from The Polynesian or Reverend Damon’s print shop really found matches to the Missionaries but not the Grinnells? If so, they need to show us exactly where those matches are to be found, and illustrate them, before this anecdotal claim can be relied on. And there has to be an exact match, close doesn’t count. Will matches for the Grinnell type pieces be found? Someone would need to spend a lot of time looking, but you never know. When William Emerson was writing to his mother in September, 1851, and he mentioned “motto wafers,” he was not referring to Missionary stamps as has been suggested by the Arrigos. Motto wafers are little gummed pieces of paper commonly used in those days to help seal envelopes. The owners of the Grinnells have suggested the unused Grinnells may have been sent to New England to be used on letters TO Hawaii. The justification that this was done in other instances is the Pogue correspondence to Maria Pogue, two covers and one large fragment of a cover sent from the US (Census 65, 67, 75). These are incoming letters with a 5-cent Missionary on them in addition to US stamps. A key point which isn’t brought out (see Meyer/Harris pages 56-58) is that Mrs. Pogue is the SISTER of Henry Whitney, the Honolulu postmaster (see Advertiser Sale lot 7). This opens other interpretations of what the situation really was in the Pogue case (I don’t have an answer). It may have been some special accommodation Whitney made for his sister, and we don’t know whether the Missionary stamps were put on the letters prior to mailing in the US, or after they arrived at the Honolulu post office. It may be significant that these Pogue letters are the only examples of inbound usages with Missionary stamps. Patrick Culhane has suggested that perhaps William Emerson took the unused Grinnells with him in his Book of Sermons on his final voyage on the whaling ship, so he could stamp his letters. There are two places in the book where “stain” images of stamps can be seen, one opposite a sermon headed “Discourses upon the Recovery from Illness.” While it is possible he had the book containing the unused stamps with him on the voyage, I feel it would be more likely that in his hasty departure from Waialua to catch the ship, he took the book without realizing the stamps were there. The suggestion William took the stamps on the whaling ship planning to use them on the letters he wrote while at sea seems to me far-fetched at best. On the subject of postmarks having to match known sailing dates, I make two comments. The first is, that if the postmarking devices were in Waialua, and applied then and there, we would not expect the dates to 27
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