Seaport to honor Bill Pinkney, first captain of the freedom schooner Amistad
Feb. 22—MYSTIC — Mystic Seaport Museum announced Tuesday that it will present its 2022 America and the Sea Award to William "Bill" Pinkney, who served as the first captain of the replica of the schooner Amistad and was the first Black man to sail around the world solo via Cape Horn.
The award "recognizes individuals and organizations whose extraordinary achievements in the world of maritime exploration, competition, scholarship, and design best exemplify the American character."
In its announcement, which comes during Black History Month, the museum said Pinkney's work to open the maritime world to inner-city youth and others around the country embodies its mission to inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.
"Captain Pinkney expertly and professionally unwraps the stories of the sea, from circumnavigation to the history of the triangle trade, for a wide and diverse audience. An ambassador to those who believe the maritime world is not their world, he has proven adept in showing everyone that the sea connects us all," museum President Peter Armstrong said.
During his around-the-world trip aboard a 47-foot sailboat from 1990 to 1992, schoolchildren in Chicago and Boston, where his trip began and ended, tracked his progress through video diaries, phone conversations, satellite technology and lesson plans.
In 1999, Pinkney, his crew and a group of teachers sailed a 78-foot ketch through the Middle Passage, the Atlantic slave trade route in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. They traveled 12,000 miles in six months, sailing first from Puerto Rico to Brazil, where they visited the sites of former slave markets. They then sailed across the Atlantic to Ghana and Senegal, where they also visited the "Door of No Return," a small island off the coast of Senegal where enslaved people were loaded onto ships. They communicated with students in several hundred schools back in the United States using computers and satellite TV.
Pinkney then served as captain of the Amistad from 2000 to 2003, taking it to ports around the country. Following retirement, he settled in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where he became the captain of the charter catamaran Lady Dee cruising the U.S., British and Spanish Virgin Islands. His full biography can be read at mysticseaport.org/gala.
The museum will honor Pinkney, 86, on Oct. 26 at the Metropolitan Club in New York City, during the museum's premier fundraising event.
Among the past recipients of the America and the Sea Award are America's Cup Hall of Fame members Tom Whidden and Gary Jobson; Stonington boat designers Rod and Bob Johnstone and their company J/Boats; author and historian Nathaniel Philbrick; WoodenBoat Publications founder Jon Wilson; former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle and legendary yacht designer Olin J. Stephens II.
