Hawaii (Sandwich Islands)

About

This page follows the flag of Hawaii through the sources collected in the Historical Flag Atlas, setting documented flag history beside the printed depictions and keeping the two apart. What a publisher printed is evidence of what that publisher represented; it is not proof of what was flown. Three depictions are catalogued below, in the chronological order of their sources.

Status: Preliminary. The documented history below is assembled from the sources gathered in the study notes; several citations remain to be completed and are marked accordingly.

Names

European sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries usually call the archipelago the Sandwich Islands, the name James Cook gave it in 1778, and the c. 1863 plate in this collection prints Sandwich (Iles) accordingly. The kingdom unified under Kamehameha I in the early nineteenth century is called Hawaii or the Hawaiian Kingdom here. Printed labels are preserved as transcribed in each study.

Documented Flag History

The Hawaiian flag combines a Union Jack canton with a field of horizontal stripes, the canton standing for the kingdom's early association with Britain. Its origin is conventionally dated to the reign of Kamehameha I, around 1816.

The arrangement in use from 1845 onward has eight stripes, white, red, blue repeating from the top, one for each of the eight principal islands under a single sovereign. The Polynesian published it on 31 May 1845, though an account cited in the study notes places the adoption two years earlier, at the restoration of sovereignty in 1843.

Before 1845 the descriptions and depictions vary a great deal. Seven stripes are commonly reported, in differing orders. An 1831 translation gives “red, white, blue, red, white, blue, red, signifying seven islands,” and a recollection published in 1864 says that “the number of the stripes betoken 7 islands which are under the government Tameamea.” Visitors of the period mention many variations besides, and some foreign publications printed striped flags for the islands that look more like the flag of the East India Company than anything flown at Honolulu. The account cited in the notes as Reversal of the Hawaiian Flag holds that the stripe order was reversed when the flag was reissued, in reference to the overturn and restoration of the government.

Three political dates govern how foreign attributions should be read. The islands were ceded under duress to Captain Lord George Paulet on 25 February 1843, and Hawaiian flags were ordered burned; when Commodore Kearny asked for one in July, none could be found. Rear-Admiral Richard Thomas restored sovereignty on 31 July 1843. Britain and France jointly recognized Hawaiian independence on 28 November 1843. No British protectorate existed after that.

Collected Depictions

Source date	Source	Printed attribution	Study
c. 1863	Pavillons des principales puissances	Sandwich (Iles) — Protectorat de l'Angleterre	Study below
c. 1864	Johnson's New Chart of National Emblems	Hawaiian Islands. (Sandwich Islands.)	Note below
c. 1899	Flags of All Nations	Hawaii	Note below

Study: the c. 1863 Depiction

Source and printed label

The panel appears in the Puissances étrangères division of Pavillons des principales puissances (Armand Le Chevalier, Paris, c. 1863). The printed heading is Sandwich (Iles); the printed caption is Protectorat de l'Angleterre (“protectorate of England”).

Observation

The depiction shows a rectangular flag with a Union Jack canton at the upper hoist, spanning the depth of the upper four stripes. The field carries seven horizontal stripes, reading from the top: red, white, blue, red, white, blue, red. Neither the top nor the bottom stripe is white. The panel is hand-coloured, with visible hatching and colour bleed, as elsewhere on the plate.

Documented comparison

The flag in force at the plate's date, published in the Polynesian of 31 May 1845 and unchanged since, has eight stripes ordered white, red, blue from the top. The depiction departs from it twice: in count, seven rather than eight, and in order, red first and no white edge stripe at either margin.

It agrees stripe for stripe, however, with a pre-1845 arrangement attested in the sources gathered in the notes. The 1831 translation's “red, white, blue, red, white, blue, red, signifying seven islands,” read from the top down, is exactly the sequence printed here, and the count matches the 1864 recollection that the stripes “betoken 7 islands.”

Interpretation

The simplest reading is that the plate reproduces an obsolete but genuine earlier arrangement rather than misdrawing the current one. Count and order both match pre-1845 descriptions, and two matching errors are less likely than one inherited model, though the drawing and colouring conventions of the plate leave room for coincidence. That would mean copying from an older source or a predecessor plate instead of from observation, which was common practice and fits the wide inconsistency of foreign depictions of this flag throughout the period.

The protectorate attribution

The caption Protectorat de l'Angleterre is a separate anomaly resting on different evidence. Britain and France had jointly recognized Hawaiian independence in November 1843, and no British protectorate existed when the plate was printed. The attribution may echo the brief Paulet cession of that year, or the kingdom's long British association, symbolized by the canton itself, or simply an older source passed along unchecked. Whatever its origin, it records how a Parisian publisher of the early 1860s classified the islands, which is evidence of European understanding, or misunderstanding, of Hawaiian sovereignty.

Alternatives and remaining uncertainty

Three alternatives cannot yet be excluded: that the depiction is an engraver's or colourist's error that happens to match older descriptions; that it copies a particular intermediate source not yet identified; or that seven-stripe flags in the older order stayed in circulation, or in memory, later than the documented adoption suggests. The account of the stripe reversal and the 1831 and 1864 quotations reach this page through the preliminary notes. Their full citations remain to be secured, and the reading above should be weighed again once they are.

Confidence

High: the depiction is intended as the flag of Hawaii, and the protectorate attribution was obsolete or incorrect at the plate's date. Moderate: the depicted arrangement corresponds to a genuine pre-1845 form, per the sources cited in the notes. Tentative: the explanation of how that older form reached this plate.

Note: the c. 1864 Depiction

The panel sits in a position of some prominence, as one of only two small panels flanking the title at the head of Johnson's New Chart of National Emblems (Johnson & Ward, New York, copyright 1863). Its caption gives both names, Hawaiian Islands. (Sandwich Islands.), and unlike the French plate of the same years it attaches no political qualifier at all: no protectorate, no association, a kingdom among the nations.

The depiction shows the Union Jack canton over eight stripes in the documented order, white, red, blue repeating from the top and red at the bottom, the arrangement in force since 1845. As on the later c. 1899 sheet, the topmost white stripe is unprinted paper inside the drawn outline and is easy to miss, but count and order are both right, and the canton spans the upper four stripes as documented. The drawing is careful for its scale.

That makes the panel a sharp counter-example to its French contemporary. Within a year or two of each other, the Paris plate printed an obsolete seven-stripe red-first arrangement under an obsolete protectorate caption while the New York chart printed the current flag correctly, under both current names and no qualifier. Whatever older model Le Chevalier's plate followed, Johnson's compiler had better information here, which sharpens rather than settles the question raised in the 1863 study: where the French depiction came from.

Note: the c. 1899 Depiction

The panel appears among the nations of the eighth row of Flags of All Nations (American, c. 1899), captioned simply Hawaii, with no political qualifier. It shows the Union Jack canton and eight stripes in the documented order, white, red, blue repeating from the top and red at the bottom, the arrangement in force since 1845. The printing is loose. White stripes are unprinted paper, the widths are uneven, and the topmost white is nearly pinched out between the drawn outline and the first red, so that at a glance the flag can read as red-first. Allowing for the sheet's mass-market colour work, count and order are correct, and no fuller study is planned.

The interest here is chronological, and lies in what surrounds the panel. The sheet brackets to about 1896–1902. The Republic of Hawaii was annexed by the United States in August 1898 and organized as a territory in 1900, yet the publisher still presents Hawaii as a nation among nations, with no reference to the United States anywhere. The flag itself is not the anachronism this time; the c. 1864 Johnson panel had already printed the eight-stripe form correctly, and the design stayed in use under the republic and then the territory. What the panel records is the moment when the sovereignty went and the flag did not.

References

• Pavillons des principales puissances, panel Sandwich (Iles), in the present collection.
• Johnson's New Chart of National Emblems, panel Hawaiian Islands. (Sandwich Islands.), in the present collection.
• Flags of All Nations, panel Hawaii, in the present collection.
• The Polynesian (Honolulu), 31 May 1845 — publication of the eight-stripe arrangement. Full citation pending.
• Reversal of the Hawaiian Flag — account of the stripe reversal, quoting an 1864 recollection and an 1831 translation. Full citation pending.