Robin Knox-Johnston, first officer of the passenger liner Kenya berthed at London, watched the arrival of Francis Chichester on television and immediately began to wonder whether it would be possible to sail round the world without a single stop. He analysed his motives for me:
‘In a way, it’s relatively simple. One: I think there are so few things to do in this world and so many people, that it is rather nice to turn round and say you’re the first to do something. Two: I was happy in the Merchant Navy but in some ways frustrated by the fact that while in South Africa I had very briefly commanded a ship and I realised that this would be my future for the next thirty-five years; I also wondered whether it offered enough. I thought I’d get terribly bored, just looking at my peers, I could see that they were fat and getting fatter, that the job didn’t require an awful lot of them and I thought that life should offer more. And thirdly, I heard that Tabarly was building a new trimaran, Pen Duick IV, which I thought he must be planning to use to beat Chichester’s time round the world. At the time the French were being very arrogant, trying to keep us out of the Common Market, and then when Tabarly had just won the single-handed trans-Atlantic race Paris Match had screamed that the Anglo-Saxon ocean had been dominated by the French and that we weren’t even a second-rate power – we were third-rate.
‘That annoyed me intensely and I felt that if anyone was going to do it, it should be one of us because we wouldn’t make the fuss that they would about it.’
And so, with a desire to make his mark and get out of a career which was not entirely satisfactory, combined with a strong, even aggressive, sense of patriotism, Knox-Johnston resolved to sail single-handed around the world.
He had always loved the sea, building his first boat, a raft made from orange boxes, at the age of seven. This sank the moment he climbed on to it. He was the eldest of a family of four boys and one girl; his father worked in a shipping office before the war and took an active part in local government, becoming mayor of Beckenham. They were a typical well-to-do suburban family, with all the boys going to public school.
Knox-Johnston, almost from the very beginning, wanted to go to sea. The Royal Navy was his first choice but he failed the physics paper in the entrance exam for Dartmouth, could not bring himself to sit again and therefore opted for the Merchant Navy, joining the British India Steam Navigation Company’s cadet ship, Chindwara as an officer cadet. The cadets worked the ship as seaman and, at the same time, received the theoretical and technical training they were going to need as Merchant Navy officers. It gave Knox-Johnston the basic grounding that was going to be so useful to him as a lone sailor. A vast fund of restless, exuberant energy led him into running races up Table Mountain, scuba diving and playing in a ship-board group which was very popular at all the ports of call, particularly in South Africa.
He met Sue in England and they married on completion of his cadetship before going out to Bombay where he was to be based for the next four years, running pilgrims and cargo to the Persian Gulf. He thoroughly enjoyed his work as third officer and filled his leisure time swimming and scuba diving in the clear seas of the Gulf. He even thought of building a dhow, but was dissuaded because it would have been very difficult to sell; finally he decided to go in with a fellow officer to build an ocean-going family cruiser that they could use both as a base for skin diving and to sail back to England. They wrote off to a firm in Poole, Dorset, for a set of plans and, though the design was old-fashioned, Knox-Johnston liked the look of it; it was obviously very robust. He also had good materials to work with, for Indian teak, one of the finest boat materials known, was readily available. Rigging plans had not been included; these were an extra, so Knox-Johnston, with characteristic ingenuity, designed his own. The boat was built by Indian craftsmen using the traditional tools and methods with which the old eighteenth-century ships of the line had been built. Knox-Johnston named her Suhaili, the name given by Arab seamen in the Persian Gulf to the south-east wind.
She was not a modern-looking, streamlined boat; her jib boom, broad beam and the square-cut raised cabin gave her a homely, old-fashioned but very durable appearance. She was not finished until September 1965, too late for the North-East Monsoon which would have driven her across the Indian Ocean to the coast of Africa. Knox-Johnston had to return to Britain anyway, to sit the examination for his Master’s Ticket and fulfil his Royal Naval Reserve service. In addition, his personal life was a mess; his marriage had broken up and his wife had returned to Britain. It was not until the following year that he, his brother and a friend returned to Bombay and sailed Suhaili back, with a long stop in South Africa where they all took on jobs to replenish funds. He sailed non-stop from Cape Town to Gravesend, thus confirming Suhaili’s seaworthiness and also the excellence of her balance. Suhaili could be sailed for long periods close hauled with very little attention.
Knox-Johnston was not a yachting man, had done practically no racing and comparatively little messing about in small boats, but he was a professional seaman who, through his down-to-earth apprenticeship, knew every aspect of the job at sea in a way that he would not have had he gone to Dartmouth and risen up through the ranks of the Royal Navy. His long-distance sail from Bombay to London had also given him the kind of practical experience that he was going to need to get round the world.
Even so, having decided to try a non-stop single-handed circumnavigation, he found it difficult, as a completely unknown Merchant Navy officer, to convince potential sponsors. Ideally he wanted a new and bigger boat made from steel, but to pay for it he needed £5,000. He tried to sell Suhaili but there were no buyers; she was, perhaps, too old-fashioned in appearance. He wrote over fifty letters to various firms asking for sponsorship but without success. He even applied to his own company for support but, although they had a warm respect for his ability and sympathy for the project, the board refused, telling him that times were hard. Knox-Johnston would not give in, however, and resolved to attempt his circumnavigation in Suhaili. At least he knew all of her foibles and she had even touched the Roaring Forties around the Cape of Good Hope.
Knox-Johnston was not the only person to be inspired by Chichester’s achievement. By the end of 1967 at least five sailors were planning the voyage. The most advanced in his plans was Commander Bill King, an ex-submarine skipper with plenty of good contacts in the ocean-racing world. He already had sponsorship from the Daily and Sunday Express and in close consultation with Blondie Hasler, the Daddy of the trans-Atlantic solo races and pioneer of self-steering gear, was having built a specially designed boat with a streamlined deck surface and revolutionary junk rig. The two masts were self-supporting without any stays, with a single big square sail to each. This makes it easier to sail single-handed, but imposes a great deal of strain on the mast. At this stage King undoubtedly seemed to be one of the favourites.
But the most serious contender was Bernard Moitessier, a lean almost frail-looking man of forty-three, with the gaunt features of an ascetic which were lightened by a warm smile betraying an impish sense of humour. Born in Saigon, he had spent all his early years in the Far East, most of them at sea in small sailing boats, at first traditional cargo-carrying junks and later in boats he had built himself, wandering, a vagabond of the sea, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Having sailed with his wife from Tahiti to the coast of Portugal, a voyage of 14,212 miles, he already held the long distance record for small boats. He was not obsessively competitive in the way that Chichester was. Moitessier was a romantic adventurer who loved the sea with an intense, almost mystical passion. It was the thought of committing himself and his boat to this gigantic voyage of over 30,000 miles, to be alone in the oceans with the wind and the restless sea, that attracted him more than the idea of establishing a record. Publicity was a painful means of getting the money he needed for the voyage. Like Knox-Johnston, he was planning to use his own, well-tried boat, but Joshua, named after Joshua Slocum, was eminently better suited to the voyage than Suhaili; she was bigger, had a welded steel hull, which Knox-Johnston had wanted, and was built for both speed and strength.
John Ridgway had no trouble in getting sponsorship. He was still a celebrity, a name that the press could recognise, that manufacturers could use to promote their products. In 1966 he and Chay Blyth had made a name for themselves by being the first to row the Atlantic in his Cape Cod dory, English Rose III. Originally Ridgway had intended to enter the 1968 Atlantic single-handed race and had been promised a boat for this; with Chichester’s successful circumnavigation, he changed his mind, but for a time used the single-handed race as a cover to keep his own plans secret. He did confide in Chay Blyth, however, never thinking that this one-time partner might become a competitor. Ridgway and Blyth had been a wonderful partnership on their Atlantic row, but afterwards the publicity, the pressures of money and ego took their toll in a way that so often happens when the spotlight goes on the world of shared adventure. Team spirit had given way to rivalry. Blyth’s spirit of competition was immediately kindled when he heard that Ridgway was entering the Atlantic single-handed race. He told me: ‘For Christ’s sake, knowing John as I did then, if he could do this thing, there was absolutely no way in the world that I could not.’
This sense of competition was probably kindled by the stress that had already entered their relationship, with Ridgway getting the lion’s share of attention after their rowing the Atlantic. At this stage Blyth did not have a boat, had never sailed before and knew nothing of navigation, but with the same dogged but practical determination that he had rowed the Atlantic, he started preparing for the voyage, getting the loan of a production model thirty-foot family cruiser, Dytiscus III. Then, when he learned that Ridgway had changed his objective to a solo circumnavigation, he did so as well. Ridgway felt a great sense of betrayal, partly because he thought Blyth should have told him earlier, but there also seems to have been a feeling that Blyth had broken a partnership – even though Ridgway was doing this equally on his own account.
Donald Crowhurst, who had been so scathing about Chichester’s reception, had also entered the lists. A keen weekend sailor with his own boat, he was certainly more experienced than Chay Blyth, but he had never exposed himself to the levels of risk and hardship that Blyth had known both on the Atlantic and in the course of his work in the Parachute Regiment. Crowhurst was thirty-five, happily married and the father of four young children. He was born in India where his father had worked on the railways, but they returned to Britain at the time of Independence, when the family went through the painful process of transition faced by so many ex-colonial families. Donald Crowhurst was doing moderately well at Loughborough College when he was forced to leave after getting his school certificate, his father having died of a heart attack and his mother being desperately hard up. He joined the RAF and continued his studies in electrical engineering at Farnborough Technical College, eventually learning to fly and getting a commission.
The story could have been the same as that of Ridgway –or, for that matter, myself – but in Crowhurst there was always a need to be the centre of attention, to seem to be the daring leader of practical jokes, of wild pranks, racing round in souped-up cars (he owned a Lagonda for a time, until he smashed it). The adventure was superficial, of the barroom variety. One of Crowhurst’s pranks led to him being asked to leave the RAF, so he went into the army, was commissioned, but continued to lead the same sort of life. He lost his licence for a variety of driving offences and was finally caught trying to borrow someone’s car without their permission. This led to the resignation of his commission.
Shortly after this he met Clare, an attractive dark-haired Irish girl who was captivated by his whirlwind courtship and mercurial personality. They got married and, after a number of unsatisfactory jobs in electronics, settled in Bridgwater, Somerset, where he set up in business manufacturing electronic aids for yachts on the South Devon coast. He had excellent ideas, but was less adept at putting them through and by 1967 his small company, Electron Utilisation, was very nearly bankrupt. The challenge of sailing round the world, therefore, was immensely attractive on several levels. He enjoyed pottering about in his boat; still more, he loved the grand gesture, the boast of out-sailing Chichester round the world; also, it seemed to present a wonderful solution to the vexing and dreary problems besetting him in his business. Once he had been round the world there would be plenty of acclaim and money; people really would sit up and take notice. At the time it appeared to be an attractive way out of all his tribulations.
But at the moment he was unknown and had a packet of debts. His first idea was to approach the Cutty Sark Trust, who were planning to put Gipsy Moth IV on permanent display alongside the famous clipper Cutty Sark at Greenwich. Crowhurst suggested that it was a waste of a good boat to mount it in concrete, when she could be immortalised still further by a non-stop circumnavigation of the world, and he offered to charter her for a fee of £5,000. He bombarded the Trust with letters, approached Lord Dulverton, the owner, and when he proved unresponsive lobbied through the yachting press, getting a great deal of support for his request; but the Trust remained adamant and he did not get the boat. Chichester was consulted at this stage and made some enquiries about Crowhurst’s sailing background, quickly discovering that he had no real ocean-sailing experience and was little more than a competent offshore yachtsman. Crowhurst was undeterred, however, and continued to seek a boat and sponsorship.
The idea of sailing around the world non-stop had been a natural evolution inspired by Chichester’s voyage, but perhaps it was inevitable that, once it became obvious that several sailors wanted to make the voyage, someone should try to turn it into a race. Robin Knox-Johnston, through his agent, George Greenfield, who also represented Francis Chichester, had approached the Sunday Times for sponsorship for the voyage. The editor, Harold Evans, stalled in giving a reply, having already heard that Knox-Johnston was not the only one planning to make the attempt. Murray Sayle, a swashbuckling Australian journalist who had handled the Chichester story for the Sunday Times, was told to have a look at the field and report back on who was most likely to succeed. He came up with ‘Tahiti Bill’ Howell, an Australian dentist with a good ocean-racing record who was planning to enter the Observer single-handed Atlantic race and then continue round the world. In the event, he abandoned the round-the-world project. Of all the contestants Sayle dismissed Knox-Johnston with his slow old boat, his down-to-earth modest manner and lack of sailing experience as the least likely to win.
It was at this stage that the Sunday Times decided to declare it a race, thus ensuring that, as race organisers, they would automatically get good coverage of all the contestants whether or not they had bought their exclusive stories. Their main worry was that the sailors who had already made their plans, and in some cases were sponsored by rival newspapers, might not want to play the Sunday Times’ game. Features editor, Ron Hall, and Murray Sayle found an ingenious solution to the problem. For a start they did not require a formal entry into the race, merely laying down that departure and return should be recorded – as it inevitably would be – by a national newspaper or magazine. Boats could, therefore, set out from where and when they liked. But because it was felt dangerous to encourage anyone to arrive in the Southern Ocean before the end of the southern winter, or not to be past Cape Horn before the beginning of the following winter, starting dates were restricted to between 1 June and 31 October 1968. Obviously, the boats which set out earliest would have the best chance of getting round first, even though they might not make it in the fastest time. It was decided, therefore, to have two prizes – a trophy which was to be the Golden Globe, for the first round, and a cash prize of £5,000 for the fastest time. This would also have the attraction of extending interest in the race even after the first entrant had got home.
In the event, all the sailors tacitly accepted the race, though some were more influenced than others by the rules imposed by the race organisers. It raises the question of where adventure ends and organised competition takes over, of whether the quality of the experience was enhanced by the introduction of a formal race, admittedly with a very loose set of rules. There had been an element of a race already, since each person setting out to sail round the world non-stop wanted to be the first to do it. The situation is similar, in mountaineering terms, to the desire of climbers to be the first to achieve a particularly difficult climb. The media delighted in describing the race as ‘the Mount Everest of sailing’. In the field of mountaineering, however, a direct race for the summit is barely practicable and, anyway, in expedition terms the Himalayan countries have not until recently allowed more than one expedition on any one route up a mountain at the same time. The situation can arise, however. In 1963 I was a member of a team that made the first ascent of the Central Tower of Paine, a granite tower in South Patagonia. After we had been there for about two months, having made very little progress, an Italian team who had the same objective arrived at the foot of the mountain. What evolved was undeniably a race to get to the top first, which I am glad to say we won.
There is, however, a long tradition of ocean racing, and there was certainly every ingredient of adventure in an attempt to sail single-handed non-stop round the world. The element of racing would add still further stress, for each man would need to push his boat to the utmost, yet if he pushed too hard the boat might not last the course. The test was to prove a harsh one.
First off the mark was John Ridgway, in English Rose IV. For sentimental reasons he wanted to start from the Aran Islands, his landfall when he rowed the Atlantic. He set out on the earliest date possible, 1 June, acutely aware that his thirty-foot sloop would need all the time he could get to beat the bigger boats which were to set out later on in the summer. Things went wrong from the start. Both the BBC and ITN had sent out camera crews to film his departure. The BBC launch nearly crashed into his stern, threatening the vital self-steering gear. Ridgway, nerves stretched, screamed abuse at them and they veered off, but then the trawler carrying the ITN crew swung in close to get a final telling shot, misjudged it and smashed into the starboard side, splintering the wooden rubbing strip that protected the hull itself. It was impossible to see if there was any structural damage, but Ridgway had a terrible feeling of ill-omen waving for the last time to his wife, Marie Christine, as the trawler swung away. Chay Blyth had sent Ridgway a telegram, ‘Last one home’s a cissy, who cares who wins?’ It was a conciliatory gesture, but both knew that they cared very much who got home first. Blyth set sail a week later on Dytiscus III. He had tried for sponsorship but his lack of sailing experience stood against him.
‘They always brought in some retired naval officer,’ he told me, ‘and then asked very intricate questions about navigation and, of course, I had no idea at all. They’d then ask intricate questions about sailing and I wouldn’t know the answers to those either. The interviews always came to an abrupt halt.’
But he had persevered, using most of the profits from his row across the Atlantic to finance the voyage. He learnt navigation at night and had a fortnight’s sailing instruction, though he reckoned that in the end it amounted to little more than four days’ actual practical experience. His replies to the queries of reporters about his motives and attitudes were down to earth:
‘Out there it’s all black and white. I’m not particularly fond of the sea, it’s just a question of survival. I may come back as queer as a nine-bob note. But one day Saint Peter will say to me, “What did you do?” and I’ll tell him. He’ll say, “What did you do?” and you’ll say, “I was a reporter”.’
But he set out full of confidence, certain that he could beat at least one man – his old mate Ridgway.
Six days later Robin Knox-Johnston set sail from Falmouth in Suhaili. His little group of sponsors from the Sunday Mirror and the publishers Cassell had come down to see him off. They had become a close-knit team, very confident in their man, Knox-Johnston, who had submitted to a going-over by a psychiatrist and been judged ‘distressingly normal’. He was sure that even though his boat was not fast enough to make the quickest circumnavigation he would most certainly get round. He also displayed a healthy aggressiveness when, irritated by a Sunday Times reporter, he threatened to throw him into the harbour. It is unlikely that Knox-Johnston would have allowed any of the media’s boats to get close enough to collide with him as he sailed for the line outside Falmouth harbour.
It would be over two months before anyone else set sail, but these three contestants needed all the time they could get if they were to stay ahead of the bigger and faster boats that were to set out later on in the season. They settled down in their different ways to the long run in down the Atlantic which provides the introduction to the rigours of the Southern Ocean.
John Ridgway found the solitude difficult to cope with, becoming almost obsessively worried about the damage done in the collision at the start as he sailed past Madeira, and then on down over the equator into the Southern Atlantic. The boat slammed into the swell, juddering with the impact of each wave. Ridgway had already noticed some hairline cracks in the deck around the after shroud plate, which held one of the stays; but now the deck around it was bulging while the cracks opened and closed, bubbling spray. If it should pull away, the mast would probably go as well; not a pleasant prospect in the empty reaches of the Southern Atlantic. Even more serious, his wireless transmitter had failed so that there was no chance of calling for help. He did his best to repair the damage, replacing and strengthening the plate, but the deck continued to bulge ominously and the prospects of entering the Southern Ocean with a damaged boat, without wireless communication, became increasingly intimidating. At last, on 16 July, some 600 miles south of the equator, Ridgway admitted defeat and swung westward for Recife, on the Brazilian coast.
Chay Blyth got further than Ridgway, sailing Dytiscus III into the great Southern Ocean round the Cape of Good Hope, but on the way down his self-steering gear was damaged and in order to radio South Africa for spare parts to be sent out from England, he took on some fuel for his generator from a yacht, Gillian Gaggins, which he passed near Tristan da Cunha. He reached East London, on the South African coast, on 13 September, to be told that he was disqualified from the race. He replied, ‘I don’t see how the Sunday Times can disqualify me when I never entered the race’. He was determined to go on and, having repaired his self-steering gear, set out into the Southern Ocean.
Quite apart from lacking experience, his boat was not suitable for the huge seas he encountered. He told me:
‘The boat was similar to John’s in that she had a bilge keel, but mine was much more buoyant in the stern; she was fine until we reached the Roaring Forties. What used to happen was that the buoyancy would lift the arse end up and so she’d go down a wave and start burying her nose. Two things can then happen; you can either pitchpole, which means the boat does a somersault, or you can broach, which means the boat swings ninety degrees to the oncoming wave and is then pushed along sideways and can go right over so that it capsizes. At least with a monohull you always come up again since there is so much weight underneath you.
‘Chichester talks about being capsized once; well, I was absolutely hopeless really, hadn’t a bloody clue. I capsized three times in one hour and eleven times in a day. And I thought this was part and parcel of sailing – I really did! The boat would go BANG and you’d get thrown all over the place; kit would go everywhere and I’d say, “Geez, that was pretty tough”, and then you’d get up. The steering gear went again and then I thought, “You’ve got to make a decision”. And the decision to pack it in is always much worse – I think it’s easier to die really. The decision to pack up is bloody terrible.’
Chay Blyth swung back to East London, the second competitor to fail. His greatest triumph was still to come when, in the early 1970s, he sailed the ketch British Steel single-handed non-stop round the world – the wrong way, from east to west against the prevailing winds and currents.
By this time Robin Knox-Johnston, in Suhaili, had caught up and passed Blyth. His trip down the Atlantic had been full of event, some of which might easily have forced him out of the race. On the sixteenth day out from Falmouth, on 30 June, he noticed that Suhaili was taking in much more water than she should. He got past the Cape Verde Islands, then donned snorkel and flippers and went over the side to discover exactly what was wrong. He found a frightening gap, more than eight feet long, along the seam where the keel was joined on to the hull; it opened and closed as Suhaili pitched and rolled in the water. It was easy to imagine what would happen in the ferocious seas of the Southern Ocean.
He swam back to the surface, lit a cigarette and thought out a problem that I suspect would have defeated most of the contestants in the Golden Globe race. He described his repairs in his book, A World of my Own.
‘Having decided that caulking was the answer, I had to think of some way of doing it five feet below water. Normally dry twisted raw cotton is hammered into the seam, stopped with filling compound and painted over, but I could not do that. I decided to try and do the job with cotton anyway and hope that the fact that it would be wet would not make too much difference. We had had to do just the same thing when in the middle of the Arabian Sea, but it had not been easy, and at least I had had two other people helping me and keeping a lookout for sharks. This time I would have to do the job on my own and hope that I would notice any sharks whilst they were still circling.
‘I got out the cotton and twisted up some pieces in 18-inch lengths, a convenient length to handle, although ideally I should have done the job with one piece. Next I put a long length of line on a hammer and lowered it overside near where I had to work, finally I dressed myself in a blue shirt and jeans to hide the whiteness of my body, something that sharks, great scavengers, always associate with refuse, and strapped my knife to my leg. I put the cotton on deck where I could reach it from the water and taking my largest screwdriver as the most convenient caulking instrument, I went overside.
‘The job was impossible from the start. In the first place I would run out of breath before I had hammered enough cotton in place to hold it while I surfaced, and each time I came up for air I lost all the work done. Secondly, the cotton was just not going in properly, and even when I changed the screwdriver for a proper caulking iron I made no progress. After half an hour of fruitless effort I climbed back on board and tried to think of some other way of doing the job.
‘A while later I was busily engaged in sewing the cotton on to a strip of canvas 1 1/2 inches wide. When the whole strip, about seven feet of it, was completed I gave it a coating of Stockholm Tar and then forced copper tacks through the canvas about six inches apart. I went into the water again and placed the cotton in the seam so that the canvas was on the outside: I then started knocking the tacks into the hull to hold the whole thing in place. The finished job did not look too bad but it was a bit ragged at the edges and I thought that it might be ripped off when the Suhaili got moving again, so I decided to tack a copper strip over the canvas to tidy it up. The copper strip was, in fact, left on board by the Marconi engineers when they fitted the new radio and I am afraid that I had not drawn their attention to it when they finished.
‘So far, although I had kept glancing nervously about me while I was in the water, I had seen no fish at all. But whilst I was having a coffee break, having prepared the copper strip and made holes for the tacks so that I would have an easier job under water, I suddenly noticed a lean grey shape moving sinuously past the boat. The sharks had found us at last. I watched this one for ten minutes hoping it would go away as I did not want to have to kill it. I was not being kind to the shark; if I killed it, there would be quite a lot of blood in the water and the death convulsions would be picked up by any other sharks near at hand who would immediately rush in, and I would not be able to get the job finished.
‘After ten minutes though, during which the shark kept circling the boat and showing no signs of leaving, I got out my rifle and, throwing some sheets of lavatory paper into the water, waited for the shark to come and investigate. On its first run round the shark passed about three feet below the paper, but then he turned and, rising slowly, came in again. I aimed the rifle at the shape and, with finger on the trigger, squeezed the trigger. There was an explosion in the water as the shark’s body threshed around but within half a minute the threshing ceased and the lifeless body began slowly to plane down until it disappeared into the blue. For the next half hour I watched carefully to see if any other sharks would appear, but apart from two pilot fish, which, having followed their previous protector down until they realised he would never feed them again, now decided to join a larger and apparently stronger master, Suhaili and I had the sea to ourselves. I went overside and in an hour and a half had the copper tacked over the canvas on the port side. A light wind getting up forced me to leave the starboard side until we were next becalmed. But in any case I was quite chilled from four hours’ immersion, and also a little tense from constantly glancing round expecting to see a shark coming in behind me, and I was quite glad to give the job a rest for a while.’
Two days later he caulked the other side. Throughout the voyage down the Atlantic he went swimming, showing a confidence and knowledge of the sea that was to help him throughout the trip. He would dive in off the bow and swim as hard as he could, as the boat pulled ahead of him and then, in the nick of time, pull himself up on the stern stanchions. It took fine calculation not to be left alone in the middle of the ocean.
There were other crises. His battery-charging motor failed and he took the magneto to pieces, trying to find the fault. It was only when he came to re-assemble the engine that he realised he had forgotten to bring a feeler gauge for setting the gap between the points. ‘I eventually got round this by counting the pages of this book – there are 200 to the inch, therefore, one page equals 5/thousands. I wanted a gap of between 12–15/thousands, thus three thicknesses of paper.’ And the charging motor worked again.
But there were moments of doubt, when he was tempted to abandon the voyage at Cape Town. He describes his feelings:
‘This, I think, was the second period of my adjustment. When I had got over the initial problems and doubts, a short period of acceptance of the new environment arrived. This was followed by a second, longer stage of deeper and more serious doubts. Surviving this, I had my second wind, and was able to settle down to things. I got through it by forcing myself to do some mental as well as physical work. For example, I began to write out a description of the Admiral [his self-steering gear, devised by himself]. The self-steering seemed simple enough, but trying to write out a description was far from easy. Anyway, the effort took me out of my depression.’
Almost every sailor venturing into the Southern Ocean has his boat knocked down sooner or later; it happened to Knox-Johnston almost immediately, just three days after getting down into the Roaring Forties. His description of the event, like that of all his fellow solitary sailors, was amazingly matter of fact.
It was the evening of 5 September. The wind had changed during the day, blowing with increasing strength from the west, quickly building up the waves to meet the old seas created by the early wind direction. It was a conflict of waves that created a savage cross sea, with waves coming in from every direction. As night fell, Knox-Johnston reefed the mainsail down and left the boat under the tiny storm jib, which drove her along, under the guidance of the Admiral. He lay on his bunk, fully dressed, his damp waterproofs still on, with just a sheet of canvas to cover him. At last he dropped off to sleep, lulled by the roaring of the wind in the rigging and the crash of waves against the hull. He was woken cruelly in the pitch dark, as heavy objects crashed down upon him and he became aware that the boat was lying on its side. He struggled to get out of the bunk but was pinned, as if in a straitjacket, by the canvas sheet weighed down with the debris hurled upon him. Just as he struggled from under it, the boat heaved itself upright, throwing him across the cabin in the opaque darkness. Picking himself up, he fumbled for the hatch leading out on to the deck, dreading what he was going to find, convinced that the mast had been carried away when the boat lunged back up again against the immense clinging force of the sea. He pulled the hatch open, pushed his head out into the darkness through the wind-driven spume and could just discern the mast and boom; he could hardly believe that they were still there.
The boat was bucking like a wild stallion in the cross seas; he could see the angry gleam of the foam against the dark of the night but could barely discern the deck on which he was standing. He never used a safety harness, feeling that it restricted free movement. As he hauled himself from stay to stay, up the tossing deck, he felt every piece of rigging to make sure it was in place and got halfway up to the bow when another huge wave smashed into the boat, covering him, lifting him off his feet; all he could do was to cling on to the rigging as the roaring black waters tried to tear away his grasp. Once the freak wave had swept on its way he struggled back to the cockpit and adjusted the self-steering; he could not see in the dark whether or not it had been damaged and climbed back down into the shambles of the cabin, which was ankle-deep in water, with tins and packets of food, books, articles of clothing sloshing around in it.
The first priority was obviously to reduce the water level. He was reassured by the familiar effort and motion of pumping out the bilges; the adrenalin generated in the last few moments began to settle. Once he had pumped out most of the water he started to tidy up the appalling mess of soaked food, clothing and equipment. It was while doing this that he noticed a torrent of water pouring down from the side of the coach roof, where it joined the deck of the boat. On closer inspection, he was horrified to find that there were cracks all the way round, that the huge impact of the waves was slowly tearing the coach roof from the deck, with the frightening prospect of leaving a gaping hole nearly thirteen feet by six for the waves to thunder into. If this happened there was no way he could have saved the boat from foundering. There was nothing he could do in the dark or while the storm was at its height. He could only wait patiently for the wind to drop. The following morning, after a good breakfast while waiting for the seas to quieten down, he went through his stock of tools and spare parts to find some long bolts with which to strengthen the cabin. He spent the rest of the day painstakingly drilling through the hard teak of the deck and cabin sides to reinforce the fastening of the cabin. It was another two days before he could start repairing the self-steering gear, and even then he was completely immersed by the waves on several occasions.
Life was lonely, acutely uncomfortable and very dangerous but, more than that, it stretched out in front of him, as to any solitary sailor, for such a long time-very different from the experience of a mountaineer who, at times, is probably under greater risk but over much shorter periods of time. An expedition rarely lasts more than two or three months, of which the climb above the relative comfort of Base Camp is measured in weeks at the very most.
On 9 September, still just short of the Cape of Good Hope, Knox-Johnston summed it up in his log: ‘I have bruises all over from being thrown about. My skin itches from constant chafing with wet clothes and I forget when I last had a proper wash so I feel dirty. I feel altogether mentally and physically exhausted and I’ve been in the Southern Ocean only a week. It seems years since I gybed to turn east and yet it was only last Tuesday night, not six days, and I have another 150 days of it yet ... Why couldn’t I be satisfied with big ships?
‘The life may be monotonous but at least one gets into port occasionally which provides some variety. A prisoner at Dartmoor doesn’t get hard labour like this; the public wouldn’t stand for it and he has company, however uncongenial. In addition he gets dry clothing and undisturbed sleep. I wonder how the crime rate would be affected if people were sentenced to sail around the world alone instead of going to prison. It’s ten months solitary confinement with hard labour.’
Every adventurer must question his motives when the going gets rough. There was little let-up in the next 150 days, but Knox-Johnston kept going, pushing the boat as hard as he dared because he knew that he could finish the course, but he wanted to do more than that – he wanted to win. Just south of Australia, the self-steering gear finally packed in completely. Once again he thought of giving up. But his natural optimism soon bubbled back. He had come so far, was so far ahead of the field, it would be a pity to give up. He resolved to push on to New Zealand before coming to a decision. His fellow competitors were a long way behind. Moitessier and Loick Fougeron had set out on 21 August, Bill King three days later.
It is interesting to note the way the younger men, all in their twenties, had set out at the earliest possible moment, fully aware that they would be entering the Southern Ocean in the final throes of the Southern winter, while the older men in their forties and, in Bill King’s case, his fifties, had chosen the later departure date which hopefully would give them an easier passage through the Roaring Forties. In addition, Moitessier and King had larger boats, being forty feet long, though Fougeron’s thirty-foot cutter was no bigger than those of the younger men. Neither Fougeron nor Moitessier would carry transmitters, wanting, for aesthetic reasons, to sever all links with the land; Fougeron did start, however, with a companion, a wild kitten from Morocco called Roulis. It did not last long, for the kitten made mayhem of his cabin, pirating food and even chewing the plastic covering the wires leading to the aerial of his radio. After a few days he put it aboard a passing ship and returned, with some relief, to a solitary life. He and Moitessier were undoubtedly the most experienced long-distance solitary sailors, but Fougeron did not even reach the Roaring Forties. He was caught by a severe storm, knocked down during the night in much the same way that Robin Knox-Johnston had experienced. Afterwards he wrote:
‘I curl up in the cramped bunk and wait for the unbridled sea to win its victory over me. What to do? The boat lunges sideways, driven by a frightful force. I am flattened violently against the side and then in the middle of the bubbling waters everything goes black. A cascade of kitchen materials, books, bottles, tins of jam, everything that isn’t secured and in the middle of this song and dance I am projected helter-skelter across the boat. At this moment I believe that it is the end, that the sea will crush me and prevent me ever coming to the surface again.’
The boat recovered and the mast was intact, but Fougeron had had enough; he resolved to head for the nearest port and abandon the voyage.
Commander Bill King did get down into the Southern Ocean, but his speed down the Atlantic had been slow. He lacked the ferocious drive that had kept Chichester racing against himself, even when exhausted, and complained in his dispatches of feeling a lack of vitality; but it was the design of his boat that finally forced him out. The junk rig, which made it much easier for a single-handed sailor to control, had inherent weaknesses. The masts were not supported by stays and therefore terrific strains were exerted on the housing. When his boat was knocked down by a wave about a thousand miles south-west of Cape Town, the main mast was twisted by the force of the water, so he had no choice but to return to Cape Town.
This left Bernard Moitessier, who had already gained 2,000 miles on Bill King’s Galway Blazer, and was undoubtedly going faster than Robin Knox-Johnston. The Sunday Times even began to postulate whether Moitessier could catch Suhaili, whose progress so far had been steady, but slow. It is extremely unlikely that Moitessier was ever particularly interested in the voyage as a race. He commented just before setting off: ‘The people who are thinking about money and of being the fastest round the world will not win. It is the people who care about their skins. I shall bring back my skin, apart from a few bumps on my head.’
He took everything the sea could do to him in his stride, even when a cargo ship, which he had closed with to hand over some mail, collided with him. He simply repaired the damage and sailed on, completely at ease with the sea, happier to be alone in the middle of the ocean than on dry land. In this respect he was different from Knox-Johnston who, though equally a seaman, was not a natural loner. Knox-Johnston was able to adapt to the situation he was in from necessity, because he had to reach his goal of being the first man round the world single-handed; but he looked forward to his return to everyday life.
Moitessier, on the other hand, embraced the experience of being alone on his boat for its own sake. He wrote: ‘The days go by, never monotonous. Even when they appear exactly alike they are never quite the same. That is what gives life at sea its special dimension, made up of contemplation and very simple contrasts. Sea, wind, calms, sun, clouds, porpoises. Peace and the joy of being alive in harmony.’
Robin Knox-Johnston was approaching New Zealand as Moitessier sailed down into the Southern Ocean. Having come to terms with the total loss of his self-steering gear, in a short period free from storms Knox-Johnston had refined his system for balancing out the boat so that she would sail herself, both when running under reduced canvas and also when reaching. He had nearly crossed the Tasman Sea and was coming up to Fouveaux Strait. Soon he would be in the South Pacific, with the long clear run to Cape Horn before him. He always listened to the weather forecasts from the nearest radio station and, on the evening of 17 November, at the end of it came another message for the Master of the Suhaili: ‘Imperative we rendezvous outside Bluff Harbour in daylight – signature Bruce Maxwell.’
Knox-Johnston knew that a cold front with its accompanying storm was on the way, but reckoned he would be able to meet Maxwell, a journalist from the Sunday Mirror, before it arrived, hand over his story and, perhaps even more important, actually talk to someone in the flesh – an attractive thought after all the lonely weeks in the Southern Ocean. But the front rolled in faster than he had anticipated. The following evening, just off the Fouveaux Strait, force-ten winds, heavy rain and poor visibility were forecast; all this and he was being blown on to a lee shore. He made ready the warps that would keep Suhaili’s stern pointing into the waves to prevent her broaching, took a compass bearing on a light he identified as the Centre Island lighthouse and then waited for the storm to strike. He wrote: ‘I put the kettle on; it was still quiet outside, although as black as pitch, and I thought of Bruce sitting in a comfortable hotel lounge with a large beer in front of him. Perhaps we’d be drinking together in twenty-four hours. This last thought stuck with me and I had even begun to welcome the idea when it struck me how disloyal I was being to Suhaili.’
The clouds rolled in, the rain lashed down, the waves started to race past as he sailed into what he thought was the middle of the strait. He was uncomfortably close to land in this kind of weather and was being driven inexorably closer. Somehow he managed to claw his way round a headland into calmer waters, the immediate danger was over; but he still wanted to make his rendezvous with Maxwell, though he realised that he would not be able to reach Bluff Harbour in those wind conditions, especially as his engine was now completely seized up. He resolved, therefore, to head for Otago harbour, which looked as if it would be more sheltered. He reached it the following day, nosed his way cautiously round the headland and then, to his horror, realised he had run aground. He reacted immediately to the crisis; it was a sandy bottom, so would not damage the boat and, hopefully, when the tide rose again Suhaili would float herself off. He dived below for the anchor, grabbed it and leapt into the shallow water, walking along the bottom carrying the thirty-pound anchor. As it got deeper and the water went over his head he jumped up every few paces to get a quick breath of air, until he felt he had gone far enough and was able to dive to the bottom, to dig in flukes. He could now rest assured that the boat would not be driven further up the sand as the tide came in, though he was still faced with the problem of getting her out again. At least it was going to be easy to make his rendezvous. Some boats came out to investigate the lonely yacht, but Knox-Johnston kept them at a distance, refusing all offers of help. He was determined not to break any of the race regulations.
That night, when the tide came in, he was able to haul himself off the sandbank by pulling on the warp attached to the anchor. All he needed to do now was wait for Bruce Maxwell to find him. He arrived the following day, with plenty of news but, to Knox-Johnston’s immense disappointment, no mail. Maxwell told him that since Knox-Johnston had set out, the Race Committee had got round to making some rules, one of which was that none of the competitors should be allowed to take anything on board throughout the voyage. Maxwell had read this to include mail. It seemed an extraordinarily petty restriction to Knox-Johnston and, in some ways highlights the artificial nature of the voyage. A mountaineer, in climbing a mountain, has no easy alternative. He must keep going until he reaches the top and, having decided to climb, doing it on foot is probably the easiest, probably the only feasible way. An Italian expedition raised a certain level of controversy by using a helicopter to help ferry supplies on Everest but, in the event, its payload at altitude was so poor that it was no more effective than muscle power and, in the end, it crashed near the head of the Everest Icefall. A sailor, on the other hand, is choosing to make life difficult for himself, firstly by selecting a sailing vessel rather than an ocean liner to make his journey, and then by denying himself the right to call in at ports on the way or, in this instance, the solace of mail from family and friends.
Even so, Knox-Johnston did get news of his fellow competitors and learned, for the first time, that three more had started – though one of them, Alex Carozzo, was already out of the race and the other two, Lieutenant Commander Nigel Tetley and Donald Crowhurst, were still in the Atlantic a long way behind.
Nigel Tetley first heard of the Golden Globe race in March 1968. He was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, based on Plymouth, and was using his trimaran, Victress, as a floating home for himself and his wife, Evelyn, to whom he had been married for eighteen months. Tetley was forty-five, with two sons, aged sixteen and fourteen, from his first marriage. He was approaching a critical stage of his life; he had had an enjoyable Naval career which had given him command of a frigate, a great deal of exciting and interesting travel and also the leisure to pursue his own hobby of sailing. Having entered Victress for the Round Britain race, he had come in a very respectable fifth place. But only a certain number of officers gain promotion to commander and Tetley had not made it; as a result he was automatically due for retirement at the age of forty-five – a fairly traumatic period in the lives of most service officers.
One Sunday morning Eve slipped out, a coat over her nightdress, to buy the Sunday papers. When she got back Tetley picked up the Sunday Times, leafed through it and then was rivetted by the announcement of the Golden Globe race.
‘Round the world non-stop. To solve the problem of perpetual motion. Why had the idea always fascinated me? To sail on and on like the flying Dutchman. An apt simile even two years back; but the lost soul had since found its mate. A challenge from the past? It was now or never, like one’s bluff being called in poker.’
He started to make plans immediately. Ideally, he would like a new boat designed for the rigours of the voyage; he wrote around to all the likely sponsors but, like Knox-Johnston, was turned down. He therefore resigned himself to using his own boat, even though it was an ordinary production model, designed more for family cruising than for solitary circumnavigation. In a trimaran the centre hull holds the living quarters, while the two outer hulls are little more than balancing floats which can be used for storage. Whereas the monohull has a heavy keel which, combined with the boat’s ballast, will always bring the boat back upright even in the event of a complete capsize, the trimaran is much more lightly built and has no keel. The boat is a platform resting on three floats. This design gives it great stability and almost limitless speed, for before the wind it literally surfs on the crest of the waves, achieving speeds of anything up to twenty-two knots – much faster than the speed a monohull could ever achieve. There are snags, however, for should the boat be capsized it will not right itself. The risk was highlighted by the fact that two leading multihull exponents and designers, Hedley Nichol and Arthur Piver, had recently been lost at sea.
Tetley was not deterred by the risk; he was fully committed to multihull sailing and showed an almost evangelistic zeal in his desire to prove the capabilities of his trimaran. Eve, his wife, gave him her total support, devising for him by far the most palatable and, I suspect, nutritious menu of all the sailors. Ridgway had taken, for simplicity’s sake, a uniform diet of army rations; Knox-Johnston’s was fairly limited, but Tetley’s was a gourmet’s delight, with braised kidneys, roast goose and duck, jugged hare, oysters, octopus and Yarmouth bloaters. He also had a good hi-fi system in his cabin and set out with a magnificent tape library. It was very appropriate that he obtained the sponsorship of a record company, Music For Pleasure. The only thing he neglected was books, and he complained on the way round of how limited was his reading matter.
He refitted the boat himself, experienced all the usual crises, but was ready to sail in good order on 16 September. Good-looking in a clean-cut, rather Naval way, he was excellent company, fitting easily into a group, and yet there was a definite reserve in his character, moulded in part, no doubt, by public school and his Naval career. This reserve is certainly perceptible in his book Trimaran Solo, for it reveals very little of his innermost feelings or reservations. The log of his voyage is equally inhibited, tending to cling to the surface of day-to-day sailing problems, accounts of the menu and the daily programme of music.
His achievement, though, was remarkable. Sailing down towards the Southern Ocean he must have been acutely aware of the risk he was taking. His boat was an ordinary production model; the comfortable cabin and raised wheelhouse undoubtedly made her the most comfortable boat going round the world, but they represented potential weaknesses in the structure which could prove fatal. Every solitary sailor has his moments of doubt and Tetley was no exception. The solitude and stress bore heavily upon him. This was reflected in his entry on October 2nd, seventeen days out:
‘Thoughts of packing it in came into my mind for the first time today, brought on I think by too much of my own company. It would be so easy to put into port and say that the boat was not strong enough for the voyage or unsuitable. What was really upsetting me was the psychological effect – of possibly twelve months – this might have. Would I be the same person on return: This aspect I knew worried Eve too. I nearly put through a radio call to talk over the question in guarded terms. Then I realised that though she would straightaway accept the reason and agree to my stopping, say at Cape Town, we would feel that we had let ourselves down both in our own eyes and those of our friends, backers and well-wishers. It was only a touch of the blues due to the yacht’s slow progress.’
Like Knox-Johnston, he overcame depression by some practical work; in this instance having a hair cut. There is never a shortage of things to do on a long-distance voyage; quite apart from sailing the boat, there is a constant round of preventive maintenance on rigging and equipment and, however thorough the sailor may be, wear and tear is relentless. Tetley had an elaborate workshop with an electric drill; a practical man, again like Knox-Johnston, he kept on top of maintenance problems as he nursed his boat down the South Atlantic and into the Southern Ocean where she was to meet her greatest test.
After failing to charter Gipsy Moth IV, Donald Crowhurst also decided to go for a trimaran, even though he had never actually sailed one. Since it was obvious that he would not be ready to start before the end of October, the last possible date for entering the race, it was also unlikely he would catch up with the sailors who had started earlier. He would, therefore, have to go for the fastest time if he wanted to achieve distinction, and for that he needed a really fast boat. He decided to have a trimaran built to the same basic design as Victress, Tetley’s boat, but with a streamlined, strengthened superstructure and a host of electronic aids to increase the boat’s safety. All this needed money, though, and it was here that he effected his greatest coup. The most important creditor of his failing business was Stanley Best, a down-to-earth businessman, not easily impressed by romantic ideas. Crowhurst nevertheless succeeded in persuading Best that his surest chance of recovering his investment was to increase this still further and foot the bill for the new boat.
Now he could get started, but it was mid-May – all too little time to build a boat, especially one which was to include all the revolutionary ideas thought up by Crowhurst. It was to have a buoyancy bag hanging from the top of the mast; the electronic sensors in the hull would automatically inflate the bag from a compressed air bottle if the boat was blown over. Hopefully this would stop it capsizing. There were many other electronic aids, all to be controlled by a ‘computer’ installed in the cabin. Crowhurst’s ideas were certainly original and might have worked; unfortunately, however, he lacked both the time and also the temperament to put them into effect. He was rushing about constantly, between boat-builders, his own home in Bridgwater and around the country chasing all the loose ends, drumming up further sponsorship and talking to the press. He had all too many bright ideas, but seemed unable to carry them through to the end and often ignored the less exciting, but essential, minor details. As a result of this and the inevitable teething troubles suffered during any form of boat construction, everything slid behind schedule. October 30th came all too quickly and Crowhurst was barely ready. The interior of the cabin was a mess of unconnected wires; there was no compressed air bottle to feed the unsightly flotation bag which hung from the masthead. More serious still, several short cuts had been taken in the construction of the boat which undoubtedly affected her seaworthiness. A team of friends helped him to get everything ready in time to beat the deadline, but it was chaotic. Crowhurst did not seem able to co-ordinate their efforts, was prey to too many conflicting demands – not least those of his energetic press agent, Rodney Hallworth, a big man with a powerful personality who handled Teignmouth’s public relations.
At two o’clock on the morning of 31 October the decks and cabin were still piled high with stores, many of which had been bought at the last minute. Exhausted, Donald Crowhurst and his wife, Clare, returned to the hotel where they were to spend what was to be their last night together. Most adventurers have moments of agonising doubt, particularly on the brink of departure, but those of Crowhurst were particularly painful. He admitted to Clare that the boat was just not up to the voyage and asked whether she would go out of her mind with worry. With hindsight she realised that he was asking her to stop him going, but she did not see it at the time and did her best to reassure him. He cried through the rest of the night.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon of the 31st, just a few hours before deadline, that he set sail. It was a messy departure; almost immediately Crowhurst discovered that the buoyancy bag, which had been hurriedly lashed to the mast the previous day, had been tied round two halyards as well, so that neither the jib nor the staysail could be raised. He screamed invective at his accompanying escort and asked to be towed back into harbour so that the rigging could be cleared. He then managed to get away, tacking into Lyme Bay against a strong south wind, until he vanished into the misty drizzle.
As he sailed down the Channel he sorted out the shambles on deck and in the cabin, but in the next few days the hopelessness of his voyage became increasingly evident. The Hasler self-steering gear, ideal for a monohull but not really suitable for a trimaran, was giving trouble; then, even more serious, he discovered that the port bow float was shipping water. The hatches to the floats were not fully watertight. This probably brought on a further realisation. He had a very powerful pump for bailing but in the last-minute rush they had failed to get the length of Heliflex hosing needed to bail out all the different compartments. The only way he could do it was by hand, a slow and exhausting process which would be impractical in a really heavy sea because almost as much water would pour back in through the opened hatch as he would be able to bail out. (Tetley had anticipated this problem by putting permanent piping into the forward compartments of Victress.) Also, he discovered that a pile of spare parts and plywood patches that he would need for repairs en route had somehow been taken off the boat, even though he knew he had put them on board.
The winds across the Bay of Biscay and down the coast of Portugal were mainly against him but, even so, his progress was slow, even erratic. It was as if he were shying from commitment, trying to make up his mind what to do. The BBC had given him a tape recorder and a huge pile of tapes on which to record his impressions during the voyage. Whatever his doubts or secret thoughts, he was obviously very aware, whenever he made a recording, that this was eventually going to a wide audience and there was often a tone of bravado in his monologue which, somehow, struck a false note, when the reality was so different. For a start the boat was very bad at sailing into the wind but, much more serious, there were hosts of potentially disastrous structural faults. At last, on 15 November, he summed up the problem in his log, stating, ‘Racked by the growing awareness that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision!’
He went on to write a very clear, carefully thought-out assessment of his situation, listing the many faults and omissions, all of which pointed to the seeming inevitability of failure in the Southern Ocean, failure which, in all probability, would be accompanied by his own death. He then questioned whether he should abandon the voyage immediately or try to salvage something from it by going on to Cape Town, or even Australia, so that he could withdraw with greater honour and at the same time give his backer, Stanley Best, a little mileage for his investment.
Yet on 18 November, when he managed to make a radio link-up with both Clare and Stanley Best, he did not mention the possibility of abandoning the voyage. He asked Best to double-check whether or not the Heliflex hosing had been put on board and complained of his slow progress, giving his position as ‘some hundred miles north of Madeira’. Talking to Best again a few days later, he still did not mention the possibility of pulling out of the race, but he did warn that he might be forced to go off the air because of problems with the charging motor. It was as if he could not bring himself to admit failure and return to the enormous problems which he knew faced him at home.
Crowhurst’s fellow late entrant, Alex Carozzo, had no such inhibitions or, for that matter, very much choice. A thirty-six-year-old, flamboyant Italian, he was a very experienced sailor. Like Knox-Johnston he had a Merchant Navy background and had built a thirty-three-foot boat in the hold of his cargo ship on the way to Japan. There he had launched the boat and had sailed single-handed to San Francisco, surviving a dismasting on the way. His entry to the Golden Globe race was equally bizarre. Having already entered the Observer single-handed race, he set out from Plymouth and in the vast emptiness of the Atlantic, by an incredible coincidence, met up with John Ridgway, who had just set sail on his voyage. They exchanged greetings and it was this, perhaps, that influenced Carozzo in turning back to England so that he could build a boat specially for the circumnavigation. There was little time left and he had the boat built in a mere seven weeks. It was a revolutionary design, with two steel rudders and, in front of the main keel, a three-foot centre plate which could be used to adjust the boat’s trim. She was by far the biggest boat to start out on the long, single-handed voyage. Provided he could manage her alone, she should have been the fastest of all the contenders. Unfortunately, however, he was overtaken by severe stomach pains whilst in the Bay of Biscay; these were diagnosed as stomach ulcers and, in the end, he had to be taken in tow to the Portuguese coast at Oporto. No doubt the nervous stress of putting together the enterprise so very quickly had been too much for him.
This was the news that Bruce Maxwell passed on to Knox-Johnston. The only serious threat seemed to be that of Moitessier, who had been making good progress as far as the Cape of Good Hope where he had last been seen on 26 October. The pundits had calculated that at his present rate of progress he could challenge Knox-Johnston to a neck-and-neck finish and would undoubtedly win on the elapsed time basis. Knox-Johnston commented, ‘that was just the sort of news I needed to spur me on’.
He raised sail once again, his next sight of land to be Cape Horn. Even though he had worked out a series of sail patterns to cope with the loss of his self-steering, he still had to take the helm while sailing before the wind. This meant long hours, sixteen and seventeen at a time, sitting exposed to the elements in his tiny cockpit. Suhaili did not have a wheelhouse or even a canvas dodger to protect the helmsman; Knox-Johnston did not believe in them, feeling that he had to be completely exposed to the winds and to have a real feel of what they were doing to his sails and boat. He spent the long hours clutching the helm, meditating about the world and his own future, or learning and reciting some of the poetry he had on board. He never relaxed his efforts to nurse Suhaili along, to get the very best he could out of her and yet to avoid straining her to the point of irreparable damage. By now his radio transmitter was out of action, so he had no chance of calling for help nor of reporting his position, though he could pick up the coastal radio stations back in New Zealand and then, as he crept across the South Pacific, on the South American coast.
There was a constant drudgery and discomfort – of damp clothes, of insufficient sleep punctuated by crises, a hand badly scalded by boiling porridge, the failure of a succession of parts on the boat, the struggle with contrary winds which came in against him from the east almost as often as they swept round from the west.
Cape Horn, which he reached on 17 January, was almost an anticlimax – he coasted past it in an almost dead calm. There was no one to meet him, no aircraft flying out from the land: he slipped past unnoticed up into the South Atlantic, past the Falkland Islands and on up the coast of South America towards the equator. He was on the home stretch, though still had a long way to go. The only person who had any chance of catching him up was Moitessier, who had handed some letters to a fisherman in a bay near Hobart, Tasmania, on 18 December. Moitessier was next spotted off the Falkland Islands on 10 February, but had the variables where he could expect contrary winds before him, while Knox-Johnston had reached the South-East Trades. It is unlikely that Moitessier would have caught up with Knox-Johnston, but he almost certainly would have had a faster time round the world, having set out more than two months after him.
The question was to be academic. The next time Moitessier was sighted was off the Cape of Good Hope, when the rest of the world believed he was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic approaching the equator, nearing the final run for home. He sailed into the outer reaches of the harbour and, using a slingshot, catapulted a message for the Sunday Times on to the bridge of an anchored tanker. It read: ‘The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea and perhaps also to save my soul.’
His message was received with incredulity. How could anyone, with success and glory in his grasp, reject it like this? The Sunday Times tried to get a message from his wife through to him by having it broadcast on South African news bulletins: ‘Bernard – the whole of France is waiting for you. Please come back to Plymouth as quickly as possible. Don’t go round the world again. We will be waiting for you in England, so please do not disappoint us – Françoise and the children.’
Moitessier never heard this message, and it is impossible to guess how he would have responded if he had. He had contemplated calling in at Plymouth to claim the reward, collect all the equipment he had left there and reassure his family, but then he rejected the thought, afraid that he would be drawn back into a way of life he felt was false and into a society that he considered was destroying itself with materialism, pollution and violence. Sailing on round the Cape of Good Hope for the second time, into the savage winds and seas of the Southern winter, it was a much rougher voyage than his first through the Southern Ocean. He was knocked down on four different occasions as he sailed past Australia, past New Zealand and then on up into the Southern Pacific towards Tahiti.
Moitessier finally reached Tahiti on 21 June 1969, having sailed one and a half times round the world, further than anyone had ever done single-handed. On arrival he told journalists that he had never intended to race:
‘Talking of records is stupid, an insult to the sea. The thought of a competition is grotesque. You have to understand that when one is months and months alone one evolves; some people say, go nuts. I went crazy in my own fashion. For four months all I saw were the stars. I didn’t hear an unnatural sound. A purity grows out of that kind of solitude. I said to myself, “What the hell am I going to do in Europe?” I told myself I’d be crazy to go on to France.’
To him, the voyage was sufficient in itself; he did not need the embellishments of competition, rejected both the material rewards and the accolades of fame. There had even been talk of him being awarded the Legion of Honour in France. He displayed an independence that is rare. Most mountaineers, for instance, have consistently rejected formalised competition but, in most instances, have accepted any plaudits bestowed on them on their return to their homeland. Moitessier, however, was not so much rejecting the rewards of a society wanting to adulate its heroes; rather, he was saying, ‘I am not going to play your games. I am going to do exactly what I want and lead my own life in the way I choose.’ He preferred the simplicity of life in the Pacific Islands, the freedom to sail where and when he would.
With Moitessier out of the race there were only three left. Knox-Johnston had last been seen at Otago and now, in mid-March, should be somewhere in the Atlantic, though his family and sponsors were becoming increasingly worried about his survival; ships and planes in the mid-Atlantic were asked to keep an eye out for him. Crowhurst also had gone off the air. The only competitor still in contact was Nigel Tetley. He had made steady, but nerve-wracking progress across the Southern Ocean, nursing his trimaran through the gigantic rollers that all too easily could have capsized him with fatal results. It appears that he picked the ideal time to sail through the ocean, for the weather seems to have been kinder to him than to the others, particularly around the Cape of Good Hope where all other circumnavigators experienced the appalling storms which forced Blyth and King to abandon their voyages and which very nearly scuppered Knox-Johnston. Tetley had his narrowest escape when nearing Cape Horn; caught by a storm with sharp, choppy waves, he was very nearly pitchpoled, the cabin damaged and one of the windows smashed. In the aftermath he thought of giving up, sailing for Valparaiso, but then obstinacy set in and he turned the boat to head for Cape Horn. His passage round the Horn also was anticlimactic – he was almost becalmed.
He now turned north-east to pass the Falklands on the east, for the long run home. Tetley’s achievement in sailing a trimaran through the Southern Ocean was considerable, but the stress on his boat was now beginning to tell. Both the floats and the main hull were letting in water, sure signs of structural damage caused by the months of hammering but, provided he nursed Victress carefully, she should get back to England and might even be the only boat to complete the voyage. Then, on 5 April, the tanker Mobil Acme sighted Suhaili to the west of the Azores. Knox-Johnston was on the home stretch and would undoubtedly be first home. Tetley, on the other hand, had a better average speed and – in all probability – would win the prize for the fastest voyage, even if he had to nurse Victress very carefully those last few thousand miles up the Atlantic.
Nobody had heard anything from Donald Crowhurst since 19 January, when he had reported his position a hundred miles south-east of Cough Island in the South Atlantic to the west of the Cape of Good Hope. It could be assumed, therefore, that by this time he should be somewhere in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Cape Horn. In fact he was still in the South Atlantic and had never left it.
We shall never know exactly what went through Crowhurst’s mind as he dallied hesitantly down the Atlantic through December 1968 and the early months of 1969. The only evidence are the logs and casual notes he left in Teignmouth Electron and which Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin, two Sunday Times writers, sifted and analysed in a brilliant piece of detective work, described in their book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. It seems unlikely that he planned his deception from the very start of the voyage – or even from the moment when he concluded that there was no way his boat could survive the seas of the Southern Ocean. Both Tetley and Knox-Johnston had had moments when they decided their voyages were no longer possible, had resolved to give up, then decided to keep going until the next landfall and to take a decision there. The big difference was that their decisions were all in the open; it never remotely occurred to either of them to practise any form of deception.
With Crowhurst, the deception seems to have built up over a period, from the original germ of the idea to final, absolute commitment. It started in early December with a spectacular claim to an all-time speed record of 243 miles in the day. (This almost certainly would have been a record, since the best run previously publicised was that of Geoffrey Williams who had logged about 220 miles in the Observer single-handed Atlantic race.) It certainly got Crowhurst the headlines he probably sought and was accepted, without comment by nearly all the media, though Francis Chichester was suspicious, phoning the Sunday Times to advise them that they should watch out for Crowhurst – he could be ‘a bit of a joker’. At this stage it is possible that Crowhurst was still thinking of abandoning the voyage at Cape Town; the claim, which the calculations found in his cabin show was false, would have given him a bit of glory with which to face his backers on return to England.
But then, as he sailed on down the Atlantic, the moment of irreversible commitment came ever closer. He had already started a new logbook, even though his existing one still had plenty of empty pages, the inference being that he intended, at a later date, to write out a false log of his imagined circumnavigation through the Southern Ocean, while he used his second logbook for his actual calculations which, of course, he needed to know from day to day. He also started to mark out on his chart a series of false positions, well to the west of his actual route, which was taking him down the South American coast. He could still, however, have brought his actual route and faked course together at Cape Town and it is unlikely that anyone would have bothered to scrutinise his calculations sufficiently closely to see that there were discrepancies.
There would come a point soon, however, when if he tried to fake his voyage through the Southern Ocean there was no way that he could suddenly appear at a port in South Africa or South America without exposing his fraud. He must have devoted hours to working out all the pros and cons of trying to carry out the deceit. For a start he would have to close down his radio since any call he made would give a rough indication of where he really was. But the biggest problem of all was that of writing up the false log with all the navigational calculations he would need, in a way that would satisfy the examination by experts on his return to Britain.
There have been challenged claims in the past. There is doubt about the claims of both Cook and Peary to have reached the North Pole in 1908 and 1909. The claim of the former was widely rejected, while the latter was generally accepted, even though there were several contradictions in his account. The distances Peary claimed to have made each day in his dash for the Pole seem far-fetched. If he did fabricate, however, it was a relatively simple operation, since it represented only a few days and, after all, nobody could challenge conclusively whether or not the bit of featureless ice on which he had stood was or was not the North Pole. There have also been several cases of disputed mountaineering ascents, but these also have usually involved a push from a top camp towards a summit, as often as not in cloud or storm. One of the most notorious is that of the first ascent of Cerro Torre by Cesare Maestri and Toni Egger. They were gone from Base Camp for a week; on their way down, in a violent storm, Egger slipped and fell to his death, Maestri staggered back down and was found semiconscious and delirious. He claimed they reached the top, though this was disputed. Whether he did or not can never be proved conclusively, but if he did fabricate the story, again it was comparatively easy to do so, since he only had to imagine a few days’ climbing and could be excused lapses of memory in the struggle he had for survival.
But Crowhurst was embarking on a massive fraud. He would have to spend several months circling the empty wastes of the South Atlantic, carefully avoiding all shipping lanes, while he forged a log, day by day, across the Southern Ocean. On his return he would have to sustain the lie in all its details. From the scrap sheets he left in his cabin, he had obviously spent a great deal of time and thought in taking his speed record. Falsifying a circumnavigation represented an infinitely greater challenge. Doubtless he must have been wrestling with this as he sailed down the South Atlantic. His radio reports were consistently vague, but by 19 January he realised that the distance between his actual position, a few hundred miles east of Rio de Janeiro, and his claimed position approaching the Cape of Good Hope, was becoming too great and that it was time to close down his radio. He sent a message to Rodney Hallworth, his agent and promoter back in Teignmouth, for once giving a positive position a hundred miles south-east of Gough Island and, at the same time, warned him that the generator hatch was giving trouble, to create a reason for going off the air. This was his last call for three months – three months of complete isolation, denied the stimulus of pushing a boat to its limit or of a real goal.
He had started the journey with four logbooks; the first had entries up to mid-December and then, even though there were still plenty of blank pages, had been abandoned. The second was a working log, giving the day-to-day details of his actual voyage. In it he had recorded his thoughts as the voyage progressed, and it is these which give the clearest indication of his state of mind. He used the third book as a wireless log, in which he recorded not only his own messages but also detailed weather reports from stations in Africa, Australia and South America, presumably to help him falsify his log in a convincing manner. The fourth book was missing when the boat was eventually recovered. It is possible that he kept this as the false logbook. On a practical level, working out the false sun sights in reverse would take considerably longer than doing it for real; also, of course, it would only be by doing it from day to day that the appearances of the log could have been at all convincing.
The nervous stress of living out this solitary world of make-believe must have been immense, but there are few records of direct introspection in his logbook over this period; it is full of observations of the sea life around him, of the birds and porpoises that kept him company, and yet through these emerge glimpses of his state of mind. On 29 January an owl-like bird, which was almost certainly from the land, managed to reach the boat. He wrote a short piece about it, entitled ‘The Misfit’:
‘He was unapproachable, as a misfit should be. He flew away as soon as I made any effort to get near him, and on to the mizzen crosstrees where he hung desperately to the shaky stays with claws useless for the task he had set himself.
‘ ... Poor bloody misfit! A giant albatross, its great high-aspect wings sweeping like scimitars through the air with never a single beat slid effortlessly round the boat in mocking contrast to his ill-adapted efforts of survival.’
And then a poem:
Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart,
Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight.
Save, save him some pity. But save the greater part
For him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit’s guiding light.
It is a poignant cry for understanding and sympathy, stripped of all the shallow bravado that appears in his taped commentaries for the outside world.
And then a real crisis presented itself. The starboard float of Teignmouth Electron was seriously damaged, letting in the water. The spare pieces of plywood he needed for repairs had been left behind. There seemed no choice; he would have to put into port to get the boat repaired. This presented a huge problem. Even had he wanted to use this as an honourable excuse for retiring from the race, he was now so far from where he had said he was, that his fraud would inevitably have been exposed. He seems to have dithered for several days, zigzagging off the coast of Argentina, before finally summoning up the resolve to get into port, and then he chose the obscure anchorage of Rio Salado, near the mouth of the River Plate. He arrived on the morning of 8 March, repaired the damage and left two days later. Although the arrival of Teignmouth Electron was noted in the coastguard log, it was not passed on, but Crowhurst could not be sure of this and it must have been yet another source of worry.
As he set sail from Rio Salado, in his pretended voyage he should have been somewhere between New Zealand and Cape Horn. The time was coming close when his real self could join up with the fantasy self and, with this in mind, he started sailing south towards the Falkland Islands and the Roaring Forties. It is ironic that from 24 March, on his way south, he must have passed within a few miles of Tetley going north. He sailed to within sight of the Falklands on 29 March, but it was still too early to radio his false position approaching the Horn, and so he veered off to the north for a further ten days, zigzagging back and forth, before sending out his first radio message for three months:
DEVON NEWS EXETER – HEADING DIGGER
RAMREZ LOG KAPUT 17697 28TH
WHATS NEW OCEAN-BASHINGWISE
The broken log line covered any contradictions there might be between his actual mileage and the one he declared, while he still avoided giving a precise position, though definitely inferred that he was approaching the small group of islands named Diego Ramirez, to the south of Cape Horn. His radio call arrived just five days after Knox-Johnston had been sighted near the Azores and inevitably the world’s press were concentrating on him, saving Crowhurst from a closer scrutiny that might have picked out some anomalies both in the apparent speed of his crossing the Southern Ocean and the timing of the resumption of radio communications. Once again, Francis Chichester was one of the few people to make sceptical comment.
Tetley was approaching the Tropic of Capricorn, well off the coast of South America, when he heard that Crowhurst was back in contact and heading for Cape Horn. It was unlikely that Crowhurst could get back to England before him, but of course he had set out over a month later and seemed, from his report, to have caught up dramatically. If Crowhurst kept up his present rate of progress he would have the fastest time round the world. Tetley had been stoical about Robin Knox-Johnston’s reappearance, writing in his book Trimaran Solo:
‘Robin’s arrival would hive off most of the publicity and his position where expected made glad tidings. Donald Crowhurst’s challenge to me from the rear was a different matter. Even so, I could by then regard the possibility of his winning without envy. At the same time, I still wanted to win; or put in another way, I didn’t want anyone to beat me … least of all a similar type of boat.’
Tetley undoubtedly started to push Victress very much harder, keeping as much sail up as possible: in his words, he was now racing in earnest. But the boat was not up to it. In the early hours of 20 April, just short of the equator and the point where he would cross his outward track, disaster struck. A frame in the bow had disintegrated, leaving a gaping hole. His first reaction was that it was all over and he started working out the nearest port he could reach, but once again his stubborn determination won through. He patched up the damage as best he could and was soon pushing his boat to the limit once again, his eyes set on Plymouth.
At the time Tetley was struggling to repair and then nurse his battered boat towards home, Crowhurst, in the South Atlantic, was still marking time; he had to calculate very carefully the moment when his false voyage could actually catch up with his real progress, when the two logs could become one, when fantasy became reality. During this period he tried, unsuccessfully, to get a telephone link-up with Clare. This was obviously tremendously important to him – not only the result of his isolation, but also of the massive strain he must now have been under. The period without any contact with the world might have enabled him to relax in his fantasy, but he was now back in contact, was perhaps beginning to wonder about the practicalities of carrying through his deception.
Robin Knox-Johnston had no such problems. He was very nearly home in his dirt-streaked, old-fashioned-looking ketch, Suhaili. As he came into the Channel, planes dipped low over him, getting the first shots of film showing his arrival; two boats came out to greet him – one carrying his mother and father which, to the embarrassment of his sponsors, the Sunday Mirror, had been chartered by the Daily Express, and the other carrying reporters and photographers of the Sunday Mirror. As Suhaili neared Falmouth the escort increased, with a Royal Naval Reserve ship to give him a formal escort and a host of yachts and small boats whose crews wanted to pay tribute to his achievement. Suhaili crossed the bar at 3.30 in the afternoon of 22 April. The finishing cannon fired. Robin Knox-Johnston was the first man to sail round the world non-stop single-handed. He had taken 313 days to sail the thirty-odd-thousand miles. It wasn’t a dramatically fast time, but in many ways the speed was meaningless. The reason why Knox-Johnston had finished at all was because he had known how to care for his boat as well as how to push her.
The first people to board him were the Customs officers with the time-honoured question, ‘Where from?’ Knox-Johnston replied, ‘Falmouth’.
This would have made a nice, tidy end to the story, but of course the race was not yet over and the competition, created by the Sunday Times was still very open. Crowhurst, who had now united his fake position with that of his real position, sent off a jaunty congratulatory cable:
NEWSDESK BBC – TICKLED AS TAR WITH TWO FIDS SUCCESS KNOX JOHNSTON BUT KINDLY NOTE NOT RACEWINNER YET SUGGEST ACCURACY DEMANDS DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOLDEN GLOBE AND RACE = OUTRAGED SOUTH ATLANTIC OTHERWISE
CROWHURST
But Crowhurst’s actual log shows that he continued to sail southward for a further four days and then, even when he did turn north, his progress was spasmodic, as if he wanted to ensure that Tetley was first home, with himself sufficiently close behind to get a good share of the honour, yet be spared the close scrutiny that his logs and story would receive were he the winner. He did get in a few good days sailing and his log even registered one day’s run of 243 miles – by coincidence the same as his false claim of a record the previous year.
Tetley meanwhile continued to push his damaged boat to the limit and by 20 May had reached the Azores, only a thousand miles from home. A force-nine gale had blown up through the day and, as dusk fell, he took down all his sails and hove to. It was midnight when he was woken by a strange scraping sound forward. He realised instinctively that the bow of the port float must have come drift but, when he switched on the light, he was appalled to see water flowing over the floor. He went up on deck to find a gaping void where the float should have been, but somehow, in tearing away from the hull, it had left a huge hole in the main hull as well. Victress was sinking fast. He only had time to send out a quick emergency call on his radio, grab his log books and a few instruments and clear the life raft from the deck, before the boat sank under him in the pitch dark. For a hideous moment the raft’s automatic drogue snagged something, pulling him under the three wildly rearing sterns of the boat. He managed to cut the line only just in time, shouting, ‘Give over, Vicky, I have to leave you ... Then the pangs set in. I had fleeting glimpses of her hull above the jagged silhouette of the waves, then all I could see was her riding light waving bravely among the tumult. As I watched, the sea reached her batteries, the light grew suddenly bright, flickered and went out.’
He spent the rest of the night, protected by the cocoon-like canopy of the rubber dinghy, tossed like a piece of flotsam by the dark waves. In the morning an American Hercules rescue aircraft flew overhead and later on that afternoon an Italian tanker, guided by the plane, picked him up. He had completed his circumnavigation, had come so close to completing the voyage; he was like the marathon runner who, having almost completed the course, collapses at the entrance to the stadium, a mere lap from the finish.
This now left Crowhurst in an agonising predicament. His spasmodic progress up the South Atlantic indicates that he intended to ensure that he came in second to Tetley. But now, if he kept going at his present rate, he would almost certainly beat Robin Knox-Johnston’s time round the world and be subject to the inevitable close scrutiny of his logs and story that this would entail.
On the other hand, if he were to slow down, this in itself would appear suspicious – particularly in comparison with the very fast passage he had claimed for crossing the Southern Ocean. In addition, the radio messages from England were beginning to indicate both the scale and the closeness of the reception he would have to face on getting back to Teignmouth. The stress was increased still further by the failure of his transmitter – he was unable to get any messages out. He now devoted all his energy to trying to repair the transmitter, leaving the boat to sail herself while he stripped and then tried to rebuild it. The cabin must have been unbearably hot, for he was now sailing through the Tropics; it also became an untidy shambles, with bits of wire and transistors scattered everywhere. And yet, in a way, it was probably therapeutic. Even back in England, Crowhurst had frequently locked himself away for hours as he wrestled with electronic problems. This was something that he knew he could do well and, after several days’ work, he managed to make the transmitter work for morse. He did not manage to make it work for voice and this meant that he was unable to get the telephone link-up with Clare that he so desperately wanted. Even so, during this period he still kept up the public front of his deception with morse messages to England and a series of passages recorded on his tape recorder. His last recording was on 23 June:
‘I feel tremendously fit. I feel as if I could realise all those ambitions I nurtured as a boy like playing cricket for England. I feel on top of the world, tremendously fit. My reflexes amaze me. They’re so fast you know. I catch things almost before they start falling. It’s really very satisfying.’
And the tape ran off the spool. He did not reload it. He had had a second go at making a high-frequency speech transmitter but did not have the parts. He had even telegrammed the Race Committee to ask for dispensation to have the necessary parts sent to him, but they had stuck to the rules. There was nothing more he could do with the radio, it is easy to surmise why he could not bring himself to reload the spool.
The reality of his position must now have been too appalling for almost anyone to have borne. Crowhurst seems to have turned away from it, into the therapy of the kind of philosophical discussion that he had always enjoyed at home, particularly amongst his close friends. He started it in his second logbook – a series of passages which, over the next few days, stretched into 25,000 words, some of which represented reasoned, philosophical analysis, some a tortured, indirect self-justification and, towards the end, it all became increasingly obscure with more and more deletions and repetitions. His first thoughts were strongly influenced by Einstein, whose work on relativity was one of the very few books which Crowhurst had brought with him to while away the months of solitude. He gave his exposition the title ‘Philosophy’ and went on:
‘Man is a lever whose ultimate length and strength he must determine for himself. His disposition and talent decide where the fulcrum will lie.
‘The pure mathematician places the fulcrum near the effort; his exercises are much more mental than physical and can carry the ‘load’ – his own ideas – taking perhaps nothing but his own and kindred minds along the route. The shattering application of the idea that E = mc2 is one extreme example of this activity.’
Crowhurst developed and expanded this theme to the point where he made his great discovery, that Man – and Crowhurst in particular – could escape from his body.
‘And yet, and yet – if creative abstraction is to act as a vehicle for the new entity, and leave its hitherto stable state it lies within the power of creative abstraction to produce the phenomenon!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can bring it about by creative abstraction!’
Not only could he escape from his body and from the appalling predicament in which he found himself, he could become one with God. He continued to explore this thesis and to study the last 2,000 years of history, showing how some exceptional men have managed to make their impact on the world, shocking it into change. He was also becoming aware of how important were both his words and discoveries, observing: ‘Now we must be very careful about getting the answer right. We are at the point where our powers of abstraction are powerful enough to do tremendous damage ... ’
But the outside world still intruded. On 26 June he received a cable from Rodney Hallworth:
BBC AND EXPRESS MEETING YOU WITH CLARE AND ME OFF SCILLIES YOUR TRIUMPH BRINGING ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOLK TEIGNMOUTH WHERE FUND REACHING FIFTEEN HUNDRED PLUS MANY OTHER BENEFITS PLEASE GIVE ME SECRETS OF TRIP NEAR DEATH AND ALL THAT FOR PRE-PRESS SELLING OPPORTUNITIES MONEY OUTLOOK GOOD REPLY URGENT THINKING ABOUT ADVERTISING
He was still able to project his public self through his morse key: on the 28th he told off the BBC and Hallworth for demanding an exact time of arrival, with the admonishment:
BECALMED THREE DAYS PUFF BOATS HAVE DESTINATIONS NOT ETAS
He was also disturbed by the thought of Clare coming out to meet him and on the 29th sent a message, through the operator at Portishead, that under no circumstances was Clare to come out to the Scillies. This was his last message, his last direct contact with the outside world.
Another subject that fascinated him was that of ‘the game’ as one’s approach to living, but with a strong sense of self-justification of how he had played and manipulated ‘the game’ of the round the world race. He now began to jump from one idea to the next, at times very obviously in agony, as shown by these lines which filled a single page:
Nature does not allow
God to Sin any Sins
Except One –
That is the Sin of Concealment
This is the terrible secret of the torment of the soul
‘needed’ by a natural system to keep trying
He has perpetuated this sin on the tormented ...
Crowhurst had lost all awareness of the passing of time, had not wound up either his watch or chronometer. There had been no practical entries into his log, no sights or positions. And then, on 1 July, he reopened the log, annotating his thoughts with the passage of time. His first problem was to work out the passage of days, in which he had ignored the time, and then to calculate the time itself. He did this by taking a sight of the moon. Initially, he made a mistake of both the day – forgetting that June has only thirty days, and of the time, but then he realised it and made his correction.
There followed his final testament which amounted to both a confession and also a conflict in his own mind. He seems to have determined to take his own life or, perhaps as he saw it, simply to leave his physical body but what was he to leave? He could destroy all evidence of his fraud and leave the falsified log, which he is assumed to have kept throughout the voyage. In all probability his story, at least publicly, would have been accepted; Clare, and more particularly his children, would have had a hero to mourn and remember. But to do this he would have had to destroy his testament, something that had become the very centre of his world; but most important of all, he probably needed to make his atonement and to do this he had to leave what amounted to his confession. His last lines, still annotated with the time were:
11 15 00 It is the end of my
my game the truth
has been revealed and it will
be done as my family requires me
to do it
11 17 00 It is the time for you
move to begin
I have not need to prolong
the game
It has been a good game that
must be ended at the
I will play this game when
I will chose I will resign the
game
11 20 40 there is no reason for harmful
These were the last words he wrote. He only had two and a half minutes before the self-appointed moment of his departure. One can speculate what he did next, but the three logbooks and the navigational plotting sheets, on which he had fabricated his run the previous December, were stacked neatly on the chart table in a place where they would easily be found. There was no sign of the fourth logbook and so, presumably to wipe away his deceit, he either threw it into the calm waters of the ocean or, clutching it, plunged over the side to watch the Teignmouth Electron gently slide away from him at around two-and-a-half knots – a speed which, even if he had had second thoughts, he could never have attained by swimming.
Teignmouth Electron was spotted on 10 July by the lookout on the Royal Mail Vessel Picardy, bound from London to the Caribbean. She was like the Marie Celeste, ghosting along under her mizzen sail, no one on board; the cabin was untidy with a lived-in look, dirty pans in the sink, tools and electronic gear scattered over the work table as if they had only just been put down, and the logs, with their damning testimony, lying waiting on the chart table.
All nine contestants in the Golden Globe race had now been accounted for; only one had finished the voyage. Viewed as a single entity, the expectations, tribulations and interlinking tragedy of their stories has a quality of escalating drama one would expect to find in a classic tragedy; at the same time can be seen elements of a moral fable. Robin Knox-Johnston, the contestant who finished, showed a single-minded determination combined with fine seamanship and a level-headed judgement. He had been pronounced ‘distressingly normal’ on setting out; the verdict was the same on his return. One can assume that the psychiatrist meant that he was extraordinarily well balanced and, at the same time, was adjusted to our own everyday life in an urbanised, consumer society.
Looking at Robin Knox-Johnston’s career as a whole this would certainly seem to be the case. With that spark of adventure that exists in many people, he simply took it to extremes by sailing round the world single-handed, but even this act was carefully thought out, based on his own background as a sailor and his knowledge, both of himself and an awareness of what it might lead to. He had no trouble in adapting to everyday life; in fact he plunged into it, exploiting his success to the full, without letting the ephemeral glory go to his head. He applied his spirit of adventure and initiative to running yacht marinas and at the same time balanced this out with the excitement and satisfaction of sailing, winning the Round Britain yacht race on two occasions and still holding the record of ten days, six hours, twenty-four minutes. He also skippered Heath’s Condor, a big ocean racer, on three of the legs of the Whitbread round-the-world race in 1977–1978. His family life is back on an even keel; he remarried Sue in 1972, and with his daughter Sara, they are a close-knit and very happy family.
As Tomalin and Hall observed in their book, it is doubtful whether anyone would describe Moitessier as ‘distressingly normal’. In sailing on round the world to Tahiti he rejected the behaviour patterns that society expects of its heroes. He did not want to face the razzamattaz of the media’s welcome back to Europe, despised the very business of racing across oceans and, most important of all, did not wish to return to our ferociously competitive society, preferring the peace of a South Sea island.
In some ways the saddest outcome of all was Nigel Tetley’s failure to finish, a failure that was undoubtedly influenced by the apparent competition offered by Donald Crowhurst. He desperately needed to complete and, ideally, win the race; on his return he maintained a very sportsmanlike front but, only two years later, he committed suicide. It is impossible to tell for certain how far this was influenced by what he felt was a failure, a failure which was only relative, since his achievement in nursing his trimaran through the Southern Ocean to complete a circumnavigation of the globe was quite extraordinary. He had shown the same high level of seamanship as that displayed by Knox-Johnston, on a boat that was less suited for the task in hand.
Of the others who withdrew from the race, three tried again, Bill King, in his revolutionary boat, Galway Blazer, with one stop in Australia, and John Ridgway skippering his own boat in the Whitbread round-the-world race, while Chay Blyth actually sailed round the world against the winds of the Roaring Forties from east to west. For them, the experience of the Golden Globe race, however painful at the time, had been a formative one from which they had been able to learn lessons and apply them as part of their lives.
Crowhurst, on the other hand, was engulfed by the experience. Enamoured of a venture that was beyond him, he found himself on an escalator built by the media and other people’s expectations from which he could not escape. He had set out in a boat that was ill-prepared and, in all probability, would have foundered in the Southern Ocean, but while Ridgway and Fougeron, who had found themselves in similar circumstances, had retired with honour, Crowhurst could not bring himself to admit that his dreams of glory were over. Having allowed fantasy to lead him into fraud, when it became inevitable that his deception would be discovered, his mind escaped from reality and he committed suicide.
The way in which the ambitions of a few sailors to out-sail Chichester developed into a formalised race undoubtedly added extra pressures. It also attracted others who might never have set out without the focus given by the race and its associated publicity. There is a temptation to condemn the very concept of a formalised race, as something that sullies the purity of adventure, and yet this is an almost inevitable manifestation of the compulsive competitiveness built into so many people. The sailor or, for that matter, most adventurers, has an ego that requires the approval of others; he also needs money just to launch the venture and one way of getting it is through sponsorship or the media. They, in turn, need a story and look for ways of building one, whether it be a round-the-world race, the first to the top of Everest or the first across one of the polar ice caps. And so the merry-go-round of the big adventure is built.
Some, like Robin Knox-Johnston, can ride it to attain their ambitions. Others, like Crowhurst, are not strong enough, and are destroyed.