A diplomatic chronicle of the seizure of the Hawaiian Islands by Lord George Paulet of H.M.S. Carysfort, 1843. Written in Honolulu in 1970, from the Admiralty files, the Archives of Hawaii and the State Department despatches.
A note from the author, 2026
We started to create websites in the early 2000s primarily using Article Manager software — which came, amusingly, with a lifetime support contract. Over time the software house introduced a replacement product with no easy migration tool from Article Manager, so we just let the old sites age gracefully, expecting them to ultimately die as operating systems and internet technology outgrew them. We consulted our friendly IT guru to ask if he could somehow migrate the content, and he said it would be easier, and less expensive, if we hired an offshore agency to simply re-type everything into new WordPress sites.
Then something wonderful happened. Along came Claude — and, more specifically, Claude Code. This user-friendly, helpful AI friend was able, with our permission of course, to connect to the old server, install WordPress on the new server, and migrate everything across, including post comments and images. In this process he discovered a forgotten piece of my own history: my 1969–70 college thesis about Lord Paulet and the British seizure of the Hawaiian Islands.
I wrote it when I was 20, in my senior year at university. I was the first person to start as a humanities major — economics — before the first class of freshman year, and Rensselaer ran out of courses for me to take. They kindly created a thesis course for me, and I decided to research the Paulet Affair. I took a trip to London and was able, eventually, to visit the Public Records Office and the British Museum, and paid to have the log of Paulet’s ship Carysfort microfilmed for the first time. I donated that microfilm to the Hawaii State Archives.
I can remember typing up my paper in my grandparents’ home in Nuuanu on something quite revolutionary: an electric typewriter. Putting sheets of rag bond into the typewriter and having to re-type many pages when I decided there were simply too many corrections. It was satisfying to see my stack of typed pages gradually grow, and even more satisfying to mail the final copy from Honolulu to Troy, New York. A flood of comments came back, and I answered them all in an appendix to the original thesis.
The original is scanned in our FileDirector system, but at some time and for some reason I uploaded a copy to our old web server. And that’s where Claude Code found it.
So here it is, summarised for you by AI, and downloadable. Please remember I wrote it when I was 20 — at a time when you are certain you know everything and are always right. I am fifty-six years older now, and still think I know everything, but also know that I am rarely right. I wasn’t right when I described Kamehameha III as “being a simple Polynesian [who] never relished the effort he was required to expend as a monarch in the mid-nineteenth century.” I don’t think that now, and wouldn’t write it today.
When I edit a movie I give it a final look, “ship” it — publish it on the internet, or whatever — and never look at it again. If I did look at it, I’d just see all the things I don’t like and want to change. The same is true of a paper I wrote more than a half-century ago. But it was sitting there on the old server and we had to do something with it … so here it is. The Paulet Affair was quite interesting, and it explains the Hawaiian motto and why Thomas Square is called that. It is also part of the longer story of the British in Hawaii — the story that gave Honolulu a street called Beretania, and put the Union Jack in the corner of the Hawaiian flag.
What it argues
For five months in 1843 the Hawaiian Kingdom was not independent. On 25 February, Kamehameha III ceded his islands to Great Britain under the guns of a Royal Navy frigate; on 31 July they were handed back. Almost nobody in Hawaii knows it happened.
The conventional account credits the diplomacy — the Hawaiian envoys negotiating in London, Paris and Washington through the spring of 1843. This thesis argues that the diplomacy had almost nothing to do with it.
Admiral Richard Thomas sailed from Valparaiso on his own initiative as soon as word of the cession reached him, and restored the kingdom before news of Britain’s recognition of Hawaiian independence had arrived in Honolulu. He did not consult the Admiralty or the Foreign Office. He acted on what he already knew his government’s policy to be, and he acted alone. The negotiations mattered enormously for what came afterwards — they secured Hawaii’s independence for another half-century — but they did not cause the restoration. One admiral, three months ahead of his own government’s post, did that.
How it happened
The French threat
Captain Laplace of the Artemise extracts $20,000 and a treaty at gunpoint; the Embuscade follows; the Marquesas and Tahiti fall to France. Hawaii has reason to believe it is next, and Paulet later names this as “the moving cause which led to the cession of these Islands.”
Richard Charlton, Esq.
The British consul lays claim to a large parcel of Honolulu land, horsewhips the editor of the government newspaper in his own home, and departs for London without permission to press his grievances. The thesis is unsparing about him, and about how much of what followed was his doing.
Paulet and the Carysfort
The frigate enters Honolulu harbour. Paulet refuses to deal with Dr Gerrit Judd, issues his demands to the king late at night with a deadline attached, and takes possession. The full text of the official correspondence is reproduced.
The islands under the British
Every Hawaiian flag on the islands destroyed, a standing army raised, a commission governing. Judd sends a full despatch out aboard the Boston. The occupation is documented here from both sides — Paulet’s reports to the Admiralty and the Americans’ letters home.
London, Paris, Washington
Richards and Haʻalilio negotiate for recognition while Charlton, arrived ahead of them, works against it. Aberdeen manoeuvres; Tyler equivocates. None of it reaches the Pacific in time to matter.
Admiral Thomas
A Hawaiian flag is sewn aboard the Dublin because Paulet had destroyed all the others. Marines parade, twenty-one guns from the Carysfort, then the Dublin, then the American ships, answered by the battery on Punchbowl. Lord George is not present. The ground where it happened is Thomas Square.
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Britain and France jointly renounce Hawaii; the United States declines to join. Hawaii’s damages claim of $31,926.61 is refused on the ground that the cession was voluntary. Haʻalilio dies at sea. Kamehameha III dies at forty-one. The Carysfort goes down in the English Channel. And Lord George, commanding the Bellerophon at Sebastopol, is set on fire and raked by a battery he had sailed too close to.
Where the evidence came from
This was written before photocopies were casual and long before anything was online. The sources were physically consulted or written away for, one at a time:
- British Public Records Office, London Admiralty 1/5531 — Paulet’s own despatches to the Admiralty, obtained by post through Mr Evans of the PRO
- Archives of Hawaii Foreign Office & Executive files, British Commission documents, the Wyllie correspondence, William Richards’ journals, and the only known photograph of Lord George Paulet
- United States Department of State Consular Letters and Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Honolulu, Record Group 59, on microfilm from the National Archives
- Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library missionary correspondence and journals
- The Reading Room, British Museum entered on a temporary admission permit granted, after a week of asking, to an applicant below their minimum age
A note on the text
What follows the download link is the thesis exactly as submitted on 10 May 1970. Nothing has been corrected, softened or brought up to date.
The last five pages are the author’s own addendum, dated 14 July 1970 — a dense list of corrections written in response to his examiners, in which he concedes that one of his sources is “tantamount to citing Collier’s Encyclopedia”, flags a sentence of his own that should have been footnoted, admits a legal argument is weak, and goes back to the Archives of Hawaii to answer a marker’s passing question about the identity of one Duncan Forbes Mackay. It is left in place because it is part of the document.
The original typescript was given to the State Archives and the Bishop Museum.