On paper colored like the sea, Hawai‘i’s “island rose,” Princess Victoria Kawēkiu Ka‘iulani Lunalilo Kalaninuiahilapalapa Cleghorn, penned her name in black ink. The “V” in her English name arcs gracefully, like a wave about to curl onto short and wispy letters which are like bumps on the ocean. The princess settled for the shortened version of her name, Victoria Ka‘iulani, but added “of Hawaii” as a declaration of her heritage and place as the rightful heir to the Hawaiian monarchy. Below her signature is the date “September 1891,” when she was 16 years old and studying in England. Her handwriting is feminine and well formed, symbolic of the princess’ renowned beauty and her education.

The cover page of Ka‘iulani’s autograph book is an archive of meaning, and it is only the beginning. In 1991, The Friends of ‘Iolani Palace received the book from a descendant of Kai‘ulani’s half-brother, Thomas Alexander Kaula‘ahi Cleghorn. Inside, historians discovered around 40 pages of autographs, sketches, and notes from people she had met, collected between 1883 and 1896 at home and abroad.

In the 19th century, the trend of autograph books reached America from Germany, where it had originated. While the blank-paged books were initially used by students for exchanging signatures, like today’s yearbooks, in America they became canvases for celebrity signatures. Fans of Walt Whitman or Washington Irving sought the prized signatures of their favorite authors for their autograph books. Ka‘iulani’s position as Hawaiian royalty allowed her to use her autograph book in both ways. Many of the writings found in her book came from famous persons she had socialized with. According to ‘Iolani Palace historian Zita Cup Choy, “[The book] says she treasured her friends and people she met and had them sign her book so she could remember them.”

Today, the autograph book informs us that Ka‘iulani’s social circle stretched around the globe. In 1889, the 13-year-old princess left her widowed father, Archibald S. Cleghorn, (her mother, Princess Likelike, had died two years prior) for several years of schooling in England. There she studied art, history, literature, physics, and the ways of a distinguished Victorian woman. In 1893, she took a month-long hiatus to America to plead against the overthrow of the Hawaiian government. She delivered a moving speech to the New York press, saying, “I, a poor, weak girl, with not one of my people near me and all of these statesmen against me, have the strength to stand up for the rights of my people. Even now I can hear their wail in my heart, and it gives me strength.”

While we only know generally of her travels, the signatures in her autograph book suggest that she met many dignitaries while abroad. The scrawling, lopsided handwriting of Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg takes up an entry in the journal dated 1896, when the prince was 35 years old. The autograph book also contains the layered, similar signatures of two sisters a couple years older than Ka‘iulani, Anna and Sophia Römer, and their mother, Celine Römer, who were of a Baltic-German royal family of painters.

On one page dated March 1893, when Ka‘iulani was in New York having delivered her moving plea for the Hawaiian Kingdom, there lies a beautiful, curving signature, barely legible, beneath a drawn musical score labeled “Allegretto.” It’s possible that the signature belonged to Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist and composer. He was most likely on a recurring musical tour in America when he met the princess.

Other pages contain talented sketches, some only marked by initials: a stork prodding a child in a basket down a moving river; daisies arranged into the letter “K”; a scene at a riverbank where a tower sits among pine trees. A curved stalk bearing blooming cherry blossoms. A watercolor stretch of beach with white caps on a blue horizon, drawn by Edward Clifford, an English aesthete best known for his portraits, who visited the leper colony in Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i and met Father Damien.

The entry perhaps most prized by scholars is by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Scottish novelist, best known for his works Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had stayed in Honolulu during the months prior to Ka‘iulani’s departure for England. In that time, Stevenson befriended the young princess and her father, who was a fellow Scot. As her farewell gift, Stevenson wrote a poem in Ka‘iulani’s autograph book: “Forth from her land to mine she goes, / The island maid, the island rose…”

It is this image of the youthful Ka‘iulani that we hold today. We imagine our princess, who died too soon at the age of 23, playing in the garden of her Waikīkī residence, ‘Āinahau, among the pīkake and peacocks she so loved. But in the pages of her autograph book, we are given evidence of her maturity. There we see a diplomat on track to become a great matriarch. With every foreign signature, the princess moved Hawai‘i toward a better future.