January 2011

On Munich’s bustling Maximilianstrasse, before the huge Bavarian National Museum, is a bronze statue of a tall, elegant, strikingly handsome man in the uniform of a general of the late Eighteenth Century. His chiseled features are framed by a peruke, a military cloak hangs in folds to his knees, across his chest slants the broad riband of an order of knighthood, he swings a tasseled cane as he strides forward arrogantly, and his left hand grasps the plans of the city’s famous Englischer Garten which he conceived and laid out.

That statue was erected by Maximilian II, king of Bavaria, in recognition of the public services of Graf von Rumford, the great minister of an earlier ruler. Yet it is the exceptional American tourist who recognizes in the figure a fellow countryman, and even he seldom knows how to evaluate that strange man. Was he an international scoundrel as rumored from his day to our own, or was he one of the greatest benefactors of the human race—a thinker ranked by Franklin D. Roosevelt beside Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson?

In 1841, before Commodore Perry had opened up Japan, before any Japanese had set foot in America, a fisherman’s boy was transported by a chance of history to Massachusetts. This is his story, condensed from a new book by Hisakazu Kaneko, published by Houghton Mifflin Co. Manjiro, The Man Who Discovered America is a true account, so strange and charming that it reads like a fairy tale.

By one of the coincidences of publishing, a second book dealing with the adventures of Manjiro was published a little later this year. Titled Voyager to Destiny and written with verve and clarity by Emily V. Warinner, it is enriched by Manjiro’s illustrations of the new world that unfolded before his incredulous eyes. American Heritage is indebted to its publishers, the Bobbs-Merrill Company, for permission to reproduce this two-page portfolio as well as three of the drawings in the text of the article.

All of these pictures, in the collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, were done by Manjirc himself or by two artists who worked under his close supervision and from his preliminary sketches. The pagoda-roofed Nineteenth-Century America that emerges resembles a Japanese garden, over which flies an Old Glory that Manjiro consistently gave but one big star.

History as a Cure H and Non-H

On various occasions the American muse has sung of arms and the woman: a musketeer, a marine in the fighting tops of the Constitution, a color bearer, a cavalrywoman, even a brigade commander ex officio. The twain of this story, Molly Corbin and Molly Pitcher, were cannoneers, serving pieces in two of the hottest actions of the Revolution.

Fittingly they embodied tradition, for the patron saint of the artillery was of their sex. Since the day had passed when gun crews wore the image of St. Barbara on their caps and invoked her protection against premature explosion of their weapons, few comrades in arms of the two Mollys realized the appropriateness of their feat.