The Chicago Maritime Museum didn’t plan for its two exhibition openings this month to be quite so timely.
The new exhibitions — the museum’s first since opening in the Bridgeport Art Center in 2016 — have been underway for years: “Lady Elgin: Treasures from the Shipwreck,” on the steamship that sank in 1860, the Great Lakes’ deadliest disaster to date, and “Bill Pinkney: Breaking Barriers with Commitment,” about the Chicagoan who became the first Black sailor to solo circumnavigate the globe around the capes in 1992.
But Pinkney died last autumn at 87, after complications from a fall. The same year, an anonymous donor stepped forward with 160 previously unaccounted-for Lady Elgin artifacts he’d recovered from the wreck decades before. The additions went from “interesting” to “essential” overnight — one a public memorial, the other a vehicle for brand-new research.
Pinkney grew up in Douglas on the South Side, where he was raised by a single mom. Money was tight, and he was an unhappy student, targeted by peers and teachers alike as one of very few Black kids in his school.
Pinkney found an escape in “Call It Courage,” a 1940 book by Armstrong Sperry about a Polynesian youth who makes a solo voyage that changes his life. Pinkney had no idea he would do the same decades later, in his 50s, after a stint in the Navy changed his life. He worked several jobs over the years: at a cosmetics company, for the city of Chicago’s Human Services department, even as a freelance makeup artist. But the sea always beckoned — so much so that it eventually precipitated his divorce from his wife, Chicago restauranteur Ina Pinkney.
“My life was the sea, and hers was on land,” he told the New York Times in 2019.
Business sponsors from Chicago and Boston backed Pinkney’s trip. The two-year voyage would be not only historic but educational: an integral part of Pinkney’s pitch to sponsors was his plan to use the navigational technology aboard his 47-foot Valiant — renamed “Commitment” — to update some 150 Chicago Public Schools on his journey in live-time. Thousands of students traced “Captain Bill’s” path around the globe on classroom computers.
Before his death, Pinkney also published a children’s book about his voyage; the book and exhibition feature illustrations by Pamela Rice, who joined Pinkney in the first all-Black crew to compete in the Mackinac Race.
“He very much appreciated the idea of education being something that can come from any source, because children may not be getting it from their teachers,” says museum curator Madeline Crispell.
The significance of being a Black man sailing across waters that once facilitated the Middle Passage was never lost on Pinkney. In video footage included in the exhibition, Pinkney recalls a stop in apartheid-era Cape Town on his voyage. He sailed directly past Robben Island, where Black political prisoners were still incarcerated. He also stopped, twice, in the coastal city of Salvador, in Brazil. Pinkney intentionally chose to anchor there because of its legacy as the country’s largest slave port.
“This time, I’ll be the captain of the ship, rather than the cargo,” he told a filmmaker at the time.
After his trip, Pinkney also oversaw the construction of, and later captained, a replica of La Amistad, the ship-turned-abolitionist-symbol that was seized by captive West Africans in 1839, en route to being sold into slavery.
Greatest loss of life on the Great Lakes
Pinkney’s biography is a stark foil to the story of the Lady Elgin’s fatal voyage. At the time, Wisconsin’s abolitionist governor, Alexander Randall, was prepared to secede from the U.S. if Abraham Lincoln didn’t win the presidency. Those onboard the Lady Elgin were Wisconsin Union Guard soldiers and their families — drawn largely from Milwaukee’s Irish American community — who opposed Randall.
“They were going to fight for the Union. They were not going to secede with their governor,” says Valerie van Heest, the exhibition’s curator and onetime lead diver in a state-commissioned dive to document the wreck.
Randall, knowing the militia’s sympathies, confiscated their weapons. But the militia purchased 60 new muskets, then chartered the Lady Elgin for a one-day excursion from Milwaukee to Chicago to raise money to cover the purchase. (While there, they planned to hear Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s pro-slavery opponent, speak at a rally, but he was held up on the campaign trail and never showed.)
In the wee hours of Sept. 8, 1860, the ship hit a churning storm on its overnight return to Milwaukee, during which a poorly lit schooner collided with the Lady Elgin’s port side. The schooner bobbed off with minor damage. For the Lady Elgin, however, the collision was fatal. Its midsection compromised, the ship’s boilers smashed through the bottom of the ship and it split in two.
Van Heest has identified 302 dead and 96 survivors, many helped to shore by Garrett Biblical Institute students, later the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University. More likely remain unaccounted for and lost to time.
Unlike the Titanic, though the Lady Elgin sunk in two, it didn’t stay in two. Shipwreck enthusiasts looking for the ship in the ensuing decades, familiar with eyewitness reports of the sinking, searched for two big chunks on the lake floor. But it was only after the wreck was discovered off the shore of Highland Park in 1989 by Harry Zych, a private salvor in Chicago, that historians learned the ship had crumbled on its way down, leaving a debris field a mile long.
With his discovery, Zych struck gold, literally and figuratively. In a detail he divulged in court years later, he’d found gold and silver coins in a trunk left in the wreckage, equivalent to about $100,000 today.
“It’s the only modern-day discovery of gold, the worst loss of life and the most broken-up shipwreck on the Great Lakes. So, lots of superlatives,” van Heest says.
Just before Zych’s discovery, the federal Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1988 made abandoned vessels the property of the state whose waters they rest in. But by digging up old documentation from the Lady Elgin’s insurer, Zych successfully argued to the Illinois Supreme Court that the ship was never legally abandoned, a postscript also detailed in the exhibition.
The Lady Elgin is now the only privately owned shipwreck on the Great Lakes, and one of very few in the world — yet another superlative. Those who strap on their scuba gear and visit it are technically trespassing.
How that legal quagmire applies to the Lady Elgin’s artifacts gets murkier. The 160 pieces in the Maritime Museum’s possession were allegedly gifted to the donor by Zych, but there’s no written record of the transfer. While the museum works out the fine print with the Lady Elgin Foundation — which coordinates all things Lady Elgin after Zych’s death in 2016 — the “treasures from the shipwreck” displayed are close doubles sourced by Crispell from local antique shops. Those are supplemented by photos of real artifacts, both the 160 pieces in the museum’s possession and those van Heest documented on the lake floor in the early 1990s — including those muskets, the whole reason for commissioning the fateful trip.
These days, few artifacts are left at the Lady Elgin wreckage site. Despite Zych’s best efforts, its location leaked to the diving community. Most of the artifacts have been picked over by collectors.
But, van Heest says, there’s still a chance to do the right thing. Already, the 160 “groundbreaking” artifacts donated to the Maritime Museum have accelerated historians’ understanding of Lady Elgin’s demise. She wants that research to continue.
“We’re hoping that anybody who did pilfer anything back in the day would perhaps anonymously donate those items to the Chicago Maritime Museum. We’d like to repatriate all the artifacts,” van Heest says.
Update: This story has been changed to correct information about where Bill Pinkney grew up.
“Bill Pinkney: Breaking Barriers with Commitment,” and “Lady Elgin: Treasures from the Shipwreck,” on display now at the Chicago Maritime Museum, 1200 W. 35th St. Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., closed Mondays; $10 admission, $5 for seniors and students, free for children. More information at chicagomaritimemuseum.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
