Captain William Pinkney has a unique place in history and it’s a good bet his remarkable feat flies below, or should we say sails below, your radar screen. Pinkney, who became the first African American to sail around the world solo via the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, is back in the news with the recent announcement of his death on August 31. He was 87.
He was born on September 15, 1935, in Chicago, where he was raised. His parents divorced when he was very young. He attended Tilden Technical High School, from which he graduated in 1954. Two years later, he was in the Navy, serving as a hospital corpsman. In 1964, after mustering out of the Navy, he moved to Puerto Rico, and it was during his brief stay there that he began learning to sail. During his three years in Puerto Rico, he worked as a stringer for a local paper and later as an elevator operator. His nightlife included frequenting bars, where he earned a reputation as an excellent limbo dancer.
There were many opportunities to be a crew member on sailboats.
Pinkney was employed in several occupations upon returning to the mainland, including working as a marketing manager for Revlon, and later the Johnson Products Company. It was in 1985 that he began thinking about a voyage around the world. After he was laid off from his job at the Department of Human Services, the idea became a greater possibility. For the next several years, he made various fundraising ventures to finance such a trip.
The original concept for the voyage was to circumnavigate via the Panama and Suez Canals in 1987, a route that had already been accomplished by another African American, Teddy Seymour. Pinkney began devising a different way to circle the globe.
On August 5, 1990, he left Boston for Bermuda, and sailed along the eastern South American coastline, across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Town, South Africa, and across the Indian Ocean to Hobart, Tasmania. He sailed across the South Pacific Ocean, around Cape Horn, up the eastern South American coastline, and onward to Boston. Overall, the trip took 22 months and covered approximately 27,000 miles. The expedition cost him around $1 million.
A Boston law firm and the rich industrialist Armand Hammer provided some of the financing, thanks to Bill Cosby, Pinkney’s lifelong friend.
He arrived on a 47-foot cutter Valiant, named the “Commitment,” at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston Harbor on June 9, 1992. More than 1,000 school students and 100 officers from the Navy, Coast Guard, and National Park Service greeted him. A week later, students who had been tracking his trip gathered in Chicago to welcome him home, along with his wife, Ina, and his two grandchildren.
The journey had been long and full of challenges. Sailing alone was even more difficult when it came to managing the large vessel and finding time to sleep. When he rested, according to the log he kept, he depended on his radar to watch the seas for him. On one occasion, he was awakened by the radar’s alarm, indicating a ship was within 24 miles of him. He quickly got up and began tracking the other ship—a large freight container ship approaching fast behind him. It passed so close that it shook his boat. “All the guys from the crew—they were taking pictures of this crazy American on his little sailboat,” Pinkney recalled in a story in the Chicago Tribune.
Another memorable sea voyage occurred when he and a crew retraced the trips of the Middle Passage slave trade routes, a tale he related during an interview with HistoryMakers. His next adventure was as the first captain of the replica schooner “Amistad” from 2000 to 2003, and he worked with director Steven Spielberg on the film “Amistad” (1997).
Pinkney’s books include an autobiography, “As Long as It Takes” (2006), which won the John Southam Award, and two children’s books: “Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey” (1994) and “Sailing Commitment Around the World” (2022). The 1994 documentary “The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney” received a George Foster Peabody Award.