Embodying the soul of a sailor

Ex-executive now master of Amistad replica

The old sea captain is a man in love.

Brad Nettles
The Post and Courier

The Amistad dwarfs a fishing boat as the tall ship returns to Charleston Harbor for Charleston Harbor Fest 2008.

Bill Pinkney strides down the dock, grabbing the newly arrived crew one by one in a massive bear hug. His eyes come back to the Freedom Schooner Amistad, its Douglas fir masts, its graceful, dark lines of iroko and angelique wood from Africa, live oak from South Carolina. This is his.

"I was with this boat when it was logs from places like Sierra Leone, up in Washington state, Lagos. The wood that came from Surinam. The keel came Guyana," he says. "I have splinters still in me somewhere from it."

The Amistad is a replica of the famous 19th century sailing ship commandeered in 1839 by captive Africans en route to being sold as slaves in Cuba. They would win their freedom in the United States and eventually return home to Sierra Leone.

It's in Charleston for Harbor Fest 2008 this weekend and will stay to take part in Spoleto Festival USA 2008 at the end of the month, during which an opera about the original Amistad odyssey will be performed. Pinkney is here with it.

Tyrone Walker
The Post and Courier

Bill Pinkney is the former captain of the Amistad, and now its storyteller.

He is "a 73-year-old ex-limbo dancer," he says playfully. He was the first captain of the replica when it was launched in 2000; today he is its master, its storyteller. He is descended from captured west Africans like the rice farmers who pulled loose a spike on that trade boat 180 years ago and pried off their shackles.

He has the rollicking manner of a sailor, swinging easily back and forth between humor and philosophy. His two favorite philosophers, he says only half teasingly, are Winnie the Pooh and Satchel Paige.

Pinkney is a former corporate executive who learned how to sail on treacherous Lake Michigan in a boat not much bigger than a bobber. He gave up corporate life in 1992 to take a 47-foot boat across the endless, merciless Southern Ocean, then around Cape Horn in hurricane-force winds and 25-foot seas. He became one of those singled-out firsters — the first black man to sail solo around the world.

"It's a fact," he says about a recognition that could easily evoke mixed feelings. He's comfortable with it. "It was done as an object lesson for young people who were told they were failures, they were losers. As I was. I think it's important if it inspires someone, inspires anyone."

First and foremost, he is a sailor, he says with a simple pride. When he arrived in Uruguay, he could barely stand the hubbub after two months in the Southern Ocean.

"After three days I was ready to go. You develop a rhythm, you develop a mindset, where you're comfortable with the sea, to where everything else is disruptive to you — the noise, the smells (of being on land)." And not so oddly, when he talks about the 53 rice farmers who sailed from chains to freedom those many years ago, the pride he has is a sailor's pride.

"You took your destiny into your own hands," he says of them. The lesson is the lesson he learned crossing the pit of an ocean that people said was too big for him. "We can extend beyond what we think our limitations are, if the cause is the focus."

His eyes get soft when he looks at the Amistad. She is more a reminder of history to him.

"It's part of the whole struggle for the rights of human beings, the only iconic symbol of that whole era that can move," Pinkney says. There's a chill up the spine to walk down a modern pier, past the trim steel sails and lithe hulled boats, turn past the pylon and see the almost mythic features of the ship and read "Amistad." But he doesn't think about its heritage when he's aboard.

"When I sail the boat I'm part of it, part and parcel of it," he says. "When I'm at speaking engagements, the boat channels its stories through me. That's where I get my personal injections of what the Amistad means to me."

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@post andcourier.com.