Hawaiian Missionaries
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The Hawaiian Missionaries are the first postage stamps of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Issued in 1851, they came to be known as the "Missionaries" because they were primarily found on the correspondence of missionaries working in the islands. Only a handful of these stamps have survived to the present day, and so they are among the great rarities of philately.
In the first of the 19th century, mail to and from Hawaii was carried by ship captains on an adhoc basis. By 1849, partly as a side effect of the California Gold Rush and the settlement of California, mail to and from San Francisco had increased greatly, and in response the Hawaiian government established a post office and set postal rates. Henry M. Whitney, the first postmaster, was authorized to print stamps for those rates in June of 1851, which he did using the printing press of the The Polynesian, a government newspaper.
The stamps went on sale October 1, 1851, in three denominations covering three rates: the 2-cent stamp was for newspapers going to the US, the 5-cent value was for regular mail to the US, and the 13-cent value was for mail to the US East Coast, combining the 5 cents of Hawaiian postage, a 2-cent ship fee, and 6 cents to cover the transcontinental US rate.
The design was very simple, consisting only of a central numeral of the denomination framed by a standard printer's ornament, with the denomination repeated in words at the bottom, and the top reading "Hawaiian / Postage" for the 2- and 5-cent values, but "H.I. & U.S. / Postage" for the 13-cent value, reflecting its unusual role of paying two different countries' postage. A thin line surrounded by a thicker line framed the stamp as a whole. All stamps were printed in the same shade of blue on pelure paper, an extremely thin tissue-like paper prone to tearing; 90% of known Missionaries are damaged in some way.
Although the stamps were in regular use until as late as 1856, only about 200 have survived (Scott Trepel's census in the Siegel catalog lists 197, but see below), of which 28 are unused, and 32 are on cover.
The most valuable of all Missionary items is a cover sent to New York City bearing the only known use of the 2-cent value on cover, as well as a 5-cent value and two 3-cent US stamps. It was in a bundle of correspondence shoved into a factory furnace around 1870, but packed so tightly that the fire went out (though one side of the cover bears a scorch mark). The factory was abandoned; 35 years later, a workman cleaning the factory for reuse discovered the stuffed furnace, and knew enough about stamps to save the unusual covers. This cover was acquired by George H. Worthington in 1905, then bought by Alfred Caspary around 1917. It changed hands several more times, and in the 1995 Siegel auction it realized a price of 1.9 millions US$, making it one of the highest-priced of all philatelic items.
[edit] The Grinnell Missionaries
In 1920, 43 additional Missionaries appeared on the philatelic market. They came from a Charles Shattuck, whose mother had apparently corresponded with a missionary family in Hawaii, were acquired by George H. Grinnell and then sold to dealer John Klemann for $65,000. But in 1922, the stamps' authenticity became the subject of a court case, and they were adjudged forgeries.
They have been studied on a number of occasions since then, but opinion remains divided. In 1922, experts testified that the Grinnells had been produced by photogravure and not by handset moveable type, but in the 1980s Keith Cordrey showed that they were probably typeset, and the Royal Philatelic Society agreed. Further analysis showed that the ink and paper were consistent with 1850s types. Even so, the Royal Philatelic Society declared the stamps to be counterfeit, and is preparing a book detailing their findings.
In May 2006, Mystic Stamp Company announced that they had acquired 36 of the Grinnells from the descendants of George Grinnell, and were selling the group "as is" for 1.5 million US$.
[edit] References
- Donna O'Keefe, Linn's Philatelic Gems 1 (Amos Press, 1989)
- Siegel auction catalog for the Honolulu Advertiser collection, November 1995
