Catching the first wave in Mazatlán

When you write history, there’s always a temptation to say this or that was the first time something happened… only to have more evidence pop up later.  And sometimes the explorers themselves have to admit they probably aren’t the first.

From Malcolm Gault-Williams, “LEGENDARY SURFERS: A Definitive History of Surfing’s Culture and Heroes.”

Phil Edwards, in the company of legendary surfer Whitey Harrison, were two of the first known surfers to explore Mexico in 1957. But, as Edwards’ description aptly points out, they were far from the first:

“In Mexico,” Edwards wrote, “I… served as a crewman aboard another boat, a 30-foot sloop. Then the owners took off for home; leaving the boat with Harrison and me — with the agreement that we could take three months to bring it home, providing we got it there intact.

“Naturally, we surfed our way back, stopping and anchoring wherever the surf looked good, taking our time in the lazy, hot waters off Mexico.

“One day we found the island.

“It lay uninhabited, a humpback of pure desert, 150 miles off the Mexican coast — three degrees north of our charted course — somewhere off Mazatlan. On the east face of it, waves were breaking in perfectly. A million miles of waves, each with a tube slicing across the top, each with the light shining through like turquoise, glittering. Alone in the world.

“We dropped the anchor, got our boards, got out of our clothes and over the side in one blur of motion. It was perfect: the waves were eight feet and we began to cut patterns where no man had ever surfed before, kicking up plumes of green and white diamonds.

“Then, jazzed, we fell on the beach to rest. And we found the sign. It was a crude thing, hand lettered on an old board and jammed into the sand.

“‘Mel Ross surfed here,’ it said, and gave the date. ‘The surf was 10 feet,’ it said.

“You should have been here a year ago.”

Here’s an interesting throught.  There were more than a few sailors bound to and from Polynesia in Mazatlán in the 1840s and 50s.  One was a guy named Herman Melville — who wrote a couple of books about Polynesia and — probably learned to surf or at least ride a body-board.  Everyone assumes Herman spent his time in Mazatlan just toiling away at Redfern, but he must have hung around with somebody, and his gloomy puritanical New England buds weren’t around.  Which was probably just as well:  otherwise, we be reading Henry David Thoreau on how to sell timeshares to your cabin, and we’d all suffer through reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Condo of Seven Gables.”

I guess if you’re going to write the Great American Maritime Novel, you need to be in puritanical New England… so, I’m afraid Mazatlan can’t take credit for Moby Dick.  However, there’s not reason to not think that Herman might have been hanging out with Polynesian harpooners while he was here.  And we have no definitive proof that Mel Ross DID NOT run across an old coffin lid used as a body board with “Want to know where the really big waves are?  Call me… Ishmael” written on it.

Could be true.  Should be true. But damned if I can prove it.