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A number of years ago the volunteer transcribers at the New Bedford Whaling Museum were involved in a project transcribing 19th century whaling crew lists to be added to an international database, www.whalinghistory.org , where typing a person’s or ship’s name into the search link brings up crew lists, information about the ship, the person sought, links to log books, and any information related to the person or ship. Old ancestors of local families have been discovered this way.

Previous to this project I had transcribed the logbook of the whale ship Newport while it and the Northern Pacific whale fleet wintered on Herschel Island on the northern edge of Canada about 60 miles East of Barrow Alaska in the mid 1890s. The ships would be packed in with snow and sand to protect the hulls from the crush of forming winter ice and would remain there as a little town until the spring thaw and the return of migrating whales. Why chase them when you can wait for them to come to you?

There is no whaling going on, just the activities of those living their lives as normally as possible waiting for the thaw, living on the ships converted into housing with shelters, recreation rooms, dining halls, and a baseball diamond on the tundra. The log keeper of the Newport, in contrast to others that made cursory entries as there was really nothing to write home about, kept detailed daily log entries, many ending with his mentioning, without explanation, that he worked the lathe.

This caught my interest and, as a volunteer without the fear of getting fired because I might not be fast enough and, as the museum loves it if in checking on some minor detail out of curiosity a transcriber might find some new historic fact, as has happened often, I went searching to solve this mystery.

Quite by accident, I cannot remember how, just that I came across the journal of Sophie Porter, a captain’s wife, who, like other wives, had joined her husband for the voyage and the wintering at Herschel. Not being an official log book with its requirements of form, style, and substance, this was a personal diary filled with non-ship related, more social details such as those about Christmas, birthday parties, daily routines, and deaths, all while referring to crew members not in words that implied a power and status hierarchy like the captains’ attitude toward crew which the wives did not share, as she spoke of the various crew members, both good and bad, the way one would talk about a neighbor. While her husband may have seen the crew as the great unwashed, Sophie’s was a softer attitude. In one of her many entries about the social life of the “colony” she mentioned a baseball game, the one depicted in a painting done that year and which hung in the museum until a recent exhibit change, and subsequently how the captain of the Newport had brought some bats to replace the broken ones, and the mystery of the lathe was solved.

It took an accidental cross reference to a journal, come upon by kismet, to solve a mystery mentioned multiple times without explanation in the original source material, the log book. 

Left only to the Newport Log, we would know neither that the game in the painting was a real scene captured by the artist nor what the captain’s obsession was with the lathe whose product he never mentioned in the log.

It gets better.

During the transcribing of many rather mundane entries by a captain fulfilling his duties and in doing so was meticulous with events and details, listing the poundage of meat brought by the local people whose names he listed, the many men who ran away, those who were frozen, the number of times and details about limbs amputated from frost bite, the details of what the men were doing beyond the simple words “employed with ship business” and telling exactly what the work was, and there among his many entries. included as a factual recount without comment, was a single sentence stating,

“Monday Feb 11^th

A light breeze from the W.N.W. Cloudy and misty Bar. 30.10. Ther. -4 Got a load of meat put the Steward (Scott) forward for Sodomy and Onanism of Bark Wanderer one of the men deserted but was overtaken and brought back.”

Confusion comes in as runaways had also been mentioned in passing among a number of other details in earlier and later entries and, because of the lack of punctuation in the original, sentences are blended and separation comes through context which is lacking when events are listed in order of occurrence and not by category .

I was curious about this because it was the first mention I had come across of Homosexual activity, and it was written in such a way as to imply two possibilities. Either Mr. Scott was alone, which brings up the question as to this being a one time interruption, or, because it concerns an activity that would involve another person, perhaps the man later to be noted as having been the man who ran away, or the reference to the run away was not related to this at all or just, as usual, an unrelated detail included because it was part of the day’s activities, like working the lathe when in an entry he had been talking about sanding the deck. The runaway was noted as being from a different ship than the Newport, meaning either there was an inter-ship hook up, or there is no connection between Mr. Scott and the runaway.

The other alternative is that in not mentioning he had caught anyone in the act, it is possible that the steward could have been “busy” since they left the port of San Francisco, continuing during the wintering and, growing tired of it especially if it continued while all male crews of many ships were gathered in close proximity, the captain may have acted in such a way as to slow things down if not totally prevent Mr. Scott’s activities. To this end, the Captain isolated him from the crew. In another log book a captain had done that to a crew member because he was simply a jerk and might have messed up the whole Catalpa mission at the last minute.

Questions engender research, so I went digging a little.

With the name of the ship and Mr. Scott’s name and position on it, as well as that of the captain, researching Steward Scott would be simple to investigate and learn a lot about if there was information, and so I went to www.whalinghistory.org, entered the name of the ship from which the runaway had, well, run, and what came up included the names of the three captains who had mastered the ship, Thrasher, which I was not researching but which the website included with all search link information, and after the name of Captain Weeks, in the column with the heading “Death”, while nothing was there for the other two, the notation “At Sea?” came after his.

This meant someone somewhere wanted information that was necessary for that person and most likely useful to others, and, as I was familiar with the other two captain’s, Bodfish and Tilton, Tilton having been the captain of the Newport, the worker of the lathe, who had taken over the Thrasher, Weeks’s ship, when he died, and was familiar with all three through the Sophie Porter journal, I knew how Weeks died because Sophie, whose journal I had not looked at for six years until I went looking for Mr. Scott, explained,

“Fine clear weather fresh wind the mate of the Wanderer reports seeing the runaways east of the southwest sand spit At 5:15 p.m. Captain Charles Weeks fell from between decks striking we suppose the keels and then the skin of the ship He was insensible when picked up and died at 1 oclock He was quite conscious when he died His collar bones were crushed in and there was apparently some injury to the back.’ “

He may have been on a whaling voyage, but in light of the wintering, he did nor die at sea as his ship, like the others, was surrounded by arctic ice and was not sailing. 

Sophie Porter goes on in an entry a few days later,

“Captain Weeks’ remains were laid up in the ice house to await the arrival of the Jeanie when they will be taken to San Francisco the casket was placed on a sled and draped with the Ensign A large body of men and all the Captains and ladies followed to the vault our attention was given then to poor Mrs. Weeks who needs the most tender care I stayed up with her last night and will take turns with Mrs. Cook in doing so til she is a little stronger”

I might point out that even in her personal journal, in a serious entry, Mrs. Porter threw in a reference to runaways in the same by-the-way manner as the runaway from the Wanderer was mentioned in the Newport log.

Or not.

There is a research topic here.

While my intention was to look up Mr. Scott and, perhaps, begin a whole new area of study at the New Bedford Whaling Museum with all its resources and connections dealing with those whose sexual orientation was Gays or who, because of long voyages on ships filled with men, performed circumstantial Homosexual acts for release because of physical need, to pursue research in a more formal manner than just taking it for granted that there would have to have been Gay crew members and homosexual activity on ships by sheer number and circumstances when in one case, which implies many more, there is an actual recorded bit of homosexual activity, instead, I ended up answering a question on an international website because I had found, by accident, the answer to the present question many years ago before it was even asked or the website existed upon which it could be asked. A total stranger, and the project itself, now has the answer because I was following one sentence in an old ship’s log that caught my attention but was totally unrelated until the threads got pulled.

A “lowly” transcriber who, like the others, routinely comes across information no one is looking for but will be happy it was found, had his work validated and his worth shown and that of his fellow transcribers, all unpaid volunteers, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He also used the website to which he and they had contributed through a variety of transcription projects and was able to use the website and his contribution as research to answer some unknown question.

I had the privilege to see this happen in my case as I had to go back and review past work that, had Mr. Scott not been so obvious, I would never have looked back at as I had moved on to a new project now, and having no pressing need to, just wanted to answer one question but answered another.

The transcribers come together at times and while transcribing, ask each other questions about things we come across which often leads to an answer being found and we go home satisfied with our work and our discovery unaware that while we assuaged our own curiosity, we also did so for others from many places now and in the future.

This thing with Captain Weeks shows that even as the transcribers may seem isolated from the big picture, obscure as we may seem to be, we are feeding information to those who need it and are benefiting from it in whatever way the benefit comes without us knowing that we are more than individuals on keyboards, part of a web from which, like all of us on earth looking at our galaxy from here, see little there while in reality it is huge.

Mr. Scott will have to wait until my next shift at the museum.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if this man who could have gone the rest of time as an obscure reference in one sentence out of thousands in a logbook from a multi-year voyage over 130 years ago (by the way this entry about Steward Scott was written 100 years before I arrived in Oklahoma in 1993) became the seed for studies related to Gays in the whaling industry going beyond the wealthy and famous owners whose same sex activities were of interest because every era has its Kadashians. 

The New Bedford Whaling Museum restarted the New Bedford Lyceum by having the author of a recently banned book, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” speaking on the present frenzy of conservatives to ban books, and just as Frederick Douglass spoke and educated the locals about the true conditions of slavery and who Black people really were if their potential is respected not subjugated, George Johnson, a Black, non-binary individual did the same for every stripe on the Rainbow Flag.

Between that speech and the Newport entry, this would be a good time to have the New Bedford Whaling Museum institute a committee on Gay studies, or whatever acceptable name is assigned by the youth to the new area of study that will be as on-going and unending as all the other areas of study at the institution.

Hoping that any research on Steward Smith shows either good things, or obscurity as opposed to his having gone too deeply in the shadows as far as identity and activity and was not a good person, perhaps, to avoid all the discussion of what Gay people call ourselves these days and all the infighting about the dominant identity, we just name it after him, the first discovered actively Gay crew member identified by name.

There may be plenty of references in earlier log books even if described in Victorian era, Quaker vocabulary, but to my knowledge, this is the first one found.

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It was an odd moment.

It was the mid-nineties and I had been in Oklahoma about a year and my involvement in Gay Rights activism had gotten me to become a volunteer for and be sworn in by the City bCouncil president as a member of a subcommittee to review and revise the city’s Human Rights Ordinance.

Obviously, adding “Sexual Orientation” to cover the Gay citizens was a goal.

This was the Buckle of the Bible Belt at the time and this would not be easy.

The members of the subcommittee itself were in favor of the addition, except for the one or two members who had volunteered for the work in order to prevent something like this, and, after much discussion and revision, the sub-committee produced a document for the Council’s approval.

Usually those in attendance at the live streaming of the i council meetings was very low, usually made up of people there for a specific agenda item and then would leave when it was addressed, but for the meeting where the ordinance was to be reviewed, discussed, and, hopefully, passed, the room was full.

Like a wedding in church, the two sids, those for the addition and those against, gathered on opposite sides of the chamber with a cadre of Baptist pastors taking up most of the front benches on their side and those on the other gathered in a similar sized group, but a little toward the back and middle of the chamber.

Cable cameras captured the gathered pastors whose placement had them on camera in far shots and close ups of the dais. Members of the Gay Community, many of whom could lose their jobs, homes, and social standing if they were seen, sat outside of camera range with only the speakers representing the Community up front and visible. 

Yes, little details like that were considerations in the past and may be again.

The person presenting the proposed revisions went through any addition or subtraction, explaining the reasons for it, and summarized the sub-committee’s discussions to show there had actually been some and this was not an automatic move.

When the time for public comments came, those wanting to add the words “Sexual Orientation” presented facts and figures based on statistics and studies to show such protections are good, not only for those directly affected, but the community at large.

The pastors, however, had a different approach. 

They wanted to talk about sex.

Pornograhy was basically illegal in Oklahoma at the time and none could be bought or sold in the state unless it followed certain guidelines. There were to be no direct shots of the main event, only the scenes leading up to it with the only parts allowed shown being the two bodies in motion, but never together at the point of co-mingling with certain camera angles forbidden as they would clearly imply what was going on downtown as you are forced to look at the foliage in a outlying neighborhood.

To get the good stuff you would have to drive across the Red River into Texas where there was a Porno Palace just across state lines, approachable by a service road from which you could not reenter the highway and head back to Oklahoma without first driving up to the on-ramp further up by the Welcome Center so whether you had reentered after visiting the center or the Porn Palace could not be determined by Texas law enforcement, and you would be in general traffic coming from Texas into Oklahoma. 

There is another such porno place a few more miles into Texas, but for the pastors’ purposes, the one across the state line was adventure enough.

Standing in the council chamber while being streamed live into the homes of the people, a pastor confessed to the crime of having crossed state lines to purchase illegal material and then transporting it across state lines to a state in which it was clearly illegal. To emphasize his various attempted points as he spoke, the pastor began to wave one of the Porn magazines he had bought to prove the perversion of the Gays, having chosen magazines that contained some of the more out there sexual activity dealing with fetishes, BDSM, scat, and most other activities of a limitted interest nature and practiced with equal relish by heteroseulas in porn productions, claiming it represented the regular behavior of all Gay people. 

He was on live cable only able to wave one magazine around and hold it up for view because he had handed the other magazines he had purchased to the pastors to his left and right who, after leafing through them passed their copy on down the line to the next pastors who also peruse before passing.

He was apparently attempting to explain that you can learn all about Gay sex if you go to a porn store, I guess, just as anyone could learn all about being Heterosexual and a good life companion by getting information solely from porn.

My parents had three sons which would mean they were having Heterosexual sex on occasion. I never saw a whip or ball gag among their things. How Heterosexual were they, really  if they weren’t doing all those things you see Straight couples doing in magazines and videos?

The magazines did eventually reach the dais. 

One side presented statistics and studies, one having been conducted by the first Bush administration that reveal the horrifying number of teen suicides annually and how the treatment of Gay youth drove many to it.

On the other side, a pastor who had broken the law was confessing to it as he passed the evidence around the chamber, condemned Gay people for leading children to sin as he stood in the Council Chamber  waving around the visual evidence of his crime, committing a further one by displaying the porn in public while reciting in detail some activities pictured in the porn.

There had been no warning to viewers, especially those with children in the room, of the impending sexual content, nor was the broadcast on any time delay. 

The pastor’s actions, his constant reference to and presentation of pictures of men in flagrante delicto, and his detailed descriptions of sex acts, heavy on the fetishes.

One side exercised decorum, respect for space, presentation of facts and personal anecdotes, and attention to the audience.

The other side, the pastors, got up in turn and described sex acts, the most fringe they could find while displaying illegal pornography in public.

While one side read reports and statistics, the other, like that old priest with Jaws I wrote of in an earlier blog who did not read the book but spent his time underlining the curse words in the novel, these pastors prepared to object to the addition of “sexual orientation” to the Human Rights Ordinance by going to a porno palace with the intention of violating the state’s pornography laws and spending time looking at all the magazines to see all the ways people have sex to find the ones that best fit their purpose. This meant they had to look at, pick up, examine, evaluate, and compare a lot of pornographic material and objects to choose the ones that might be most effective at a live streamed public meeting of the City Council in it’s chamber.

In the end the pastors, who were never pursued for their confessed crime, won..

The City Council members accepted the testimony of the pastors and decided that, although it had actually been made clear that Sexual Orientation should be included and they had no firm ground upon which to reject the revision to the civil rights ordinance, if there was no ordinance there would be nothing to revise. 

To avoid adding the words they admitted should be added, the City Council voted to rescind the existing ordinance without replacement and to disband the city’s Human Rights Commission.

In the capitol city of the state of Oklahoma it was decided that in order to keep Gay people from having Civil Rights, no citizen should have them.

If your rights were violated, there was no longer a way to address it through the city.

Book Bans?

Did that in Oklahoma 20 years ago.

Dick picks in a government chamber viewable by anyone with a television?

Stand aside Marjorie Taylor Greene. That was almost 30 years ago in Oklahoma.

Taking away the rights of the majority to deny rights to a minority as the Supreme Court is bent on doing?

Again, been there, done that.

The problem was that when these things were happening, rather than seeing the canary in the coal mine, the rest of the country just walked away from the mine because it did not have a big enough name.

The arguments are the same and the counter information stronger as it has been tested and proven.

As far as Hunter Biden?

Moe Shaft got his dick pic televised long before this.

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