An unpublished photo of a man who could be Nakahama Manjiro (1827-1898), the first Japanese known to have lived in the United States, has been found at a public library in Massachusetts.
Nakahama, better known as John Manjiro, lived and studied in America after he was rescued by a U.S. whaling ship along with a few other fisherman colleagues when their fishing boat became stranded on an uninhabited isle in the Pacific Ocean in 1841.
The photo shows a man, clad in a three-piece suit with a hat in his hand, who could be Manjiro as well as a bearded, gray-haired Caucasian man, who could be William Whitfield (1804-1886), the skipper of the ship that rescued them and took them to Hawaii.