This article ran in the July 31, 1888, issue of the Pittsburgh Press. The unnamed woman is almost certainly a wealthy Hawaii-raised teenager named Emma Spreckels, daughter of sugar baron Claus Spreckels and great-aunt to famed 1970s surfing antihero Adolph "Bunker" Spreckels. In August, the cover drawing on the National Police Gazette—a risque and hugely popular national tabloid specializing in crime and light titillation—showed a bare-armed "Gay Queen of the Waves" surfing at Asbury Park, and ran an excerpt from the Pittsburgh Press article. The Gazette also did not mention Spreckels by name, but identified her a "Sandwich Island Girl," in reference to Hawaii.

While early surf history on the Atlantic Seaboard no doubt still has some surprises, Emma Spreckels has at this point replaced Duke Kahanamoku (Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1912), Jim Jordon (Virginia Beach, Virginia, 1912), and Burke Haywood Bridgers (Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, 1909) as the original East Coast first surfer. The article below has been slightly edited from the original.

“No. She cannot drown. She must be a sea nymph.”

“Nothing so classic as a sea nymph. Simply a South Sea Island woman.”

A group of summer loungers on the beach at Asbury Park were watching the antics of a dark-eyed, bronze-faced girl in the sea this morning. The object of all this interest and solicitude was beyond the line of breakers and standing on a plank that rose and fell with the swelling waves. Her bathing dress was of some dark material, fitting close to the figure, the skirts reaching scarce to the knee, her stockings were of amber hue, adorned with what from the shore seemed to be vines and roses in colored embroidery. She wore no hat or cap. Her hair bound across the forehead and above the ears by a silver fillet turned down upon her shoulders or streamed out upon the wind in black and shining profusion

Her tunic was quite sleeveless, and one could scarcely fail to observe the perfect development and grace of her arms.

As a wave larger than those which had gone before slowly lifted the plank upon its swelling surface, she poised herself daintily upon the support, her round arms stretched out and her body swinging to and fro in harmony with the motion of the waters. As the wave reached its fullest volume she suddenly, quick as thought and with a laugh that rang full into shore, drew herself together, sprang into the air, and, her hands closed together and clearing her way, plunged into the rolling sea. There was a little cry from timid feminine watchers on the sand, but the smiling face was above water again while they cried, and the daring Triton was up on the plank again in another moment and waiting for a second high roller. So she has been amusing herself and interesting the mob for three mornings.

She is as completely at ease in the sea as you or I on land, and the broad plank obeys her slightest touch. When she has had enough of it she will bring the plank into shore, she riding upon the further end and guiding it like a goddess over the crests and through the foam of the biggest breakers.

She comes from the Sandwich Islands and is making a tour of the country. Her father is an enormously rich planter. She arrived [in Asbury Park] a week ago with the family of a wealthy New York importer. She is at a fashionable hotel, and is one of the most charming dancers at the hotel hops, as well as the most daring swimmer on the Jersey coast. She is well educated and accomplished, and, of course, speaks English perfectly, and with a swell British accent that is the despair of the dudes. She learned to be a mistress of the waves in her childhood at her native home by the sea, where, she modestly says, all the girls learn swimming as a matter of course, quite as much as girls in this country learn tennis and croquet.

[Thanks to Vinnie Dicks, Mike May, and Skipper Funderburg for research and assistance]

"SOUNDS FROM THE SEA - THE GREATEST GIRL BATHER," SURF HISTORY DISCOVERY (1888)

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