135-year-old mystery solved? We may finally know Asbury Park's East Coast surfing pioneer
Three-minute read
SEA GIRT, NJ - Is Emma Spreckels the mysterious Sandwich Island girl, the "Gay Queen of the Waves," who put on a surfing expedition in Asbury Park in 1888, possibly the first of its kind on the East Coast?
After four years of research, author Vincent Dicks of Sea Girt believes he found the likely surfer, and she is the subject of his new novel, "Forsaken Kings: Emma Spreckels The Surfer of Asbury Park."
The mystery girl who appeared on the cover of The National Police Gazette on Aug. 18, 1888, with the caption, “A Gay Queen Of The Waves: Asbury Park, New Jersey, Surprised By The Daring Of A Sandwich Island Girl,” has puzzled surfing historians since 2006, when Joseph "Skipper" Funderburg, a Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, surf historian, rediscovered the wood-cut illustration of her. The Sandwich Islands is the former name of the Hawaiian Islands.
Funderburg told the Asbury Park Press in a previous story that she represents the earliest known illustration of a surfer standing up riding a surfboard on a wave in the continental United States.
Surfing biographer Craig Lockwood likened the Gazette to a tabloid of its era in a critique published on the Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center website. The center, located in San Clemente, California, is home to some of the world’s most important and authoritative archive of surfing artifacts, surfboards, memorabilia, photography, video, periodical and scholarly work.
However, there has yet to be a positive identification of the Sandwich Island Girl, or conclusive evidence that she did indeed surf the waves — which was called planking in the 19th century — in Asbury Park.
If the Sandwich Island Girl is real, it would mean Asbury Park is the first spot where surfing occurred on the East Coast, not Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
"I was intrigued by the story so I did some digging," Dicks siad. "I thought it was a solvable problem."
Dicks argues that Emma was the daughter of sugar king Claus Spreckels. Claus dominated the sugar trade in Hawaii for over a decade. He had come east to Philadelphia in 1888 to build his first sugar refinery on this coast as his rival Harry O. Havermeyer funded a competing plant in the west.
Dicks, who visited Hawaii several times, followed one of the few clues that could lead to the mystery board rider that appeared in local papers at the time. The Philadelphia Press in July 1888 described a “Sandwich Island Girl” performing a never-before-seen activity in the water. She was surfing, standing on a plank riding the waves over the course of four days in Asbury Park.
“The Press article mentions the surfer was the daughter of a wealthy planter of the islands,” Dicks said. “I took the 1888 Planters Journal and tracked each owner and manager of the plantations in the Kingdom of Hawaii. I researched the families for an appropriate-age daughter and ships' logs for travel records. Emma Spreckels is the only one who was the correct age and on the East Coast that summer. Her family also had a relationship with John Lorimer Graham of Rumson, who took out the ad which appeared in the Asbury Park Daily Press in August 1888, trying to locate the girl for his lonely Hawaiian wife.”
The Asbury Park Daily Press was the predecessor to the Asbury Park Press.
The book is historical fiction and is available in print and digital media through Amazon.
The first reported board riding in the continental U.S. took place at Santa Cruz, California, in 1885 when three Hawaiian teenage royal princes took a break from boarding school. Hawaii was still an independent island kingdom but was coming increasingly entwined in American business interests. It was annexed by the United States in 1898.
Even before the three princes surfed on boards made of local redwood, Americans learned of surfing in a Harper's Weekly story about Sandwich Island surf riders that was published in the early 1880s. The Harper's Weekly account appeared in the Red Bank Register in April 1883.
In 1909, Burke Haywood Bridgers introduced surfing to the East Coast at Wrightsville Beach. The Sandwich Island Girl could push the date back for East Coast surfing 20 years and move it 600 miles up the coast to Asbury Park, though Dicks' said he was not able to get definitive proof that Spreckles is indeed the mystery surfer girl.
Read for yourself.
When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com