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The captain of the Amistad and the shipwrights who built this reproduction of the famous schooner were not alone in feeling a deep personal stake in the vessel's launch.
Traffic was backed up over a mile onto Interstate 95 from Exit 90, the exit to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Once off the interstate and onto the local roads, traffic was still bumper-to-bumper, and a line of pedestrians laden with long-lensed cameras, baby strollers, backpacks, and folding chairs stretched out for a mile along the road between a shopping mall parking lot and Mystic Seaport. In the harbor, kayaks and canoes, motor launches and sail boats, schooners and Coast Guard ships were jockeying for position and moorings. Thousands of people were assembling on March 25 to witness the first launching of a new wooden ship on the Mystic River since the 1920s.
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 Quentin Snediker | |
But the launching of a wooden ship is not enough to explain the crowds. "Other boats are just boats," said Quentin Snediker, the project coordinator for the ship's reconstruction. "This is really a symbol of the struggle for human rights, and has a much more important mission for it to accomplish than any other vessel that I am aware of."
The Amistad, Spanish for "friendship", was living up to its name and succeeding in its educational mission even before its hull touched the water. But it seems doubtful that it can ever reach the end of this mission. While a young woman in traditional African dress was opening the ceremonies under the tent at Mystic Seaport with a spine-chilling story of a girl's brutal capture by slavers, across Long Island Sound in Brooklyn the funeral of Patrick Dorismond-the fourth unarmed black man to be killed by police in the last 13 months-was turning into a riot with the police.
 Amistad's Gold-leafed Trailboard | |
The original ship was not a stranger to violence. It was a coastal cargo schooner engaged in transporting slaves from the Havana auction blocks to Cuban plantations until the day in 1839 when it carried Singbe Pieh among its human cargo. He and 52 others were seized in Africa and fraudulently sold in Cuba as Cuban-born slaves. After Amistad set sail from Havana, Pieh led a revolt killing the captain and cook, and took command of the ship in the hope of sailing home. During the day, they sailed toward the rising sun and Africa, but during the night the ship was steered north by the two Spaniards who had bought the Africans, and Amistad wound its way up the eastern seaboard of the United States. When they were off Montauk Point, Long Island, a US Naval Revenue Cutter seized the ship and towed it to New London, CT, and the Africans were jailed for murder. They were not freed until 1841, when the US Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that they had been illegally enslaved.
 Samuel H. Pieh | |
"When you are the descendant of a slave in Sierra Leone, that is not something to be proud of," said Samuel H. Pieh, a descendant of Singbe Pieh, at Mystic Seaport for the launch. "Even though he won his freedom," he added. "In Sierra Leone, once you are a slave, they think that you are not very important."
Today, however, the re-created ship is a "bridge" between Sierra Leone and the United States. "We are very proud now, and do not feel shame," he explained. The diversity of the people who were involved in his ancestor's pursuit of freedom, said Pieh, as well as of those who built and will sail the re-creation, "portray cooperation and perseverance in times of difficulty, which is why it is important to us."
His ancestor and the others were helped toward their eventual freedom by abolitionists, and upon Pieh's return to Sierra Leone, where his home village had been destroyed during a civil war, he was reunited with family by American missionaries.
The planks of the ship itself speak to the theme of cooperation among diversity. The Amistad replica was built from iroko from Sierra Leone, purpleheart from Guyana, white oak from Connecticut, live oak from South Carolina, angelique from Suriname, Douglas fir from the Pacific Northwest.
 Amistad's Figurehead | |
After two years of shaping and fitting those planks, the black hull and gilded eagle figurehead waited for the moment of truth in Mystic Seaport's dry dock, surrounded by throngs of people of all colors. Among those crowds was Captain William Pinkney, sporting a gold Cape Horn earring, a white captain's hat, and more happiness and excitement than it seemed possible for him to contain.
"I haven't sailed a topsail schooner, ever," he exclaimed.
He did, however, crew aboard the racing schooner Agamemnon in the 1960s, and recently sailed on a similar schooner to get a feeling for the rig.
 Captain William Pinkney | |
The original Amistad, he noted, "was like most Baltimore clippers, very narrow, very tender, carried a lot of sail, and in many cases in bad weather was rather dangerous-you would have to drop the top masts." The re-created Amistad should be more sea kindly, he judged, because it is beamier, has a deeper keel, and a little more freeboard. "She should be a fairly stable, stiff boat, so we can carry our topsails and top gallants in a pretty good wind," he said, adding, " I'm a racer and will want to go fast."
Pinkney is also a blue-water sailor. His 1991-1992 solo circumnavigation was the first ever by a black American, and in the late 1990s he conceived the Middle Passage Voyage, commanding the Sortilege, a 78-foot pilot ketch, in a re-tracing of the routes taken by slave ships between Africa and the Americas.
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The launching of the Amistad was timed to coincide with high tide at 12:30 p.m. Shortly before the launch, a church on a hillside across the harbor began tolling its bell 53 times, once for each of the slaves on the original ship. A chain was broken on an anvil, the ship was christened with a bottle filled with waters from Sierra Leone, Cuba, and Connecticut, white doves were released, and the ship was slowly lowered into the water. Ships' horns and whistles filled the air as she floated proudly, a foot or more shy of her waterline since her massive spars have yet to be stepped.
After the launch, the crowds surged forward to view the ship and to ring the gleaming ship's bell, attached to a post near the speaker's podium. Capt. Pinkney was surrounded by TV crews, but he couldn't stay still on land for long. "I've got to go see my baby," he told one TV interviewer. "She's waiting for me."
Making his way through the crowds to the pier, Capt. Pinkney boarded the Amistad and greeted Snediker with a bear hug. A bottle was passed around and lifted high in toast as Capt. Pinkney scampered from one end to the other and from side to side to examine his new command. Later, line handlers on shore and two motor launches moved the Amistad out of the dry dock to its berth alongside the pier, where it will remain until its fitting out is completed. On July 3, it will set out on its maiden voyage, joining OpSail 2000 in New York harbor, before beginning a series of visits to towns along the Connecticut coast.
Where the original Amistad's cargo holds were once packed with slaves, the re-creation is now freighted with hope.
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Sidebar The Amistad was built over a two-year span by the full-time shipwrights at Mystic Seaport with the help of volunteers. Traditional and modern tools were used. The design was culled from various historic records, and modified to meet the specifications and regulations of the US Coast Guard for a seaworthy vessel. The reproduction is 10 feet longer than the original to accommodate two 140-hp engines.
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