A thousand years after Hawaiians first paddled long wooden boards into the ocean, modern surfers have continued this practice, which has recently been transformed into a global industry. Pacific Passages brings together four centuries of writing about surfing, the most comprehensive collection of Polynesian and Western perspectives on the history and culture of a sport currently enjoyed by millions of people around the world. The stories begin with Hawaiian legends and chants and are followed by the journals of explorers; the travel narratives of missionaries and luminaries such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Jack London; and the contemporary observations of Tom Wolfe, William Finnegan, Susan Orlean, and Bob Shacochis. Readers follow the historical transformation of surfing’s image through the centuries: from Polynesian myths of love to Western accounts of horror and exoticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to modern representations of surfing as a character-building activity in pre-World-War II California and the quintessential expression of disaffected youth. They explore the sport’s most recent trends by writers and cultural critics, whose insights into technology, competition, gender, heritage, and globalism reveal how surfing impacts some of today’s most pressing social concerns. Aided by informative introductions, the writings in Pacific Passages provide insight into the values and ideals of Polynesian and Western cultures, revealing how each has altered and been altered by surfing—and how the sport itself has shown an amazing ability throughout the centuries to survive, adapt, and prosper.

A thousand years after Hawaiians first paddled long wooden boards into the ocean, modern surfers have continued this practice, which has recently been transformed into a global industry. Pacific Passages brings together four centuries of writing about surfing, the most comprehensive collection of Polynesian and Western perspectives on the history and culture of a sport currently enjoyed by millions of people around the world. The stories begin with Hawaiian legends and chants and are followed by the journals of explorers; the travel narratives of missionaries and luminaries such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Jack London; and the contemporary observations of Tom Wolfe, William Finnegan, Susan Orlean, and Bob Shacochis. Readers follow the historical transformation of surfing’s image through the centuries: from Polynesian myths of love to Western accounts of horror and exoticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to modern representations of surfing as a character-building activity in pre-World-War II California and the quintessential expression of disaffected youth. They explore the sport’s most recent trends by writers and cultural critics, whose insights into technology, competition, gender, heritage, and globalism reveal how surfing impacts some of today’s most pressing social concerns. Aided by informative introductions, the writings in Pacific Passages provide insight into the values and ideals of Polynesian and Western cultures, revealing how each has altered and been altered by surfing—and how the sport itself has shown an amazing ability throughout the centuries to survive, adapt, and prosper.

"Travel writer Hans-Christof Wachter sails to Vanuatu, Ovalau, Fiji, Rarotonga and the Cook islands looking to find the rhythms of the lives of the islands and their inhabitants and discovers that the South Sea islands were never the paradise the first European travellers imagined them to be."--BOOK JACKET.

When Thomas J. Watson, Jr. retired as chief executive officer of IBM in 1971, he began to pursue sailing, flying and exploring adventures he had dreamed about during his successful decades in business. One of the sailing and exploring adventures was a Panamato-Fiji passage through the South Pacific, and in this book he writes a charming, candid, erudite account of that sojourn in a part of the world we all dream about. A book for sailors and travelers, Pacific Passage takes us to Cocos Island, the Galapagos, Easter Island, Pitcairn, the Gambiers and Mangareva, the Tuamotus, Tahiti and Moorea, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. And 72 color illustrations bring the lush, exotic South Seas to this book's oversize pages with great impact.

Comparing and contrasting the diverse experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander subjectivities across a shared sea