The Origin of Bungee Jumping: From a Vanuatu Harvest Ritual to New Zealand’s Extreme Sport

On Vanuatu’s Pentecost Island, every year between April and June, men still climb wooden towers as tall as 30 meters, tie vines around their ankles, and dive head-first toward the ground. Before climbing, they measure and remeasure the vine’s length again and again. A miscalculation doesn’t end with a scraped shoulder — it ends with a broken neck. The point of the jump isn’t the thrill. It’s a prayer for a good yam harvest that year.^[1]

On April 1, 1979, on the other side of the world in Bristol, England, a man in a morning coat and top hat, his face hidden behind a scarf, climbed onto the railing of a bridge. Around his ankles was not a vine but a rubber cord. He wasn’t jumping for a harvest, and he wasn’t undergoing a rite of passage.^[2]

The two scenes are, in essence, the same motion — tying something to your ankles and leaping from a height. But that motion has been rewritten with an entirely new meaning at least four times: from an agricultural ritual, to a prank pulled by British eccentrics, to an illegal stunt, and finally to a tourist product.

A Leap for Yams: The Naghol Ritual

Vanuatu is an island nation in the South Pacific. In villages on the southern part of Pentecost Island, a ritual called Naghol (also spelled Nagol in the local language) survives as a living tradition. Every year, the village’s men build a new wooden tower and dive head-first with freshly cut vines tied to their ankles.^[1]

The origin story goes like this: a woman fled up a tree to escape her husband’s violence, wrapped a vine around her ankles, and leapt to safety. Her husband chased her and jumped without a vine — and died. Afterward, the village’s men, determined never to be fooled again, began building towers and jumping themselves, and this is said to be how today’s ritual took root.^[1]

Contrary to common belief, Naghol’s primary purpose is not a coming-of-age rite. It is an agricultural ritual tied to the yam harvest. It takes place during the dry season between April and June, as the yams ripen, and a smooth round of dives that year is believed to bring a good harvest. The coming-of-age dimension is a second layer laid on top of this agricultural ritual: younger boys jump from lower platforms, while experienced adult men jump from the highest one, and a boy who completes his first dive safely is recognized as a man in the village that same moment.^[1] A single act, in other words, carries both a prayer for the harvest’s success and a formal recognition of personal growth.

There’s a distinction worth making clear here. The vine used in Naghol and the rubber cord used in modern bungee jumping look, at first glance, like they work on the same principle — but physically, they are opposites. A bungee cord is elastic; it decelerates the jumper gradually and gently. The liana vine used in Naghol, by contrast, barely stretches at all.^[1] That difference shapes how safety is achieved. Because the vine won’t give, villagers calculate the tower’s height and the vine’s length precisely, matching them to the jumper’s weight and height. The goal is to stop the fall at the exact point where the jumper’s shoulder or head brushes the ground. The soil at the landing spot is sometimes loosened beforehand to absorb a little of the impact.^[1] If the calculation is off, there’s no cushion to absorb the mistake. Bungee jumping reduces risk through elasticity; Naghol manages risk through precise calculation — the same motion, governed by two entirely different logics.

This precision was documented by outsiders long ago. American photojournalist Kal Müller lived in a village on Pentecost Island starting in 1968, earned the trust of its residents, and eventually became the first outsider to take part in the ritual and dive himself. His account of the experience was published in National Geographic in December 1970.^[3] Naghol, in other words, was not some exotic custom “discovered” by Oxford students in 1979 — it had already been documented academically and in the press nearly a decade earlier. What hasn’t changed since then is that Naghol is not a re-enactment staged for tourists. It remains a living agricultural ritual and coming-of-age practice, held every year in the villages of southern Pentecost Island.

Oxford’s Eccentrics: A Ritual Becomes a Prank

April 1, 1979, was April Fools’ Day. Four members of the Dangerous Sports Club, a group of Oxford University alumni, stood atop the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. Designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the bridge spans roughly 76 meters above the river below.^[4][5]

The first to jump was David Kirke, dressed in a morning coat and top hat, champagne bottle in hand, his face covered with a scarf. He later said he’d hidden his face so his mother wouldn’t recognize him in the newspaper photos.^[6] After Kirke came Simon Keeling, Alan Weston, and Tim Hunt, one after another.^[4] The cord tied to their ankles had originally been military-grade elastic rope, used to arrest fighter jets landing on aircraft carriers. The word “bungee” itself has a history worth tracing: in late-19th-century British schoolboy slang, it meant a rubber eraser — likely an onomatopoeic nod to its bouncy, springy feel. The word’s first recorded use to mean “elastic rope” dates to 1930. And the phrase “bungee jumping” itself first appears in print in 1979 — the very year these four men jumped off this bridge.^[7] Kirke later admitted in an interview that they hadn’t done any testing beforehand at all.^[6]

The Dangerous Sports Club made no secret of where the idea came from: a vine-diving ritual practiced on a Pacific island.^[4] But what the Oxford graduates recreated was only the shape of the motion, not Naghol’s purpose. Naghol carries a prayer for a good harvest, a fixed place in the yearly calendar, and the presence of an entire watching community. The four men on Clifton Bridge had none of that context. Their goal was the transgression itself, and the notoriety it brought. The Dangerous Sports Club went on to stage other bizarre stunts — bungee jumping off a volcano in opera gowns, leaping from a hot-air balloon with a horse-drawn carriage attached.^[5] The four were arrested immediately after their jump but released after promising not to do it again. The promise didn’t last long: they soon repeated the stunt at the Golden Gate Bridge and the Royal Gorge Bridge in the United States.^[4]

This was the first time the same motion completely lost its original context — no harvest, no communal rite of approval, just an act meant to generate attention for its own sake.

For British readers, the choice of bridge carries its own irony. Clifton Suspension Bridge is Grade I listed — the UK’s highest protection category for a historic building, reserved for structures of exceptional national interest.^[17] Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed it in the 1830s, but he died five years before it was finished; other engineers completed the bridge in 1864, partly as a memorial to him. A structure built to honor painstaking calculation and structural integrity became, more than a century later, the site where a length of rope originally meant to catch landing fighter jets was tied to a man’s ankles with no safety testing at all.

From Illegal Stunt to World News

The Dangerous Sports Club’s stunt made headlines within Britain, but what actually put bungee jumping on the world’s radar was something else entirely. On June 26, 1987, New Zealand carpenter and adventurer A.J. Hackett jumped from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.^[8]

Hackett had already been captivated by bungee jumping. He made his first personal jump from Auckland’s Greenhithe Bridge in November 1986, and went on to test jumps from bridges and cable cars in France that same year.^[9] The Eiffel Tower jump was the boldest of them all. It was carried out without permission — plainly illegal — and Hackett was arrested and briefly detained immediately afterward.^[8][10] But it was precisely that recklessness and illegality that drew the world’s media attention: a stunt in the heart of Paris, off a structure that symbolizes France itself, had more than enough news value on its own. New Zealand’s official government history site records this as the moment that put bungy jumping on the world map.^[8]

There’s a distinction worth drawing here. If the Dangerous Sports Club’s jump off Clifton Bridge was a private prank among eccentrics, Hackett’s Eiffel Tower jump was closer to a deliberate spectacle. Choosing a landmark with that much symbolic weight, despite the risk of arrest and detention, already looked like promotion for a business he had in mind. And in fact, Hackett threw himself into turning bungee jumping into a formal enterprise soon after.

From a Gold-Rush Bridge to a Tourist Product

On November 12, 1988, Hackett and his business partner Henry van Asch launched the world’s first commercial bungee jumping operation at the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge near Queenstown, New Zealand. On opening day, 28 people paid $75 each to jump from the 43-meter-high bridge.^[11][10] With help from scientists at the University of Auckland, the two developed their bungee cords, and the safety standards they set in the process later became the official industry standard in New Zealand and Australia (AS/NZS 5848).^[11]

Here’s an interesting detail: the Kawarau Bridge itself wasn’t built in 1988. It had been completed 108 years earlier, at the end of 1880 — and for gold mining, not tourism. After gold was discovered in the Otago region in the 1860s, a reliable route was needed to carry mining equipment and workers across the gorge to the Central Otago goldfields; until then, people had to cross the river by boat. Engineer Harry Higginson designed the suspension bridge to withstand the gorge’s fierce winds and rugged terrain, and it was recognized as an outstanding structure, receiving the Telford Award, one of the world’s most prestigious civil engineering honors. Today it’s protected as a Category 1 historic place, the highest designation given by Heritage New Zealand.^[12][13] A bridge built during a gold rush became, more than a century later, a place people flocked to for an entirely different reason — this time, to pay for the chance to risk their own lives.

Commercialization meant more than simply charging people to jump. Before this, bungee jumping had been a reckless act individuals undertook on their own terms. Starting at Kawarau Gorge, it became a repeatable product, with standardized equipment, tested formulas for cord length, insurance, and safety staff on hand. What Naghol’s village elders once judged by experience and eye — the length of a vine — engineers now worked out with formulas and specifications. Who bore the risk changed too. In Naghol, the community calculated together and answered for the outcome together. At Kawarau Gorge, a company calculates and answers for the outcome, while customers pay for the privilege of taking on the risk.

The timing of the launch was fortuitous as well. Global stock markets had crashed in 1987, and New Zealand’s tourism market had contracted along with them; the bungee jumping business that opened the following year injected new energy into a sluggish regional tourism sector.^[14] Paragliding, skydiving, downhill mountain biking, canyon swinging, and other extreme sports operators soon followed. Queenstown, once a town of only a few thousand people, became — within a few decades — the “adventure capital,” drawing millions of visitors a year.^[14] Van Asch later reflected that the venture’s success showed that even activities considered dangerous could be turned into large-scale businesses, and that it gave other operators the confidence to try.^[14]

What Happens When a Ritual Is Scheduled Around an Itinerary

In February 1974, Queen Elizabeth II visited Vanuatu. The colonial administration at the time asked that a Naghol ritual be held to coincide with her visit. The problem was timing. Naghol is normally held between April and June, when the yams are ripening and the vines hold the most moisture and give. Because the ritual was moved to fit the Queen’s schedule, it took place out of season, and the vines weren’t as pliable as usual. When one diver jumped, his vine failed to hold. It snapped, and he was fatally injured.^[15][1]

This tragedy shows, in the starkest way, why Naghol is so strict about its season and procedure. Its safety doesn’t come from chance — it comes from generations of accumulated knowledge about which vines to use in which season. The moment that knowledge was overridden to fit an outside schedule, the safeguard it provided simply vanished.

This event connects, in an odd way, to another dispute that surfaced later. As bungee jumping, inspired by Naghol, grew into a multi-million-dollar tourism industry in New Zealand, the people of Pentecost Island — who had kept the original practice alive all along — saw little in return. In 2013, Silas Buli, vice president of the South Pentecost Tourism Council, told TIME magazine that people there believe A.J. Hackett took the idea from Naghol and made a great deal of money from it. Ham Lini, a Vanuatu opposition leader, raised the same issue formally in parliament, arguing that Pentecost’s land diving had been taken by someone from New Zealand.^[16] In response, Henry van Asch, Hackett’s business partner, said he had visited Pentecost Island in 1992 and had made “some contribution” over the years — including donations and help with airfare — and that he would be open to negotiating directly if the islanders came forward to ask.^[16]

More than a decade has passed since van Asch said that, and there’s no record that the two sides ever reached a formal agreement. As vines gave way to rubber cords, and a ritual watched by an entire village became a product sold by the ticket, what remained for the people who first devised the leap — and had kept it alive the whole time — was little more than recognition as the ones who inspired it.