I rather vividly recall seeing the line-drawn sketch of John Mashow in an old New Bedford newspaper article while researching my book, Whaling Captains of Color-Americas' First Meritocracy. The newspaper clipping is located in the whaling scrapbook collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum Library, and I was going through it to locate background information on some of the whaling captains I was including in the book. It is exceedingly rare to find portraits of persons of color from the era when Mashow was alive, before the Civil War. He was obviously a man of the moment to have had his portrait included with the newspaper article titled "Old Time Shipbuilding," followed by the subtitle, "A Mashow Ship Considered One of the Very Best."1 He wears a slight smile in the picture, a rare depiction for a portrait of a black man during this time period. There is substantive information in the article about Mr. Mashow's prolific work as a shipbuilder and architect, but little on how he came by those skills.
展开▼
