Charmian Kittredge, an educated, wealthy, free-love-believing Socialist from the San Francisco Bay area, was born in 1871. At age 34, she married Jack London, five years her junior and at the peak of his fame. In 1907, the couple sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu aboard the Snark, a 45-foot yacht London designed himself. "Riding the South Sea Surf," London's still-popular account of his first surfing experience in Hawaii, was published in the October 1907 issue of Woman's Home Companion. Our Hawaii, Charmian's 1917 book, covered the three trips she made to the Islands, two with Jack and one not long after his death in 1916. Like her husband, Charmian was adventurous and hands-on and gladly took to the Hawaiian surf herself.

The section below opens just after Jack and Charmian's arrival in Hawaii in 1907.

The text has been shortened and lightly edited


We took the five o’clock train to Honolulu and drove in a funny one-horse carriage to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for dinner. Ever since Jack’s letters to me from Hawaii three years ago, I have longed to see this noted tropic hostelry with its white tiers of balconies and its Hawaiian orchestra, and the red and green lights which its foreign visitors execrate and adore. Last evening, however, the hotel was quiet—no music, no colored lights, and few guests. But the gardens were there, and the fairy balconies, on the lowest of which we dined most excellently, with an unforeseen guest, [as] a bearded young man stepped briskly up:

“You’re Jack London, aren’t you?—My name is Ford.”

“Oh, yes,” Jack returned, quickly on his feet. “Alexander Hume Ford. I heard you were in Honolulu, and have wanted to see you. I’ve read lots of your stuff—and all of your dandy articles in 

Mr. Ford could hardly spare time to look his pleasure, nor to be introduced to me, before rushing on, in a breathless way that made one wonder what was the hurry:

“Now look here, London,” in a confidential undertone. “I’ve got a lot of whacking good material—for stories, you understand. I can’t write stories—there’s no use my trying. My fiction is rot—rot, I tell you. I can write travel stuff of sorts, but it takes no artist to do that. You can write stories—the greatest stories in the world—and I’ll tell you what: I’ll jot down some of the things I’ve got hold of here and everywhere, and you’re welcome to them. . . . What d’you say?”

Jack suggested that he make three at our table, and [Ford] talked a steady stream all through—of information about everything under the sky, it would seem, for he has traveled widely. At present, he is interested in reviving the old Hawaiian sport of surf-riding, and promised to see us at Waikiki, and show us how to use a board.

 We keep repeating the word; for already it spells a new phase of existence. Here but a scant twenty-four hours, the rest of the world slips into a mild and pleasant, not imperative memory, for the spirit of storied Waikiki has entered ours. The air seems full of wings. I am so happy making home, this time a tent. We two can pitch home anywhere we happen to alight: a handful of clothes-hangers, a supply of writing materials—and other details are mere incidentals. The art of living, greatest of arts, may be partially summed up in this wise:

“. . . to inhabit the earth is to love that which is; to catch the savor of things."

[Our] brown canvas domicile, comprising three rooms separated by thin portieres, with an accessory bathhouse and servant room, also of tenting, is the last of a scattered row of detached accommodations belonging to the Seaside Hotel, some of them weathered old cottages of the palmy days when Hawaiian royalty spent most of its time on the beach. To the south, we are separated from the big Moana Hotel with its tiers of green roofs, by a sand-banked stream fed from the mountains, with, beyond, a lavender field of lilies. Kalakaua Avenue is so far away across the hotel gardens that the only sound from that quarter is an occasional rumble of electric trams over a bridge that spans the stream, fitting into our bright solitude like distant thunder from the black range that is visible through a grove of palms.

Not twenty feet in front, where grass grows to the water’s edge at highest tide, the sands, sparkling under blazing sun rays, are frilled by the lazy edges of the surf; and the flawed tourmaline of the reef-waters, pale green, or dull pink from underlying coral patches, stretches to the low white line of breakers on the barrier reef some half-mile seaward, while farthest beyond lies the peacock-blue ribbon of the horizon.

Such content is ours here at Waikiki, that it is a shame to press it all into one life, for it could be spread over several incarnations. We sleep like babies, in the salt night airs wafting through mosquito canopies. All hours one hears the steady, gentle boom and splash of the surf—not the disturbing, ominous gnashing and roaring of the Pacific Coast rollers, nor the carnivorous growlings off the rock-jagged line of New England. And under sun or moon, it is all a piece of beauty. Toward Diamond Head, when the south wind drives, swift breakers, like endless charges of white cavalry, leap and surge shoreward, flinging back long silver manes. The thrill of these landward races never palls at Waikiki. One seems to vision Pharaoh’s Horses in mighty contest with backwashing waters, arriving nowhere, dying and melting impotent upon the sand.

In the cool of morning, we skipped across the prickly grasses for a dip, accompanied by a frisking collie neighbor. The water was invigorating enough at this early hour, full of life and movement. Jack gave me lessons in diving through the mild breakers, and it was hard to tear ourselves away, even for the tempting breakfast tray that a white-suited Filipino was bearing to the tent-house.

Jack, to whom beauty is never marred by knowledge of its why and wherefore, has explained to me the physics of a breaking wave:

“A wave is a communicated agitation,” he says. ‘‘The water that composes a wave really does not move. If it moved, when you drop a stone in a pool and the ripples widen in an increasing circle, there should be at the center an increasing hole. So the water in the body of a wave is stationary. If you observe a portion of the ocean’s surface, you will see that the same water rises and falls endlessly to the agitation communicated by endless successive waves. Then picture this communicated agitation moving toward shore. As the land shoals, the bottom of the wave hits first and is stopped. Water is fluid, and the upper part of the wave not having been stopped, it keeps on communicating its agitation and moves on shoreward. Ergo,” says he, “the top of a wave keeps on after the bottom has stopped, dropped out from under. Of course, the wave-top starts to fall, forward, down, cresting, over-curling, and crashing. So, don’t you see? don’t you see?” he warms to his illustration, “it is actually the bottom of the wave striking against the rising land that causes the surf! And where the land shoals gradually, as inside this barrier reef at Waikiki, the rising of the undulating water is as gradual, and a ride of a quarter of a mile or more can be made shoreward on the cascading face of a wave.”

Alexander Hume Ford, true to promise, appeared today with an enormous surf-board, made fun of the small ones that had been lent us, and we went down to the sea to learn something of 

, sport of Hawaiian kings. The only endeavor of fish, flesh, and fowl, which Mr. Ford seems not to have partially compassed, is that of the feathered tribe—undoubtedly from lack of time, for his energy and ambition seem tireless enough even to grow feathers. Jack, who seldom stops short of what he wants to accomplish, finds this man most stimulating in [his] enthusiasm to revive neglected customs of elder island days, for the benefit of Hawaii and her advertisement to the world. Although we have seen a number of natives riding the breakers, face downward, and even standing upright, almost no white men appear to be expert. Mr. Ford, born genius of pioneering and promoting, swears he is going to make this island pastime one of the most popular on earth, and judging by his personal valor, he cannot fail.

The thick board, somewhat coffin-shaped, with rounded ends, should be over six feet long. This plank is floated out to the breaking water, which can be done either wading alongside or lying face-downward paddling; and there you wait for the right wave. When you see it coming, stand ready to launch the board on the gathering slope, spring upon it, and—keep on going if you can. Lie flat on your chest, hands grasping the sides of the large end of the heavy timber, and steer with your feet. The expert, having gauged the right speed, rises cautiously to his knees, to full stature, and then, erect with feet in the churning foam, makes straight for the beach, rides up the sparkling incline, and steps easily from his grounded sea-car.

A brisk breeze this afternoon, with a rising surf, brought out the best men, and we saw some splendid natives at close range, who took our breath away with their reckless, beautiful performance. One, George Freeth, who is only one-quarter Hawaiian, is accounted the best surf-board rider and swimmer in Honolulu.

When a gloriously bodied Hawaiian, naked but for a loin-cloth carved against his shining bronze, takes form like a miracle in the down-rushing smother of a breaking wave, arms outstretched and heels winged with backward-streaming spray, you watch, stricken of speech. And [as Ford] duplicated the act, Jack murmured, “Gee! What a sport he is—and what a sport this is for white men too!” His glowing eyes, and a well-known firm expression about the jaw, told me he would be satisfied with nothing less than hours a day in the deep-water smokers. As it was, in the small surf, he came safely in several times. I accomplished one successful landing, slipping up the beach precisely to the feet of some stranger hotel guests, who were not half so surprised as myself. It took some while to learn to mount the board without help, for it is a cumbrous and unruly affair in the heaving water.

The rising tide was populous with Saturday afternoon bathers, but comparatively few women, except close inshore. A fleet of young surf-boarders hovered around Ford and his haole pupils, for he loves children and is a great favorite with these. Often, timing our propelling wave, we would find a brown and smiling cherub of ten or so, all eyes and teeth, timing the same wave, watching with anxiety lest we fail and tangle up with the pitching slice of hardwood. Not a word would he utter—but in every gesture was “See! See! This way! It is easy!”

Several times, on my own vociferous way, I was spilled diagonally adown the face of a combing wave, the board whirling as it overturned, and slithering upended, while I swam to bottom for very life, in fear of a smash on the cranium. And once I got it, coming up wildly, stars shooting through my brain. And once Jack’s board, on which he had lain too far forward, dived, struck bottom, and flung him head over heels in the most ludicrous somersault. His own head was struck in the ensuing mix-up and we were able to compare size and number of stars. Of course, his stars were the bigger—because my power of speech was not equal to his. It seems to us both that never were we so wet in all our lives, as during those laughing, strenuous, half-drowned hours in the milk-warm surf.

Sometimes, just sometimes, when I want to play the game beyond my known vitality, I almost wish I were a boy. I do my best, as to-day; but when it comes to piloting an enormous weighty plank out where the high surf smokes, above a depth of twelve to fifteen feet, I fear that no vigor of spirit can lend my scant five-feet-two, hundred-and-eleven [pounds], the needful endurance. Mr. Ford pooh-poohs: “Yes, you can. It's easier than you think—but better let your husband try it out first.”


An eventful day, this, especially for Jack, who is in bed thinking it over between groans, eyes puffed shut with a strange malady and agonizing in a severe case of sunburn. I can sympathize to some extent, for, in addition to a considerable roasting, my whole body is racked with muscular quirkings and lameness from the natatorial gymnastics of the past forty-eight hours. Our program to-day began at ten, with a delirious hour of canoe riding in a pounding sea. While less individual boldness is called upon, this game is even more exciting than surf-boarding, for more can take part in the shoreward rush.

The great canoes are the very embodiment of royal barbaric sea spirit—dubbed out of hard koa logs, long, narrow, over two feet deep, with slightly curved perpendicular sides and rounded bottoms; furnished with steadying outriggers on the left, nearly the canoe's length. The hulls are painted lusterless, dead black, and trimmed by a slightly in-set, royal-yellow inch-rail, broadening upward at each end of the boat, with a sharp tip. There is an elegance of savage warlikeness about these long sable shapes; but the sole warfare in this day and age is with Neptune, when, manned by shining bronze crews, they breast or fight through the oncoming legions of rearing, trampling, neighing sea cavalry.

It required several men on a side to launch our forty-foot canoe, and altogether eight embarked, vaulting aboard as she took the water, each into a seat only just wide enough. Jack wielded a paddle, but I was placed in the very bow, where, both outward and back, the sharpest thrills are to be had. As we worked reef-ward in the high breaking flood, more than once breath was knocked out of me when the bow lunged straight into a stiff wall of green water just beginning to crest. Again, the canoe poised horizontally on the springing knife-edge of a tall wave on the imminence of curling, and then, forward-half in midair, plunged [down] into the oily abyss, with a prodigious slap that bounced us into space, deafened with the grind of the shore-going leviathan at our backs. I could hear Jack laughing in the abating tumult of sound, as he watched me trimming my lines so as to present the least possible surface to the next deluge. He knew, despite my desperate clutches at the canary streak on either hand, that I was having the time of my life, as, from his own past experience, he had told me I would have.

It was more than usually rough, so that our brown crew would not venture out as far as we had hoped, shaking their curly heads like serious children at the big white water on the barrier reef. Then they selected a likely wave for the slide home, shouting strange cries to one another that brought about the turning of the stern seaward to a low green mounting hill that looked half a mile long and ridged higher and higher to the burst.

“‘A hill, a gentle hill, Green and of mild declivity . . . It is not!” someone quoted and commented on his Byron and the threatening young mountain, with firm hands grasping his paddle, when, at exactly the right instant, he joined the frantic shrill 

 (Paddle! Paddle like everything!) that sent all the blades madly flying to maintain equal speed with the abrupt, emerald slope. Almost on end, faster, faster, and yet faster, we shot, ever the curl of white water behind, above, overhanging, menacing any laggard crew. Once I dared to look back. Head above head I marked them all; but never can fade the picture of the last of all, a magnificent Hawaiian sitting stark in the stern, hardly breathing, curls straight back in the wind, his biceps bulging to the weight of canoe and water against the steering paddle, his wide brown eyes reflecting all the responsibility of bringing right-side-up to shore his haole freight.

And then the stern settles a little at a time, as the seething bulk of water dissipates upon the gentle upslope of the land before the Moana, while dripping crew and passengers swing around in the backwash and work out to repeat the maneuver.

Few other canoes were tempted out today, but we saw one capsize by coasting crookedly down a wave. The yellow outrigger rose in the air, then disappeared in white chaos. Everything emerged on the sleek back of the comber, but the men were unable in the ensuing rough water to right the swamped boat. We lost sight of them as the next breaker set us zipping inshore, but later saw them swimming slowly in, towing the canoe bottom-upward, like a black dead sea monster, and making a picnic of their plight.

An hour of this tense and tingling recreation left us surprisingly tired, as well as chilled from the strong breeze. Mr. Ford, with a paternal “I-told-you-so" smile at our enthusiasm over the canoeing, was prompt for the next event on our program, a further lesson in surf-boarding.

After assisting me for a time I noticed he and Jack were sending desireful glances toward the leaping backs of Pharaoh’s Horses, and I knew they wanted to be quit of the pony breakers inshore—the wahine (woman) surf, as the native swimmers have it, and manfulwise ride the big water. Our friend [Ford] had a thorough pupil in Jack, who with characteristic abandon never touched foot to sand in four broiling hours.

Nursing my own reddened skin in our cool tent-house, I saw a weary figure dragging its feet across the lawns, which it was hard to recognize for Jack until he came quite near. Face and body, he was covered with large swollen blotches, like hives, and his mouth and throat were closing painfully. He had not given a thought during those four hours, face-downward on the board, to the fact that under the vertical rays of a tropic sun a part of him never before so exposed, was being cooked through and through. Shoulders and back of neck were cruelly grilled; but the really frightful damage was to the backs of his legs, especially the tender hind-side of the knee joints, which were actually warping so rapidly that in a few moments he could not stand erect because the limbs refused to straighten. Between us we managed to get him into bed, and later on, restless with the intolerable pain of his ruined surfaces, and thinking my room might be cooler, he could progress there only on heels and 'palms, face upward. “Don’t let me laugh—it hurts too much,” he moaned through swollen lips, realizing the preposterous spectacle.

Little aid could be rendered, either of diagnosis or practice, by the physician, Dr. Charles B. Cooper. From his six-foot-odd of height he bent wide, black eyes upon the piteous mass on my bed, that indisputably required all known sunburn remedies; but the swollen blotches were plainly beyond him. He had observed cases of mouth and throat swelling from fruit poisoning in the tropics; but this patient had eaten nothing that he had not been living on for weeks. And also there was the blotched body.

“Just my luck!” this from the sufferer. “I’m always running into something no one ever saw or heard of! Although this is something like the shingles I had on the 

Dr. Cooper left some medicine, and later his filled prescription came from a druggist, to relieve the torturing burn. Meantime I kept up a steady changing of cool, wet cloths on the warped legs, while Jack’s “It can’t last forever!” was the best cheer under the circumstances, until the blotches began to subside and the throat could swallow grateful drafts of cold water, and a supper of long, iced poi-cocktail—“Such beneficent stuff,” he dwelt upon it.

You! All whiteskins who would learn Ford’s rejuvenescent royal sport, take warning that the “particular star” which illumes our world, despite its insidiousness, is particularly ardent in Hawaiian skies.

Jack and Charmian London continued sailing across the Pacific, eventually landing in Australia, where Jack spent five weeks recovering from an unspecified tropical illness. They returned to Hawaii in 1915 and found that the Honolulu and Waikiki had changed greatly in the eight years since they'd last visited


We came back, as we had always known we should. The 

 voyage ended untimely in 1909—because we paid too little heed to warnings against “speeding up” in the tropics. Jack’s articles, collected under the title of 

, tell the story of the wonderful traverse as far as it attained. To this day, friend and stranger alike occasionally write from the South Seas that the little Snark, now schooner-rigged, has put in at this bay or that in the New Hebrides, under the flag of our French Allies.

Back in Honolulu at daybreak, Jack declined to be ousted by any officious steward until the final period was dotted to his morning’s ten pages. Eventually, he issued upon deck almost into the arms of Alexander Hume Ford, whom we were no end glad to see, buoyant and incessant as ever, brimful of deeds for the advantage of Hawaii as ever he had been.

The first responsibility, not to be neglected for a single hour, was the hunting of a habitation that we might call our own for the time being. Honolulu was chock-a-block with tourists. “Beginning to realize what they’ve got,” Jack observed with satisfaction, though a trifle put out that his prophesied appreciation of the Islands by the mainlanders should interfere with his own getting of a roof-shelter.

We learned from one of the large Trust Companies that a cottage on Beach Walk, a newly opened residence street not far from the Seaside Hotel, was to be let a couple of months hence. We found it eminently suitable for our little household.

We walked down Kalia Road to the old Seaside Hotel, and once more felt underfoot the sands of Waikiki. But such changes had been wrought by sea and mankind that we could hardly believe our eyes, and needed a guide to set us right.

The sands, shifting as they do at irregular periods, had washed away from before the hotel, leaving an uninviting coral-hummock bottom not to be negotiated comfortably except at high tide, and generally shunned. A forbidding sea-wall buttressed up the lawn of the hotel while the only good beach was the restricted stretch between where the row of cottages once had begun, and the Moana Hotel.

And what had we here? In place of those little weather-beaten houses and the brown tent, the Outrigger Canoe Club had established its bathhouses, separate club lanais for women and men, and, nearest the water, a large, raised dancing-lanai, underneath which reposed a fleet of great canoes, their barbaric yellow prows ranged seaward. At the rear, in a goodly line of tall lockers, stood the surf-boards, fashioned longer and thicker than of yore, of the members of the Canoe Club.

The only landmark recognizable was the date-palm still flourishing where had once been a corner of our tent-house, now become a sheltering growth with yard-long clusters of fruit, and we were told it was known as the “Jack London Palm.” For it might be said that in its shadow Jack wove his first tales of Hawaii.

All this progress meant Ford! Ford! Ford! Everywhere evidence of his unrelaxing brain and energy met the eye. But he, in turn, credits Jack with having done incalculably much toward bringing the splendid Club into existence, by his article on surfboard riding, “A Royal Sport.” Largely on the strength of the interest it aroused, Mr. Ford had been enabled to keep his word to Jack that he would make surfboarding one of the most popular pastimes in Hawaii. Upon his representations, the Queen Emma estate, at a lease of a few dollars a year to be contributed to the Queen’s Hospital, which her Majesty had established, had set aside for the Club’s use this acre of ground, which, with the revival of surf-boarding, was now almost priceless.

Queen Emma was the wife of Kamehameha IV, mother of the beautiful “Prince of Hawaii,” who died in childhood, herself granddaughter of John Young, and adopted daughter of an English physician, Dr. Rooke, who had married her aunt, Kamaikui. The Queen owned this part of the Beach, from which her own royal canoes were launched in the good old days, and where she also used the surf-board.

“Her estate holds this land,” Ford had said in 1907, “and I’m going to secure it for a Canoe Club. I don’t know how, but I’m just going to.”

Honolulu had of course altered and grown. New streets, like this our Beach Walk, had been laid on filled marshlands at Waikiki and bordered with bungalows set in unfenced lawns, while the lilied area of duck-ponds along Kalakaua Avenue had shrunken to the same populous end. With the incursion of gasolene-driven craft and vehicle, the old-time yachting has nearly lapsed. No more does one see the racing fleets outside the reef. One can only hope that the matchless sport will be revived.

Upon the Beach at Waikiki it was seldom we missed the long afternoon. “I’m glad we’re here now,” Jack would ruminate; “for someday, Waikiki Beach is going to be the scene of one long hotel. And wonderful as it will be, I can’t help clinging, for once, to an old idea.”

Under the high lanai of the Outrigger, we lay in the cool sand between canoes and read aloud, napped, talked, or visited with the delightful inhabitants of the charmed strand, until ready to swim in the later afternoon. One special diversion was to watch several Hawaiian youths, the unsurpassed Duke Kahanamoku among them, performing athletic stunts in water and out. And that sturdy little American girl, [swimming champion] Ruth Stacker, with records of her own, could be seen instructing her pupils in the wahine surf. George Freeth, we heard, was teaching swimming and surf-boarding in Southern California.

The newest brood of surf-boarders had learned and put into practice angles never dreamed of a decade earlier. Now, instead of always coasting at right angles to the wave, young Lorrin P. Thurston and the half-dozen who shared with him the reputation of being the most skilled would often be seen erect on boards that their feet and balance guided at astonishing slants. Surf-boarding had indeed come into its own. And it never seems to pall. Its devotees, as long as boards and surf are accessible, show up every afternoon of their lives on the Beach at Waikiki. When a youth must depart for eastern college-life, his keenest regret is for the loss of Waikiki and all it means of godlike conquest of the “bull-mouthed breakers.” No athletic-field dream quite compensates. Surfing remains the king of sports.

CHARMIAN LONDON: "THE SURFING EXPERT, ERECT WITH FEET IN CHURNING FOAM, MAKES STRAIGHT FOR THE BEACH" (1917)

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