King Kamehameha I Statue

This guide to the King Kamehameha I statue in Honolulu opens in 1881, when a ship carrying an eighteen-foot bronze king caught fire and sank near the Falkland Islands, thousands of miles from Hawaii. It follows the effort to cast a replacement from the same mold, sculpted in Italy by an American who had never seen Hawaii, using a friend of the king as his stand-in, and unveiled in 1883 as part of King Kalakaua's coronation. Officials paid for the second casting with roughly twelve thousand dollars in insurance money.