Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  IT GIVES ME GREAT PLEASURE TO BESTOW THE RANK AND TITLE KNIGHT BACHELOR TO OUR SERVANT: FRANCIS CHICHESTER STOP ELIZABETH R STOP

  As we know Francis could be, in fact pretty much always was, a stubborn old cuss on a passage, and never more so than at his insistence on leaving on time. (It goes without saying that, onshore at least, he always arrived on time.) With the tiny Cape Horn summer in mind and working through the days and evenings and weekends of January, by the third week he could foresee and announce a time to leave: 11.00 am on Sunday 29 January, 1967.

  Tropical cyclones are equally stubborn cusses and 500 miles north-east of Sydney Cyclone Tamara was busy gathering up her skirt for a merry dance across the Tasman Sea. Old Tasman hands implored Francis to let her blow through. He was having none of it: he said he was leaving at 11 am on Sunday 29 January 1967 regardless. Very well, said the Tasman hands, leave if you must but head south around New Zealand. As Francis later admitted, ‘foolishly I disregarded this excellent advice’.

  The voyage continues, Gipsy Moth IV leaving Sydney Harbour

  Lord Casey, entering into the clipper spirit of Gipsy Moth IV’s voyage, gave Francis three small bales of wool as cargo for London. Once clear of the well-wisher fleet, the Chichesters said their goodbyes. For Francis: ‘Sheila and I parted as if for a day. She has an uncanny foresight in spiritual matters, and had no doubt but that we should meet again. I must confess that I wondered rather sadly if we would as I sailed away from the fleet’. For Sheila: ‘Francis sailed away and I felt perfectly confident all would be well’.

  Eight hours later Francis was becalmed. To the north the summer evening sky turned dark grey, then deep blue, then black. Zephyrs became breezes became gusts became winds became gales. Tamara was coming to find him.

  When the capsize came Francis was lying on his bunk, trying to sleep. He had long since given up any hope of sailing the yacht. He later wrote:

  That Monday night was as foul and black a night as you could meet at sea. Although it was pitch dark, the white breakers showed in the blackness like monstrous beasts charging down on the yacht. The sea was violently disturbed with winds gusting up to 80 knots. The breakers towered high in the sky. I wouldn’t blame anyone for being terrified at the sight. There was nothing I could do about it. I did not worry over much, but just tried to exist until the storm passed.

  If Francis didn’t suffer from fear, he also didn’t suffer from imagination.

  Down below he hung on as best he could. He felt seasick, which he put down to the Australian sparkling wine he had drunk so lustily the day before. As a remedy he made his favourite seasickness cure: warmed brandy, sugar and lemon. Giving up all hope of influencing events, he took to his bunk, trying to rest if not to sleep. Amidst the screaming noise and stomach-churning drops into troughs, Francis felt the rogue wave coming moments before it landed on top of him.

  ‘Over she goes!’ he remembered saying to himself in the upside-down pitch darkness. Moments later he was flying through the air; so was anything loose in the cabin: bottles, crockery, cutlery, books, boots. In the void and confusion he wondered if Gipsy Moth IV would roll over completely. When she righted herself she was on the same tack. Francis stumbled in the chaos for a light. Amazingly, it worked and some order was brought into the chaos.

  One half of him desperately wanted to look outside to see how much damage the mast and rigging had taken; the wiser half knew a breaker would fill the cabin if invited in. It was bad enough inside:

  The cabin was two foot deep all along with a jumbled-up pile of hundreds of tins, bottles, tools, shackles, blocks, 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 5 feet deep, but it was not quite full, for which I thought, ‘Thank God’.

  The next morning the worst of Tamara had passed and the gale had dropped to a regular Force 8. Francis was back in mare cognitum. The deck inspection showed that he had been lucky. One of the big genoas, a drogue [underwater parachute] and its 700 feet of rope had been washed overboard. The forehatch had been forced partially open. A piece of the cockpit had been torn off. She had shipped a lot of sea water and Francis had to spend exhausting hours on the pumps, counting 200 strokes at a time between breaks. Climbing below to report the damage in the log, he felt a mixture of fear and exhaustion, luck and dread. Francis-the-wise wished he could turn back; Francis-the-proud knew he never could. He feared rogue waves like never before but knew that more would be ready to ambush him as he neared Cape Horn.17 He dreaded the Southern Ocean voyage ahead but knew his fate required him to be offered up to whatever the weather gods chose to throw at him.

  It took a week to clear up the mess caused by the capsize and another six weeks to cross the 5,000 miles of wild ocean to reach Cape Horn. Francis would later recall that this was the most frightening and exhausting part of the circumnavigation and always for the same reason: the sheer unpredictability of the wild and windswept waves that he was crossing meant he could never relax, that he was always trying to stay ahead of the next turn in the weather and always trying to manage Gipsy Moth IV’s unsuitability to the task.

  It is easy to imagine him being fully preoccupied with just hanging in there, changing and trimming the sails, tuning the self-steering, navigating, feeding and watering himself, making radio calls and trying to stay as warm and dry as conditions allowed. But this was just the half of it. He had a long list of preventive maintenance jobs, which he called his ‘agenda’. Every day this meant an inspection tour of the boat, checking on everything from the water tank connections to the alternator belts, all the lines and their connections; as they used to say in the Navy: if it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t, paint it.

  Then there were repairs tasks, some due to the capsize, others due to ‘stuff happens’, what insurers call ‘inherent vice’ – eggs break, chocolate melts, glass shatters. There was also a housekeeping agenda, anything from sowing wheatgerm to refilling meths containers to starting mustard and cress. If there was ever a calm day he had a calm day agenda, mostly repairing leaks and drying out clothes.

  On top of this there was the occasional laundry day, such as midway to Cape Horn on Wednesday 15 February. His technique was to wash his clothes and sheets in warmed sea water, then rinse them over the side and finally rinse out the salt with fresh water. It worked well enough and saved fresh water. To celebrate he opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, only to find that ‘as usual champagne brought me no luck, and only brought me rain and a backing wind. To try to defeat the influence of the champagne I had two glasses of Whitbread’s beer from the keg, which was excellent’.

  Reading his log now, it seems that the Southern Oceans crossing was a non-stop battle against vile weather in a semi-uncontrollable yacht, in constant discomfort pierced by moments of pure fear and the yearning for it all to be over. So I read this entry with as much pleasure as he must have had in writing it:

  There were good moments, though, when I would sit in the sun in the cockpit, drinking mugs of Whitbread. It amused me every time I drew off a half-pint from the keg in the bilge, and I would think, ‘What a place to be sitting drinking beer, in glorious sunshine, with a deep blue sea and light blue sky’.

  It was never too hot, because of the southerly breeze coming up from the Antarctic. Once when I was sitting in the cockpit like this I tried to calculate whereabouts was the nearest human being to me. There might have been a ship somewhere in the vicinity, but unless there was, which was unlikely, the nearest living person would have been in the Chatham Islands, some 885 miles away.

  One bad shock is duly timed and entered in the log, as befits its seriousness:

  Wednesday, 22 February. 19.25. I have just realised I have only four bottles of gin left, enough for four weeks. I reckon I have been pretty stupid not to have brought plenty. I’ll just have to ration it, a
nd no hard drinks at lunch. It might be worse – I might have none.

  A week of unremitting self-torture – and so indirect pleasure – defying the elements was to follow, up half the nights changing sail in the dark, on a bucking deck with freezing spray flying across the decks. Then came his wedding anniversary and Francis became human again:

  I wish I was at home with my darling and feel sad to be away from her, but that is how life goes. I have only just finished breakfast, and will drink her health later. If this gale continues, I may wait until tomorrow for my celebration party.

  But he didn’t wait. He decided that there was too much of a gale blowing to put on his smoking jacket, so he’d celebrate as best he could, given the circumstances:

  I am drinking a toast to Sheila in the delicious Montrachet she brought out from England, and left on board for me. A long life, health and happiness, with grateful thanks for our happy thirty years together. A very remarkable, exceptional woman is Sheila. I did what is supposed to be un-British, shed a tear. Life seems such a slender thread in these circumstances here, and they make one see the true values in life, mostly things (or whatever you may call them) which one disregards, or brushes aside when with people. I must not get too sentimental. I will return to the Montrachet.

  Forty days after leaving Sydney he passed the 5,000 mile mark, leaving only 1,600 to the ‘Old Ogre’, Cape Horn. By then the sea, uninterrupted by land and stirred up by constant winds and gales, was always in swell. Outside the temperature was dropping and Francis dug out his winter warmies and had the stove on below more or less constantly. Here he warmed up his rum and lemon keep-warm panacea.

  For non-Cape Horners I can report that the Cape itself is not a point at the end of a contiguous South American land mass; it is rather a 1,400-foot cliff on the southern tip of the most southerly island of an archipelago of a thousand islands and rocklets known as the ‘Milky Way’. Friendly waters they are not. When Charles Darwin looked down from the deck of the Beagle he reported that ‘Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week’. In his book Along the Clipper Way, written a year before he sailed around the Old Ogre, Francis noted:

  Why has it such an evil reputation? The prevailing winds in the Forties and Fifties, are westerly and pretty fresh on the average. For instance, off the Horn there are gales of Force 8 or more on one day in four in the spring and one day in eight in the summer.

  Winds have a lazy nature. They refuse to climb over a mountain range if they can sweep past the end of it. South America has one of the greatest mountain ranges of the world, the Andes, which blocks the westerlies along a front of 1,200 miles from 35° S. right down to Cape Horn. All this powerful wind is crowding through Drake’s Strait between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands, 500 miles to the south.

  The normal westerlies pouring through this gap are interfered with by the turbulent, vicious little cyclones rolling off the Andes. The same process occurs in reverse with the easterly winds, which though more rare than the westerlies, blow when a depression is passing north of the Horn.

  As for the waves, the prevailing westerlies set up a current flowing eastwards round the world at a mean rate of 10 to 20 miles per day. This current flows in all directions at times due to the passing storms, but the result of all the different currents is this 10 to 20 miles per day flowing eastwards. As the easterly may check this current or even reverse it for a while, the prevailing stream flowing eastwards may sometimes amount to as much as 50 miles a day. As with the winds, this great ocean river is forced to pass between South America and the South Shetland Islands. This in itself tends to make the stream turbulent.

  What size are these notorious waves? Recently one instrument with a 60-foot scale recorded a wave of which the trace went off the scale. This wave was estimated at 69 feet in height, higher than our five-storey house in London. An American steamship in the South Pacific is said to have encountered a wave 112 feet high.

  Reading Francis’s account of his Cape Horn day, one is immediately struck by the extraordinary confidence he had in his own navigation. Closing in on the archipelago, contact with any one of whose countless outlying members would have sunk him, he aimed to pass a mere 12 miles south of the nearest one in the middle of the night.

  It was so dark that I did not think it worth keeping a watch, so I set the off-course alarm to warn me if there was a big wind shift, and I also set an alarm clock to wake me at daybreak. Then I put my trust in my navigation and turned in for a sleep. For a while I lay in the dark with the boat rushing into black night. In the end I slept, and soundly too.

  He woke at 5 am and took stock. It was a cold, grey morning, wind merely Force 4 and now southerly and the sea state swelly but not violent. The barometer was steady. Dead reckoning put him 40 miles to the west of the Horn. He should round it by noon. It looked like he was going to be lucky, to catch the Old Ogre off guard. He decided to head directly for the Horn rather than pass 40 miles south of it, as usual conditions would have recommended. He treated himself to a fry-up special breakfast, excited about the next sail and change of course. For the first time in months he would have some north in his heading – and so a homeward heading. With a light heart, after breakfast he stepped on deck to change sails and set the new course. But then an unexpected, major annoyance, for Francis the ultimate spoiler. He was dumbfounded and furious:

  When I stepped into the cockpit I was astounded to see a ship nearby, about a half-mile off. I had a feeling that if there was one place in the world where I would not see a ship it was off Cape Horn. As soon as I recovered from the shock I realised that because of its drab overall colour it must be a warship, and therefore was likely to be HMS Protector.

  She was on fishing patrol duty out of the Falklands and had picked up his radio reports to The Sunday Times. Working out his likely position, she had placed herself at the most likely choke-point between the islands and waited for him.

  Francis’s internal fury at having his finest hour, his pinnacle moment alone, witnessed by a whole ships’ company was soon matched by the changing mood of the weather outside. By 9 am the wind had risen to 40 knots. Back on deck he took down the genoa and trysail, leaving only the storm jib to power him along. On his way back to the cockpit, hand-holding along the top of the cabin, from a wave crest he looked and saw the Horn standing up from the sea ‘like a black ice-cream cone’. A great wash of triumph and excitement swept over him. Then off the next crest he looked east and saw the still-lurking HMS Protector. Infuriating!

  Two hours later it was gusting over 50 knots. He took a bearing and confirmed that he was east of the Cape Horn. He had rounded the old Ogre, alone! Or nearly alone. ‘I cursed the Protector for hanging about. I just wanted to be left alone, by things and especially by people.’

  But worse was to come. Much worse. ‘Just then, I’m damned if an aircraft didn’t buzz into sight. I cursed it. If there was one place in the world where I expected to be alone it was off Cape Horn. I was greatly relieved when it finally cleared off’. Soon HMS Protector, too, cleared off. Francis felt a forlorn, empty feeling of desolation at being alone again, as if the unwelcome company had not only spoiled his moment of triumph but left him even more alone than if he really had been all alone all along. He couldn’t place the feeling: triumph and annoyance, loneliness and overcrowding. Something wasn’t right when it should have been perfect.

  Infuriating though the intrusion on his ultimate hour of triumph had been for Francis, the correspondents on board the HMS Protector and the aeroplane did give us eyewitness accounts of that same ultimate hour.

  On board the naval ship was a Reuter’s stringer, Michael Hayes. He filed:

  As I stood on the pitching and tossing deck of the Royal Navy Ice Patrol ship H.M.S. Protector 400 yards off, the sight was awesome. The translucent, bottle-green seas were moving mountains and valleys of water, rearing, rolling and subsiding with a fearful brute force. The 50-mile an hour wind slashed at the waves, slicing off
foaming white crests and sending icy spume flying. Lead-grey clouds, blotting out the weak sun on the horizon, rolled across the sky, so low that it seemed I could reach up and touch them. The thermometer said the temperature was 43° F, but the numbing wind cut through my lined, Antarctic clothing like a knife, and salt spray swelled up and crashed against the face with stinging fury.

  On board the battered old yellow Piper Apache was Murray Sayle of The Sunday Times and he filed for the 21 March 1967 edition:

  The flight out to find and photograph him at the most dangerous point of his voyage was a magnificent and terrifying experience. I flew from Puerto Williams, the tiny Chilean naval base which is the southernmost inhabited spot in the Americas.

  As my aircraft rose to find a cleft in the mountains of Hoste Island, the biggest of the Horn group, I was confronted with a superb sight. Green glaciers tumbling from the high snow-blanketed Darwin ranges into the Southern Ocean. As I flew by Cape Horn Island, its grey pyramid could be seen lashed by heavy seas and rimmed by breaking seas which appeared from time to time through the driving rain.

  South of the Horn the waves were driving eastward in long ridges of white and grey-green. Overhead were black driving clouds driven by the gale and a mile or two ahead the clouds were joined to the sea by rain in a black, impenetrable barrier towards the south and the pole.

  I picked up H.M.S. Protector first, wallowing in the heavy seas as she kept company with the yacht. Then I picked out the salt grimed hull of Gipsy Moth lurching forward as the seas passed under her. My Chilean pilot, Captain Rodolfo Fuenzalida, gamely took us down to 60 ft. where spume torn from the seas lashed across the aircraft’s windscreen. But I had time to pick out Chichester in his cockpit, apparently nonchalantly preparing for his change of course and the long voyage home.