By Eve Wackett

Starting out from a childhood dream, Captain William Pinkney, master of the freedom schooner Amistad is developing a unique tool to learn and teach many of life’s basic lessons.

Five statements sum up the lessons he learned at sea:

1. Smarter than he thought
2. Dumber than he thought
3. Help is always there—Just ask
4. Adversity ends—Hang in there
5. Dreams do come true—You can make dreams a reality

The Amistad is ready to begin its 2003 Great Lakes Tour with Pinkney proudly at the helm. The ship will be in Buffalo Sept. 10 -14; and the community is invited to visit and meet the first African-American to sail around the world---solo. When he was 55 years old, Pinkney became one of only five Americans to solo navigate a sailing vessel around the world.

“You can achieve anything if you are willing to do what it takes.” Pinkney said in a recent lecture at Buffalo State College.

Pinkney was born in 1935 near Chicago and raised by his single mother. He said statistics say he should be a failure—a loser on drugs, in jail or dead. He was told not to believe it. He joined the Navy in 1953. He started sailing when he was 25 years old. The sea doesn’t care who you are, he said. He started out sailing 156 miles. On his next sailing adventure, he traveled 32,000—around the globe.

“You can’t practice life,” he said. “Life is like sailing, you can’t really practice life or sailing, you just keep doing it—time passes by.”

In 1999, Pinkney retraced the journey between the Americas and Africa made by African slave ships. PBS produced Captain Bill Pinkney's Voyage Home, a documentary about his trip to Africa. Several schools followed his adventures when he sailed the seas. Pinkney is the author of the first-grade reading text, Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey (SRA-McGraw/Hill) that appears in several schools.

“Dreams are different from fantasies; you can control your dreams. You don’t have control over fantasies,” Pinkney said.