Freedom Schooner Amistad is back at her berth at Long Wharf on New Haven's waterfront. She moored there on June 2nd and is expected to stay until Saturday.

It is a first stay following her long winter absence that the ship spent in Mystic Seport getting shipshape for a new season. She has undergone a serious maintenance including hauling out (watch video) and afterward passed a rigorous US Coast Guard inspection.

The Freedom Schooner Amistad and her crew under command of Captain John Beebe-Center is ready to get her anywhere carrying the legacy (watch video) of the Amistad.

Check the 2009 season Amistad calendar to learn more about her voyages.

Come visit Amistad at Mystic Seaport on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of Memorial Day weekend! Open 9-5pm. 

Freedom Schooner Amistad was built at the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard at Mystic Seaport and launched in 2000. 

Recently she was hauled out there after two years long  2007-2008 Atlantic Freedom Tour commemorating 200th Anniversary of Abolition of Slave Trade.  Amistad reconnected to the roots of original Amistad story of 1839 by visiting Sierra Leone in West Africa - the homeland of Sengbe Pieh and the La Amistad captives.

Click on events to see details

Special opportunity to tour the Amistad for free today!

On Thursday, May 21, the Freedom Schooner Amistad will be in New London, CT and open for tours from 1 to 5 pm at Waterfront Park's Amistad Pier. FREE

Custom House Maritime Museum in New London hosts a permanent exhibition "Amistad Journey to Freedom" and is one of Amistad's partners. New London's Custom House is historically connected to the Amistad Case of 1839. 

Check the Museum's program for the extended Memorial Day weekend

Webmaster's comment: December 11th marked the first anniversary of Amistad's landing in Freetown, Sierra Leone - that visit touched each and everyone from Amistad's team who was privileged to visit Sierra Leone. We all became Friends of Salone (that's how Sierra Leoneans casually refer to their country). We follow reporting from there and simply are thinking how we can help our friends.

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

High maternal mortality levels in Sierra Leone contribute to its low human development rank (file photo)

 DAKAR, 18 December 2008 (IRIN) - For the second consecutive year Sierra Leone has come last in the UN Development Programme ranking of human development indicators of 179 countries.

Some analysts say Sierra Leone is nonetheless advancing in some areas and that the impact of the country’s 11-year civil war must be taken into account for a full measure of progress.

The UN Human Development Index measures development based on three principal dimensions: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. These are measured by life expectancy at birth; adult literacy, and combined gross enrollment in primary, secondary, and tertiary education; and per capita income in terms of purchasing power.

Life expectancy in Sierra Leone is 42, or just over half of the life expectancy in the top 20 ranked countries. Just 25 percent of women are literate, with the level at just 37 percent for the entire population.

“Sierra Leone’s placing on the index should be a call to action for everyone who is interested in the well-being of ordinary people in Sierra Leone,” Engilbert Gudmundsson, World Bank Sierra Leone country director, told IRIN.

Read the full report published on IRIN website

I personally agree with the assessment published in a newsletter covering International Sail Training & Tall Ships Conference in Halifax.

400 DELEGATES FROM  28 COUNTRIES... CONFERENCE RATED NEAR ‘EXCELLENT’ 

Four hundred delegates from 28 countries around the world converged on Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of last week (14-15 November 2008) for the International Sail Training and Tall Ships Conference 2008. Organized by Sail Training International, in collaboration with the American Sail Training Association (the biggest of STI’s 25 member national organizations), the conference had an overall rating from delegates of close to ‘Excellent’. Sail training vessel operators from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and throughout both Europe and North America attended, along with representatives of host ports from Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. The conference comprised a mix of plenary sessions for all delegates and an á la carte menu of 16 workshops. These covered a range of topics from dealing with the current ‘economic tsunami’ and navigating the regulatory seas, to recruiting trainees, the development of a successful sail training program.

AMISTAD America was represented at the Conference by President and CEO Gregory Belanger, Trustee Howard Slotnick, Captain of the Freedom Schooner - John Beebe-Center, and by this author. We all had a very busy time trying to participate in as many seminars as possible as well as making new friends. That activity got us in a "good" place in a photo collage published in the Conference Newsletter - Amistad's CEO, Greg Belanger, and this author got caught between Bermuda 2009 Tall Ship Atlantic Challenge organizers - hint, hint: Amistad will be sailing there to join the fleet of vessels sailing from Europe to Charleston, SC via Bermuda.  

Learn more  - Read the full conference newsletter

Chestertown, MD — Washington College is pleased to announce several special events in conjunction with Freedom Schooner Amistad's presence in the Chestertown harbor from Thursday, October 30 to Sunday, November 2. The college's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and Center for Environment & Society are partnering with Sultana Projects, Inc. to bring this recreation of the Spanish ship La Amistad, which made history as the site of a famous slave revolt in 1839, to Kent County as part of Sultana's annual Downrigging Weekend, an end-of-season festival of tall ships.

A public open house onboard the Freedom Schooner Amistad will be held at the Cannon Street Pier on Sunday, November 2, from 2 to 5:30 p.m. Members of the Amistad crew will be on hand to conduct tours of the ship and share her remarkable story.

The open house is one of several events by which Washington College will celebrate the Amistad visit; a college sail will take students out onto the Chester River aboard the craft, and a special screening of Steven Spielberg's 1997 film "Amistad" will be presented at Litrenta Lecture Hall on Tuesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. Jill Ogline, Associate Director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, will provide introductory comments. Admission to the movie is free and open to the public.

Washington College's co-sponsorship of the Amistad visit was made possible by a grant from the Van Dyke Family Foundation.

The two-masted schooner, whose home port is New Haven, Connecticut, is a full-scale recreation of La Amistad, a swift Spanish vessel that dodged international law to smuggle illegally imported Africans from one Cuban plantation to another. But on the night of July 2, 1839, her African captives rose up in revolt.

Successfully seizing control of the vessel, they ordered the crew to sail back to Africa, but 63 days at sea brought them instead to the coast of Long Island, where they were thrown into a Connecticut jail on charges of murder and piracy.

For two years, the captives languished in jail as their case wound its way through the court system of a slave-holding nation. Anti-slavery activists, black and white alike, flocked to their defense, and as their story spread, they become heroes to American blacks.

Against the U.S. government's assertion that the Amistad rebels were outlaws and murderers, the captives, with former President John Quincy Adams himself as their champion, insisted that they had only exercised the natural right of self-defense against individuals trying to take away their freedom.

Acquitted on a technicality—since the ship was acting in violation of international law, the Supreme Court considered the captives illegally enslaved and thus justified in their efforts to liberate themselves—the rebels returned home to Sierra Leone in 1841. Though only 35 survived to see their homeland again, those who did so had successfully reversed the infamous Middle Passage, returning to Africa, free.

Amistad's spars and canvas and wooden hull will look right at home on the Chester River during her sojourn in the community: Each year, Downrigging Weekend returns the Chestertown waterfront to its 18th century glory, with tall-masted schooners clustered around the docks and streams of people bustling around the wharves. For a full schedule of Downrigging Weekend activities, please visit http://www.sultanaprojects.org/downrigging08.htm. For more on the Freedom Schooner Amistad, visit http://www.amistadamerica.org.

For more information on Washington College's Amistad events, contact the Center for Environment & Society or the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at 410/810-7161.

The Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race is over. We still have not heard anything from the Schooner Amistad.  The pigeon carrying the news from Captain John Beebe-Center and the crew onboard apparently got intercepted by a hawk over Central Park in NYC, while flying to New Haven.  In case you wonder about the race results, here is some information:

The Virginian-Pilot

Schooner Amistad didn't wanted to be late to the starting line of the 19th Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race after seven years of absence. Captain John Beebe-Center motored under the Bay Bridge before noon, giving the crew of Amistad lots of time to set all her sails in the start area south of the bridge. More than 50 sailing ships gathered there and divided into a few groups, crossed the starting line around 1:30 pm on Thursday, October 16th.

The fleet sailed south in a light wind. At times, that breeze seemed to blow only into Pride of Baltimore II's sails – she gained a lot of distance from competitors during the race's first hour. Amistad had a very good start, but her sails are very old, and it shows. [This is the same set of sails she's carried since her launch in 2001 and through last year's transatlantic voyage. The African equatorial sun took its toll.] Watching the fleet of the racing schooners, one automatically compares Amistad with Pride of Baltimore II – they both are represent the beautiful lines of the Baltimore Clippers – Amistad is substantially smaller than Pride.

Schooner Amistad, fulfilling her duties as Connecticut's Official Flagship, was flying a brand new Connecticut Flag atop her foremast. The clean blue color of that flag contrasted with the faded flags – notably the flag of Sierra Leone that Amistad carries in honor of the land of the original La Amistad captives.

Watching and filming the start to the race was fascinating for me. A feast for a sailor's eyes!

More info and photos later....