Duke Kahanamoku, 1890 to 1968
On the morning of 11 August 1911, in the salt water of Honolulu Harbour, Duke Kahanamoku swam a hundred yards in 55.4 seconds and beat the world record by 4.6 seconds. The Amateur Athletic Union would not ratify it. The officials, they said, had used alarm clocks, and the current must have helped him.
He was twenty. Stockholm was ten months away.
This site is a record of what he did, kept by people who wanted it kept accurately.
What is here, and what is not yet
This is the first week of a site that will take months to build properly. Rather than publish a full set of thin pages, we have published four finished ones and left the rest visibly empty. What follows is what exists today.
- The statue at Kūhiō Beach
- Who he was, why the bronze stands where it does, why it faces the street, and what to do and not do when you are standing in front of it.
- Duke's Waikīkī
- Five places within walking distance of the statue, and what happened at each. Including the ones that are no longer there.
- Events
- What is happening in his name this month, run by whoever is running it. OceanFest is on now and his birthday is on the 24th.
- The story of the name
- How Duke Kahanamoku's name came to be a piece of property, who owns it, what his family has said about that, and where we sit in it.
Still to come: the biography, in seven chapters. A timeline. The photographs, as they are cleared. The films at /waterman. A page on the word aloha, which will not be written by us. And an account of what this company gives away, with the numbers in it.
But for the work of Kahanamoku and the others, we would all have perished.
F. W. Hock, who was aboard the Thelma when it capsized off Newport Beach, 14 June 1925. Reported in the local press at the time; we are working from a reproduction and have not yet seen the original clipping.