Davis was born in 1819, in
Honolulu to Captain William Heath Davis, Sr. and Hannah Holmes Davis, a daughter of Oliver Holmes,
Governor of Oahu. His father, who arrived in Hawaii in 1812, was a Boston ship captain and one of the pioneer merchants of the
sandalwood trade in the islands. He was given his middle name after Captain Eliab Grimes, a close friend of his father who was also once a privateer in the
War of 1812. His younger brother was
William Heath Davis, Jr., who was an early settler of
San Diego. Davis and his younger brother were one-quarter
Hawaiian from their maternal grandmother Mahi Kalanihooulumokuikekai, a high chiefess from the Koolau district of Oahu. After his father's death on November 26, 1822, Hannah Holmes remarried to another American merchant
John Coffin Jones, who took the five-year-old Davis back to
Boston in 1825. In the United States, he was given "a classical education" and raised in the household of an uncle who was a wealthy merchant in Boston, remaining there until he completed his schooling. He traveled for a time in Europe where he acquired the ability to speak French, Spanish and German. For a time, he was a clerk on the Boston merchant ship
Monsoon which traded in
Monterrey and
Yerba Buena (now San Francisco). He returned to Honolulu and went into the mercantile business, trading between Hawaii and California. Davis resigned his post as Peruvian Consul upon his appointment as Police Magistrate of Honolulu in 1859. Davis also served many governmental posts for the Kingdom of Hawaii. He served as Commission of Customs in 1853, Police Magistrate of Honolulu in 1859 and briefly served as a member of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the
Hawaiian legislature, during the session of 1855. He was also a member of the Privy Council from 1863 to 1865 under the reign of
Kamehameha V. In 1852, he began studying law and shortly after became a well read lawyer. He also was appointed to succeed
John Papa ʻĪʻī as the Second Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court of Hawaii from February 16, 1864, until his resignation on July 8, 1868. During his time in office, he would also published Volume II of Hawaiian Law Reports. Between 1868 and 1869, after his term as Associate Justice, Davis and Richard H. Stanley served on a commission which compiled and translated the Penal Code of the Hawaiian Kingdom into Hawaiian and English. He married secondly on August 1, 1862, to Maria Sumner Sea (1824–1908), daughter of Captain William Sumner and the widow of Henry Sea, with whom he had Maria and Robert Crichton Wyllie "Wally" Davis. His daughter Charlotte married
James A. King making Davis the grandfather of
Samuel Wilder King, who became
Governor of the
Territory of Hawaii 1953–1957 and was the first person of
Native Hawaiian descent to become governor. He died on March 4, 1872, in Honolulu after suffering for several months from the
dropsy. After his death, Davis was buried at
Oahu Cemetery. ==References==