Legends

Charles Kauha: The Forgotten Hawaiian Surfer of 1898

Posted on by Drew
Charles Kauha standing in the shallows at Waikīkī with his alaia surfboard, Diamond Head behind him — Frank Davey photograph, April 1898
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May

Image: Frank Davey, Waikīkī, April 1898

The Photograph Everyone Has Seen

A man stands shin-deep in the flat water inside the reef at Waikīkī, a thin wooden board tucked under his arm, Diamond Head rising behind his shoulder. He wears a malo and a short beard, and he is not looking at the camera. The photograph is sepia, quiet, and well over a century old, and you have almost certainly seen it — on postcards, on museum walls, in the colorized versions that go around the internet every year or two wearing captions of varying accuracy.

When Davey’s beach portraits of this man were sold in Honolulu’s curio shops, the printed mounts read “Native With Surf Board, Honolulu, H.I.” — numbered stock prints of the Davey Photo Co. No name anywhere. The most famous face in nineteenth-century surfing went to market as scenery.

The name came later, out of the archives: Charles Kauha.

Who Was Charles Kauha?

Here is the honest answer, and it is the reason this page exists: we know his name, and almost nothing else. No published birth or death date. No recorded occupation, no family in the civil record, no interview, no obituary anyone has ever found. The documented life of Charles Kauha consists, in its entirety, of some hours in front of a camera in the spring of 1898.

Even the name took a century to surface. The Hawaiʻi State Archives carries the identification in its records — including a formal studio portrait of the same bearded face, filed under “Charles Kauha” — and the historian John Clark’s research corroborated it through one of his informants. Tim DeLaVega, who compiled the definitive photographic history of early Hawaiian surfing, published the identification and the date. The literature cannot even settle the spelling: DeLaVega’s own printed caption renders it “Kaura.”

One thread runs forward from the photograph into living surfing. The family of Ben Aipa, the great Hawaiian shaper, carries an oral tradition that the man in the Davey pictures is their ancestor. The generation count shifts from telling to telling, and no genealogy has been published, so it remains what it is — a family’s memory rather than a record. But it would mean the man holding one of the last of the old boards was kin to one of the men who built the new ones.

An Afternoon’s Work for the Davey Photo Co.

The photographs were a business proposition. Frank Davey was a London-born portrait photographer who had passed through the famous studios — Sarony’s in New York, Taber’s in San Francisco — before landing in Honolulu in January 1897 and opening a showpiece gallery in the Mott-Smith building, electric elevator and all. Hawaiʻi was becoming a destination, and destinations need pictures.

In April 1898 he photographed Kauha in numerous poses. Standing in the shallows with the board under his arm. Seated on the wet sand, knees drawn up, the board lying flat behind him. A formal bust portrait. What the series does not contain, anywhere, is Kauha on a wave — every surviving image is posed, and the historians who know the collection best say so plainly.

There is one more layer of staging worth naming: the malo itself. By 1898 it had largely passed out of everyday dress, and the surf-history researcher Geoff Cater suggests it was probably wardrobe — a costume of old Hawaiʻi for the visitor trade. The pictures did their job. Davey’s hand-colored surf riders took awards at the 1900 Paris Exposition; his studio went under in 1904 and he left for California, and that was that.

Not the First Surf Photograph — Something Better

The claim usually stapled to this picture — the first photograph of a surfer — is wrong, and this page itself used to repeat it, so let’s set the record straight. A group photograph at Waikīkī in 1887 shows King Kalākaua’s beach party with a surfboard rider among them. In 1890 a visiting scientist named Henry Carrington Bolton photographed surfers at Niʻihau actually riding — the first known photographs of surfing in the water. And around 1893 the Honolulu photographer James J. Williams made a beach portrait so similar to Davey’s that the two have been confused with each other ever since.

What the Kauha series actually is: the earliest photographs of a surfer whose name we know — and if the near-twin Williams portrait shows him too, as DeLaVega suspects it may, the claim only reaches further back. Everyone else photographed before 1898 survives as a caption — a “native with surf board,” an unidentified rider in the distance. Kauha is where surf photography acquires a person. That is a better superlative than “first,” and it has the advantage of being true.

Waikīkī, Three Months Before Annexation

The date gives the pictures their charge. Davey’s presentation album is dated April 1898. On July 7 of that year the Newlands Resolution annexed Hawaiʻi to the United States, and on August 12 the Hawaiian flag came down over ʻIolani Palace. Nothing documents any connection between the session and the politics — Davey was making tourist stock, not statements — but the frames have carried that weight ever since: a Hawaiian man with a Hawaiian board in Hawaiian water, in the last months the Hawaiian flag flew.

The old surf histories say heʻe nalu was nearly dead by then, strangled over the nineteenth century and revived only after 1900. The record says otherwise. Hawaiian-language newspapers, worked through by modern scholars like Patrick Moser and Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, document surfing running continuously through the century: Kalākaua staging surfing for his guests through his reign, three Hawaiian princes introducing the sport to Santa Cruz on redwood boards in 1885, Princess Kaʻiulani surfing Waikīkī as a girl in those same years. The Kauha photographs are themselves evidence: a skilled surfer holding a real alaia at Waikīkī in 1898 is not a picture of an extinct pastime.

The Image That Outlived the Man

The pictures went to work almost immediately. One of the Davey portraits ran as the frontispiece of Charles Warren Stoddard’s A Trip to Hawaii in 1901. The Williams near-twin went onto curio-store postcards and into the illustrated Hawaiʻi books of 1899 and 1900 under the same kind of anonymous caption, and the two series have been shuffled together in books and auction rooms ever since. In 2011 a British auction house pitched a print of a malo-clad surfer beneath Diamond Head as “circa 1890 … one of the earliest photos taken of a surfer”; DeSoto Brown, the Bishop Museum archivist who published the Davey originals, re-dated it to around 1900 and noted that it was not the oldest with any certainty. The colorized version reruns on social media every year or two. The image never stopped selling Hawaiʻi. It just stopped mentioning that anyone was in it.

Within a decade of the session, the water Kauha stood in belonged to the Waikīkī beach boys; within two, Duke Kahanamoku had carried heʻe nalu to the world, and the sport’s faces finally had names attached to them. Kauha went the other way — back into the drawers of the Hawaiʻi State Archives, the Bishop Museum, and the Hawaiian Historical Society, filed under a name almost nobody used. The next time the sepia frame slides past you, colorized and cropped and captioned “old Hawaiʻi,” you will know the one fact the caption never carried. The man had a name.

Questions About Charles Kauha

Who was Charles Kauha?
Charles Kauha was a Native Hawaiian surfer photographed by Frank Davey at Waikīkī in April 1898, holding a traditional alaia board with Diamond Head behind him. He is the earliest surfer in photography who can be identified by name. Beyond the photographs and the archival identification, nothing about his life is documented.

Is the Charles Kauha photo the first surfing photograph?
No. An 1887 group photograph at Waikīkī includes a surfboard rider, and Henry Carrington Bolton photographed surfers riding waves at Niʻihau in 1890. The Kauha series is something narrower and arguably richer: the earliest photographs of a surfer whose name we know.

What board is Kauha holding?
An alaia — the thin, round-nosed, square-tailed board of traditional Hawaiian surfing, often described as one of the last of the old alaia to be photographed. No measurements of his particular board were ever recorded; the dimensions that circulate with the viral versions of the photo are generic.

Was Charles Kauha related to Ben Aipa?
The Aipa family carries an oral tradition that the man in the Davey photographs is their ancestor, though the generation count varies between tellings and no genealogy has been published. It is a family memory rather than an established record.

What happened to Charles Kauha after 1898?
Nobody knows. No birth date, death date, or record of his later life has ever been published. The photographs are the whole of his documented story — which is exactly why they matter.

Sources

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Last Updated: July 2026

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Drew

Drew is the founder, writer, and editor of Hawaii.surf, where he documents Hawaiian surf history — the legends, breaks, shapers, and culture of the sport's birthplace. Stories are researched and written in Hawaii, drawing on kupuna, primary accounts, and the archival record.