Honolulu County HI Archives News.....ENGINEER RETIRES AFTER SERVICE IN T.H. SINCE DAYS OF SANFORD DOLE December 1947
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J. Orr jessicanorr@gmail.com March 2, 2012, 9:21 pm

UNKNOWN NEWSPAPER December 1947
By Betty Jo Clinton

  Today a man who has been in the service of the territory almost continuously 
since the turn of the century will retire.
  He is Robert Davis King, chief cadastral engineer, who entered the 
territorial survey department in June, 1900, the same month that Sanford B. 
Dole was inaugurated as the first governor of the newly-formed territory.
  Except for his military service during World War I and a brief period in 
private business, during which he was a member of the city-county board of 
supervisors, he has been in the department ever since. He has worked under 
every governor of the territory.
  Acclaimed as the outstanding authority on Hawaiian land and land titles, Mr. 
King has written numerous articles on the Hawaiian land system. He was 
instrumental in setting up the territorial taxation map bureau as it is today.
  The tax map system now used, by which every parcel of land is recorded for 
taxation purposes, took him three weeks to figure out and five years to finish.
  When he says, “There’s no such thing as ‘no man’s land’ in Hawaii,” he 
knows, for he has personally surveyed or supervised surveying of almost every 
foot of land in the territory.
  Back in the “good old days” surveying was a precarious job, Mr. King 
recalls, although he doesn’t believe any surveyors were injured during their 
mountain-scaling stunts.
  The work of the surveying office has expanded greatly since 1873, when it 
was set up to straighten out land ownership tangles resulting from the “Great 
Mahele” – division of territorial land in 1848 under Kamehameha III.
  Mr. King has answered frequent queries from persons who believe they have 
claims to land in the territory, since his office handles land court titles.
  Once the daughter of a man who was an American minister here during the 
republic wrote Mr. King claiming that King Kalakaua had given her father an 
island.
  Mr. King checked his records, found no evidence and wrote back that Kalakaua 
was ruling under a constitutional monarchy and did not have the right to give 
away islands, even if he had made such an agreement.
  A member of a five generation kamaaina family, Mr. King has carried on the 
tradition of official life in which his ancestors were prominent for more than 
100 years.
  His great-great-grandfather, Oliver Holmes, arrived in the islands in 1793 
and was later appointed by Kamehameha I as governor of Oahu.
  His grandfather, Robert G. Davis, was an associate justice of the supreme 
court under the monarchy, and his father, Capt. James A. King, was minister of 
the interior under the republic.
  “My great-great-grandmother was a Hawaiian chiefess—at least we like to 
think she was,” he chuckled.


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