Today is Restoration Day, which commemorates the liberation of the kingdom of Hawaii by British Adm. Richard Thomas on July 31, 1843, after a five-month forcible occupation by his countryman Capt. Lord George Paulet.

At the time, Timoteo Haalilio, a Native Hawaiian in his mid-30s, was in Europe. He had been sent by Kamehameha III to secure recognition of Hawaii as an independent nation.

After 180 years, eloquent letters that Haalilio wrote in Hawaiian to his mother and his fellow envoy, William Richards, have been exhumed from archival files and translated into English for the first time.

Writing from the St. Paul’s Hotel in London, Haalilio thanked his mother for her letter from home, which brought him comfort in “this friendless land.” Homesick and physically ailing, he gently broached the possibility that he and his mother might not see each other again. Later, from Brussels, where he was detained by illness in 1844, he wrote to Richards, who had traveled ahead, “I think constantly about you, wishing to behold your face.”

Haalilio’s affectionate missives are among 225 letters from the 19th century, most written in Hawaiian, from about 35 alii, or Hawaiian chiefs. They have been collected and digitized by the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and transcribed, translated and annotated by Awaiaulu, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to making historical resources accessible to Hawaiian- and English-speaking audiences .

The year-long project, which wraps up in August, will be discussed at a free public symposium Saturday at Punahou School, and the letters will be made available to the public on the Hawaiian Mission Houses website by the end of September.

Hina Kneubuhl, 38, is one of four translators working under the direction of Puakea Nogelmeier, Awaiaulu executive director and a professor at the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Asked how it felt to read personal letters by historical figures, Kneubuhl said: “Well, it makes them seem like real humans.”

Kneubuhl, who lives on Maui and was present via Skype at a weekly team meeting in Nogelmeier’s Kalihi home, added, “It’s neat to hear from (the alii) in their own words, instead of reading about them in a textbook by a scholar telling you what they did.”

Some of the letters have a quality of freshness and spontaneity of expression that hadn’t yet been forced into social and grammatical norms, said translator John Yasuda, 30. He and Kneubuhl both hold master’s degrees in Hawaiian language from the Kawaihuelani Center.

“The way their thoughts are being expressed in writing, in the early 1800s, seems very similar to how they would have spoken,” Yasuda said. “It breaks the rules of what we’ve learned in Hawaiian studies.”

Nogelmeier, 63, smiled. “And it makes you think about how the rules were made,” he said.

He co-founded Awaiaulu, Inc., in 2004; it spearheaded an eight-year project, Ike Kuokoa, that digitized Hawaiian-language newspapers and made them available online.

Having spent 40 years translating the Hawaiian language, Nogelmeier said he welcomed the letters project “as a training endeavor, providing funding for two young scholars (Kneubuhl and Yasuda) so that they can learn to do what I can do.”

He is eager to share his skills. When he arrived in Hawaii from Minnesota in 1972, “translation from Hawaiian was discouraged,” he said, because the priority in the community and in academia was, understandably, on learning to speak and read the language for oneself.

In the case of the alii letters, “Incredible resources have lain dormant for more than a century because they were not considered important, or academicians were never convinced there was value there,” he said.

Nogelmeier credits Tom Woods, executive director of the Mission Houses, with recognizing that value and providing the idea and driving force for the letters project.

Woods, 65, who came to the Mission Houses from the Minnesota Historical Society in 2010, said he felt strongly from the start that the chiefs’ letters, written to missionaries and to one another, should be made accessible to the public.

While there are more than 75,000 pages from missionary letters and journals available at missionhouses.org, “We’d been talking about how important it was to tell the story from the chiefs’ perspective,” Woods said.

The alii letters, he said, support an emerging consensus among historians that the Hawaiian chiefs were active determiners of their fate, not colonial victims.

Whether the topic is politics, economics, education or domestic matters, the letters show that the alii were in control, Woods said. “They decided what happened until the overthrow,” he said.

Death and ice cream

In his Mission Houses office, wearing protective white gloves, Woods showed some of the original letters, penned in elegant, calligraphic script, the ink faded, the pages yellowed.

In one of the early letters, from 1830, Hewahewa, who had been a high priest under Kamehameha I, addressed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and praised the Christian religion to which he had converted.

In another letter, from March 1825, William Pitt Kalanimoku, high chief of Maui, wrote to 10-year-old Princess Nahienaena, announcing the death of her brother, King Liholiho, who ruled as Kamehameha II, and sister-in-law Queen Kamamalu in London, both from measles.

He wrote that the queen died first and that, before his death seven days later, the king asked Boki, a high chief in his contingent, to ensure that their bodies be returned to Hawaii. “They will likely be making landfall soon,” Kalanimoku wrote. The letter was co-signed by Kaahumanu, Hawaii’s first queen under Kamehameha I, and Nahienaena’s 12-year-old brother, Kauikeaouli, who ascended the throne as Kamehameha III.

The king and queen died while waiting to ask the British monarch for a treaty recognizing Hawaii’s sovereignty, according to the Awaiaulu team’s annotations, which provide context for every letter in the collection.

One can imagine how Kauikeaouli must have felt almost 20 years later when his friend Timoteo Haalilio died in Europe while pursuing the same goal in 1844.

In a lighter vein, the most recent letter in the collection was written by then-Princess Liliuokalani in 1887, inviting Anderson Oliver Forbes, a priest at Kaumakapili church, to an ice cream party. “It was also historic, the first time ice cream would be served in Hawaii,” said Hilinai Sai-Dudoit, 16, an Awaiaulu student intern.

“Seeing that letter helps us contextualize the social as well as political world,” added Kalikoaloha Martin, 23, an Awaiaulu staff member who is pursuing his master’s degree in Hawaiian language.

Sex and alcohol

The first American missionaries came to Hawaii in 1820, and within just a couple of years, several alii were reading and writing. That was because they understood the power of this form of communication and wanted it for themselves and their people, Nogelmeier said.

“Hawaii had higher literacy than in the rest of America because it was engendered from inside,” he explained. “You can see from their letters that Kaahumanu and other Hawaiians were interested, not so much in the missionaries’ religion as in their sewing and teaching skills.”

In the oldest known alii letter, which is in the State Archives and dated 1822, Liholiho instructs a missionary to teach Hawaiians James Kahuhu and John Papa Ii to read and write so they could then become teachers of the alii, Woods said.

An 1839 letter from Kauikeaouli to the missionaries orders the creation of a school for the children of the chiefs. Amos and Juliette Cooke would teach there, and Ii would be kahu, looking after the students’ welfare with his wife, Sarai.

In June 1843, before the restoration, Ii wrote to Amos Cooke that the diplomatic mission of Richards and Haalilio was “near succeeding” in Europe and commented on his charges’ reaction to the presence of Paulet’s British warship. “I approve of the children’s anger towards that dark flag,” Ii wrote.

Although it has been assumed that the missionaries were responsible for a law banning visits by Hawaiian women to Western ships, Woods showed a letter from Ii that makes clear it was the alii’s decision.

Several alii had been baptized in 1825, and “they thought it was wrong for women to go on ships for the sex trade,” Woods said.

In November 1827, Capt. William Buckle brought a libel lawsuit against William Richards for publishing, in a New England newspaper, an account of Buckle’s purchase of a young Hawaiian woman, Leoiki, as his sex slave. In Richards’ defense, Ulumaheihei Hoapili, the governor of Maui, and his wife, Kalakua Kaheiheimalie, wrote letters testifying to the truth of his account.

“The bargain was plain to us. Leoiki wept on account of her unwillingness to go — but she was unable to stay on account of the desire of her chief for the money,” Kaheiheimalie wrote.

The alii also controlled land use and sought to protect their people by banning alcohol.

Another side of Kamehameha III is revealed in an 1836 letter to Kinau, who was co-regent of the kingdom. “The letter you sent me, I have recently seen; I probably should not agree, for I am still drinking,” the king wrote.

“He was saying it wouldn’t be fair for him to make a law against drinking when he was still drinking. And he signs it ‘King,’ as if to say, ‘Just in case you forgot, Auntie,’” Nogelmeier said with a puckish smile.

Interspersed with the historical dramas are letters filled with the simple but essential stuff of daily lives. Many are written to Levi Chamberlain, the secular agent for the mission who kept the books and requested such items as hymnbooks, cloth, panes of glass and shoes for Prince Lot and young Chief Lunalilo.

“The letters show that the alii and the missionaries were friends and collaborators,” Woods said. “The Hawaiians were bringing food almost every other day, basically feeding the missionaries.” He carefully unwrapped an 1825 “donation book” that listed the amounts and value of fish, pork, potatoes and other provisions and the names of the alii who gave them.

“The alii knew who provided the food for events and who cleaned up afterwards,” Kneubuhl said.

“When they get grouchy is the funniest,” she added, recounting the irritation and frustration expressed in one official’s letter to someone who delivered “sour” (spoiled) shrimp that was supposed to go to the king.

“I wish I could make it this real, this fresh, in the classroom,” Nogelmeier said as the young scholars carefully read through, discussed and edited their translations, line by line, occasionally breaking into laughter and gossip about these historical personages as if they were very much alive.