Mr. Pinckney left the Boston Navy Yard with little fanfare on August 5, 1990, honking his horn three times and calling his then-wife, Ina, at home in Chicago. “It’s a good day,” he said. “I’m going sailing.”
That was an understatement. Pinckney spent years planning his trip, which ended on June 9, 1992, 22 months and 27,000 miles later, making him one of the few Americans to circumnavigate the world solo. This is an epic feat of single-handed navigation, all the more remarkable because instead of sailing along the center of the Earth via the Panama and Suez Canals, they chose the most difficult route: passing beneath the five southernmost capes. worth it.
On the day he rounded Cape Horn in South America, the man he called “Big Daddy,” in honor of the perilous passage that sailors compared to Mount Everest, opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated the old sailing tradition. I obeyed and said: He put a gold earring in his left ear.
By then, he was facing one obstacle after another while captaining the Commitment, a nine-sail, 47-foot cutter. After engine trouble and autopilot failure, the ship was threatened by a pair of hurricanes coming from opposite sides near Bermuda. Upon his arrival in Cape Town, he encountered the continent of his ancestors for the first time, which impressed him (“It was like standing outside of myself and watching a movie”). Later, his boat was hit twice in the Indian Ocean, almost causing disaster. It can be overcome by wind and waves.
While far from shore, Mr. Pinckney ate canned Hormel, crackers, and cooked meals (he regretted not bringing more candy) and usually slept only six hours a night. Ta. During my quiet moments, I spent time reading from my library of paperbacks ranging from Shakespeare to Daniel Steele. His loneliness became so severe that he began calling his wife using a satellite phone when circumstances permitted.
“Yna,” she remembered him saying. “There are some stories I can tell other sailors. There are some stories I can tell other solo sailors. And there are some stories I can never tell.”
Mr. Pinckney’s progress was followed by thousands of schoolchildren in his hometown of Chicago and in Boston, where the voyage was financed by a real estate investment company. According to Ina, he was a natural storyteller with a talent for connecting with children, creating video lessons for students and mailing them to their homes at the port, and writing a book for first graders called Captain Bill. He is said to have written “Pinckney’s Journey”.
Some of his footage was used in the award-winning educational program “Bill Pinckney’s Incredible Voyages,” narrated by TV star and comedian Bill Cosby, a friend from his Navy days. Peabody Award.
“I wanted to do something that would leave a legacy for my grandchildren,” Pinckney said. told the interviewerHe explained his motivation for the voyage. “And I said, ‘I can’t leave them money, but I can leave them a standard to live by.'”
The journey leading up to the trip was an adventure in itself. Mr. Pinckney, a former cosmetics executive, was working as an official for the Chicago Department of Human Services when he was fired in 1984. Growing up on the city’s South Side, he was fascinated by his children’s book, “Call Me Courage.” Written by Armstrong Perry, this is the story of a boy who overcomes his fear of water through a sea voyage. Now he decided it was time to have an adventure of his own.
Mr. Pinckney learned to sail small ships in the Navy, took more advanced lessons on City Island in the Bronx, and began sailing solo in Chicago. So he bought his first boat in the late 1970s, but he was tired of waiting for friends to join him. He’s on the water. He originally planned to circumnavigate the world via the canal route, and Teddy Seymour rode this in his 1986 and his 1987, becoming the first black man to circumnavigate the world solo.
However, through his friend Cosby, he met businessman Armand Hammer, who provided him with $25,000 in seed money to help Robin Knox Johnston, the British sailor who completed the first solo non-stop circumnavigation of the world in 1969. He encouraged Mr. Pinckney to go to London for a visit. .
“Once you get through the canal, no one will remember you did this,” Knox-Johnston reportedly told him. chicago tribune. “It might be a good idea to go around the five capes, take the right path.”
Mr. Pinckney took his advice. To finance the trip, he spent his two years promoting the voyage to companies, showing it as a potential marketing coup. He estimates he received 300 rejections, including one from his former employer, Johnson Products.
After a short article about his plans was posted, New York Times 1989, he found a key backer in investor Todd Johnson. Help Mr. Pinckney expand the educational component of the trip, meeting with numerous schools across Chicago and developing history and geography lessons for students who track Mr. Pinckney’s travels by sticking pins into classroom maps. The MacArthur Foundation also signed on.
That voyage was far from his last. Upon his return, tired but energized, he takes up ocean sailing again, believing that the “real world” is a world of 50-foot waves crashing behind his boat, and that he is not living in the world. He said that this is not a world where people are living in the world. He is worried about paying his mortgage and credit cards.
In 1999, while serving as director of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, he led a six-month educational trip to recreate the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Slave Trade, taking teachers and students to Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Ghana. I took him to And Senegal. The following year, he began serving as captain of the museum’s replica of the Amistad (a cargo ship on which West African prisoners of war mutinied in 1839), took control of the ship, and appeared in Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad. In the dramatized case, he won the case in court. freedom.
Mr. Pinckney lectured on the history of sailing, often answering questions about his travels around the world. Ina Pinckney recalled that when he got home, “someone said to him, ‘What’s the bravest thing you ever did out there?'” Untie me and let’s go.” All that’s left is to survive.”
William Deltrice Pinckney III, the eldest of two children, was born on September 15, 1935 in Chicago. His parents divorced when he was six years old, and he and his sister were raised by their mother, who worked as a maid.
Her family was sometimes on welfare, and as one of only four black students graduating from Tilden Technical High School, Pinckney began to feel like an outsider. He spent much of his free time at the Museum of Science and Industry, reading placards at exhibitions, and dreamed of becoming an artist, but his mother dismissed the idea as “making money with art.” are only dead white people.”
When he entered high school, he experienced a mental crisis, Ina Pinckney said. “His mother went to her storefront church, and Bill went with her, and one day he said to her, “I can’t go with you anymore.” Every time I go, I’m told that everything is great when you die. You have to go to heaven before everything goes well. Why doesn’t this work? ”
At his mother’s urging, he went to the library, borrowed a book on comparative religion, and read it cover to cover. He decided to become a Jew and began attending the temple before converting as an adult.
After high school, Mr. Pinckney trained as an X-ray technician and served in the Navy as a hospital corpsman. In his 2006 memoir, “As Long As It Takes,” he wrote that after his discharge from the military, he abandoned his first wife Yvonne Glover and his young daughter and moved to Puerto Rico, leaving the mainland. I am reminiscing about what I left behind.
“I still feel ashamed and humbled by it,” he wrote. …I ran then, and in some ways I still run now. ”
Mr. Pinckney worked as a bartender, elevator mechanic, limbo dancer, and newspaper stringer before moving to New York City, where he resumed his work in X-ray examination. He married Ina in his 1965 year and around the same time became his make-up artist, working on commercials, magazine shoots, and low-budget films. He once used make-up to draw a stripe down the center of a horse’s face in a Western movie.
She joined Revlon in 1973 and worked on marketing the Black cosmetics line. He moved to Chicago four years later after being hired to launch Johnson Products’ luxury cosmetics line.
Pinckney and Ina’s marriage ended in divorce in 2001, but the two remained close. He married Migdalia Vasiel in his 2003 year and together they moved to Puerto Rico and ran a charter boat business in the city of Fajardo. She survives him as well as his daughter, Angela Walton; a sister; and two grandchildren to whom he dedicated the voyage.
In 2021, Mr. Pinckney National Sailing Hall of Fame. He was the first black sailor to receive this honor, though he downplayed it, saying: PBS News Hour The sea was said to be the “great equalizer.”
“The ocean doesn’t care about your economic status, your religion, your nationality, your gender. It doesn’t matter what you think. It cares about one thing,” he continued, “I am the ocean. .”