Colette Higgins looked back and forth from the 1887 photographs to the rooms in Rackheath Hall. The realization was thrilling.

“This is the staircase! That’s the stained-glass window!”

Queen Kapi‘olani had stayed at the sprawling estate in Norwich, England, during her trip to London for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. The current residents, even the historians for the property, didn’t know the story.

Higgins, 49, a history professor and the new dean of academic affairs at Windward Community College, is a Kapi‘olani scholar who has devoted years of research to the Hawaiian monarch she says has become “the forgotten queen.”

“It’s like Kapi‘olani lives in the shadows for us,” she said. “Lili‘uokalani was queen for two years. Emma was queen for six. But Kapi‘olani was queen for 17 years.”

This summer, Higgins completed a one-year sabbatical by retracing the footsteps of Kapi‘olani’s trip to the United States and England. Higgins visited the places Kapi‘olani visited, blogging about what she saw so colleagues and students back home who knew of her enthusiasm for the project could follow her journey.

It started in 2002, when Higgins was teaching Hawaiian history at Kapiolani Community College. She was asked to give a talk on the school’s namesake, so she began to research the topic. All she found was a slim book that was mostly photos and the words to chants with only about 30 pages of text.

There had to be more.

There was, but not yet assembled in one text with the rigor of an academician and the contextual nuances of a historian.

Higgins became fascinated with Kapi‘olani. Her research took her to places like the Bishop Museum, Iolani Palace, the Hawaii State Archives. To find details of the 1887 trip, she turned to newspaper accounts published in the different cities the queen visited. Several members of the traveling party, including Curtis ‘Iaukea and then-Princess Lili‘uokalani also kept diaries of the trip.

Then Higgins started thinking about what it would be like to retrace the journey, to see what Kapi‘olani had seen, to stand where Kapi‘olani had stood.

She took a year sabbatical starting in August of last year. The first several months were spent planning. Higgins sent query letters to the places the queen had been: Could she visit? Did they have further information on Kapi‘olani’s time there? The people she contacted were excited by her enthusiasm and many were happy to help. Meanwhile, her husband, Gary, worked on the logistics of where they would stay and how they would get from place to place.

In April of this year, the two set off on their trip, carrying just backpacks and one rolling hand-carry bag apiece (whereas, she says, Kapi‘olani’s traveling party of nine people had a total of 55 pieces of luggage). They flew to San Francisco and then took a train across the U.S. They went to Washington, D.C., Boston and New York City as the royal party did on their trip. From there, like Kapi‘olani, they went by ship across the Atlantic to England.

“My actual traveling time was 13 days out of a 56-day trip,” Higgins said. “Kapi‘olani traveled 50 days out of 106.”

In New York, Higgins went to Roosevelt Island, which was home to a number of state-run institutions, including an asylum and a charity hospital. Kapi‘olani had visited a maternity hospital there, and newspaper accounts describe her holding a baby and affectionately babbling to the child.

Higgins notes that Kapi‘olani had one child who was stillborn and had been a wet nurse for Queen Emma’s son, Albert, who died at age 4. She had suffered heartbreak but held such love for mothers and their babies. Higgins believes it was this visit to the maternity hospital — which was at the time revolutionizing sanitation standards for childbirth — that inspired Kapi‘olani to found the Honolulu hospital that still bears her name.

Higgins carried information from her research on her laptop so she could include historical context with her daily posts of her experiences. She forced herself to write regularly and cogently even though some days she was very tired.

“Blogging was the hardest thing, but if I waited until I got home, no way would I remember everything,” she said.

There are stories about finding trees that Kapi‘olani planted, visiting Wellesley and Gallaudet and schools in London and tracing those connections back to the school Kapi‘olani founded that later became KCC. So many stories. Kapi‘olani saw the journey as a trip of a lifetime and packed in as much as she could. Higgins marveled at the stamina the queen must have had to do so many things and visit so many places.

The travel blog platform that Higgins used has a feature that compiles blog posts into a hardcover book, which is available for purchase for $75. Higgins doesn’t get any money from the book and the information is available free online, but she ordered a copy of the book anyway. It’s over 42,000 words, which she wrote in 56 days, and has more than 400 photos.

“I can flip through it, which is a different experience than looking at a blog,” she said.

Of course, when a scholar loves a subject as much as Higgins loves this, the learning never stops and the project is never truly over. She plans to return to some of the places, but at a more leisurely pace. There were also a few things she didn’t get to do, so that’s for next time. She’s contemplating writing a book and is doing speaking engagements, including a presentation next month at a KCC alumni gathering.

She’s happy to share the story. When Higgins talks about Kapi‘olani’s journey and the warm, generous character of the woman she has come to admire so much, she gracefully weaves the hard historical nuggets of dates and facts into a captivating tale of adventure.

“That’s what history is. Stories.” Higgins says. “Name a place. I’ll tell you a story.”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.