Instant Globe-Circling: Just Add Water

ON MARCH 17, 1968, IN LONDON, ENGLAND a great banner headline appeared in the London Sunday Times newspaper.

It announced the creation of a solo, nonstop, round-the-world London Sunday Times Golden Globe Yacht Race—the first race of its kind, and the longest, most challenging competition in the history of yachting.

No one had ever sailed single-handedly around the world without stopping at least once. The sailor who could do so in the fastest time would receive a prize of 50,000 pounds (about $100,000)!

The race was unusual in several respects. First, since it involved circling the world, contestants didn’t all have to start and finish together at a single location. Anyone could enter the race from anywhere in the world—so long as they finished back where they’d started. Second, contestants could start their race anytime between June 1, 1968 and October 31, 1968. Everyone would have to keep an accurate daily logbook and be willing to have it examined by the judges at the end of the race. The winner would be determined after the final contestant had landed back in his home port.

Not surprisingly, the race attracted many of the world’s most famous sailors. There was Bill Leslie King, a British ex-naval submarine commander who had won many prizes with his yacht Galway Blazer II. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, known worldwide for the speed of his ketch Suhaili. There was Bernard Moitessier, the legendary French yachtsman who held the current record for the longest nonstop solo sailing voyage in his yacht The Joshua.

Other veteran stars of the yachting world included British naval commander Nigel Tetley, Australian dentist Bill Howell, the British adventurers John Ridgway and Chay Blyth (who had rowed across the Atlantic Ocean together two years earlier), the Italian yachting champion Alex Carozzo, and the award-winning French yachtsman Loick Fougeron.

And then there was a mysterious contestant who was completely unknown to the yachting world. He hadn’t set any records, or won any sailing trophies or prizes. All that the newspapers were able to report about this man was that his name was Donald Crowhurst, his home port was Teignmouth, England, and the name of his boat was the Teignmouth Electron.

The press called him the “dark horse” entrant.

Donald Crowhurst was an electronics engineer who had entered the London Sunday Times Golden Globe Yacht Race completely on impulse.

That didn’t surprise anyone who knew Crowhurst. He was a very impulsive sort of man. Impulsive—and reckless. He was notorious for careening around his home county of Devon like a demented race-car driver. He’d smashed up three cars by the time he turned 26.

He’d even been kicked out of the Royal Air Force for roaring straight through a barracks full of sleeping men on his motorcycle, drunk as a skunk.

Yet he was very smart, and could be enormously charming. He could make you feel as if you were the most important person in the world. He was generous and funny and a lot of fun to be around. As a result, he had a lot of friends.

But even his friends rolled their eyes when they heard that Crowhurst had entered the Sunday Times yacht race. What on earth could he have been thinking? Crowhurst barely knew how to sail—he was a novice sailor at best. And what was all this about a boat called the Teignmouth Electron? Crowhurst didn’t even own a boat.

“That’s true, but I’m going to build one,” Crowhurst grinned. “And when I do, that’s what it’s going to be called.”

That’s when his friends began questioning his sanity in all seriousness. To build an ordinary weekend sailboat from scratch in a mere six months—the time remaining until the October 31 deadline—might be a possibility, but to design, build, launch, test, tune up, and properly provision a boat for a race as grueling as the Golden Globe would take at least a year, even under the best of circumstances. It would also cost at least 50,000 pounds.

And Donald Crowhurst was broke.

This wasn’t because he was lazy or didn’t know how to handle money. Three years earlier he’d founded his own electronics factory, Electron Utilization, which at its height had employed 12 assemblers and been a considerable success. But Crowhurst got bored easily, and he’d gotten tired of running a business. Soon the plant was down to half a dozen assemblers; most recently only a single assembler working part-time.

His main financial backer, Stanley Best, had become alarmed and suspicious about where all his money had gone. He’d demanded a look at the books—and while he hadn’t found anything dishonest, it had become clear that most of his investment had been lost.

So Stanley Best was probably the least likely human being on Earth to lend Donald Crowhurst any more money—but Crowhurst called him anyway.

Best couldn’t believe his ears. “You want money for what?” he demanded.

Crowhurst explained that he was desperate. He’d tried getting people to lend him their boat, and he’d tried getting shipyards to sponsor him, but he hadn’t had any luck and he was running out of time. Was there any possible way at all that Best could spare him 50,000 pounds?

Best’s initial reply was probably unprintable, but Crowhurst could be very persuasive. Somehow, after a series of urgent, pleading phone calls and meetings that went on over several days, Best finally agreed to put up 30,000 pounds to have a bare-bones version of the Teignmouth Electron built.

When Crowhurst’s friends heard about this amazing development, they rallied around. If Donald could pull off this kind of miracle, he could pull off anything. Everyone pitched in and the project began to shape up. To save money and time, Crowhurst designed much of the boat himself, and hired two shipyards to build different parts of it simultaneously.

The boat Crowhurst designed was a 12.5-meter (41-foot) trimaran—a boat with three hulls, a main one in the middle and a smaller one on each side like outrigger floats. The great advantage of trimarans is that they are very fast and stable with a wind at their backs. Their weakness is that when the wind blows from the sides, they become sluggish and hard to keep on course.

Even with everyone helping, the work progressed at a frustratingly slow pace. Crowhurst worked like a maniac, 20 hours a day, negotiating, suggesting, fixing, and inventing, but he also argued with everyone, driving his helpers crazy. He haggled about the boat’s design, its materials, how to fit everything together, what systems to install. For every problem he encountered, his fevered brain always seemed to come up with three half-baked solutions instead of a single workable one.

And then there were the usual bungles—hatch covers that didn’t fit, equipment that didn’t work, sails that were the wrong shape or size, and motors that were miswired. On a normal boat-building project you didn’t worry about those things because there was time to find them, fix them, and test them. But Crowhurst and his friends didn’t have the time. Some things got fixed, but some didn’t. Crowhurst tried to keep a list, but he kept losing it.

On its shakedown cruise five months later—when the hastily assembled Teignmouth Electron was tested for the first time in seagoing conditions—so many things went wrong that she almost sank twice, and the trip took two weeks instead of the planned three days!

So it definitely seemed a miracle when, on October 31, 1968, at 4:52 p.m., only seven hours before the final cutoff, the Teignmouth Electron staggered out of Teignmouth harbor to enter the London Sunday Times Golden Globe Yacht Race—with her paint barely dry, her cabin still littered with uninstalled nautical equipment, and a stack of unpaid bills fluttering in her wake.

Not surprisingly, her start was not great. On November 2, Crowhurst radioed a Morse Code message (which was the way sailors communicated in those days) to Rodney Hallworth, his press agent for the race, that the Teignmouth Electron’s self-steering gear was falling apart and that one of her outrigger floats was filling with water. SPENDING MUCH TIME FIXING LEAKS, REPAIRING EQUIPMENT AND BAILING, he reported. HEADWINDS KEEPING PROGRESS DOWN TO 75 MILES PER DAY.

On November 5, Crowhurst radioed again. GENERATOR FAILED. USING BATTERIES, RUNNING LOW. Then nothing. No radio transmissions for almost two weeks.

When Crowhurst began transmitting again, on November 16, he announced that he had managed to fix his generator, but that crosswinds were slowing him down. He reported his position as just off the coast of Portugal, heading for the island of Madeira.

He was now managing less than 50 nautical miles per day—the slowest sailing speed of any of the race contestants. His progress was so poor that the betting shops in England didn’t even bother calculating the odds for Donald Crowhurst.

Finally, a month after setting sail, the Teignmouth Electron began to pick up speed.

So far, Crowhurst had been bucking westerlies—winds that blew from the side, to which trimarans don’t respond well. Now he had finally sailed far enough into the Atlantic Ocean to catch the northeast trade winds—winds that blew from behind.

The effect was immediate. The Teignmouth Electron surged ahead and began to make rapid progress. On December 10 Crowhurst radioed that he had just finished a week of 145 to 174 sea miles per day—including one 24-hour period in which he’d managed a whopping 243 nautical miles. TUNING TRIALS OVER! he radioed cheerfully. RACE BEGINS!

He was now halfway between Africa and South America in the mid-Atlantic, with a thousand-mile sail straight down to the tip of Africa ahead of him, and the wind at his back all the way. This was where trimarans really shone. AVERAGING 170 MILES DAILY, he radioed on December 14. APPROACHING TRISTAN DA CUNHA ISLAND, he reported on December 20. On Christmas Eve, in a radio message forwarded by an operator in South Africa, he reported he was already rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

Suddenly the betting shops in England sat up and began to take notice. What was happening here? The Teignmouth Electron was beginning to move like a racehorse!

Rodney Hallworth and the rest of Crowhurst’s friends in Teignmouth couldn’t believe their luck. They’d been so bogged down in gloom, convinced their boat was a total loser, that it had taken them some time to realize what was happening. They became even more amazed when it was announced that Crowhurst’s 243 nautical miles in a 24-hour period might just possibly be a world record!

“Donald Crowhurst, last man out in the Sunday Times round-the-world yacht race, covered a breathtaking and possibly record-breaking 243 miles in his 41-foot trimaran Teignmouth Electron last Sunday,” the Sunday Times reported. “The achievement is even more remarkable considering the very poor speeds in the first three weeks of his voyage. He took longer to reach the Cape Verdes than any other competitor...”

Another factor that significantly improved the Teignmouth Electron’s position in the race was a string of unbelievably bad luck that had dogged many of the other contestants during the previous weeks.

Ridgway, Blyth, and Howell had all been forced to drop out with mechanical problems. Bill King’s Galway Blazer II had lost its mast in a south Atlantic storm and was being towed back to Cape Town. Alex Carozzo had developed a stomach ulcer and had given up. Loick Fougeron had capsized in the Roaring Forties—the stormy region between 40 and 50 degrees of latitude south—and had quit the race. Robin Knox-Johnston had capsized in the Tasman Sea but had managed to right his boat and was carrying on—however, a lot of his gear had been smashed and his sails were in tatters. Only Nigel Tetley and Bernard Moitessier were still in good shape and sailing steadily, though neither was managing to match Crowhurst’s speed.

KNOX-JOHNSTON LEADS, Hallworth radioed Crowhurst excitedly. MOITESSIER BEYOND TASMANIA. TETLEY EASTERN INDIAN OCEAN. YOUR AVERAGE SPEED 30 MILES FASTER. PLEASE GIVE WEEKLY POSITION AND MILEAGE. CHEERS, RODNEY.

Crowhurst agreed, and sent at least four more reports. Each time, his odds in the race improved.

Then, on January 20, 1969, he reported more generator trouble. His last transmission was on January 21.

For the next three weeks, Hallworth kept sending radio queries to the Teignmouth Electron but received no reply. He complained to Crowhurst’s wife Clare that he was just getting dead air. Was she getting anything on her radio?

Nobody was—but at first no one got too worried about it. Crowhurst’s generator had caused problems right from the start, and so far he’d always managed to fix it. But after another three weeks of dead air, everyone started wondering. By now, barring any signficant problems, Crowhurst should have been somewhere in the Tasman Sea, sailing east between Australia and New Zealand, but no naval traffic was reporting him there.

There was also no sign of Knox-Johnston, who had been out of radio contact even longer, but who had occasionally been sighted by a passing freighter or airplane. Now no one had reported seeing him for several weeks, and people were beginning to fear that he might be out of the race, or even drowned.

Bernard Moitessier was still cruising right along—but then, on April 2, to everyone’s utter astonishment, the London Sunday Times received a letter from him, mailed from Tahiti, explaining that he’d had such a great time sailing through the South Pacific that he’d decided life was too short to spend it racing around the globe. He was dropping out of the race to spend some quality time among the South Pacific islands!

That left only Nigel Tetley, who had rounded Cape Horn on March 20 and was now heading north in a beeline for home.

Two weeks later, on April 6, a tanker spotted Robin Knox-Johnston in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His boat was a mess and his speed was very slow—but he was still sailing valiantly.

Only Crowhurst remained unaccounted for. His odds in the betting shops of England dropped lower and lower.

But then, on April 9, over 10 weeks since his last radio message, a very faint signal from the Teignmouth Electron was relayed to England via a radio station in Argentina. It read: HEADING DIGGER RAMREZ.

This news brought everybody right back to the edge of their seats!

Digger Ramrez was sailor talk for Diego Ramírez, a small island just southwest of Cape Horn. If Crowhurst was closing in on Diego Ramirez, it meant he had already sailed all the way around the bottom of the world—through the South Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Tasman Sea, and the South Pacific Ocean—and was now coming around the bottom of South America on the last leg of his return journey.

Not only that, but it also meant he’d been belting along at a very high speed—about 178 nautical miles per day. If he could keep that up, he might well beat the current leader, Nigel Tetley, and actually win the race.

Crowhurst’s home team in Teignmouth leaped off their seats and started screaming. This was incredible! One minute their man was dead last, then he was setting world records, then he disappeared completely, and now he was chasing the leader—how was this going to end?

YOU’RE ONLY TWO WEEKS BEHIND TETLEY! Hallworth radioed Crowhurst. PHOTO FINISH WILL MAKE GREAT NEWS! RODNEY.

On April 18 Crowhurst radioed confirmation that he’d rounded Cape Horn and was passing the Falkland Islands east of Argentina.

The news sent Nigel Tetley’s support team into a near panic. For the past several weeks their man had looked like the clear winner, and now, at the last moment, there seemed to be a chance that victory could be snatched away from him. His boat—a trimaran very similar to Crowhurst’s—was suffering from similar problems: leaking floats, peeling fiberglas, damaged running gear. He’d been babying it along, trying not to sail too aggressively, hoping he could keep it all in one piece during the final month’s sailing.

But when they did the math, the Tetley team could see that at his current rate of speed, Tetley wouldn’t make it. He was simply not sailing fast enough. If he couldn’t do better than 140 nautical miles per day, Donald Crowhurst would win the race.

Tetley decided to go for broke. He began to sail as hard as he possibly could. He strained his equipment to the utmost, desperately squeezing another 20 nautical miles per day out of his boat. At 20 additional miles, his calculations showed, he might be able to win the race by a hair.

Meanwhile, Crowhurst was having his troubles too. SIX BROKEN FRAMES, he radioed on May 12. TWO FOOT SPLIT STARBOARD FLOAT TOPSIDES.

After a week of speeds reaching up to 200 miles per day, Crowhurst reported unhappily: FOUR DAYS LOST, UNUSUAL NORTHEASTERLY GALE. OVERTAKE TETLEY ONLY BY LUCK NOW.

But by the third week of May, with Tetley approaching the Canary Islands and Crowhurst just off Brazil, the gamblers in England were putting their money on Crowhurst.

In Teignmouth, the excitement was really starting to heat up. Hallworth booked Teignmouth’s largest meeting hall and was preparing the biggest, noisiest celebration in the town’s history. Win or lose, Crowhurst had already achieved amazing success. He, a weekend sailor, a novice, a beginner, had already beaten eight of the world’s top-ranked sailors—the cream of the yachting world! TEIGNMOUTH AGOG AT YOUR WONDERS! Hallworth radioed Crowhurst. WHOLE TOWN PLANNING HUGE WELCOME. RODNEY.

And then, just after midnight on May 21, it happened.

Sailing frantically through a storm near the Azores Islands, with too much sail laid on, one of Nigel Tetley’s already cracked floats finally broke away and smashed into his boat’s center hull.

The resulting hole was so big that Tetley couldn’t plug it. As the water poured in, he had just enough time to radio an SOS giving his position, launch his liferaft, and row clear.

His boat sank in minutes.

He was rescued the next day by a British naval vessel.

Hearing the report, the world’s news media went berserk.

What a story this would be! A complete unknown takes to the high seas in an unfinished boat, challenging the world’s most famous and experienced sailors in a global yacht race, and six months and 26,000 nautical miles later, cleans their clocks!

Now all Donald Crowhurst had to do was loaf the last 4,000 miles to his home port of Teignmouth, collect his prize, and spend the rest of his days awash in fame and fortune.

MORE THAN A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE EXPECTED TO GIVE YOU A HERO’S WELCOME WHEN YOU ARRIVE! Hallworth radioed Crowhurst. He was planning at least a week’s worth of feasts, celebrations, and other public events. There would be an international tour, interviews with the world’s top journalists, and lots of commercial endorsements. Hallworth’s phone was already ringing off the hook.

Oddly enough, Crowhurst didn’t seem all that thrilled about his luck. He seemed a lot more preoccupied with all the mechanical and electrical problems he was having. Like Tetley’s, his floats had been taking on more and more water, and since somebody had forgotten to install the suction hoses on his bailing pumps, he had to do all the bailing by hand. His steering gear was giving him endless trouble, and his radio transmitter kept cutting out. He suspected that sooner or later it would cut out completely.

His suspicion proved to be true. After June 1, Hallworth received no more radio messages from the Teignmouth Electron.

Fortunately, this time the world didn’t lose sight of Donald Crowhurst. He had meanwhile crossed the equator and was now sailing in the more crowded shipping lanes of the North Atlantic Ocean. Various freighters and ocean liners reported seeing the Teignmouth Electron as she moved steadily northward.

Piecing together the various reports, the race judges in London began to notice a strange thing.

The Teignmouth Electron seemed to be sailing slower and slower. Some days she was barely covering 20 nautical miles. In fact, Crowhurst wasn’t even using his mainsail anymore—just his much smaller jibsail.

Then Crowhurst entered the Sargasso Sea, and that’s when the Teignmouth Electron really began to slow down. The Sargasso Sea is a strange phenomenon—a huge, eerily heaving expanse of floating seaweed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also known for its calm weather—sailboats often have trouble getting enough wind to pass through all those weeds.

Now Crowhurst was barely making 5 miles per day.

Hallworth and his crew weren’t paying much attention to Crowhurst’s affairs at sea because they had their hands full handling his affairs on land. So many offers and requests were now pouring in that Hallworth had to rent a second office, hire a secretary, and put in another phone line. Officials at Buckingham Palace called on behalf of the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, asking whether Crowhurst would be willing to present the annual Duke of Edinburgh Awards next year. The post office called, offering to produce a special Crowhurst stamp. Hallworth had already printed 10,000 postcards featuring a photograph of “Donald Crowhurst, winner of the London Sunday Times Golden Globe Yacht Race,” and was sending them all over the world on behalf of the Teignmouth Chamber of Commerce. The cards read: GREETINGS FROM TEIGNMOUTH, THE DEVON RESORT CHOSEN BY DONALD CROWHURST FOR HIS TRIUMPHANT AROUND-THE-WORLD YACHT RACE!

And then, on the evening of July 10, two policemen arrived at the Crowhurst residence to bring Clare disastrous news. Early that morning the Royal Mail vessel Picardy, en route from London to the Caribbean, had almost hit a trimaran floating aimlessly in the Sargasso Sea.

It was the Teignmouth Electron—the crew had recognized her from all the publicity. She was still seaworthy, there was plenty of food in her galley, and her liferaft was still onboard—but Donald Crowhurst had disappeared.

After days of futile searching by both the British and the American navies, attention turned to the Teignmouth Electron’s logbook.

That’s when the answer began to emerge.

They found not one logbook, but three.

Logbook #1 recorded a journey that went all around the world. Logbook #2 recorded a journey that was centered mainly in the South Atlantic Ocean. Logbook #3 was more of a notebook, containing freighters’ radio reports of sea and weather conditions all along the route described in Logbook #1.

It didn’t take the judges long to figure out what had happened.

Donald Crowhurst had never sailed the Teignmouth Electron around the world. He had merely sailed into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, then sailed in circles while only reporting a journey around the world—by radio.

Logbook #2 made it clear how this had happened. Crowhurst hadn’t originally intended to fake his journey, but by December 1, 1968, it had become obvious that the Teignmouth Electron was in no shape to sail the much rougher waters of the Indian Ocean and the Tasman Sea. Her hulls were leaking so badly, she was taking on massive amounts of seawater every day. Her wiring was a mess and her navigational equipment a disaster. One good storm would have sunk her. Indeed, during his six months at sea, Crowhurst had at one point been forced to land on the coast of Argentina to make emergency repairs.

That’s when the idea of a “virtual journey” had occurred to him. It was the days before satellites, before radio operators could pinpoint exactly where a radio message had come from. All Crowhurst had to do was report faked positions along his round-the-world route, listen to marine weather reports from those locations, and incorporate those reports into a fake logbook. Result: a logbook that would look accurate and believable when checked against the official records of weather and sea conditions around the world from December 1, 1968 to mid-May, 1969.

Having believable entries was important, because Crowhurst suspected that his high sailing speed of 170 to 200 nautical miles per day, after his miserable 50 miles per day at the beginning, would make the judges suspicious. He was right: one of the judges had already sent a letter to the race chairman, urging him to make sure Crowhurst’s logbook was carefully verified.

But as the race neared its end and Crowhurst found himself neck-and-neck with one of the most experienced yachtsmen in the world, he became less and less certain that his logbook would fool navigational experts.

So he hatched an ingenious back-up scheme. He wouldn’t try winning the race. He’d arrange to come in second!

This would solve two problems with one stroke. Coming in second against one of the greatest sailors in the world was no shame. In fact, Crowhurst would still look like a hero. But a second-place finisher’s logbook would probably not be examined very carefully. And that’s what Crowhurst wanted.

Which was why, when Nigel Tetley’s trimaran sank in a storm near the Azores, Crowhurst wasn’t overjoyed—he was devastated.

As the winner, he would be unable to avoid the kind of scrutiny he feared—and its inevitable results. Shame. Dishonor. Humiliation. Disgrace.

As he neared the end of his journey, he sailed more and more slowly, frantically turning the problem over in his mind. What to do? What to do? How could he escape this looming disaster?

Finally, at 10:03 on the morning of July 1, in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, he felt ready to answer that question.

“I will resign the game at 11:20 today,” he wrote in his notebook.

Those were his last words.

At 11:20 a.m. on July 1, 1969, the race judges concluded, Crowhurst stepped off the deck of the Teignmouth Electron and drowned.