Robert C. Ritchie - The Lure of the Beach: A Global History

Come summer, the beach was the center of the world. For a typical Southern California teenager, the attractions were body surfing, lazing around, and girls. Summers went by in a blur of sun, sand, and surf before the water got cold and school beckoned. It was an idyll. Much later, having become an historian but fortunate to live in a beach town, I came to recognize there was a history of going to the beach. It was one of those moments when one realizes that something very familiarI still loved the beachalso had an intriguing past. Once aroused, this curiosity did not vanish but lingered. Did people in the past go to the beach for the same reasons I did, or did they seek other pleasures? This book, then, is my search of discovery. Why did people go to the beach and what did they do there? It started a long time ago.

The beach was the original end and beginning. The land was home for humanity, the sea the great unknown. The beach was the boundary and last place of safety for our distant ancestors before the restless sea crashed into the sand. The land nurtured them, while the sea promised little and remained a great mystery. Yet the shore attracted them. Perhaps it was the daily drama of sunsets and sunrises and the moods of the sea, but more likely it was access to food. During the summer, mussels, oysters, crabs, and fish were available and certainly varied their diets. Footprints in the sand, left thousands of years ago, mark their passage. Homo sapiens appear to have originated in the Okavango wetlands in present-day Botswana and moved under changing climate One can imagine them splashing around in the surf before retreating inland away from the storms of winter on the exposed beach. So we know that, however they perceived the ocean, the beach was a place of relative safety.

Our most ancient ancestors, then, walked upon the beaches and contemplated the sea until they finally took to the sea. With rafts and canoes, they could begin to fish and finally use the sea as a convenient way to explore other lands. The more time they spent at sea, the more they learned to read the moods of the ocean and placate the god who controlled those moods. Over time, more and more people came to accept the sea and build their habitations close to the beach. Some would even become sea people in that they lived on, and adapted to, the perils of the sea. Polynesians created the catamaran and with it ventured over hundreds of miles of open water in their Pacific Ocean migrations. As the oceans of the world slowly came to be the scene of more and more human endeavor, they also came to be regarded as a place of religious significance. Various cultures assumed there were gods or spirits who influenced the winds and the waves and appealed to them for a safe voyage or relief from storms.

Ocean water was also imagined to have special powers. Jews had an ancient ceremony, Tashlikh, where the community, at the new year, cast bread on the water in order to erase the sins of the last year. Many communities in France and England went to the sea every year to spend a few days splashing around in a rite of renewal. These are traditional practices that are tied not to medicinal theory, but to time-honored practice and superstition. The comfort brought to the practitioners was real and appreciated. The Romans, however, went further and created a haven at Biaie on the Bay of Naples where they found very many comforts of a more immediate sort, among them licentiousness, a reputation that would always be associated with resorts, where the restraints of ones community were loosened and bathing costumes exposed the body.