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Two men joined the whaler Balaena in 1819. Their captain, Edmund Gardner of Nantucket and New Bedford, wrote their names as Joe Bal and Jack Ena. The names were his, not theirs. Their Hawaiian names are lost.
That opening now sits in Room V of “A Wide Sea,” the South Coast LGBTQ+ Network's online museum exhibit on New Bedford whaling and queer history. The section, “A wide, multiethnic ocean,” went live on August 1. It is the third deep room the exhibit has opened since spring.
The new material does three things.
Gardner's account survives in a 1958 edited volume held at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library. Joe Bal and Jack Ena boarded the Balaena in the Pacific and worked their way back to a home port they had never seen. The ship-name naming is the captain's act. We say so on the wall.
The word means “friend, also lover of the same sex,” the definition Native Hawaiian scholar Noenoe Silva gives in Aloha Betrayed (Duke University Press, 2004). Aikāne appears in Cook's third-voyage journals from January 1779, in the writing of David Samwell, surgeon of the Discovery. Samwell called it “an office that is esteemed honourable among them.”
That is the citable Cook-era mention. The internet-famous quote about “all the chiefs” having them comes from an uncited Wikipedia line, and we do not print it.
Chapter XIII, section 11 outlawed “the crime against nature, either with mankind or any beast.” The moe aikāne discussion in the surrounding scholarship makes clear the statute rendered only the “with mankind” limb. Here is the piece New England readers rarely hear: the code was drafted on a template proposed for Massachusetts and never enacted here. Sally Engle Merry lays out that history in Colonizing Hawaiʻi (Princeton University Press, 2000). A statute that failed on Beacon Hill became law in Honolulu.
This is heritage work, not a Pride month piece. New Bedford's whaling fleet reached Pacific waters at a scale that shaped the port and shaped the crews. The New Bedford Whaling Museum records show roughly 22 of 33 local ships hunting the Pacific and Alaskan grounds. NOAA cites “one-fifth to almost half” of Alaskan-waters whaling by 1871. Starbuck's 19th-century voyage list counts 1,219 voyages. Counts vary by source. What does not vary is that South Coast whalers came home carrying stories, languages, and people from a Pacific that had its own words for queer relation, long before New England had the vocabulary.
Every claim on the new wall was verified the day it deployed: four confirmed, four rated plausible, none refuted, across an audit of 84 findings. Our research archive holds the full record.
The section ends with a promise. The next round of Room V will build on collaboration with Native Hawaiian scholars and community members. The whaling voyages of the 1800s were not one-way. Neither is this history.