FOR THE RECORD

Your April 2021 issue is enjoyable, as the magazine always is—i’ve been reading it since 1976 or so—and I’m in agreement with Herb Mccormick’s Off Watch column “What the Hall?” on the National Sailing Hall of Fame. The first sentence of the piece threw me though. Bill Pinkney served as the first skipper of a vessel named Amistad, not La Amistad, and this vessel is more reasonable facsimile than replica, its lines having been taken from an oil painting and extrapolated from other topsail schooners. The original, La Amistad, was not a ship transporting hundreds of people from Africa, where they’d been kidnapped, brutalized, and enslaved, to the West Indies and Americas to be sold, but a coastal cargo schooner carrying several dozen enslaved people purchased in a slave market in

Havana to a plantation in Cuba. Today’s Amistad was built to commemorate not the slave trade but the rebellion of La Amistad’s

cargo of enslaved people and their long, ultimately successful fight to regain their freedom. Since its launch in 2000, Amistad

has served as a platform and resource for education in and exploration of this and related history.

Jamie Baldwin Redding, CT