Despite the imposed Calvinistic morality, surfing didn't disappear altogether from Hawai'i in the 1800s. While not practiced as widely and relentlessly as when Europeans first came, surfing continued throughout the islands. At times, even an adventurous visitor would catch a wave, sit on top of the world and then tell the world all about it. Hawaiian Family, 1908. Courtesy Bishop Museum ArchiveB21In 1851, the Reverend Henry T. Cheever observed surfing at Lahaina, Maui and wrote about it in his book, Life in the Hawaiian Islands, The Heart of the Pacific As it Was and Is. "It is highly amusing to a stranger to go out to the south part of this town, some day when the sea is rolling in heavily over the reef, and to observe there the evolutions and rapid career of a company of surf-players. [The sport of surfing] is so attractive and full of wild excitement to the Hawaiians, and withal so healthy, that I cannot but hope it will be many years before civilization shall look it out of countenance, or make it disreputable to indulge in this manly, though it be dangerous, pastime."Fifteen years later, Mark Twain sailed to the Hawaiian Islands and tried surfing, describing it in Chapter XXXII of his 1866 book Roughing It. "I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. 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." One of the First Known Photographs of a Surfer with his Board, c. 1890. Courtesy Bishop Museum ArchiveB11Surfing wasn't dead in the Hawaiian Islands in the late 1800s, but it was drowning, along with most Hawaiian customs and most Hawaiians. After 125 years of Hawaiian-European contact/ conquest, the haole had tried to exercise control over just about everything Hawaiian: their Gods, their culture, their magic, their land and their lives. Of the 40,000 Hawaiians that remained, a handful attempted to resist the 1893 illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by a coalition of businessmen, plantation owners and missionaries, assisted by U.S. marines. The Hawaiians asserted their native rights to maintain Hawai'i as a sovereign nation under Hawaiian control. When Queen Lili'uokalani attempted to roll back haole control of the kingdom in 1893, the foreigners overthrew and imprisoned her. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawai'i as a territory.