Brains, Beauty & Breeches

Aloha Wanderwell was an explorer, a vaudevillian and filmmaker, a female Indiana Jones, a wife and mother. She visited places no western man or woman had seen before. She was a figure of controversy, self-invention and marketing. The romance that informs her legend is both real and contrived.

Aloha was born on October 13, 1906. Inspired by the fantastic tales she read in her father’s beloved collection of boyhood books, she dreamed of travel, adventure, and intrigue in far-flung corners of the globe. In 1922, when she was 16, she embarked on an ambitious around-the–world expedition led by “Captain” Wanderwell…