| Abstract: | The journals recorded by Captain James Cook and his associates on Cook's Third Voyage of discovery (1776-1780) include extensive eyewitness accounts and analyses of the Hawaiian people and their culture-the first to be made by Europeans and Americans. Among these are several reports of young men called aikane, who were attached to the court or train of the ali'i (chiefs), and whose functions were sexual, social, and political. Among these aikane were several who acted as intermediaries between the sailors and the Hawaiians, and whose influence and conduct profoundly affected the course of events at Kealakekua Bay, where Cook was killed in February, 1779. The information contained in these materials suggests that such Hawaiian same-sex relationships are more important than currently accounted for in accepted theories of Hawaiian ethnohistory. |
