Duke Kahanamoku

I

Kālia

1890 to 1911

The water at Kālia is shallow a long way out, and the reef there breaks in shapes a child could learn by the time he was ten.

He was born on 24 August 1890 in Honolulu, in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. His father, Duke Halapu Kahanamoku, was a police officer. His mother was Julia Paʻakonia Lonokahikina Paoa. He was the eldest of nine.

The name was not a title and never a nickname. His father had been christened Duke to mark the 1869 visit of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to Hawaiʻi. The son inherited it. This is the most corrected error about him and it is worth getting right at the start: nobody ever called him Duke as an honorific, because it was simply his name.

In 1893 the family moved to Kālia, on the Waikīkī side, near his mother's Paoa relatives. That was the year an armed group backed by United States Marines overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. He was two. By the time he was eight the islands had been annexed by joint resolution of the United States Congress, over the objection of a petition signed by a large majority of the Native Hawaiian population.

None of that is background to his life. It is the legal ground under everything that happened next, including which flag he would later swim under.

Waikīkī then was wetland. Streams came off Mānoa and Pālolo into taro terraces, fishponds and duck ponds. He left school before finishing and worked the beach, which in Honolulu in that decade meant a trade: carrying boards, running canoes, teaching visitors to stand up, knowing which reef was safe on which swell. The boards were solid wood and heavy and a man carried his own.

In 1908 a South Carolinian named Alexander Hume Ford founded the Outrigger Canoe Club on that beach. Ford promoted Hawaiʻi in print as a land of opportunity for the quick, courageous white man. He asked Duke to teach him to surf. The club would not have Duke as a member.

So Duke and his friends started their own, Hui Nalu, the club of the waves, organised around the bath house at the Moana hotel. Hawaiian-run, racially mixed, and better in the water. Sources give both 1908 and 1911 for its founding and we have not resolved which.

II

The harbour swim

1911

On 11 August 1911, at an amateur meet in Honolulu Harbour, he swam a hundred yards freestyle in 55.4 seconds. The world record was 60. He beat it by 4.6 seconds. In the same meet he broke the 220 and equalled the 50.

The Amateur Athletic Union in New York refused to recognise the time. Their stated reasons were that the timekeepers had used alarm clocks and that an ocean current must have assisted him.

The refusal is worth sitting with, because it set the shape of the next fifteen years. Hawaiʻi was a territory. Duke was a Native Hawaiian swimming in salt water in front of officials nobody in New York had heard of. The time was not disbelieved on the evidence. It was disbelieved on the address.

He could not afford the passage to the mainland to prove it. Honolulu business interests paid, having noticed a promotional opportunity.

III

Stockholm, Antwerp, Paris

1912 to 1924

At Stockholm in 1912 he swam 1:02.6 in his heat of the 100 metres freestyle, a Games record. Then the American team missed the semifinals, having believed the earlier round was the final one.

What happened next is the best thing in the record and it was not done by an American. Cecil Healy, the Australian who stood to benefit, argued that the Americans should be reinstated, on the grounds that winning without Kahanamoku in the water would be worth nothing. A third semifinal was created. Duke swam 1:02.4 in it, equalling the world record, and took the final on 10 July in 1:03.4. Healy finished second.

He also took silver in the relay. Two medals at his first Games.

Antwerp came eight years later because of the war. On 24 August 1920, his thirtieth birthday, he won the 100 metres freestyle in 1:00.4, the first man under sixty-one seconds. An Australian protest over a foul by another swimmer forced the final to be re-swum five days later. He won it again, in 1:01.4, ahead of a second Hawaiian, Pua Kealoha. He took gold in the relay as well, and finished fourth in the water polo.

At Paris in 1924 he was thirty-three and swam the 100 metres a third time. He finished second, behind Johnny Weissmuller. His brother Samuel finished third.

Three Games, five medals, three gold and two silver. He was an alternate in 1928 and again in 1932, at forty-two, and competed in neither. He was not on the 1924 relay. Claims of six medals or of four Games are wrong, and they are common enough that they appear on sites run by people who ought to know.

Between those Games he was, by trade, still a beachboy.

IV

Carrying it out

1914 to 1918

He did not invent surfing and he did not father it. Heʻe nalu is Hawaiian and centuries older than him, tied to particular breaks and particular chiefs, and it had been driven down under missionary suppression before he was born. What he did was carry it out to the world, and help bring it back at home.

He was also not the first to take it to the American mainland. George Freeth, who was part-Hawaiian, was demonstrating surf-riding at Venice and Redondo Beach in California from 1907, five years before Duke appeared there. That correction matters and it costs Duke nothing.

Australia is his. On 24 December 1914 he gave a demonstration at Freshwater Beach in Sydney. He had not brought a board, so he shaped one on arrival from timber bought locally, and paddled out in front of a crowd who had not seen it done. He gave a second demonstration on 10 January 1915. The board is still at the Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club, roped off, longer than the men who look at it. Australian surfing dates itself from that summer.

The story that Isabel Letham rode tandem with him at Freshwater, and so became the first Australian to surf, is much loved and disputed. Researchers place her ride at Dee Why on 6 February 1915. We follow them.

He went on to New Zealand. In 1918, barred by amateur rules from earning anything at all from swimming, he gave exhibition swims in thirty mainland American cities to raise money for the war effort.

V

Newport Beach

June 1925

He was living in southern California. On 14 June 1925 a squall came through and the swell at the harbour mouth stood up.

The Thelma was a fishing boat with seventeen men aboard. She was caught broadside on the way in and rolled over.

Duke was on the beach with a board. He went out, came back with a man, and went out again. He did this until he had brought in eight. Three other men on boards brought in four more. Five drowned.

The Newport Beach police chief is reported to have called it the finest display of surfboard riding and the most superhuman rescue act the world had seen. We are quoting that at second hand and have not yet seen the original newspaper.

Accounts of the totals do not agree. The Newport Beach Historical Society and the Smithsonian both give seventeen aboard, eight saved by Duke, four by the others and five dead. The local paper's front page on 15 June 1925 says Duke and three companions brought in fifteen of the seventeen, which cannot be squared with five dead. The figure of eight is well attested. The rest of the arithmetic is not, and we would rather show that than tidy it.

He said little about it afterwards. Lifeguards on that coast have carried boards ever since.

VI

Hollywood, and the lean years

1925 to 1961

He made about fourteen films across thirty years and was never once the lead. He played a Pacific islander, an Indian chief, a pirate captain, a colonial servant, a guard, a trapper. He was handsome, he was famous, and by the standards of the studios he was not permitted to play himself.

This is the part of the record most often skipped. Amateur rules barred him from earning anything from swimming during the exact years he was the fastest man in the water. The endorsement money and the executive careers that went to white Olympians of his era did not come to him. He ran two petrol stations in Honolulu. He worked as a city clerk. On the mainland he was refused service in restaurants and refused rooms in hotels.

On 2 August 1940 he married Nadine Alexander, a dance instructor who had come from Cleveland to teach at the Royal Hawaiian. He was fifty and she was thirty-five. They had no children.

In November 1934 he was elected Sheriff of the City and County of Honolulu, and he held the office for thirteen consecutive terms, until 1961. Then he did not retire. The office was abolished in the reorganisation that followed statehood, and he was made the state's Ambassador of Aloha, which was a title without a salary. He spent much of the next years shaking hands with visitors.

Several sources give 1932 as the start of the sheriff's tenure, including reference works and the brand's own earlier material. Thirteen two-year terms ending in 1961 back-dates to 1935, with election in November 1934, and the 1932 figure looks like confusion with the Los Angeles Games of that year. We follow the arithmetic and would like the state archives to settle it.

One further thing carries his name and almost nobody knows it. In 1946 the Supreme Court of the United States held in Duncan v. Kahanamoku that trying a civilian before a military tribunal in wartime Hawaiʻi had been unlawful. He was the named defendant because he had made the arrest. A landmark civil liberties case is filed under his surname.

VII

The paddle out

1968, and after

He died on 22 January 1968, in Honolulu, of a heart attack. He was seventy-seven.

There was a police escort to Waikīkī and a service by the Reverend Abraham Akaka. Beachboys sang. His ashes went into the water off the beach he grew up on, which by then had hotels on it.

He was inducted into the swimming hall of fame in 1965 and the surfing one in 1966, the first person in both. A United States postage stamp was issued on his birthday in 2002.

On 24 August 1990, which would have been his hundredth birthday, a nine-foot bronze by Jan Gordon Fisher was dedicated at Kūhiō Beach. It stands with its back to the ocean. Surfers and Hawaiians said at the time that this was the wrong way round for a waterman, and they were not wrong to say it.

People leave flowers at it most days.