Kamehameha III, in a double-breasted military jacket with gold epaulets, stands nobly, his doe eyes unflinchingly meeting the viewer's. In the double portrait, he stands next to his mother, Keopuolani, widow of Kamehameha I.

The pen-and-ink watercolor, painted in the mid-1820s, is one of hundreds of Hawaiian and Hawai'i-related items that go on the auction block at Sotheby's in New York City tomorrow.

"It's almost unprecedented to have a collection this large and rich," said Selby Kiffer, senior vice president of Sotheby's books and manuscripts department, by phone from New York.

In his 22 years with the prestigious auction house, he has never seen a collection of Hawaiiana like this up for sale.

The consigners, a husband and wife who wish to remain anonymous, have been acquiring Hawaiiana for 30 years, and are refocusing their collection.

"They've had fun. They also collect Polynesian objects and have decided to concentrate on that," explained Kiffer.

The collection is part of Sotheby's two annual books and manuscripts sales. Items such as a first edition of Dashiell Hammett's debut thriller "Red Harvest" (with a high estimate of $30,000) and a cache of love letters (belonging to a member of the Romanoff family) between Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley and the writer Erich Maria Remarque fill the pages of the first half of the thick, glossy catalog.

The second half of the book is dedicated to the Hawaiiana collection.

Kiffer, who also does appraisals for the PBS series "Antiques Road Show," expects that most bidders for the Hawai'i items will be private collectors.

"That's the case in most collecting areas. The institutions aren't in the frontline of purchasing but receive collections from private collectors," said Kiffer.

DeSoto Brown, collections manager for the Bishop Museum archive, affirms that scenario.

"I was very intrigued by certain things," Brown said about the Sotheby's catalog.

However, with no acquisitions budget, "If (the Bishop Museum) were to bid on something, usually it would entail trying to find a private donor who would support that," he said.

"In one sense," said DeSoto, "we don't have to go look for stuff, the stuff comes to us."

While the sale holds no must-have items for the Bishop Museum ("I don't want to say that I'm blase about them, but I'm very accustomed to these types of papers because we have a large collection of them"), "for a private collector they would be amazing and wonderful," said Brown.

For Brown, "the thing that engaged me more was just wondering who they came from."

The collection will appeal to more than Hawaiian history buffs, said Kiffer.

Items speak to a broad range of subjects — westward expansion, whaling and seafaring, numismatics.

While Hawaiiana is an area that is always of interest, said Kiffer, the concentration of material was unusual. That's why Sotheby's accepted it.

"We checked what few auction records there were, consulted catalogs, and made the decision that this is significant history of United States Americana and Polynesian interest," Kiffer said. He and his staff extensively researched subjects to "get up to speed on it." They also received guidance from Hawai'i institutions. "We feel we have presented (the collection) in a way that makes it accessible to the new collector, but is not too elementary that a veteran collector would be put off by it."

Kiffer is intrigued to see how the collection does, "because there's no precedent for it, and there's some very important material here, especially the missionary letters."

VOICES FROM THE PAST

Lot 143 is a letter from missionary Lucia Lyons, on the Big Island, to Angeline, the wife of Samuel Northrup Castle, who went on to start Castle & Cooke.

"My school, it goes on and increases in interest daily," wrote Lyons. "Not interest in things of Eternity however. Here they are very stupid indeed."

Leafing through the catalog, the documents offer tantalizing glimpses of a different Hawai'i.

Hailed as a "major rediscovery," and toting a high estimate of $60,000, are eight pages of a letter from Anthony Allen, as dictated to Hiram Bingham.

Allen was a black slave in New York state who became a seaman and eventually settled on O'ahu in 1812. Here, he lived as a prosperous member of the community, with six acres of Waikiki land from "high priest Hevaheva" and two Hawaiian wives. The letter is a recounting of his life as a free man to the son of his former master.

Other finds in the collection include a gold pocket watch that once belonged to bon-vivant rancher Sam Parker, a bunch of 18th- and 19th-century kapa fragments, and a needlework sampler by an 11-year-old Punahou School student named Isabella Chamberlain.

For Island collectors of Hawaiiana, the sale is a chance to bring things that originated in Hawai'i — and found their way to households around the world — home. And, hey, it's almost Christmas.

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.