Hawaii's Grinnell Missionary Stamps

Part II
by Michael Mills

At the 1922 trial in California philatelic experts testified that the Grinnells were counterfeits, and even Charles Shattuck's children cast doubt on them, when they said that their then-deceased father was not the source of the stamps. (They claimed he'd lost everything in a 1910 house fire.)

Klemann's experts said the Grinnells were printed by a photoengraving process, and his lawyers used photo enlargements for the judge to do photo comparisons of certified Missionaries and Grinnell's stamps. The defense didn’t refute Klemann’s claims, simply stating that George Grinnell had given Klemann no assurance about the stamps authenticity, which he had accepted.

The Judge J.P. Wood ruled the stamps were "worthless bits of paper," and Klemann got his money back. The stamps reverted to George Grinnell, who spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name.

Caspary, a noted NY collector of the time, had deemed the Grinnells forgeries based on their cancels, and after the trial, philatelists focused on them. The Grinnell cancels were unique, and up and through the 1950s, the consensus among US experts was that the cancels were indeed fakes. And thus, so were the stamps.

In the 1995 “Honolulu Advertiser” Hawaiian stamp auction, a Grinnell was included and described as a reproduction: “One of the skillful counterfeits that caused the great Grinnell Missionary scandal of the 1920s.”

Yet, questions about the Grinnells still linger, and the matter has not been laid to rest. Recently, the descendants of Grinnell and Shattuck gathered up their Grinnells, and they are now being examined for authentication by the Expert Committee of the Royal Philatelic Society in London, chaired by Patrick Pearson.

Counterfeit?

The Missionaries and the Grinnells show differences between the stamps' numerals, borders, inscription letters, paper, ink, and cancels, leading to the conclusion that these are not Missionaries. Convincing circumstantial evidence to be sure, but given the claimed provenance, might the Grinnells simply be an unrecorded variety? Maybe, but first the facts.

The Grinnell type face shows up in no other 1851-era, Hawaiian  documents coming from the kingdom’s GPO or elsewhere in Hawaii, before or after the Grinnells, and because Hawaii is the most isolated inhabited place on earth it's highly unlikely to have been used just this once.

Genuine?

Advocates for the Grinnells claim various alibis for their authenticity, but all rely more or less on William Emerson’s involvement in printing the Missionary stamps and he and/or his brother and parents being the source of the Grinnells. The provenance is everything.

Perhaps, they say, William Emerson was duly authorized to print small additional quantities of postage stamps, and owing to supply and logistic weaknesses, Honolulu’s assistant postmaster had to improvise at the GPO. This then would make the Grinnells varieties of the already cataloged Missionary issues.