Logical leaping too.
Yesterday afternoon, a sun-dappled one in
Southern California, fireworks exploded in the ether when eminent
Italian surf historian and coach Nicolla “Nik” Zanella slipped a
well-manicured hand from a goat kid glove and used it to slap
controversial author Chas Smith across the face.
The troubles began days ago when Smith reported on Zanella’s
work digging into the root of Chinese surfing and titled the
think-piece Italian surf
historian declares people surfing in China thousands of years
before Polynesia: “There’s some who tread on drifting wood
performing hundreds of water tricks, having fun, each displaying
great mastery!”
Zanella, in a furious
missive to the editor, responded:
Who did it first was not the scope of my research, but this
time frame is almost simultaneous with what was happening in
Polynesia. Affirming that I declared that surfing happened in China
‘Thousands of years before Polynesia’ is blatantly false and casts
a bad light on my professionalism.
I hope you have the decency of erasing that article and
learn to investigate what you publish in the future, what you
stated was not in the SCMP article, nor in my book, nor in any
interview that I ever gave to the many media, all more professional
than BeachGrit, that covered my book and research. A simple google
search would have clarified it.
Smith, very much insulted, quickly turned to the aforementioned
google search, employed his iconic-adjacent combination of
rudimentary math and logical leaping, to discover that Tahiti was
first settled in the 5th century B.C. and assumed it would take the
proto-Polynesians a couple hundred-ish years to learn the art of
surfboard shaping, sorting out the person nearest the breaking part
of the wave has priority, etc. which would put the first Tahitian
surfer at, or around, the 3rd century B.C.
China, on the other hand, has been inhabited by Homo erectuses
for over a million years. Hangzhou, where surfing may have begun,
had a fine neolithic population at least 12,000 years before the
birth of Christ.
Now, Zanella quotes a Song Dynasty (960 – 1279) poet in his
interview with the august South China
Morning Post. To wit:
“Hundreds of brave watermen … with unfastened hair and
tattoos, holding coloured flags, race to the water … they paddle
towards the oncoming waves … then they leap up and perform a
hundred manoeuvres without getting the tail of their flags even
slightly wet. This is how they show off their skill. Hence the
nobles reward them with silver prizes.”
If that is not describing a World Qualifying Series event, than
I am not a surf journalist.
It must be inferred that QSes take at least ten-ish centuries to
get fully up and running what with point systems, defining the
excellent range, sorting the flags (read: singlets), having
proto-Turpel get his descriptions of the action down, etc.
Considering all angles on their merits, one can only conclude
that people were surfing in China thousands of years before
Polynesia, or at the very least that was what Zanella is
suggesting.
As the South China Morning Post puts it after an equally
thorough analysis of Zanella’s findings, “Surfing may have started
in China, long before anyone elsewhere picked up a board to ride a
wave.”
En garde!
