Did Edison really travel all the way to Honolulu to capture the sport for a silent film more than a century ago? Well, not exactly.

“We have no evidence Edison ever visited Hawaii,” said Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park. “There’s tons of stuff about Edison out there that’s bogus.”

The thing is, the surfing footage actually is legitimate—only Edison himself didn’t capture it. It was the work of Robert Bonine, a legendary cameraman for a production company owned by Edison. Bonine traveled to Hawaii in 1906 at the invitation of the territory’s Promotion Committee, according to newspaper reports at the time. He stayed in the Hawaiian Islands for nearly three months and gathered a series of film actualities—little documentary vignettes—of various outdoor scenes. That included the surfers at Waikiki and the first-known film of Kilauea, the volcano on the Big Island, newspapers said.

This wasn’t the first time an Edison crew visited Hawaii, however. DeGraaf directed me to Charles Musser’s book, “Before the Nickelodeon,” which describes an Edison camera operator stopping in Honolulu en route back to the United States from Japan in 1898. One of the short films he made, titled “Kanakas Diving for Money,” shows boys splashing in a harbor. (Kanaka means person in Hawaiian.) Despite the film’s brevity—it’s under a minute long—it conveys a powerful metaphor about the cultural upheaval wrought by colonialism at the time it was shot: At one point, an outrigger canoe passes in front of a huge cargo ship in the background. “I think this is the earliest record of an Edison film crew in Hawaii,” DeGraaf told me.

Bonine’s film was shot about eight years later, and we have a reliable estimate for exactly when: August 12, 1906. According to an item in The Honolulu Advertiser that day: “Moving pictures of canoes and surfboard riding are to be taken off the Moana and Seaside hotels, Waikiki, this afternoon. ... Those who can ride surfboards standing up are wanted to be there in force.”

The next day, The Daily Pacific Commercial Advertiser, described a cheery spectacle at the famous beach: “Everybody that could get in focus was ‘Bonined’ at Waikiki beach yesterday afternoon. That is, they were included in some rare pictures taken by Robert Bonine, the moving-picture man of the Edison company of Orange, N.J.”

“[T]he water was fairly live with people, and all were in a merry mood and that, of course, was best for the moving picture,” the newspaper account continues. “Hawaiian canoes, birch canoes, surf-boards and water wings were greatly in evidence. There were big rollers yesterday and it is believed that some good pictures were taken of surf riders standing erect on their boards as they were shot on the crest of waves toward the shore. These were taken from the end of the Moana pier. ... Mr. Bonine was satisfied and so was the crowd.”