Born at Waimea, Kaua‘i, the son of American Protestant missionaries Samuel and Mercy Partridge Whitney, Henry Martyn Whitney (1824-1904) graduated from Rochester Collegiate Institute in 1841 and learned the printing trade with Harper &Brothers of New York before returning home to Hawai‘i.
In 1849, while traveling home via Panama, he visited California during the Gold Rush, and in San Francisco met Hawaiian Finance Minister Gerrit Parmele Judd, Prince Alexander Lilholiho (later Kamehameha IV), and Lot Kapuaiwa (later Kamehameha V) as they were on their way to London, and was encouraged by them to enter government service in Honolulu.
A year later, in 1850, he established the Hawaiian postal system and became the first postmaster general of Hawai‘i.
While serving as postmaster general in 1851, the first Hawaiian postage stamps were issued in a series of numeral postage stamps later called Hawaiian Missionaries, since they were primarily used by Protestant missionaries stationed in the Hawaiian Islands.
Only a handful of these now rare and costly stamps are existent today.
Whitney also worked for the government printing office, which published “The Polynesian,” and in 1856 he published the first number of his own newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser.
Then in 1861, Whitney established the Hawaiian language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, in which the historian Samuel Kamakau wrote a series on Hawaiian history that has been translated and published in English.
Five years later, in 1866, a young reporter named Samuel Clemens asked Whitney for a job, but there were no openings, and Clemens, later famously known as Mark Twain, would often drop by Whitney’s office to entertain him with his humor — and borrow his cigars.
1873 marked the year Whitney bought the Hawaiian Gazette, and the first tourist guidebook to Hawai‘i was published by Whitney in 1875.
Whitney’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser became the Honolulu Advertiser, which merged with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2010 to become the present Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
He was also a member of the Royal Privy Council of State and the Hawaiian Legislature.
Henry Martyn Whitney and his wife, Catherine, had seven children.
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Hank Soboleski has been a resident of Kauai since the 1960s. Hank’s love of the island and its history has inspired him, in conjunction with The Garden Island Newspaper, to share the island’s history weekly. The collection of these articles can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IfbxL9 and here https://bit.ly/2STw9gi Hank can be reached at hssgms@gmail.com
