Hawaii's Grinnell Missionary Stamps

Part IV
by Michael Mills

Grinnell Saga Update

The Grinnells are seventy-one Republic of Hawaii stamps that currently exist in limbo. Though very, very close in detail to the highly valued Hawaiian Missionary issues of 1851, differences have been noted.

They're a great stamp saga, whose story has as many twists and turns as the roads in California's Bur Sur Country. Those familiar with the Grinnells, will be interested to learn that new details have been added to the provenance story. In the January 2004 "Po`oleka O Hawaii" ("Stamps of Hawaii") from the Hawaiian Philatelic Society, the first part of "The Trail of the Grinnells," thirteen-pages with two pages of color illustrations, appeared written by Patrick Culhane, a great-great grandson of Charles Shattuck, who sold the stamps in question to George Grinnell in 1918.

The meat of Culhane's article in the January edition was that after the 1922 trial, where a judge ruled the Grinnells were fakes, more information was unearthed, and more recently Culhane, himself, dug up details in Hawaiian archives that he says substantiates the story and claims of the Shattuck and Grinnell heirs, lending more credence that the stamps are genuine varieties. In effect, Culhane has gone a long way in substantiating and documenting a family history and philatelic story.

The stamps' chain of title starts with sixteen-year-old William Emerson, who apparently was employed in the Hawaiian government printing office as an apprentice to Postmaster W.H. Whitney. Culhane writes about just such proof in the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society Library in Honolulu. Emerson's own letters to and from his family provide the next links and peg him as the likely source of the canceled Grinnells, while Emerson family papers at Honolulu's Bishop Museum seem to bear out that the handwriting on the back of one Grinnell is that of William's father John.

The second part of Culhane's "Trail of the Grinnells" appeared in the April edition of the HPS journal and it addressed a physical investigation on the Grinnells.

Starting in late 2001, the seven Grinnells were studied by Dr. Gene Hall, professor of analytic chemistry, at the Wright-Reiman Laboratory of Chemistry at Rutgers University in New Jersey, outside of New York City. Significantly, Hall's lab was able to subject the Grinnells to Raman Spectroscopy, to study their chemical signature, and X-Ray Fluorescence to uncover their elemental signature.

Hall's conclusion was that "All the inks on the stamps, postmarks and papers contained only pigments and chemical compounds that were available in the 1850’s." And Hall's results on the Grinnell postmarks was that "no pigments or compounds were inconsistent with 1850’s manufacture, and chemical and elemental matches were observed to the ink of the circular date stamp postmarks from covers of the period."

With the analytic results in hand, five authenticated Missionaries were subjected to the same tests as the Grinnells. Five stamps from the Tapling Collection in British Library in London were tested and the results compared to those of the Grinnells. The Taplings and the Grinnells both showed the same pigment of the blue ink --- Prussian blue, and both Tapling and Grinnell "killer" cancels were of the same pigment --- lampblack. Likewise, both Grinnells and Taplings had the same paper-brightening agents, specks of ultramarine blue, embedded in the paper and invisible to the unaided eye.