Naukane
Native Hawaiian chief who traveled through North America in the early 19th century
Naukane (c. 1779 – February 2, 1850), also known as John Coxe, Edward Cox, and Coxe was a Native Hawaiian chief who traveled widely through North America in the early 19th century. He was either considered a member of the royal household of Kamehameha I or a chiefly retainer, possibly the same person as Noukana, the son of High Chief Kamanawa, the King's uncle and trusted advisor.
Life
In 1811, the Tonquin, belonging to the American Pacific Fur Company (PFC), stopped on Oahu and recruited twenty Hawaiians to work as labourers (known as kanakas) in the Pacific Northwest. King Kamehameha I appointed Naukane to join the group and look after the interests of Hawaiian laborers.
On the voyage to Fort Astoria on the Columbia River, Naukane was given the name John Coxe, because he resembled a shipmate on the Tonquin.
Soon after Naukane arrived at Fort Astoria, David Thompson of the Montreal-based North West Company (NWC) also arrived. In July 1811, Thompson and a group of Astorians began to journey up the Columbia River. The two parties traveled together until they reached the Columbia Gorge, after which Thompson went on ahead. Before parting ways, there was an exchange of some of the workers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Naukane” as native Hawaiian chief who traveled through North America in the early 19th century. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 17, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q6981194. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1779, 1850 and 1811.
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This entry incorporates text from “Naukane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.