About the Author

Denby Fawcett

Denby Fawcett is a longtime Hawaii television and newspaper journalist, who grew up in Honolulu. Her book, Secrets of Diamond Head: A History and Trail Guide is available on Amazon. Opinions are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Civil Beat’s views.


David W. Forbes died alone in his apartment in Portland, Ore., sometime on Jan. 29 or 30, according to his family. It was the weekend of his birthday and he would have turned 81 years old.

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The manager of his apartment building found him unresponsive after a friend worried when he did not return her many phone calls to wish him a happy birthday.

Forbes’ cousin Craig Ryan said to me in a phone call that to walk through David’s small studio apartment was to know him. Research papers were scattered in piles everywhere. In the kitchen cupboards, instead of jam and rice and cans of tuna, were books, antiques and treasures like 19th century drawings.

He lived for his work as a writer and bibliographer of Hawaii’s history as well as his research on the art of Hawaii, for which he was a recognized expert. There was little time to keep a tidy house or shelves well stocked with food.

Although he is largely unknown to the general public in Hawaii today, Forbes is widely respected in academic, literary and artistic circles both here and internationally for the sheer volume and quality of his research.

In poor health with diabetes and heart problems before he died, he was working every day in his apartment to finish three different books, including his massive 600-plus-page manuscript on the letters of Queen Liliuokalani, which he had been researching for more than 20 years. Also a work on the letters of the Rev. Dwight Baldwin of Maui and a manuscript about the letters of Isobel Osbourne Strong from a collection in the Huntington Library. Strong, the stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson, lived with her mother and Stevenson in Hawaii from 1883 to 1889.

And there were still other works in progress.

He was already responsible for the annotated version of Liliuokalani’s autobiography, “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen,” and was the editor of “The Diaries of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, 1885-1900.”

Forbes moved to Oregon five years ago — departing from Honolulu, the city his ancestors have lived in since 1832  — for the same reason many people reluctantly leave Hawaii: He could no longer afford it.

He had no steady income, living most of his life writing project-to-project and taking the occasional rare book and art consulting job. Financial hardship was a reality to him.

But in six decades of his adult life, he produced some of the most remarkable historic research to ever come out of the Hawaiian islands.

“David was arguably the most important bibliographer and historian of the time of the Hawaiian monarchy. He has left behind a body of work for scholars in the generations ahead to build on,” writer Julia Flynn Siler said in a phone interview from San Francisco.

Siler is a New York Times best-selling author. Forbes helped her with research for her book: “The Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure.”

Forbes didn’t have a mobile phone; he refused to have a voice machine on his land line and used a computer only to preserve, file and cross reference his research, not to access the internet or check social media.

His cousin Craig Ryan said, “That’s why he was able to get so much done, why he accomplished so much. He kept his focus and basically worked his ass off his entire life.”

One of Forbes’ most important contributions is the Hawaiian National Bibliography 1780-1900, a four volume series that provides a record of every printed work written in the 19th century in European countries and elsewhere that featured some aspect of Hawaii’s cultural, political, religious and social history.

Puakea Nogelmeier said, “David traveled the globe to track down and map the existing historical works about Hawaii. His ‘Hawaiian National Bibliography’ is a world-class feat.”

Nogelmeier persuaded the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to fund the digitizing of Forbes’ bibliography in the Papakilo Data Base: a website featuring links to the Hawaiian language newspapers and other important written works about Hawaii.

Nogelmeier, a professor emeritus of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii Manoa, marveled at Forbes’ focus.

“He could sit for hours and hours in the archives with a pencil and paper, reading and taking notes without ever having to get up to go to the bathroom. He had the bladder of Samson.”

Nogelmeier said Forbes’ hard, unwavering concentration exemplified the Hawaiian saying, ma ka hana ka ike: “By doing the work, you gain the knowledge.”

And he said it didn’t bother Forbes when some criticized him for being a haole who didn’t speak Hawaiian.

He just put his head down and worked harder, Nogelmeier said.

“He left behind an incredible body of work. We have lost a treasure. His endurance, dedication and persistence cannot be duplicated today.”

Author Siler said of Forbes, “He was an extraordinary person. One of the finest, most obsessive researchers I have met in my life.”

But he could be intimidating. Even his admirers described him as cantankerous, an old man before his time.

“We called him ‘Mr. Crabby Pants.’ He was one of the crankiest old men you ever met. He would go out of his way to be sarcastic,” said Tom Woods, the former executive director of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives.

Yet he could be very generous to anyone who was as interested and focused as he was on getting to the bottom of historical puzzles.

Cynthia Engle  — now the executive director of the Hawaii Historical Society — remembers when she was starting her career as a clerk in the Bishop Museum’s library and archives her boss told her not to bother Forbes or ever speak to him because he was doing important research.

One day she happened to be riding the same No. 2 bus as Forbes from the museum. She said, “I asked him, ‘If I give you a piece of candy, will you let me sit by you and talk to me?’ He said yes. I gave him a piece of Halloween candy and was able to ask him questions during the whole ride until he got off the bus in Makiki and I continued on to my second job in Waikiki.”

David was also an extraordinarily kind person. I met him when I was 8 years old and had just started the third grade at Punahou School. The first day, my name was mistakenly put on the boy’s list right before David’s name because we were both “D.F.s.” I think my teacher put me on the boy’s list because most girls in my day had names like Betty or Susan or Diane, not Denby.

When the teacher called out our names for attendance, the other children laughed at me when they saw my embarrassment to be on the boys’ list. I was new and just wanted to fit in. David stuck up for me and told me not to pay any attention to the other kids. He said they were jerks. We became friends.

David and his two sisters were adopted by Eureka Forbes, Hawaii’s first female state senator, and Frederick B. Forbes, an insurance agent and descendant of the Protestant missionaries Levi Chamberlain and Cochran Forbes.

His interest in Hawaii’s past started to blossom when he was a teenager. Initially, he began with a very narrow quest: a search one summer to find out more about Hawaiian cowboys.

While my friends and I were bodysurfing at Sandy Beach and Makapuu and drinking Ovaltine malts and eating teriyaki burgers in our cars at Alex Drive In in Kapahulu, David was hard at work in the windowless back halls of the Hawaii State Archives, combing through cardboard boxes, first researching the paniolos of Hawaii island and then slowly getting drawn into the larger research arena of 19th century life in Hawaii. He was particularly intrigued by personal letters and diaries, anything that had not yet been published.

“There was just so much stuff there. It just blew the top of my head off. It was a whole story waiting to unfold,” he told author Siler in an interview.

Former State Archivist Susan Shaner said, “Luckily for us, David didn’t like going swimming. He didn’t enjoy going to the beach. His idea of fun was piecing together information he found by sorting through boxes of documents. Like me, he began to know the people of the 19th century so well that he felt he could talk to them. He didn’t stop going through the boxes for 60 years.”

His parents did not share his passion for history and were dismayed by his avocation.

He told Siler in the interview: “They (his father and mother) decided I was never going to turn into anything.” He said they would have been happier if he found a more lucrative calling.

Forbes’ father, who friends describe as humorless and strict, was also angry about Forbes’ sexual orientation.

“The fact that his only son, his adopted son, was gay made him go ballistic,” said Lynn Ann Davis, David’s colleague and the retired head of the preservation department of Hamilton Library at UH Manoa.

Davis and former Mission Houses Historic Site director Woods said they were upset by the way some other researchers criticized Forbes for having only an undergraduate degree from UH.

“It is incredible to think he accomplished what he did without an advanced degree and without an affiliation with an institution or a university to become one of the most respected historians and researchers of Hawaiian history,” said Woods.

“Hawaii’s written history would not look the same without David Forbes. He became a resource for everyone whether they knew it or not.”

His longtime friend Irving Jenkins said Forbes sometimes seemed hurt that there was no immediate acclaim for his work, no book reviews or articles about his decades of researching and writing and enduring what author Siler describes as sitzfleisch — literally “sitting meat” or “sitting flesh” — the ability to sit still for long hours to finish a difficult task.

But in his last days, his cousin Craig Ryan said, “David told me that he was incredibly proud of what he had accomplished. He felt he had done important work.

“He made something amazing of himself.”

Photo of David Forbes is courtesy of Lynn Ann Davis.


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About the Author

Denby Fawcett

Denby Fawcett is a longtime Hawaii television and newspaper journalist, who grew up in Honolulu. Her book, Secrets of Diamond Head: A History and Trail Guide is available on Amazon. Opinions are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Civil Beat’s views.


Latest Comments (0)

Mahalo Denby for such a rich and fitting tribute to David by one who is able to contribute a story from your youth to complement the array of sources shedding light on his character and literary contributions. I too am indebted to him for his 4-vol. HNB and his seemingly photographic memory in response to my many requests for information when crossing paths with him at the Hawaiian Mission Houses library. He not only saved me countless hours of research, he also pointed me to sources that I would not have otherwise uncovered. I too hope that there is a way that his unfinished manuscripts can become part of his legacy.

mark.gallagher · 2 years ago

Thank you Denby for this remembrance of David Forbes. He and I met 25 years ago at the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society library and subsequently had conversations and corresponded over the next quarter century about many common interests from Hawaii’s history to early photography. We spoke just a month ago; I’m heart broken to hear that he’s died. He was indeed the "genuine article" in every way, focused on his passion, deeply insightful and cultured. I never found him cankerous in the least: David was charming, funny and very worldly, he just never suffered fools gladly and was a perfectionist in a way only a such a learned person can be. His body of work in unparalleled. I will miss him dearly and am grateful our friendship. A hui hou David. Robert Becker

RB3 · 2 years ago

There are so many unsung heroes who die alone. We are fortunate to have good souls amongst us like Denby who pay them tribute.

Rudiger · 2 years ago

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