Mystic — Jack London, Gidget and the Beach Boys helped stoke a worldwide passion for surfing in the 20th century, but a new grant will allow Mystic Seaport Museum to tell a broader story.

With a nearly $400,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced in August, the museum and guest curator, author and surfing aficionado Glenn S. Gordinier will present the Indigenous history of the sport, its transformation and its impact in “Stoked! Surfing’s Global Legacy.”

“Everybody understands that surfing came out of Hawaii, but it also had other Indigenous origins — in Peru, west Africa, Japan and a few other places around the world where these people, separated by thousands of miles, realized ‘If I got something under me to help me float, I could play in the waves,’” said Gordinier, director emeritus of the museum’s Munson Institute.

He said the new exhibit, set to open July 12, 2025, will trace the origins of surfing as a communal recreational activity with roots shadowed in antiquity through the individualistic sport practiced today and surfing’s full-circle return to its communal roots.

The sport evolved individually and organically in many warm water areas of the world, Gordinier explained, noting that warm water areas like Hawaii, Japan and Africa all have a history of surfing that was first recorded by Europeans as early as the 17th century, but existed for centuries before western contact.

“The origins were all around, but it really became a global thing out of Waikiki back in the 1890s, early 1900s, when tourism first began in Hawaii,” he said.

He explained that Jack London, who wrote “Call of the Wild,” described the “ecstatic bliss” of catching his first wave to American readers in 1907, and his enthusiasm drew wealthy tourists excited to try the sport.

A group of Indigenous surfers, who were called the Waikiki beach boys, started capitalizing on the tourism by teaching canoeing and surfing and sharing the spirit and culture of the Hawaiian Islands.

“For generations, there was this expert group of watermen who could fish, who could dive and surf and do all of that, and they were essentially the embodiment of ‘Aloha spirit’ as people call it — that Hawaiian spirit, and tens of thousands of people got to meet them,” he said.

That number exploded during World War II, when service men and women who were fighting and supporting the war in the Pacific were stationed in, or traveled through, Hawaii, Gordinier explained.

When they returned, particularly to southern California, the military men and women began trying to recreate that idyllic Waikiki beach boy community, replete with ukuleles, luaus and, of course, surfing.

Several years later, a California man wrote a book about his daughter, a young girl who traded her lunch for surf lessons and became enmeshed in the surf community, which Sandra Dee and the recently deceased James Darren brought to life in the 1959 box office hit “Gidget.”

“The Gidget movie in 1959 just blew up American youth’s understanding and awareness of surfing,” he explained.

“It spreads to the east coast, it spreads to the west coast, it spreads to Australia, South Africa, and it becomes a global phenomenon that is still with us today,” he said.

Gordinier said that though culture and technology have changed the way people think about surfing — from a community activity with dozens of surfers riding the same waves into a solitary activity in the west — it still embodies its original communal spirit.

The museum will publish Gordinier’s latest book, which explores 20 organizational founders who reflect that spirit, as a companion to the exhibit.

The book, tentatively also titled “Stoked! Surfing’s Global Legacy,” features stories of surfers like New London native and combat veteran Andy Manzi, whose love for surfing led him to co-found the non-profit organization Warrior Surf Foundation.

The award-winning, South Carolina-based organization offers free surf therapy, yoga classes and wellness coaching to veterans struggling with issues like post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury or traumatic brain injury.

Gordinier explained that the exhibit in the 5,000 square foot Collins Gallery will boast iconography, modern history and stories and examples of historic surfboards from around the world, including a Japanese itago, a shorter and wider board which resembles a body board, and 19th century boards that belonged to Hawaiian royalty.

The museum also has public programming planned to go along with the exhibit, including a plan to bring expert surfer and surfboard artisan Tom Pohaku Stone of Oahu to the museum for a two-week residency, where he will demonstrate traditional methods of making boards out of Koa wood and invite museum visitors to lend a hand.

Elysa Engelman, director of research and scholarship for the museum, said that though the exhibit is still in the planning stages, the opening of the show will coincide with the museum’s annual Woodie car show featuring the iconic wood paneled cars that embodied surf culture in the 1950s.