# KS1053 - Mystic's "The Grinnell Missionaries" Booklet, 2016, and RPSL "The Grinnell Hawaiian Missionary Stamps" hardcover, 2006

Read Mystic’s booklet on the “Grinnell Missionaries” for a fascinating overview of this delicious philatelic detective story.

 

Hardcover book is the opinion of the Royal Philatelic Society, London on the authenticity of the Grinnells.  Since publication of that report, two of the stamps have been proven to be genuine Missionary stamps.  

 

 

 

The Hawaiian Islands have beckoned and beguiled Americans for at least two centuries.  By the mid-19th century, Protestant Christian missionaries had settled in that Polynesian paradise, located in the Pacific Ocean about 2,400 miles west and south of the continental United States, and had initiated religious and educational work among the indigenous residents.  In those days, the Hawaiian Kingdom was a constitutional monarchy whose independence had been recognized by the United States in 1842, led by King Kamehameha III.

 

Nearly all early mail from Hawaii consists of missionaries' letters and publications to America.  For that reason, the country's first postage stamps, issued in 1851, are known as Hawaiian Missionaries.  They are among the rarest and most famous stamps in the world.  After the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, Hawaiian stamps became philatelically even more important as issue of a US possession.