British Broadcasting Corp. backs claim by wildly polarizing author that surfing was invented in Peru

Cocaine and surfing.

Now, it has long been held that our surfing bubbled up onto this earth in Hawaii or some other idyllic South Pacific archipelago. Warm waters, languid rollers, happy natives enjoying the sun and the sea. A picture easy to conjure with some historical backing. James Cook, for example, sailing into those Sandwich Islands, his chronicler recording how men and women glided upon those sparkling waves.

And then came the extremely controversial book Cocaine + Surfing which claimed that this Sport of Kings sprang from the same earth that gifted us cocaine.

Peru.

Author Chas Smith, a linguist by trade, used Derrida-ian gymnastics to prove that the South American nation, with its stimulating plants and little horses, was, in fact, surfing’s ground zero.

Now, the powerful and royal British Broadcasting Corporation has thrown its hefty weight behind the wild claim. The think piece “The unlikely country that may have invented surfing” begins thusly:

Three-metre-high waves crash onto Playa El Mogote in the northern Peruvian seaside village of Huanchaco. Gazing out into the beach, a mix of locals and international tourists surf in the Pacific, but around a curve in the coastline, the arched prows of caballitos de totora line the beach, their bows pointing towards the ocean. For at least the past 3,500 years, Huanchaco’s fishermen have been using these reed crafts to surf.

Known as tup in Mochica, one of Peru’s extinct Indigenous languages, or caballitos (“little horses”) in Spanish, these ancient crafts are made with tightly tied bundles of totora reeds that grow in freshwater ponds near the coast. Their signature upturned, narrow bow both slices through and pops up over the waves. The Pacific is anything but peaceful here, and in recent years its epic swells have been drawing modern surfers from around the world.

On it goes, introducing pottery art depicting what looks like surfing years before Polynesian references, interviewing local historians and drilling down on the probability of Peruvian surf supremacy.

Or as Smith penned some six years earlier:

I look toward the heavens, toward the Author of my Fate, before bending over to grab my for-sure cracked iPhone and realize I’m standing in front of Huntington Beach’s International Surfing Museum. What are the odds? I mean, that an ‘International Surfing Museum’ exists is weird, sure, but that the dark night of my soul takes me right to it? In the window there is a black-and-white picture of some South American mestizo-looking thing, grinning broadly, riding what appears to be a strange surfboard. Written in bold font it says, ‘Surfing and Peru. 4,000 years.’

I freeze and feel the blood draining from my face. Did surfing actually start in Peru?

Didn’t cocaine?

Brilliant.

As luck would have it, Cocaine + Surfing has just been reprinted.

Purchase and enjoy here.