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The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, for example, which featured the same text written in three different languages, allowed archaeologists to recover the lost language of the Egyptians and decipher the surviving written records of their history.

A set of fragile sketchbooks residing in the Bishop Museum has become something of a Rosetta Stone for uncovering Hawaii’s past. The two sketchbooks, containing watercolor drawings of Hawaiian antiquities that were taken from the islands in the 1770s, were painted in the 1780s by a British teenager.

They depict feathered cloaks and helmets, as well as implements made from stone and bone.

One of the sketchbooks, which are rarely open to public viewing, is on display now at Bishop Museum as part of the visually dramatic exhibit that opened in May. The exhibit, which explores the manifestations of the color red, with its deep symbolic meanings in Oceania, features the sketchbook open to a painting made by the young painter, Sarah Stone. It depicts a richly colored miniature feathered hale that is believed to have stood at the entrance to one of Hawaii’s great stone heiaus.

The feathered hale itself is held in the collection of a museum in Vienna. It is believed to have been one of the extraordinarily valuable items carted away to Europe by the Captain James Cook expedition. Curators at the Bishop Museum had hoped to display the hale itself here with the sketchbook at the exhibit, but Viennese authorities said it was too fragile and wouldn’t allow it to revisit the islands, according to Leah Caldeira, director of Bishop Museum Library and Archives.

But at least we have the sketchbooks.

For Hawaiian ethnologists, the two sketchbooks have allowed them to identify and track down some of Hawaii’s precious antiquities that were lost to the islands and scattered to the winds.

Ownership In Doubt After Cook’s Death On Hawaii Island

When Captain Cook and his men arrived in 1778, they landed in a set of islands where the culture had developed, at times for centuries, without outside influences. During the weeks they visited that year and in a second visit the next, they bought, traded for or were given many precious and sacred objects, carved goods or items covered in feathers.

At the time, many of those objects must have seemed commonplace to Hawaiians who were eager to receive items in return that were novel to them. But unbeknownst to the Hawaiians, some of the objects they had fashioned by hand would soon disappear from existence, either because of the extinction of the birds that were unique to Hawaii or because the introduction of new materials and techniques, such as iron nails, made older manufacturing techniques seem obsolete. External forces began shifting the islands’ material culture almost immediately.

That means that the objects Cook’s men took away from Hawaii have unique historical value.

Unfortunately, in the chaos following Cook’s death in 1779 on Hawaii island, the objects appear to have been handled in a haphazard manner, with Cook’s personal possessions sold in a shipboard auction. The surviving commanding officer, Charles Clerke, soon died of tuberculosis, and some of the men on board were themselves slowly dying of the same diseases they had introduced to the islands. Many of the expedition’s survivors didn’t live long once they returned to England.

That meant that the chain of ownership was disrupted and complicated almost immediately.

When the expedition arrived back in England in 1780, Sir Ashton Lever, a coal mine and real estate magnate and avid collector, was anxiously waiting at the dock. He said that Cook had promised him first dibs on what he brought back.

That put Lever at odds with his rival collector and archenemy, Sir Joseph Banks, who had traveled with Cook on an earlier expedition and viewed himself as the leading light in all things Oceania. Lever succeeded in getting much of what Cook had collected on his trip, including the items that came from Hawaii.

Lever was the founder of a new kind of museum he called the , a Greek word that he translated to “whole of nature.” The institution encompassed thousands of objects, including a suit of armor that had been owned by Oliver Cromwell. Anyone could visit for a small admission fee, according to a book about the museum written by Pacific Ocean anthropologist .

Sarah Stone Sketched, Then Painted, The Artifacts

Lever placed the objects he believed to be from Hawaii in a single area, obsequiously named for Captain Cook’s politically powerful patron, Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty. It was labeled the Sandwich Room. Historians now believe that about 287 items in Lever’s collection came from Hawaii, including 29 feathered cloaks, 11 feathered helmets and dozens of tools, weapons and fashion accessories.

A teenage girl, an aspiring artist named Sarah Stone, began visiting the museum, according to author and biographer Christine E. Jackson, author of “.”

Stone’s father was an artist who painted fans, then a popular accessory for ladies, particularly in the years before air conditioning, and Sarah and her siblings made colors for their own fabricated paints out of items they could find like brick dust and leaves, according to Jackson. Stone is believed to have been born in about 1760 and may have begun to paint when she was only 8 or 9 years old.

She first showed up at Lever’s museum around 1777 or 1778, when she was about 17 years old, and began drawing and then painting watercolors of the items in the collection. Soon Lever decided to commission her to record all the natural science and man-made objects in his collection. She attempted to be as accurate as possible in their depiction. In this way, she captured the original beauty of objects that would soon fade in time, decompose or later fall victim to institutional neglect. 

An experienced painter of birds, Stone painted many of the objects with specimens of the birds that were the source of their feathers. That means that people today can see what these rare birds, many of them now extinct, actually looked like.

Over a 30-year career, over 1,000 such objects, although no one knows for sure because she didn’t always sign her work.

Some of these paintings were gathered into albums which are now in the museum in Honolulu, and also in Australia and at the British Museum’s Ethnographical Department in London. She did not provide dates for the ethnographic objects, but a surviving news clipping placed inside a volume held by Bishop Museum suggests they were painted in 1783, soon after the Cook expedition’s return from Hawaii, which has allowed historians to link some of them specifically to pre-contact culture of the islands.

Disbursed Around The Globe

Stone also in 1786.

This painting too ended up as a historical memory of something that was soon lost. Museums are costly to operate and Lever found his income couldn’t cover his expenses. He tried to sell the collection but found no buyers. He wanted the collection kept intact, so he approached the British Museum to buy it. Sir Joseph Banks coolly nixed the offer.

In some desperation, Lever decided to hold a lottery to sell the collection, which was valued at 53,000 pounds, according to Kaeppler. For the price of a guinea, a gold coin worth about 1 pound, buyers would have a chance to acquire the entire collection. Lever printed 36,000 tickets, hoping to recoup 36,000 guineas that way, and launched the sale on March 24, 1786. But disappointingly, only 8,000 tickets sold. Lever retained 28,000.

At first nobody came forward to claim the prize and Lever thought he had essentially won, by getting an infusion of cash and also getting to keep the collection. But then a barrister, James Parkinson, showed up with the winning ticket, saying his wife had bought it and then died. He was her heir and he found the ticket when he looked through her papers.

The collection passed into Parkinson’s hands. It had been bought for a pittance.

Lever was crushed. He died suddenly in 1788, believed to have poisoned himself, according to Kaeppler.

The surprised new owner tried to sell the collection but found no takers and then operated it as museum himself. He couldn’t make a go of it either. Parkinson also tried to get the British government to buy it but again, Banks blocked the sale.

One knowledgeable insider at the time blamed the situation on Banks’ “bitter spite” against the collection, Kaeppler wrote. “Thus the ill-temper of one Man deprived the Country of the finest general Collection which had up to that time ever been formed in London,” a contemporary reported.

Parkinson sold the entire collection by auction in 1806. Lumped into 7,900 individual lots, it sold for 6,641 pounds to some 180 bidders, including private collectors in England and to museums in Vienna and England. Then things began migrating, changing hands and moving from place to place, with many items lost and others dispersed all over the globe. Some have been carefully conserved but others ended up mislabeled and mishandled.

The only saving grace was that Lever had kept good records and that some of the auction items had notations to Sarah Stone’s paintings.

Sketching And Sleuthing Provided A Treasure Map

It is believed that Lever and his family retained some of Stone’s paintings and sketchbooks.

Those came up for auction in England in a rare book salesroom and were purchased by a British military officer, , in 1940. Fuller and his wife donated a pair of the sketchbooks depicting many of the Hawaiian objects to Bishop Museum. Anthropologists Roland and Maryanne Force published a book about them in 1968.

That’s where Kaeppler, then a young ethnologist from Wisconsin working at Bishop Museum, recognized their significance and began using them as a map and guide. She launched a lifelong odyssey of using the pictures to hunt down objects that had found their way to foreign museums, often missing the specific labeling that would explain their provenance.

Keppler, an expert on hula who became curator of oceanic ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, turned into a sleuth who became the world’s leading expert on the dispersal of the Hawaiian objects, chronicling her findings in a series of ethnographic books. She tracked Hawaii’s antiquities to museums in many places, including Germany, Russia, Spain, New Zealand and Australia, continuing her work until she .

“The true significance of the Lever collection, and Sarah’s record of it, has only been realized in the twentieth century, when scientists have been obliged to search for scraps of evidence regarding the zoological and ethnographic exhibits from old catalogues of museums and passing references in the few natural history books of the late 18th century,” Jackson wrote.

The work done by Kaeppler and Stone lives on. Their commitment to sharing knowledge has given Hawaii a treasure map to finding what would otherwise have been lost forever.