This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Flags.’ See more responses here.

In Hawaii, there are usually two flags flown. The top one here is the well-known national flag. The other is Hawaii’s state flag, the only state flag to contain the flag of another country. But how did the Union Jack get there?

This comes down to interactions, in the early days of western contact with Hawaii, between the British Royal Navy and King Kamehameha, who at that time ruled only the Island of Hawaii, not the whole island chain. Kamehameha already had already taken into his inner circle, and thought highly of, a pair of British sailors who acted as military advisors. Then, in 1794, Captain George Vancouver signed a pact with Kamehameha, which he thought ceded the island to Great Britain. That wasn’t how the Hawaiians interpreted it. They thought it established the island as a protectorate. However, one aspect of this exchange was that a British flag was given to the king and was used as a symbol for the kingdom after Kamehameha went on to unite all the Hawaiian islands.

There’s a story that, when the American war of independence with Britain broke out in 1812, Kamehameha did not want to offend either side and so he designed a flag that incorporated elements of both nations’ flags. However the new design came into being, it became the flag of the Hawaiian nation, though the number of stripes, the colors, and the size of the Union Jack often varied.

It wasn’t until 1845 that the current version became official, with the eight stripes representing the eight main islands of Hawaii.