Long before it was a state in the union of the United States, Hawaii was an independent kingdom. When Captain James Cook visited the islands in 1778, he gave them the western moniker of the Sandwich Islands, named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and the Lord of the Admiralty (the head of the Royal Navy at the time). While locally the kingdom was named Hawai’i, starting in 1810 with unification, the Sandwich Islands was what Hawaii was called by westerners until the reign of King Kamehameha I.
When Cook arrived in 1778, the kingdom was inhabited by an estimated 300,000 to 800,000 native Hawaiians. However, the island’s indigenous population was decimated by foreign diseases; the 1878 census recorded only 44,088 native Hawaiians. King Kalakaua was faced with the need to increase populations for both labor and to save the declining population from going extinct.
One of King Kalakaua’s dreams was to travel the world. Given the need for immigration and to bring world attention to his kingdom, he set off on a world tour in 1881 and became the first monarch to circumnavigate the globe. It was during this world trip when King Kalakaua is believed to have met with an owner of a nickel mine in New Caledonia, a French island colony in the Pacific. The mine began sourcing nickel in 1875 and by the 1880s was a major export for the island. King Kalakaua was offered a coinage contract for his kingdom, with New Caledonian nickel being used for the coinage.
The patterns for this proposed coinage were struck at the Paris Mint, with pieces featuring the king’s portrait and inscriptions “KALAKAUA KING OF SANDWICH ISLANDS” as well as an 1881 date on the obverse. The reverse features the Hawaii crown mounted atop a garter incorporating a “5.” The text “AU MAU KE EA O KA AINA I KA PONO” is on the garter and contains a spelling error, with “AU” instead of the correct “UA.” On the edges of some coins is the inscription “MAILLECHORT,” referring to an alloy of copper, nickel, and zinc that is sometimes called “German Silver.” About 200 examples of these patterns were produced and shipped to the Kingdom of Hawaii following the king’s world tour. However, the coinage was never adopted. Two years later in 1883, the United States began producing circulating coinage for the Kingdom of Hawaii.
One of these patterns, a rare 1881 Hawaii 5 Cent piece, was submitted to PCGS during a recent grading event in Paris. Many deceptive counterfeits were made by employing fake dies across several metals. Meanwhile, genuine examples often present conditional issues, as many pieces were used as pocket pieces or incorporated into jewelry. Prior to encapsulation of this example discussed here, PCGS had certified merely 20 specimens. The highlighted example was graded PCGS MS62 and boasts a PCGS Price Guide value of $29,500.