditional Hawaiian surfing, tourism, the Waikiki Beach Boys, George Freeth, Duke Kahanamoku, surf instruction, exhibitions, and eventually international surf culture.
Duke Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian surfers subsequently demonstrated surfing in California, Australia, and elsewhere, helping transform a Hawaiian cultural practice into an international sport.
French Polynesia/Tahiti: another genuine ancient-origin claim
French Polynesia's official tourism organization explicitly calls the islands "the birthplace of surfing."
It says surfing is the oldest sport practiced in the Islands of Tahiti and describes Polynesian royalty riding wooden boards.
The claim has historical logic because Tahiti was part of the wider Polynesian world in which wave riding developed long before European contact.
It would therefore be misleading to portray Tahiti and Hawaii as simply competing claims for exactly the same thing.
The more accurate interpretation would be that Tahiti is claiming a place in the ancient Polynesian origin of surfing; Hawaii claims the extraordinary development and later globalization of that tradition.
Northern Peru: the most interesting rival to the Polynesian origin story
Now, here's what could probably be the most fascinating alternative to the conventional Polynesian story.
The focus is northern Peru, especially Huanchaco.
Peruvian archaeological evidence shows that people have used caballitos de totora, small reed watercraft, for thousands of years.
Modern Peruvian surf historians argue that fishermen rode these craft through and back over waves and therefore qualify as some of the world's earliest surfers.
Peru's official tourism organization explicitly presents this argument.
The Australian National Maritime Museum recently described the evidence from Peru as potentially representing "the birth of wave riding" and a precursor to surfing, dating the caballito de totora tradition to around 3,000 BC.
Huanchaco's World Surfing Reserve status also emphasizes its thousands-of-years-old wave-riding tradition and the continuing use of the caballitos.
There is, however, an important qualification.
The Peruvian fishermen were using a watercraft, rather than a surfboard in the Hawaiian sense.
Some historians therefore call it ancient wave riding rather than proof that Peru invented modern surfing.
Still, the archaeological evidence makes Peru impossible to dismiss from any serious discussion of surfing's origins.
West Africa, especially Ghana: the earliest written account?
Ready for a very different argument?
Research by historian Kevin Dawson has uncovered a 1640s account from what is now Ghana describing children being put on boards in the water.
A later account from 1679 described children at Elmina riding small boards or bundles of reeds, and a 19th-century account describes boys in Accra waiting for surf and riding the waves.
It's a valid claim because the conventional surf-history narrative traditionally says that the first written description of surfing came from Captain Cook's voyages to Hawaii in the 1770s.
The Ghanaian evidence predates that by more than a century.
But there is another important divergence. The earliest written description is not necessarily the earliest occurrence of surfing.
Dawson's work suggests that West Africans had developed their own wave-riding traditions independently. The wider evidence includes Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Liberia and parts of western Central Africa.
So Ghana is better described as one of the strongest candidates for the earliest documented written evidence of wave riding.
That is different from proving Ghana was the birthplace of surfing. But it is still exciting to think about.
China: an unexpected ancient candidate
Now, here's one that is much less widely known.
The location is the Qiantang River near Hangzhou, where an enormous tidal bore creates waves that can reach several meters.
Research by surfing historian Nicola Zanella uncovered Chinese literary and artistic references suggesting that people were riding the tidal bore as far back as the Song dynasty, roughly 960-1279 AD.
The activity was sufficiently established that emperors reportedly watched the spectacle and poets wrote about the people riding the local Qiantang tidal bore.
It's one of the most exciting findings because a scholarly review of the origins of surfing lists China alongside Polynesia, Peru, and western Africa as one of the four areas where evidence of archaic surfing before 1800 has been identified.
But again, this is not evidence that China invented Hawaiian-style surfing, or any other form of riding the wave.
It is evidence that humans independently learned to ride moving waves in different parts of the world.
Although we might never know how it all started, these factual conclusions are enough for our minds to navigate the idea of what it was like to glide the seawater mountains hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.
Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com
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