Hawaiian Missionaries: 1851 Stamps and Their Prices

The Hawaiian Missionaries are the first postage stamps of the Kingdom of Hawaii, issued in 1851 in values of 2, 5 and 13 cents. They were typeset from ordinary printer's type on thin, brittle paper in Honolulu, with no engraving and no security features, and they look exactly like what they are: a small local printing job.

They get their name from where the surviving examples came from. Hawaii's mail in the 1850s was dominated by American missionaries writing home, and their letters were kept by families on the mainland. Stamps used by anyone else were mostly thrown away with the envelopes.

About 200 are thought to survive in total. The 2-cent is the scarce one, with 15 recorded examples, of which exactly one is unused. That is a smaller surviving population than most of the famous European classics, which is why a stamp that looks this plain sits in the world's top rank.

The single most important Hawaiian item is an envelope, not a stamp. The Dawson cover is the only known cover carrying a 2-cent Missionary, and the only intact cover bearing two different Missionary denominations — the 2-cent and the 5-cent — alongside a horizontal pair of United States 1851 three-cent stamps for the onward American postage. It was addressed to Miss Eliza A. Dawson in New York.

It survives by accident. In 1905 a factory worker found it in a batch of old letters that were on their way to a furnace, and pulled it out with only light scorching along one edge.

Its auction record is unusual for repeating itself. The cover made US$1,900,000 at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries in 1995, and exactly the same figure — US$1,900,000 — at Siegel on 25 June 2013, in the Steven C. Walske Collection of Hawaiian Postal History, against an estimate of US$2–3 million. In between it changed hands privately at a reported US$2.1 million.

The paper used in 1851 was thin and has not aged well. Most surviving Missionaries have thin spots, tears, creases or repairs, and a substantial number have been restored at some point. Collectors accept condition faults here that would be disqualifying on a European classic, because the alternative is no example at all.

That also makes the issue difficult to buy safely. Reprints and imitations have circulated since the nineteenth century, and because the originals were typeset rather than engraved, a competent forger does not need much. Type shape, letter spacing, paper thickness and the specific settings used for each value are the points of comparison.

No Missionary should be bought without a current certificate. The Philatelic Foundation and the American Philatelic Expertizing Service both handle them, and auction houses will normally have a certificate in place before consigning one.

Almost every article about these stamps repeats a story from 1890s Paris: a collector named Gaston Leroux was murdered by a rival, Hector Giroux, for a Hawaiian Missionary, and the stamp was found in Giroux's collection after his arrest.

Treat it as a story rather than a documented fact. It has been retold in philatelic literature for more than a century and is often presented without a source; several philatelic writers regard it as legend. It is repeated here because you will meet it everywhere, not because it can be verified from the record.

What the story does capture accurately is how small the pool of these stamps has always been. When fifteen examples of a value exist, every one of them is known to specialists and has a traceable history.

Hawaii issued stamps as a kingdom, a republic and then a US territory until 1900, and the later issues are ordinary collectable stamps: engraved, perforated, often showing monarchs such as Kamehameha V, Kalakaua and Liliuokalani. Used examples of the 1880s and 1890s issues are affordable and turn up regularly in mixed collections.

If you have something inscribed Hawaii or Hawaiian Postage, it is far more likely to belong to that later group than to the 1851 typeset issue. The 1851 stamps have no perforations, no engraved portrait, and a crude typeset appearance with the value spelled out in words.

Photograph the stamp and the app identifies it, which is the quickest way to place it in the right period before you look up a value. For the wider context of how covers outrank single stamps, see most valuable stamps in the world.