HAWAII, MARQUESAS ISLANDS and PITCAIRN

An important album of sketches including the second known (and first detailed) panorama of Honolulu, and the earliest known view of Kealakekua Bay taken from Ka'awaloa, [Hawaii, Pitcairn, Marquesas Islands, Peru and Chile, 1837-1840]

Footnotes

THE SECOND EARLIEST PANORAMIC DRAWING OF HONOLULU - a new discovery in an album of Hawaiian views. The first known panorama is in the Bishop Museum - an ink and wash view dated 1834. Of smaller scale and from further out at sea, it gives only a general impression of the shore and lacks the building-by-building detail of the present image (see Forbes, Encounters with Paradise, plate 48). Two similar panoramas were printed or executed in 1840, and one appears in Edward Belcher's 1843 narrative of the voyage of HMS Sulphur in 1836-42. It was also at this time that the Lahainaluna Seminary Press began to publish engravings, including in 1838 a depiction of Honolulu from inland, after a drawing done by Edward Bailey at the foot of Punchbowl Hill (Forbes, Engraved at Lahainaluna, plate 27).

While the Pacific sketches are unsigned, there is good reason to think the artist was on board HMS Imogene. The Imogene visited Honolulu, the Marquesas Islands, Pitcairn, Valparaiso and Callao between October 1837 and June 1838. In October 1837, Captain Bruce and the crew of the Imogene were at Kealakekua Bay, where they fastened a memorial plaque to the stump of a coconut tree near the site of Cook's death. The view of the Bay in the present album - the earliest known drawing of the Bay from the Ka'awaloa side - clearly shows the stump in question.

The album bears the ownership inscription of a Jane Ross on board HMS President. Commanded by Admiral Ross (not apparently the husband or father of Jane, but likely to be a closely relation), the President certainly came into contact with the Imogene in the summer of 1838 when both ships were docked in South America. This is presumably how the drawings came into the possession of Jane Ross. The six Chilean sketches can be attributed to Charles C. Wood (1792-1856), who lived and worked in Chile from 1819 until the final year of his life.

We are grateful to David W. Forbes, author of Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People, 1778-1941 (1992) and Engraved at Lahainaluna: a History of Printmaking by Hawaiians at the Lahainaluna Seminary, 1834 to 1844 (2012), for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Provenance: "Jane Ross, H.M.S. President, Valparaiso May 7th 1838", inscription on front pastedown.