Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  ‘I said to myself, “Over she goes!” I was not frightened, but intensely alert and curious. This is the sensation shared, I think, by most people in the actual moment of disaster; I have had the same feeling in a climbing fall, with a flash of curiosity wondering what it will be like when I hit the ground. Most of us feel fear, but this is usually in anticipation of danger rather than at the time of disaster. Then, there is no time for it; there is even an excitement in getting out of the situation. Chichester describes his own response:

  ‘Then a lot of crashing and banging started, and my head and shoulders were being bombarded by crockery and cutlery and bottles. I had an oppressive feeling of the boat being on top of me. I wondered if she would roll over completely and what the damage would be; but she came up quietly the same side that she had gone down. I reached up and put my bunk light on. It worked, giving me a curious feeling of something normal in a world of utter chaos. I have only a confused idea of what I did for the next hour or so. I had an absolutely hopeless feeling when I looked at the pile of jumbled up food and gear all along the cabin. Anything that was in my way when I wanted to move I think I put back in its right place, though feeling as I did so that it was a waste of time as she would probably go over again. The cabin was two foot deep all along with a jumbled-up pile of hundreds of tins, bottles, tools, shackles, blocks, two sextants and oddments. Every settee locker, the whole starboard bunk, and the three starboard drop lockers had all emptied out when she was upside down. Water was swishing about on the cabin sole beside the chart table, but not much. I looked into the bilge which is five feet deep, but it was not quite full, for which I thought, “Thank God”.’

  I am sure Chichester’s approach to the shambles to which his boat had been reduced and the danger of another capsize, was as matter-of-fact as his description. On deck, most important of all, he found that his mast was still standing with the rigging undamaged, mainly because he had taken down all the sails before turning in that night. A monohull boat, when rolled over by waves or wind, will always right itself because of the weight of ballast and that of the keel; the real danger, though, is that the mast might break, particularly if there is any sail set. There is also the danger that the dog house, coach roof or hatches might be smashed, laying the boat open to the waves. Fortunately, in Chichester’s case, there was no damage and his only loss was one of the genoa sails and some lengths of rope he had failed to tie down the night before.

  The wind was still howling through the rigging, the seas mountainous, but he was desperately tired and realised he needed to conserve his energies. He decided, therefore, ‘To Hell with everything’, went down below, cleared the mess of cutlery, plates and bottles from his bunk, snuggled down into the soaking wet bedding, fully dressed in his oilskins, and fell into a deep sleep, not waking until it was broad daylight.

  When he awoke the wind was still gusting at between forty and fifty-five knots but he set to, first checking the boat for serious structural damage and then starting the appalling task of clearing up the mess. Although only two days out, it never occurred to him to return to Sydney or call in at a New Zealand port. Damage to the boat was superficial and, remarkably, the self-steering gear had survived the capsize, though the socket for the vane shaft was very nearly off. He fixed this, however, without too much trouble and sailed on, north of New Zealand, heading for Cape Horn.

  There were more crises, falls and minor injuries, the constant wear and tear to his own sixty-five-year-old frame and that of his boat. There were more storms, but none as dangerous as that of the Tasman Sea and when, at last, he reached the Horn – the most notorious place for storms anywhere in the world – it was almost an anticlimax. The seas were big and the wind strong, but they were nothing to some of the seas that Chichester had had to face It was also positively crowded compared to the Southern Ocean. The Royal Naval Ice Patrol ship HMS Protector had come there to greet him, a tiny Piper Apache chartered by the Sunday Times and BBC flew from Tierra del Fuego to film him from the air as his boat, under the storm jib, raced through the white-capped seas of the Horn. In some ways it was a natural focal point of the voyage, a kind of oceanic summit but, like reaching the summit of a mountain, the adventure was by no means over; having got up, you have got to get back down again. In Chichester’s case he had a long haul, a good 9,000 miles. There were more storms, more wear and tear, but he was now heading into kinder climes.

  Yet he never stopped competing with himself, never ceased trying to get the very best out of his boat, making runs of up to 188 miles a day, driven on by the winds of the North-East Trades, doing 1,215 miles a week. These were records for single-handed sailing, something of which he was intensely aware.

  And then, at last, towards the end of May he entered the English Channel and came in to a welcome that is certainly unique in post-war adventure – even greater, perhaps, than that for John Hunt and his party after Everest. It had been announced on his arrival at Sydney that Chichester would receive a knighthood. This honour no more than reflected the huge popular acclaim he had already achieved. He was met by a fleet of boats outside Plymouth; a quarter of a million people watched him sail into the harbour and many millions more saw his arrival on television.

  One man who was not there was Donald Crowhurst, a businessman and amateur sailor who had followed Chichester’s voyage avidly, had been inspired, as had others, to wonder if he could perhaps cap this achievement by sailing single-handed non-stop round the world. That day Crowhurst chose to go off sailing with a friend in the Bristol Channel. They listened to the commentary of Chichester’s arrival on the yacht radio and, perhaps out of envy, chose to belittle and joke about the adulation Chichester was receiving. But the yachting world joined the vast majority of the British public in recognising not just Chichester’s achievement but the enormous stature of the man himself. The whole voyage of 29,630 miles had taken just nine months and one day, from Plymouth to Plymouth, of which the sailing time was 226 days.

  Chichester was an innovator, one of the greatest ever in the adventure field. It is in no way belittling to the achievements of Ed Hillary and Tenzing to say they achieved what they did on Everest as part of a team, using traditional methods and following practically all the way in the steps of the Swiss team that so nearly reached the summit in 1952 (indeed, it was the Swiss team that broke some of the greatest physical and psychological barriers).

  Chichester, on the other hand, brought a completely new concept to small boat sailing, both in terms of distance and speed; he set his own rules, conceived his own challenges and had done so throughout his life, from the days he set up flying records in the ’thirties until this, his crowning glory. His achievement in going round the world on his own with only one stop, faster than any small boat had done so previously, would have been an extraordinary feat for a man of any age; the fact that he was sixty-five made it all the more incredible and certainly increased its public appeal still further.

  Chichester undoubtedly enjoyed both the acclaim and the money he was able to make by exploiting his achievement. Several of his friends have mentioned, sometimes wryly, that he was a good self-publicist. Perhaps he was, but I am quite sure that the real drive that spurred him on was not the need to make a name for himself. In Chichester the most important motive seems to have been his intense competitiveness, combined with an adventurous curiosity that was undoubtedly technically orientated. He was not in the least bit interested in the direct physical effort required to climb a mountain or row the Atlantic; he enjoyed working through machines that were still sufficiently simple to have a close and direct contact with the elements, firstly in the open cockpit of the Gipsy Moth and then behind the helm of his yachts.

  The competitiveness and curiosity never left him; having circumnavigated the globe he sought other challenges that he, an ageing but indomitable and realistic man, felt he could meet. Once again he created the competition, wrote his own rules and then tried like hell to win. He had a new boat built, Gipsy Moth
V, which was even bigger than Gipsy Moth IV and very much easier to sail. He set himself the challenge of sailing 4,000 miles in twenty days, to average 200 miles a day – this in his seventieth year. He didn’t quite make it, taking twenty-two and three-tenths days for the run. On the way back across the Atlantic he was hit by a storm as ferocious as any he had encountered in the Southern Ocean; his boat capsized but recovered, and he was able to sail her back to port.

  But by now his health was beginning to fail; he was a sick man but, still refusing to give up, he entered for the 1972 trans-Atlantic single-handed race. His agent, George Greenfield, described how at the start he was so weak he could barely climb down a ten-foot ladder from the wharf to his boat. He set sail all the same, in considerable pain, heavily dosed with pain-killing drugs. A short way out into the Atlantic he was involved in a collision with a French weather ship that had come too close. It is not clear what their intentions had been, whether to give him help or whether just out of curiosity, but the collision broke Gipsy Moth’s mast and damaged the hull. There was no question of being able to continue the race. His son, Giles, and friend and editor of many of his books, John Anderson, were flown out by Royal Naval helicopter to help him and Giles, with a Royal Naval crew, sailed the boat back to Plymouth.

  Chichester went straight into hospital and died shortly afterwards from cancer. His prayer – at least in part – had been answered: ‘From death before we are ready to die, good Lord deliver us.’

  Few people can have led such a full life.

  – Chapter 3 –

  Golden Globe

  The contest to be the first non-stop round the world single-handed

  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.