Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  No, pressing on solo, steering himself to Sydney was not any option. Then he felt something strange, a sense of relief, as if the failure had lanced some sort of boil, proving to the world that he had been right about Gipsy Moth IV’s fallibility all along: ‘If I had had a normal boat I could have trimmed her up to sail herself, but experience so far had convinced me that Gipsy Moth IV could never be balanced to sail herself for more than a few minutes’. He looked up and around at the raging sea and 40-knot winds. ‘The self-steering gear could not be repaired on board – I was well and truly in trouble. I went below and stood myself a brandy, hot’.

  He knew the answer to his next question before he opened the chart: Fremantle in Western Australia had to be the new destination. That was still 1,160 miles, or three weeks’ steering solo. He pointed slightly to north and shaped a new course to Freemantle. This was also where Sheila, on board the liner Oriana, was heading as Oriana’s first port of call before cruising round to Melbourne and Sydney. That thought, an earlier rendezvous with Sheila, at least gave him some comfort.

  The next few days were unpleasant and frustrating as Francis steered when he could and tried various methods of having Gipsy Moth IV self-steer when he couldn’t. Then on the fourth night to Freemantle, something revelatory happened.

  It was a stinking night, and I was called out several times to find the boat headed west instead of east, with all the sails aback [filled from the wrong direction]. On one of these occasions I lay drowsy in my berth, reluctant to get up again, and I noticed that although the sails were aback, the boat was forging ahead slowly and a most important fact – she kept a much steadier course than when she was sailing in the right direction with the sails all drawing. At the time I took these facts in without really being aware of them. They imprinted themselves; as it were, on my subconscious self.

  Francis had accidently discovered a new point of sail, which we might call ‘heaving-to plus’. Regular heaving-to is a much loved practice of short-handed sailors and works like this: if you turn the yacht through the wind without touching the sails, the jib will fill with wind from the other direction, while the mainsail will remain full of wind, albeit from a different direction.

  The great advantage of this tactic is that it slows the boat right down, while maintaining control and stability; it buys resting or thinking time in complete safety. As an added piece of finesse, if the skipper heaves-to with the wind from the starboard, so on starboard tack, he or she also has the right of way, so brewing that cup of tea or heating up that old curry below becomes even more restful.

  After a great deal of experimenting on a bucking deck on a semi-directionless yacht in winds of 40-plus knots and lashed by Southern Ocean spume, Francis found this ‘heaving-to plus’. Off the front of the main mast are four wires on which to hang the sails, arranged in two pairs of two. On the one nearest the bow he hung the largest genoa and flew it fully for maximum pull and speed. Left alone, that would soon have turned him off the wind, then through the wind from behind, lots of banging and slapping ropes, then off the other side, then back again and so on. To counter this he rigged his smallest sail, a storm jib, to back into the wind by fixing the end on the other side, the windward side.

  He now needed to find a way of using this system to steer him more or less precisely in the right direction instead of just generally more or less in the right direction. This is the clever part. Kneeling on the slippery, crashing deck, battered by the ocean and with the boat only vaguely under control, he rigged a combination of pulleys from the end of the jib back to the tiller.

  Francis wrote with a sense of eureka:

  After a lot of trial and error, the result was as follows: When the yacht was on course, the sail was aback, and wind pressing on it pulled the tiller sufficiently to windward to counteract the tendency of the boat to turn up into wind. If the boat did begin turning off course into wind, the pressure on the sail increased, with the result that the pull on the tiller increased, making the boat turn off the wind again. If, on the other hand, the boat started turning downwind, this steering sail would presently gybe, as it were, and the wind would press on it from the other side, thereby exerting a pull on the tiller in the other direction to leeward, with the result that the boat turned towards the wind again.

  Having won the day, his thoughts now turned to the next day, when Sheila was due to land in Freemantle. He needed to contact Oriana, which must be only a few hundred miles ahead of him, to get a message to her to wait for him in Freemantle rather than carry on to Sydney as planned. He fired up the Marconi wireless and made a contact of sorts: the liner’s radio operator seemed to be able to hear him better than he could hear Oriana. He kept on repeating: ‘I am on my way to Freemantle. I am putting into Freemantle’. The contact was too bad to explain why. Ever thoughtful – uniquely thoughtful – where Sheila was concerned, he logged: ‘Poor Sheila, she will wonder what is happening’.

  On board Oriana, as they neared Australia, Sheila was given the freedom of the bridge. Meanwhile, the crew and the passengers became absorbed in Francis’s passage. Night after night the radio operator tried reaching Gipsy Moth IV but without success. Then, on 19 November, success. Sheila recalls just about hearing Francis’s voice through 1,000 miles of the atmospherics and crackles: ‘I’m going to Freemantle. I’m going to Freemantle’. She registered her disappointment; she hated changing her plans. ‘Don’t tell anyone on the ship about this’, she told the radio operator. ‘Things may change.’

  Whether by Francis’s ingenuity or Sheila’s astral will-power, change they did. Those 24 hours around calling Sheila he had made 81 miles towards Freemantle. Not too bad. With every hour he finessed in his improvised self-steering system. The next day he made 105 miles. The following day he decided he could make Sydney after all, record or no record. And it would be no record; that much he now knew.

  Now his concern was reversing the message to Sheila: don’t get off in Freemantle, stay on to Sydney. Night after night he tried to get through. Frustratingly, there was no way of knowing if he had or not: the fact that his tiny receiver couldn’t hear Oriana didn’t mean that she couldn’t hear him. Later Sheila told him that one of the messages had got through; she awoke to find a slip of paper from the radio operator under her cabin door – ‘It’s all right. He is going on’.

  Up on deck Francis was joyful in adversity. His ingenuity had conquered the impossible; not only that but Gipsy Moth IV was cracking on famously:

  I felt happier than I had been at any time previously during the voyage. I had been waiting for the self-steering gear to fail, and apprehensive all the time that I should be helplessly stuck with a badly balanced boat. That I had been able to rig up gear to make her sail herself was deeply satisfying. I hate turning back; I hate giving up; and I hate being diverted from my course; it was a seaman’s job to get over difficulties.

  With good reason he felt he had proved himself to be the consummate seaman. I must say that as an observer I feel he had reached some other level too. For me Francis had always been primarily an otherworldly navigator and a tough-as-old-boots, hang-on-and-hope-for-the-best type of seaman. But it cannot be gainsaid that his seamanship in the final 2,800 miles to Sydney was quite exceptional.

  He reached Sydney in 105 days and 20 hours: not a record but a wonderful circumstantial achievement, in which he took pride. In the first launch to meet him were a troop of journalists and photographers; wanting an ever-closer close-up, its bow hit Gipsy Moth IV’s stern and bounced off. Francis, who was about to hate the media even more than he did already, shouted ‘Fuck off!’ The reports next day had toned this down to ‘Wander off!’ and ‘You bloody Sunday driver!’ In the second launch was his first son, George, who by now had lived in Australia for twenty years, with his wife, Gay. In the third launch were Sheila and Giles; they scrambled aboard and Gipsy Moth IV was towed in to her haul-out berth at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. An hour later, in their Billiards Room, Francis held a chaotic press con
ference with ninety-five media outlets hurling questions at him. It was at that time the largest press conference ever held in Australia.

  He started hesitantly: he had, after all, spoken to no one directly for over three months and was now speaking to all the world at once. But the film shows him warming to it as he himself warmed up. By the end he was giving as good as he got:

  ‘When were your spirits at their lowest ebb?’

  ‘When the gin gave out.’

  Press conference just after three months alone

  The Billiards Room now has a deluxe series of showers and changing rooms, and the berth where Gipsy Moth IV was hauled out has been pontooned and given the latest in haulout technology. Apart from that, the Squadron clubhouse and grounds remain recognisable, except for the entrance lobby, which has been turned into a Chichester shrine.

  Above an oil-on-wood painting by John Alboor of Gipsy Moth IV rounding Cape Horn is her propeller, bronzed and mounted, and above that, in pride of place, the wind-torn burgee from the sister club, the Royal Yacht Squadron. Luckily the club is as welcoming to visiting yachtsmen now as it was then, even if in my case the visiting yachtsman arrives by ferry from no further than downtown.

  Home from home: The Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron clubhouse

  Sheila had checked all the family into the Belvedere Hotel, where Giles and George, twenty years apart in age, met properly for the first time. The three-storey building still stands on the corner of Kent Street and Bathurst Street, thanks to Sydney’s Heritage Protection programme, but it is now a rather seedy Greek-themed pub/restaurant/lounge. George, by now forty years old, was still sickly; in fact, he died a year later. The family decided to divide their energies: Francis would repair his yacht, Sheila would deal with the press, Giles would help Francis, George would help Sheila. George was particularly happy to have found a brother. In a letter to Geoffrey Goodwin he wrote: ‘The most rewarding feature of the visit for myself was meeting Giles, who I find a most level headed and interesting person. Gay and I had dinner with Giles and Sheila at their hotel. Sheila was at her best and although worried by reporters, I think she enjoyed it’. He ended with: ‘It is quite extraordinary how the voyage has caught their interest of people here.’

  The Belvedere Hotel, scene of the knighthood phone call, as it is now

  The Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron had invited Francis to haul out at their own dock and he accepted gratefully. He felt that the best help in the world was to hand in the forms of Warwick Hood and Alan Payne, the designers of the America’s Cup racers Dame Pattie and Gretel respectively. At the time of his visit the club was at the centre of Australia’s 1967 America’s Cup challenge; the challenger, Dame Pattie, had the bad luck to come up against the New York Yacht Club’s defending Intrepid, a breakthrough design by Sparkman & Stephens. She lost and was forever known as ‘Damn Pity’, beautiful though she is. Working for them were the yard manager Jim Perry and his team of shipwrights, who between them would repair and strengthen Gipsy Moth IV’s self-steering gear, staunch the deck leaks – of which Francis had counted twenty-two – as well as right the long list of various wrongs.

  The designers quickly told Francis what he did and didn’t wanted to hear, in equal measure: that Gipsy Moth IV was fundamentally ill designed and unfit for purpose. Their prognosis exactly confirmed his misgivings all along – and worse, because of their knowledge of the Tasman Sea, they pronounced her incapable of righting herself after capsizing. With an element of grim I-told-you-so-it is, he recalled: ‘I told Warwick [Hood] how she had been built specially strong with a view to surviving a capsize and roll over. “Yes”, he said, “but she might not come up again with that shape of hull”. I said nothing’. Meanwhile Francis couldn’t resist firing off a telegram to his UK designer Angus Primrose: ‘I have found a proper designer to design a new keel profile.’ Unimpressed, Primrose shot back: ‘Just get on with it. If you’ve reached Australia you are barely run in’.

  Knowing that he would ignore their pleas for him to abandon the circumnavigation attempt, the shipwrights set about making what improvements they could in the time to hand. Francis’s deadline to leave Sydney was 29 January, in order to round Cape Horn by the end of February or early March, midsummer, its most benign – or least objectionable – month. They added a steel extension to close the gap between the keel and the rudder and simultaneously simplified and strengthened the rigging, the Achilles heel in what they felt was the inevitable capsize. They did their best down below too, centring the weight and beefing up the locker and drawer fastenings to stop the contents flying around the cabin when the inevitable capsize came.

  Dry dock at Sydney

  Meanwhile, Sheila was having a rough time with the media doom-mongers. Two photographs of Francis had sped around the world. The first showed Giles and Francis hugging on their reunion: Francis, who had after all been alone at sea for three months and had hardly scrubbed up for the landing, looked older than his sixty-five years, while the strapping young Giles seemed to tower over him. It was an image of father and son in protective role reversal. The second front-page photograph showed Francis stepping ashore: the overhead camera angle showed him being helped on to the dock by a policeman holding one arm and Giles the other. I must say that he looks very frail indeed. The Old Man of the Sea looks like an old man who had sailed one mile too many.

  Of course Francis being Francis, he didn’t confine his feelings about his yacht to the boatyard and these public thoughts on Gipsy Moth IV’s poor design, and the public photographs of a frail, wraith-like Francis, soon brewed up a storm of naysaying. Distinguished yachtsmen wrote to the main sponsoring newspapers, The Sunday Times and the Guardian, urging him to discontinue. Yachting correspondents the world over weighed in too, pointing out that he was too old and too frail and Gipsy Moth IV too unseaworthy to attempt rounding Cape Horn. One of them, from the (Australian) Sun, received an earful from Sheila for his troubles. He had suggested that ‘with such a monstrously small yacht’ Francis Chichester ‘was asking a little too much of God’. ‘You don’t ask anything of God’, Sheila shot back; ‘that is not prayer. You offer up the person you pray for, you hold them with your own strength and love.’ No more peeps from the chastened Sun after that.

  Of course every naysay only made Francis dig deeper into his determination. The higher the odds against him, the more he thrived; the shriller the perceived wisdom advised him, the more he delighted in proving them wrong. Slightly more worrying was a telegram from cousin Tony Dulverton saying that on no account must he continue. Tony was, after all, the actual owner of the boat, Francis the peppercorn rent tenant. Francis telegraphed back advising him to ignore the newspaper reports, thanking Tony for giving him the chance to pull out if he wanted to without losing face. He ended the telegram: ‘Anyway I am sailing’. Tony knew better than to reply to that one.

  Meanwhile, back at the Belvedere Hotel, Sheila was doing her best to ward off the press:

  There was a general atmosphere of ‘Prepare to Meet Thy Doom’ type of warning, and I had hundreds of letters and some very nasty Press at home, which surprised me. I have come to the conclusion that the world is more full of No-People than Yes-People and for some reason that No-People wanted to stop him. But he had no idea of stopping, and I never even thought about it. This was a project, he was only half-way.

  Once again, Francis’s soulmate was backing him unquestioningly. In spite of their mutual hostility to the press, they understood necessary evils, signing a new contract with The Sunday Times for twice-weekly radio reports, the quirks of this newfangled long-range transmitting gadget permitting.

  But there were amusing diversions. Their Excellencies the Governor-General and Lady Casey came up from Canberra to Sydney and invited the Chichesters to dinner at their residency, Admiralty House, still the most desirable property on the bay. Lord Casey, himself no slouch in the hero stakes, proposed a toast to Francis’s voyage. Unfortunately the current Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, is in Lo
ndon when I am in Sydney or I would have bludged, as they say hereabouts, a visit to Admiralty House too. Sir Peter is an excellent sport and a Squadron member too, but his underlings start babbling about security; and anyway the archives I need are in Canberra. Annoying all the same.

  On a return visit to Canberra Francis and Sheila were guests of Sir Charles Johnston, the High Commissioner to Australia, at Government House. The Chichesters and Johnstons were immediate and subsequently lifelong friends.

  An even more amusing diversion came on New Year’s Eve. At 10 pm Francis was just falling asleep when the Belevdere Hotel room phone rang.

  ‘Oh, leave it’, suggested a sleepy Sheila.

  ‘Better not’, said Francis.

  It was Sir Charles Johnston from Canberra. A few moments later:

  ‘Oh Charlie, it must be all your doing’, laughed Francis.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sheila.

  Francis put back the phone and with a broad smile said: ‘I’ve been knighted’.

  Lady Sheila beamed right back at Sir Francis.

  Of course the phone never stopped ringing after that. By 2 am Sheila had had enough and told the porter to stop putting through the calls. Later that day, New Years Day, while the Chichesters were lunching at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Lord and Lady Casey walked over to share their congratulations. From his pocket Lord Casey pulled out a telegram from the Queen: