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It’s getting to the point that airline travelers need bethels, like those established in the 19th century as sailors’ refuges in ports around the world.

The first definition of “bethel” in the American Heritage Dictionary is “a hallowed or holy place,” but I’m referring more to the second definition: “a chapel for seafarers.” The name is derived from “bet” and “el,” the Hebrew words for “house” and “God,” and the original Bethel was the place in Israel where Jacob fell asleep on a stone and dreamed of a ladder reaching to heaven.

Alaskans naturally link the name with the town 340 miles west of Anchorage. Donald Orth’s respected “Dictionary of Alaska Placenames” tells us that the village was originally an Eskimo settlement named Mumtrekhlogamute, which means “smokehouse.” When the census–taker, Ivan Petroff, visited there in 1880, he reported 41 residents, who were known as the smokehouse people because of a notable structure for that purpose.

Five years later, a Moravian mission was established there and was named “Bethel” after the passage in Genesis and because it was a port. For the record, Wikipedia, the enormous and sometimes erratic online encyclopedia, used to claim that the original village had the Yupik name Mamterillermiut, but I’ll put my money on Orth.

Moravians and Baptists established seaman’s bethels at ports around the world to offer sailors places to congregate and seek aid and solace instead of the usual bars and brothels.

The bethel in Sydney, Australia, for instance, was where several sailors from the American whaling ship “Sharon” sought shelter in 1844. Their captain, Howes Norris, had beaten, tortured and murdered an African-American crewman over the course of many months, primarily due to his race. When most of the crew was out in whaling boats some months after the murder, Norris, who was by then chronically drunk, was left onboard the “Sharon” with several native islanders who’d joined the ship following the desertion of most of the original crew. Captain Norris had begun to mistreat one of the islanders, and they retaliated by hacking him to pieces.   Despite its grisly nature, my mom recently recommended a book about the event by Joan Druett titled “In the Wake of Madness,” and although the New York Times reviewer tried to pan it, I’ve learned my mom’s taste is more reliable. Remarkably, two journals were kept by members of the Sharon’s crew, and the author drew on them to flesh out the murky story.

One of the journalists was Benjamin Clough, the third mate, who was out in the whaling boats when cries from the ship’s cook heralded the captain’s murder. When the first and second mates prevaricated, Clough waited until nightfall and swam to the Sharon and boarded her, killing two of the frenzied islanders and subduing the other, suffering numerous wounds in the process.

His superiors were both related to the murdered captain and consequently didn’t want word of the captain’s crimes and murder to emerge. Eventually the “Sharon” arrived in Sydney, where several of the surviving original crew visited the local bethel and described the foul deeds. The poor, hard lot of the sailors was already an international scandal, and by the time Clough reached America again, accounts of his actions had preceded him and he was a hero.

I wish the Seattle airport had had a bethel for my mom to turn to last fall when she was subjected to hours of harassment and questioning by U.S. immigration authorities upon returning from a Smithsonian Institution tour of North Africa.

A Sea-Tac bethel would have been helpful as well to University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Reinhard Neuhauser, who was shamefully detained and strip-searched recently by the same authorities there.

Air travel has been sadly altered for fear of terrorism, and the harsh provisions of the Patriot Act have affected libraries’ ability to protect their patron’s privacy.

All’s not lost so long as there’s a Sunshine Week. It’s sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to promote a more open government. That’s right in line with the public library’s mission of providing all points of view, so citizens can decide issues for themselves.

In fact, public libraries are bethels for all mariners of the mind.