Since the Polynesian's founding in 1840, missionaries had been allowed to subscribe at a cut rate, probably because they had been strong supporters of James Jackson Jarvis when he founded the newspaper. In 1855, James Gordon Hopkins became editor and placed himself in Honolulu's British camp in opposition to American missionaries. He smoked cigars and drank whiskey with the king, which couldn't have pleased the missionaries. He also charged them full price for the newspaper.

The story goes that missionaries in Honolulu were so annoyed that they launched Henry Whitney, son of a missionary teacher on Kaua'i, as editor and publisher of a new journal called the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a weekly that eventually evolved into The Honolulu Advertiser of today.

Another version of The Advertiser's birth is probably closer to the truth. As the government newspaper, the Polynesian printed news "by authority." Like most government newspapers, it was rather dull and not interested in publishing dissent. Hopkins spent as much time on junkets with the king as he did in his editorial chair.

Years later, the writer of Henry Whitney's obituary gave a different reason for his starting The Advertiser: "The whalemen wanted an American newspaper and the white residents wanted one that was not run 'by authority.'" Whitney gave them one and looked on his venture as an "opposition newspaper."

Opposition newspapers had never succeeded in remote Hawai'i. Without government or church sponsorship, one after another independent weekly had folded within a year or two. But 32-year-old Henry Whitney was not your run-of-the-mill voice in the wilderness.

'Get the story first'

Like Benjamin Franklin, Whitney started as a printer. In New York, he had been shop foreman at Harper's Weekly, the most popular illustrated weekly in America. He wrote with ease and authority. The New York Daily Tribune had accepted one of his pieces. He had rubbed elbows with newspaper titans Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett.

He was the first newspaperman in Hawai'i who had been schooled in New York daily journalism. There he had learned the most important rule of publishing a successful newspaper, "Get the story first."

Whitney immediately recognized Honolulu Harbor as his major news source. That was Hawai'i's link with the world; where news arrived, where residents greeted visitors, where merchants unloaded the latest goods, where everybody came to pick up mail. Before he ever went to print, he climbed the mast of a square-rigger off port and sketched the harbor.

That sketch served as the masthead of The Advertiser for 50 years and marked a revolution in journalism in Hawai'i. (An updated version of the sketch has returned to the newspaper's masthead with its new redesign.) Whitney was the first newspaperman in Honolulu to sail out in a news boat to meet ships off port and pick up foreign newspapers, a common practice in New York.

The old masthead of the The Pacific Commercial Advertiser featured a sketch of Honolulu Harbor, which Henry Whitney drew. It stayed on the masthead for 50 years and has been reinstated on the Editorial Page.

It didn't matter that the news from Boston was six months old by the time it came around Cape Horn. What mattered was that readers in Honolulu got the news first in The Advertiser. Complacent James Gordon Hopkins must have been dismayed by the fireball that had landed on his doorstep.

Whitney's dedication to getting the scoop almost cost him his life. Not long after the Pacific Commercial Advertiser began weekly publication on July 2, 1856, he sailed out to board a passing ship. His craft capsized and he swallowed a lot of the Pacific Ocean before sailors pulled him out of the drink.

Not only his readers but old salts on the waterfront admired his spunk. They helped him get the news. Whitney went out once with the harbor pilot in the pilot boat. They were on Wai'alae Beach when they spotted the sails of a large ship. The pilot ordered his crew to row to the ship so Whitney could pick up the latest papers.

The ship didn't stop. The pilot boat crew rowed through the afternoon, cursing all the way. The stars had come out before they reached the ship becalmed half way to Moloka'i. Feeling guilty, the captain served a sumptuous dinner and put them up for the night.

The young editor's tendency to speak his mind put him on the wrong side of foreign minister Robert C. Wyllie when Whitney questioned the competence of a certain government minister who turned out to be a relative of the king. Wyllie sent Whitney a stiff note down the street asking who was responsible for the editorial.

"I consider myself responsible for every editorial," Whitney wrote back by return messenger. Wyllie answered immediately to the effect that Whitney "suffered delusions of the most ludicrous and gigantic kind (that are) malicious falsehoods." Unless Whitney published a retraction, Wyllie would sue.

The editor shot back, "Having taken time for reflection on the subject matter of your communication, which I deem personally offensive and insulting, I give you the liberty to withdraw the same any time before 12 o'clock this day." Eventually tempers cooled and the furor subsided.

Another time, U.S. Commissioner J.W. Borden was so annoyed by an article in Whitney's paper that he arrived in the editorial office brandishing a bowie knife. Whitney picked up a chair in self defense and called for help.

NOTABLE FIGURES

Henry Whitney | first editor and publisher of Pacific Commercial Advertiser

Walter Murray Gibson | bought The Advertiser in 1880, became prime minister of Hawaiian kingdom in 1882

Lorrin A. Thurston | bought paper in 1898, pushed progress platform

Lorrin P. Thurston | paper faltered during his tenure

George Chaplin | editor restored paper's stature with tireless community outreach

Thurston Twigg-Smith | took control in 1962, brought paper to prominence with smart labor, circulation deals

Michael J. Fisch | Advertiser's current president and publisher

Saundra Keyes | Advertiser's current editor

For all his talent and energy, Whitney had a journalistic blind spot: failing to understand the cultural depth of the hula. To Henry Whitney, hula was an abomination. Whenever he heard of a halau in Wai'anae or Kalihi or 'Ewa, he let loose salvos in The Advertiser.

As a result, scholars today can follow the progress of Hawai'i's native dance simply by reading old copies of the paper. It's a marvelous historical record that might never had been put down if Whitney hadn't hated the hula so much.

His four-page weekly, the first successful independent newspaper in Hawai'i, looks gray and dull today. But it was considered lively and innovative at the time. Instead of printing stories "by authority," Whitney started a column of gossipy items where he could drop the names of his advertisers. His newspaper was the first to publish the Pacific Whaling List.

Even so, his news sense failed him one day when a young fellow asked for a job after putting his feet up on the desk to be comfortable. Whitney told him he already had a reporter. The journalist with his feet on the desk turned out to be Mark Twain who later called Whitney "one of the fairest and best-hearted cannibals I ever knew."

From the success The Advertiser quickly achieved, it is obvious that everybody including the missionaries approved of the energetic young editor. Readers got the latest news. Businessmen and sugar planters liked The Advertiser's up-to-the-minute financial information. But in the 1860s, the youthful publisher went on a crusade that furrowed the brows of Hawai'i's new elite, the sugar planters.

Contract labor

Sugar planters, whose profits depended on cheap labor, became increasingly irritated when the editor exposed conditions on immigrant ships. He wrote that a contract laborer had been killed on the immigrant ship Callao and several others put in irons for insubordination. Sugar planters accused The Advertiser of having its facts wrong.

Whitney responded with an eyewitness who had been aboard the Callao. The witness said he saw a heavy iron barricade at the break of the deck to keep immigrants from escaping. A guard with a gun stood at each gate. Two six-pound cannons were pointed at the passageway in case the Chinese made a break for it.

By the end of the 1860s, Whitney's Advertiser had become an embarrassment to the sugar planters. In 1870 the planters met on Maui and announced a boycott of advertisers in Whitney's newspaper. The news leaked out that they were starting a newspaper to compete with The Advertiser.

A sudden silence descended. Then Whitney announced that he was selling The Advertiser to a newly organized printing firm, Black and Auld, for an offer "he couldn't refuse." There is no information about what really happened but one can guess.

Whitney understood that he didn't have the resources to buck the sugar planters. An advertising boycott and a competing newspaper would bankrupt him. On the other hand, the planters came to realize how much it would cost, in both money and reputation, to ruin someone as energetic and well-respected as Whitney. So they offered him a lot more than the paper was worth and he accepted.

Criticism of the contract labor system in The Advertiser immediately stopped. A new editor took over; Henry Sheldon, a veteran newspaperman who had come from California to start a weekly in Honolulu in the 1850s. It failed. He married a Hawaiian woman, ran for the legislature and became a kama'aina. Next to Whitney, Sheldon was probably Hawai'i's most competent journalist.

He wasn't as keen as Whitney about foreign affairs. Sheldon filled the newspaper mostly with local news of which there was plenty as the last two Kamehameha kings died. Whitney took over a competing newspaper, the Gazette, and the two of them feuded with each other in the editorial columns. But they remained friends, like attorneys who forget their animosities outside the courtroom.

Well-known traveler

During the 10 years that Sheldon edited The Advertiser, he apparently struggled with the conflict between an editorial policy agreeable to sugar planters and his own empathy for the monarchy and Hawaiians in general. The two frequently stood in opposition. Sheldon tried to encourage more Hawaiians to run for political office.

Meanwhile, David Kalakaua became king in 1874. Before his reign, a fascinating and improbable character arrived in Honolulu, Walter Murray Gibson, who looked like an Old Testament prophet. He announced himself to be a well-known traveler, an expert on Malaysia. An enthralled audience attended his lecture.

Next, Gibson became the leader of Mormonism in Hawai'i and took over the island of Lana'i. He wrote learned articles for The Advertiser on immigration. In 1873 he started a newspaper in English and Hawaiian in Honolulu called the Nuhou that extolled his own virtues. He ran for the legislature in 1878 and received an overwhelming vote. Gibson spoke fluent Hawaiian, staunchly supported King Kalakaua and painted himself as a voice of Hawaiians.

In 1880 he worked out an agreement with Minister of Interior John E. Bush to buy The Advertiser for $15,000 with the government advancing Gibson $5,000, to be repaid by doing government printing and binding. With Gibson in charge, The Advertiser entered a rarified period in its history. Gibson brought in a steam engine to run the paper's presses, a first in Hawai'i. Foot pedals had powered the presses before.

The truth is, Gibson had an uncanny talent for journalism. He wrote with style and ease and was full of energy. He would have been an outstanding newspaperman if he had been able to control his ego. But it kept getting in the way of reality. He wrote about himself in the third person and ignored facts he didn't like.

Named prime minister

With The Advertiser as his springboard, Gibson reached the pinnacle in 1882 when Kalakaua appointed him prime minister of the Hawaiian kingdom. Then the offices of attorney general and minister of interior became vacant and Gibson filled those, too, for a while. People called him the "Minister of Everything."

On May 1, 1882, Gibson started publishing The Advertiser daily while still printing a weekly edition. But he was too busy to remain as editor. Three weeks later he announced that Joseph Webb was taking over.

Then began a succession of what a visiting writer called "mongrel editors." One of them plagiarized a story about an opium raid from Leslie's Weekly, a national publication, and got caught red handed by the Gazette. An irate reader broke a chair over an editor's head. Henry Whitney wrote a friend that he was ashamed of what was happening to his old newspaper. Within a year The Advertiser acquired new owners but stayed in the Gibson camp.

Whitney's bulletin

The Advertiser's first printing press was located in the back where offices now stand.

This is a view of the paper's old front office, where the cashier counter is now located.

The Advertiser's open-ceiling courtyard. It was covered over and made into the Contemporary Art Center, and now houses office space.

By 1888, Gibson's soaring career had crashed. His financial backers lost interest in the paper and sold it. Meanwhile, Henry Whitney had kept his hand in journalism by founding another newspaper although it wasn't intentional. After he sold The Advertiser, he first invested in a book/magazine/stationery shop.

Unable to stop reporting, he posted a bulletin of gossip and news on the door of his shop every day. Whitney's Bulletin was so interesting that everybody stopped to read it. That gave bright, young James W. Robinson an idea. He bought the rights to Whitney's Bulletin, sold advertising in it and issued it as a daily newspaper. The Bulletin eventually merged with a Honolulu daily called the Star to become the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Whitney, who already owned the Gazette, teamed up with Henry N. and William R. Castle, nephew and uncle, to buy back The Advertiser for $6,000. The Castles, a missionary family, had made it big in sugar through a company called Castle & Cooke. Whitney put the paper back on its feet, then sold his majority interest to the Castles in 1894. It was his last association with The Advertiser.

Politically, this was a turbulent time in which the power of the monarchy waned and that of American sugar planters increased. Young attorneys like L. A. Thurston and W. O. Smith called for reform of corruption in the Kalakaua government. Hawaiians resented their arrogance and impatience. The social contract that held the monarchy together began to come apart.

One crisis followed another until 1893, when businessmen and planters, with Thurston as a spark plug, overthrew Kalakaua's sister, Queen Lili'uokalani, to position Hawai'i for annexation to the United States. As part of the United States, Hawaiian sugar planters would be able to sell their sugar duty free in the U.S. An unsuccessful revolt by Hawaiians followed the overthrow. Hawai'i was annexed by the U.S. in 1898.

Backed government

During this time, The Advertiser supported the new government as it evolved from provisional status to a republic to a U.S. Territory. It was a period in which dozens of Hawaiian-language newspapers were active. Almost all were pro-monarchy and some of the editors were sent to jail for participation in the revolt.

Lorrin A. Thurston now stepped onto center stage at The Advertiser. He was a missionary descendent; brilliant, impatient, talented, fluent in Hawaiian. Punahou School almost expelled him more than once for misconduct. After school, he read law in a local attorney's office, easily passed the bar exam and attended Columbia University.

He came back and ran for the legislature, got elected and served as an angry young man impatient with bungling bureaucrats. His fellow legislators censored him for inexcusable language while criticizing a colleague. He defended that language and his speeches got people cheering at mass meetings during the overthrow.

Without an outlet for his energy after annexation, Thurston bought The Advertiser and turned it into a powerful organ in support of activities that he considered vital to progress in Hawai'i.

He promoted Hawai'i's sugar industry. He was a major influence in establishing Hawai'i as a tourist destination. Thurston talked the U.S. Interior Department into founding the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. His tireless support helped volcanologist Thomas Jaggar set up the Hawaii Volcano Observatory.

It was Thurston who put out a special edition to support the Outdoor Circle in its pioneer fight to ban billboards in Hawai'i. His newspaper published numerous books about the Islands that are collectors' items today. In his own sampan, with a professional crew, he explored the Hawaiian Island chain and claimed an uncharted islet for the United States.

Thurston welcomed Jack London to town and later roasted him for what he considered London's shoddy treatment of leprosy patients on Moloka'i. He teamed up with Wallace Farrington and Alexander Hume Ford to hold Hawai'i's first world conference of newspaper editors.

All this time, he never ran for political office while his newspaper supported the Republican party. Like Henry Whitney before him, Thurston blasted what he called the "tourist hula." He was among the many during the anti-Japanese hysteria following World War I who called for government restrictions on Japanese-language schools, legislation later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Leading newspaper

By the time Thurston died in 1931, he had built The Advertiser into the leading newspaper in Hawai'i. His son, Lorrin Potter Thurston, succeeded him as publisher. A swimming star at Yale, young Thurston was groomed by his father to take the reins.

They were not much alike. While the elder Thurston reveled in intellectual sparring with fellow journalists, his son shied away from the editorial rooms and preferred gossip at the Outrigger Canoe Club.

Under Lorrin P. Thurston, the newspaper faltered while Riley Allen, an extremely able editor at the Star-Bulletin, pushed his paper ahead of The Advertiser. Thurston's editorial policy during World War II — including use of the term "Jap" — outraged readers of Japanese descent. On Allen's orders, the Bulletin didn't use that disparagement.

Honolulu's streets teemed with soldiers and sailors with money to spend before going to war. A newsboy could sell as many newspapers on the street as he could carry. Circulation soared as The Advertiser printed numerous editions. Thurston decided that delivering The Advertiser to homes was expensive so he concentrated on street sales. The Bulletin faithfully tended to home circulation, expense or not.

Then the war ended and the bottom fell out for The Advertiser. By 1950, the newspaper was headed for bankruptcy.

Yet it remained a colorful institution, in transition from the plantation period to statehood. And it employed a series of colorful characters.

Chaplin arrives

Two events ended the trend toward oblivion at The Advertiser. The first was the arrival in 1958 of a superior journalist as new editor, George Chaplin, a Neiman Fellow and former editor of Pacific Stars & Stripes. Chaplin infused professionalism, energy and a global outlook into the paper while tirelessly repairing relations with the community. His executive editor, Buck Buchwach, proved to be a promotional genius.

The second event took place when Thurston Twigg-Smith, nephew of Lorrin Potter Thurston and grandson of Lorrin A., wrested the paper from his uncle by buying up a majority of stock in 1962. Twigg-Smith had started at the bottom in advertising, then moved to the newsroom on the second floor to work as a reporter. He rose to city editor and managing editor. Other reporters trusted him because he was one of them.

In 1963, Twigg-Smith negotiated a merger of production facilities of The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin under the Failing Newspaper Act. The newspapers combined printing, circulation, administration and advertising into one company while keeping the editorial function of each paper under separate ownership.

An increase in staff, better news coverage and participation in the community resulted in a steady rise in circulation that some call the glory days of The Advertiser. Reporters covered the war in Vietnam. Entertainment and youth sections blossomed. Talk about innovation? One popular Advertiser columnist, a convicted con man, wrote from his prison cell. In the 1980s, The Advertiser overtook the Star-Bulletin in circulation and is by far the largest newspaper in the state, both in circulation and staff.