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-justi
fication 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 T
omalin 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.
Quest for Adventure Page 11
