As "surfing's premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century"[1] and "the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face" of the Hokulea project,[2] he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia[3] in the 1960s and his co-founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society[4] in the 1970s.
The son of a United States Navy pilot, Ben Finney was born in 1933[5] and grew up in San Diego, California.
It was no time to hatch what professors might have considered wacky schemes, but silently Finney thought: Why not recreate a sailing canoe and prove Sharp wrong?When Ben Finney was a University of Hawaii graduate student in 1958,[21] working toward his Master of Arts degree and writing his dissertation on surfing, scholars were not yet in agreement that any canoe voyages over great distances on the Pacific Ocean had been intentional.
[22] The prevailing view was exemplified by a New Zealand historian with a low opinion of Polynesian navigation methods and canoes, Andrew Sharp, who believed that such voyages could only have been accidental.
In 1973, Finney co-founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with artist Herb Kawainui Kane and sailor Charles Tommy Holmes.
Within three years, they had designed, built, and sailed the Hōkūleʻa on its first historic voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti [22][24] with a crew led by captain Kawika Kapahulehua and navigator Mau Piailug.