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Manjiro’s New World Wonderland

March 2023
1min read

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.

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