Before August 1990, no Black person had attempted circumnavigating the globe via the southern capes.

Bill Pinkney, from Chicago, was audacious enough to dream it and execute that dream.

His successful trip led to 30 years crusading to get more Black people on the ocean and to honour the African diaspora’s complicated history with the sea.

Mr Pinkney was a friend of Bermuda, having numerous friends here, and was a member of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute’s fledgeling international advisory board.

His talks, books and film have inspired thousands of sailors of all ages.

Veteran mariner Ralph Richardson remembered Mr Pinkney as “an amazing character and an amazing skipper”.

He said: “Bill Pinkney set a standard for sailors. He was taken seriously among the sailing fraternity.”

Bermuda was the first and penultimate stop in his circumnavigation, which began on August 5, 1990 and ended on June 9, 1992.

Throughout the trip, Mr Pinkney sent back footage via mail and communicated with some 30,000 schoolchildren.

He was greeted in Boston Harbour by more than 5,000 cheering and singing children who had tracked his journey as part of their schoolwork.

He sent back video dispatches from his circumnavigation and social studies reports from his several stopovers during his sailing adventure.

“There they are, all up there!” said Mr Pinkney, pointing to the children on the Charlestown Navy Yard wharf as he leapt ashore and embraced his wife, Ina. “That’s what kept me going.”

The 27,000-mile circumnavigation on board his Valiant 47-foot cutter Commitment took 22 months.

“I wanted to prove to kids with backgrounds similar to mine, especially Black males, that they didn’t have to give in to statistics that they were likely to do drugs, die in a gang fight or end up in jail,” he wrote in As Long as It Takes. “They could be successful if they persevered.”

A week after leaving Bermuda, he motored into Boston Harbour and told a reporter: “I’d do it again tomorrow if I could.”

A US Coast Guard-licensed Master of Steam, Power and Sail vessels, Mr Pinkney set sail from Boston, calling at Bermuda before sailing south to Bahia, Brazil, then across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Town, South Africa.

From there, he sailed the Indian Ocean and on to Tasmania, Australia, and then on to the tip of South America.

On the second leg of his journey, he sailed around Cape Horn and back up to Bermuda — including four frustrating days becalmed.

By 1990, more than 100 mariners had circumnavigated the globe by cutting across the Panama and Suez canals, but the southern route “separates the wimps from the sailors”, Sarah Benet, of Boston Voyages in Learning, an educational group that teaches children about the sea, told The Royal Gazette at the time.

She added: “You go through the fearsome southern oceans.”

William Deltoris Pinkney III was the 23rd person to go by the southern route. The trip was not without its challenges. Mr Pinkney said the worst moment of the trip came when the boat rolled and a bottle of maple syrup spilt all over the cabin.

“It took me about a week to get it all out of everything,” he said. “It was dripping through the light fixtures.”

Disaster also struck during his last visit to Bermuda, when the cable for his gear shift broke in St George’s Harbour and he was unable to stop Commitment from smashing into a police launch.

Mr Pinkney relished the chance to show his hostility to apartheid-era South Africa: he sailed into Cape Town with a spinnaker in the Black nationalist colours of red, black and green.

Mr Pinkney hinted at the fears and joys of sailing 27,000 miles alone — Commitment was knocked over three times in huge storms and he asked his wife to pray for him as he rounded Cape Horn — but dwelt on his hope to inspire children.

“The whole idea of this was to tell you one thing,” he said. “No matter who you are, where you come from, no matter what they tell you, you and your dream are important and doable.”

Out of high school, he wanted to specialise in the US Navy hospital corps, but he was encouraged to be a “steward’s mate”, essentially a valet to the officers, and where most Black men were employed — even then in the navy.

He recalled one personnel officer tell him that as a steward’s mate, he “could be with his own kind”. Mr Pinkney prevailed, went on to train as an X-ray technician and served on various ships.

Mr Pinkney worked as an elevator mechanic, a limbo dancer, a conga player, a make-up artist on soft-porn films and then on more conventional fare, a cosmetics executive at Revlon and other companies, and a public information officer for the City of Chicago.

He had fallen in love with sailing while living in Puerto Rico after his navy service, a bittersweet period, he wrote in his book, because he had moved there after fleeing an early marriage, leaving his young daughter behind.

He lived for a time in New York City and crewed on friends’ boats in the Northeast; he was always the only Black man on board.

While in New York he converted to Judaism, the culmination of a spiritual quest which he had embarked on after his divorce and which sustained him on his journey years later.

Mr Pinkney, from the South Side of Chicago, began sailing in earnest on Lake Michigan when a job took him back to Chicago.

His first sailboat was a 28-foot Pearson Triton he named Assagai, for an African spear.

When he turned 50, having climbed the corporate ladder, he asked Ina Pinkney, whom he had married in 1965, if she would be unhappy if he went to sea.

“I’d be unhappy if you didn’t go,” she told him.

Video collected after the circumnavigation was later releases as The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney, which won the George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in children’s television programming.

The film has aired on the Disney Channel, National Geographic and PBS stations.

In 1997, Steven Spielberg directed the film Amistad, a harrowing story of a bloody revolt of enslaved West Africans who violently took control of a Spanish ship in 1839 and wrecked in Rhode Island.

The incident occurred well after the slave trade had been banned, but not before slavery itself had ended in all of the United States.

After a lengthy court case, the slaves became free — the first “civil rights” case in that country, as the Africans were born free and had never been enslaved.

The film inspired the construction of a replica of the vessel by the Mystic Seaport Museum. Mr Pinkney joined the board of the museum, becoming the schooner’s captain between the first two years after launch.

The vessel serves as an enduring symbol of unity and the human struggle for freedom.

For Bill Pinkney, circumnavigation was a way to inspire his two grandchildren and the start of developing an educational programme, Project Commitment, for schoolchildren in Chicago and Boston to follow his journey.

But it would take years to raise the funds for the mission, although he had seed money from Armand Hammer, the oil magnate and philanthropist.

Mr Pinkney’s appeals for support were rejected by a who’s who of industry, from Eastman Kodak to Procter & Gamble, as well as a slew of Black-owned businesses, whose rejections stung the most. Oprah Winfrey, too, politely declined.

When The New York Times reported on his plight in 1989, however, Tom Eastman, the head of an investment firm in Boston, and his colleagues signed on.

Ted Seymour, from Newport Beach, California, had been the first Black man to sail around the world via the Panama and Suez canals route, in 1987.

With the encouragement of Dr Hammer, Mr Pinkney flew to England to meet Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to complete a non-stop solo circumnavigation, in 1969.

Mr Knox-Johnston urged him to reconsider his “kiddie cruise”, through the canals, and travel the southern capes, the old-fashioned way, as he had done and as the great clipper ships had done.

Mr Knox-Johnston emphasised, too, that Mr Pinkney would be the first Black man to do so.

Mr Pinkney also led a group of teachers and schoolchildren on an 85-foot ketch to retrace the middle passage that slave ships took from Africa to the Americas, and created a programme for middle school children on the transatlantic slave trade.

In recent years, Mr Pinkney ran a charter-boat business in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, with his second wife. He is survived by a daughter and two grandchildren.

In 2021, Mr Pinkney was inducted into the US National Sailing Hall of Fame, which honoured him with a lifetime achievement award.

Neal Petersen, 56, a South African sailor, first met Mr Pinkney in 1989. It was at Mr Petersen’s home that Mr Pinkney stayed while in Cape Town.

Mr Petersen welcomed Mr Pinkney just off Robben Island, the fortress where Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress prisoners were held.

Over the years the men met many times, discussing ocean sailing and the challenges society faces.

“We knew what a small world it was for us,” Mr Petersen said. “Small in distance, but vast in ideas and opportunities. The question was how do we turn what the sea has given us into an opportunity [to build].

“Understanding that for the two of us to have come out of segregation in the US for him and apartheid for me, we had unique views on the challenges of the economic divide.”

The men concluded that it was through “a ‘consequence of consciousness’ that we chose to go to sea. We knew it would be life-threatening, but there are people who go through life never choosing. Follow your passions, make every day count. Bill never had regrets. He lived a full life”.

His book, Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey was used for learning to read, and for teaching the lessons of commitment and reaching goals.

Mr Pinkney also published Sailing Commitment around the World, a book for children about his circumnavigation. His earlier book, Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey is still read in classrooms throughout the US.

William Deltoris Pinkney III, sailor and motivational speaker, and frequent visitor to Bermuda, was born on September 15, 1935 and died on August 31, aged 87