Kelea, of whom in the past the bards of Oahu and Maui loved to sing, was the beautiful but capricious sister of Kawao, king of Maui, who in about A.D. 1445, at the age of twenty-five, succeeded to the sovereignty of that island.
No sport was to her so enticing as a battle with the waves, and when her brother spoke to her of marriage she gaily answered that the surf-board was her husband, and she would never embrace any other.
King David Kalakaua, The Legends and Myths of Hawaii (Tuttle edition), pages 229 and 231.
See Surf Research for a gallery of early surfing imagery.
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