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chapter 35 Honolulu Directory and Historical Sketch of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands (1869) Abraham Fornander 1812–1887 The following passage from the Honolulu Directory cites a letter from Abraham Fornander who, in describing the effects of a tidal wave that inundated the southern and eastern shores of Hawai‘i on April 2, 1868, recounted an incident that has become legend in the Islands: a native named Holoua riding a tidal wave into shore.24 Fornander indicated that eighty-one people were known to have perished in the disaster, “besides a number of the pulu pickers up in the mountains, back of Hilea; how many I am not yet advised, neither have I heard the number of those who perished at Kaalaala.”25 The Directory followed a number of publications throughout the nineteenth century that offered conflicting information on the state of surfriding: authors often insisted that surfriding was dying out while offering eyewitness accounts of natives surfriding. On one page the Directory mentioned surfriding as part of the “numerous games for amusement, which have long since fallen into disuse,” and on another presented the story of Holoua, which clearly demonstrated that natives continued to harbor these skills within their communities—at least sufficiently enough to ride a tidal wave.26 Ninole, Hawai‘i April 6 & 7, 1868 I have just been told an incident that occurred at Ninole, during the inundation of that place. At the time of the shock on Thursday, a man named Holoua, and his wife, ran out of the house and started for the hills above, but remembering the money he had in the house, the man left his wife and returned to bring it away. Just as he had entered the house the sea broke on the shore, and, enveloping the building, first washed it several yards inland, and then, as the wave receded, swept if off to sea, with him 118 in it. Being a powerful man, and one of the most expert swimmers in that region, he succeeded in wrenching off a board or a rafter, and with this as a papa hee-nalu (surf board,) he boldly struck out for the shore, and landed safely with the return wave. When we consider the prodigious height of the breaker on which he rode to the shore, (50, perhaps 60 feet,) the feat seems almost incredible, were it not that he is now alive to attest it, as well as the people on the hill-side who saw him. honolulu directory and historical sketch | 119 ...

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