The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too but missed the connection myself. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. “In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf- bathing. It was also here on the thin sliver of Waikiki Beach that Mark Twain tried surfing, and first introduced the sport to the world. It was the royal coconut grove and one-time home of King Kamehameha I, the king that united all of Hawaii by winning a famous battle here in 1795. He stayed four months in the Islands (from March to June, 1866), writing twenty-five letters for the Union that were published between April and November. The Waikiki of Twain’s day was a village of white cottages.
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