Gipsy Moth Circles the World

by Francis Chichester

  “Captain Villiers, who gained fame when he sailed a replica of the Mayflower from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1957, is one of the few men with first-hand knowledge of what Chichester and his 53 foot Gipsy Moth are facing.

  “He remembers vividly the screaming tumult and the murderous strength of the breakers when he sailed the fully-rigged sailing ship Joseph Conrad round the Horn. He was mate of the Parma, which he sailed on the same vicious course.

  “Chichester watched a film of the vindictive seas of his chosen homeward course on a visit to Captain Villiers’s Oxford home before he sailed single-handed to Australia, said Villiers.

  “‘It made him very thoughtful but I couldn’t get him to change his mind.

  “‘He knows that he has 6,000 miles of fearful sailing through the Roaring 40’s and the Shrieking 50’s of the Tasman Sea which is open to the Antarctic, before he gets to the Horn.

  “‘I faced them with a full, experienced crew and officers. I would not attempt it single-handed and I don’t know any professional seaman who would. The risks are too great.

  “‘I don’t see how he can keep going by himself—he will be flung around miserably for about six weeks.

  “‘Chichester has done enough. I’ve told him that he is an inspiration now, but he won’t be if he is thrown into those savage seas. We need this man and this inspiration.

  “‘He is a redoubtable man with abundant courage and we cannot spare him.’”

  I have the greatest respect for Alan, and secretly I agreed with everything he said about the Horn, but I replied: “No matter what anyone says anywhere, I am sailing as soon as I can. I wish they would pipe down and let me get on with the job.”

  I had quite a big enough job, a man-size job I reckoned, to get the boat and gear in order soon enough to get away on time, to collect all the stores and gear required for a four months’non-stop passage, to get the radio links organised with New Zealand, Argentina and Britain, as well as to deal with a hundred other problems such as radio beacons, weather charts, ordinary charts. Max Hinchliffe gave me invaluable help; for example he wangled a corrected volume of radio beacon frequencies as a gift from the Captain of HMAS Perth, the Australian Navy’s cruiser; and most important, he dug up the relevant pages from the Admiralty’s Ocean Passages of the World giving details of the clipper route in the Atlantics for different months of the year. John Pleasants not only checked the radio links for the second half of the voyage, and checked over the radio telephone, but also discovered that one of the insulators on my starboard backstay aerial was cracked. A replacement was impossible, so he made up a fresh insulator himself. I came to realise that this backstay aerial was the better of the two, and ended up by relying on it entirely. I was immensely impressed by the efficiency of my Australian helpers. I had a lot of help, too, from the Chief Naval Officer at Canberra, Commander George, RN, who exchanged signals with HMS Protector patrolling in the Falkland Islands area. Protector sent me the wonderful news that there was no ice north of 60° S in Drake’s Passage. All the time I was under a steady bombardment of press articles and letters from retired sailors who had been round the Horn, besides hundreds of letters from a few who had not the faintest notion what they were talking about, predicting my watery end if I persisted, or begging me not to go on with the venture.

  The following appeared in a round up of clairvoyants expressing their views for the coming year in the Sunday Express, January 1, 1967:

  “Lone yachtsman Francis Chichester is doomed to failure in his attempt to sail around the world. This is the opinion of clairvoyant Marjorie Staves. ‘But he will come home to one of the greatest welcomes in our history,’ she told me. ‘He will give up due to lack of physical strength. But any man who has such great mental strength as to make me feel it across thousands of miles is going to make a wonderful try.’”

  All these negative wishings and willings on the part of different people use up valuable strength in resisting them, just as prayer and positive wellwishing give strength, and lend support. Just as Alan Villiers carried great weight with his opinions in England, Captain John Jagoe, a retired sea captain in Sydney, had great publicity in Australia when he said that I had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival, and that I must be “a glorious bloody fool” to attempt it. Incidentally, he said that it was nonsense to assess the average clipper passage as 100 days, and that Lubbock in his books had only quoted the fastest clipper passages of the year, and that the 100 days was the average of the fastest; that 127 days was the true average, which I had beaten handsomely. He sounded a great character and we enticed him to our hotel for tea and a talk.

  At about this time I jumped off the stem of Gipsy Moth on to the jetty, my foot slipped on the edge of the planking, and I came down a purler, hitting the bone of my good leg on the edge of the wharf. This was seen by a reporter, and more articles appeared, asserting my unfitness, and that I should be stopped from proceeding. I tried to point out that, on the contrary, the fact that I had picked myself up and got on with my job ought to be a qualification for continuing the voyage, but I thought that this argument was received with undue glumness. Although all these things depressed me, I had found out about the hazards of the voyage, and had weighed them up three and a half years ago; and it was then that I had decided to attempt the voyage. There was no question now of whether I went on or not. Sometimes I got positive support which gave me strength; particularly, I remember with gratitude the strength I drew from Lady Casey, the Governor General’s wife, whom I had known for many years because of being a fellow patron of Gertrude McKenzie’s Flying Club outside Melbourne. Maie Casey, who is one of the outstanding women of the century, said, “Pouf! Take no notice what the papers say or anyone else says, go right ahead.”

  Some of the forecasts were amusing, if you can call a barbed arrow which sticks into your flesh amusing. One night Sheila and I were walking up to the Village for some dinner at a Chinese restaurant, when we passed a man haranguing or preaching to the crowd. When he saw me he stopped, came over, and thrust a pamphlet into my hand, saying, “You need this; you, more than anyone, should prepare to meet your doom.”

  I do not believe that there is any other woman in the world who could have stood up against this steady sniping from doom forecasters as Sheila did. I had an active role to play, and also I should be away once the passage started, whereas Sheila would be left with even worse attacks to repel. She not only had the endless questions: “Aren’t you frightened that he will be drowned?” but also “How could you bear to let him go?” To make matters more difficult for her she sprained her ankle in Sydney. The Sunday before I left she got up suddenly from off her bed to answer the telephone, her ankle was “asleep”, and when she put her weight on her foot the ankle doubled up under it. She tore three ligaments.

  I have been criticised for running down Gipsy Moth IV. “Don’t forget,” Sheila said to me, “that she has brought you further and faster than any other small boat has ever sailed on a passage.” Let me say at once that I think she is a very handsome boat and if she is controlled she can go fast. Time after time she has reminded me of Lisette, the famous mare. Lisette belonged to General Marbot, ADC to Napoleon. Marbot was able to buy her because she had a bad habit of killing grooms. Marbot controlled this viciousness as far as he was concerned and she saved his life, once by her great speed, a second time by treading down and killing a Russian who was lunging at Marbot with a bayonet, and a third time by killing a Russian officer striking at Marbot with a sabre which wounded Lisette. I admire Lisette immensely, but I do not think I could ever have been fond of her.

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  10. Capsize in the Tasman Sea

  Giles had to return to Oxford, and I was sorry to see him go. I think both of us were thinking of the uncertainty of life. I badly missed his help, too. I was making every possible effort to get away, feeling that every week’s delay could mean more unpleasantness at the Horn. At last the time came when I could give o
ut that I was leaving at 11.00 hrs on Sunday, January 29. When the day came there was a tropical cyclone north east of Sydney, and it would have been advisable to delay my leaving. But I hated to do this. I think I have always sailed when I said I would. Max Hinchliffe advised me to get south as much as I could because of the storm, but foolishly I disregarded this excellent advice.

  There was no storm in Sydney itself that morning—it was a fine, sunny day. And so, at 11.00 precisely, Gipsy Moth IV slipped her moorings and stood out to sea. Lord Casey, the Governor General, had presented me with three miniature bales of wool to be carried by Gipsy Moth to London and I reckoned that they were travelling by the smallest wool clipper that ever left Australia! I had a crack crew, all friends, to sail the boat to Sydney Heads. In spite of her foot, Sheila took the helm, and the ship was worked by Alan Payne, Warwick Hood, Max Hinchliffe and Hugh Eaton. Hugh had been working for several days without a let-up helping to get Gipsy Moth ready for sea. At the Heads, my crew transferred by way of a rubber motor boat to Trygve Halvorsen’s launch, which was standing by as a tender. 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.

  I passed Sydney Heads at 12.15, and at 14.30 the last of the accompanying boats left me. I had trouble with the propeller shaft, which I couldn’t stop rotating. The brake would not work, so I had to dive down under the cockpit, head first and feet up, to fix the thing. I didn’t enjoy these upside-down antics, and I felt horribly seasick. By 18.00 I was becalmed, but the calm didn’t last long. There was a dense roll of clouds above the horizon, and wind began coming in from the south, at first lightly, but soon blowing up. By 19.00 it was coming at me in a series of savage bursts. At first I ran off northwards at 8 knots, then I took down all sail and lay ahull—that is, battened down, without sail, to give completely to the sea like a cork—in a great deluge of rain, reducing visibility to about 50 yards. Soon it got dark, and it was very dark—absolutely pitch dark. I was seasick and turned in but didn’t get much rest. After about three quarters of an hour I heard the self-steering oar banging about, and went on deck to deal with it. The wind then was about 35 knots, and I thought that Gipsy Moth could stand a jib and get moving again. I set a working jib, but it was too much for her. So I replaced it with a storm jib. With this I left her to fight her way slowly east at about 2 knots and turned in again, determined to sleep all night.

  I stayed in my bunk until just after 04.00, when the wind began coming still more strongly and I went up to drop the storm jib and lie ahull again. We stayed like this for most of the day; it was too rough for even a storm jib with the wind blowing at 50 knots or more. In the afternoon I did set a storm jib, reefed to only 60 square feet1 a mere rag of sail, chiefly to try to cut down thumping in the heavy seas. I hoped that the thumping was due to the self-steering gear, and not to the new false keel.

  In spite of the storm, radio conditions were good, and at 8 a.m. I had a good radio talk with Sheila which cheered me up. I was still sick from time to time, but slowly began to feel better, and gave myself some brandy, sugar and lemon, which I managed to keep down. The weather forecasts were bad with renewed cyclone warnings. This was Tropical Cyclone Diana, which was reported to be moving SE at about 20 mph. I tried to work out where it was in relation to me, and I reckoned that the worst of it would pass some 270 miles to the east of my noon position. That was something, but the whole area of the Tasman Sea was violently disturbed with winds from 40 to 60 knots, gusting up to 80 knots in squalls. There was nothing I could do about it. I did not worry over much, but just tried to exist until the storm passed.

  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. They towered high in the sky, I wouldn’t blame anyone for being terrified at the sight. My cross-tree light showed up the breaking water, white in the black darkness, and now and then a wave caught the hull and, breaking against it, sluiced over the decks. As I worked my way along the deck I thought: “Christ! What must it be like in a 120-knot wind!” I dropped the remaining storm sail, furled and tied it down. Gipsy Moth had been doing 8 knots with the little sail set, and I thought she would be less liable to damage lying ahull with no forward speed. As I worked my way aft again after finishing the job on the foredeck, I looked at the retaining net amidships, holding the two big genoas bagged up, and the 1,000 feet of warp in several coils. I knew that I ought to pass a couple of ropes over the net between the eye bolts at each side for storm lashings—I had always done this before on the passage out. But these ropes had not been re-rigged in Sydney and I was feeling ghastly, I thought due to sea sickness. (From something which happened later I can only deduce that the chief cause of my trouble was the Australian champagne I had drunk. For some reason this acted like poison on me.) Whatever the cause of my trouble, I weakened, and decided to leave the extra lashing until the morning. When I got below and had stripped off my oilskins I rolled into my bunk and put all the lights out. This was about two hours after dark. The bunk was the only place where one could wait below, for it was difficult to stand up, and I should have been continually thrown off if I had sat on the settee. However, lying on my back in the bunk, I dropped into a fitful sleep after a while.

  I think I was awake when the boat began to roll over. If not, I woke immediately she started to do so. Perhaps when the wave hit her I woke. It was pitch dark. As she started rolling I said to myself, “Over she goes!” I was not frightened, but intensely alert and curious. Then a lot of crashing and banging started, and my head and shoulders were being bombarded with 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 2 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 5 feet deep, but it was not quite full, for which I thought, “Thank God.”

  This made me get cracking with the radio, at forty-five minutes after midnight, and two and a quarter hours after the capsize. I was afraid that the radio telephone would go out of action through water percolating it, and that even if it didn’t, if the boat went over again the mass of water in the bilge must inevitably flood the telephone and finish it. I had to try to get a message through to say that I was all right, so that if the telephone went dead people would not think that I had foundered because of that. I called up on the distress frequency 2182 and got Sydney Radio straight away. As usual they were most efficient and co-operative. I asked them to give my wife a message in the morning to say that I had capsized, but that I was all right and that if they got no more messages from me it would only be because the telephone had been swamped and packed up, and not because I had foundered. I asked particularly that they should not wake up Sheila in the middle of the night, but call her at seven o’clock in the morning. I said that I did not need any help.

  I am not sure when I discovered that the water was pouring in through the forehatch. What had happened was that when the boat was nearly upside down, the heavy forehatch had swung open, and when the boat ri
ghted itself the hatch, instead of failing back in place, fell forwards onto the deck, leaving the hatchway wide open to the seas. It may seem strange that my memory is so confused, but it was a really wild night, the movement was horrible and every step was difficult.

  I must have got out on deck to pump the water below the level of the batteries. I found the holding net torn from its lashings. One of my 600-foot genoas had gone, a drogue, and 700 feet of inch-and-a-half plaited warp. The other big genoa was still there in its bag pressed against the leeward lifeline wires. I don’t remember how I secured it. I found the forehatch open and closed that. A section of the cockpit coaming and a piece of the side of the cockpit had been torn away. I was extremely puzzled at the time to know how this could have happened. The important thing was that the masts were standing, and the rigging appeared undamaged. I think it was then that I said to myself, “To hell with everything,” and decided to have a sleep. I emptied my bunk of plates, cutlery and bottles, etc. One serrated-edged cutting knife was embedded close to where my head had been, and I thought how lucky I was. I had only a slightly cut lip; I do not know what caused that.

  My bunk was soaking wet, which was no wonder, considering that in the morning I could see daylight through where the side of the cockpit had been torn away just above the bunk. But I did not give a damn how wet it was, turned in, and was soon fast asleep. I slept soundly till daylight.

  When I awoke the boat was still being thrown about. All that day it was blowing a gale between 40 and 55 knots. I was still queasy and unable to face eating anything. I had not had a proper meal since leaving Sydney. Now and then I had some honey and water, but even that was an ordeal, for I had not filled up my vacuum flasks with hot water before starting as I always intend to do before a voyage, so that I can have honey and water hot as soon as I feel queasy. And I was faced with this awful mess; it looked like a good week’s work to clear up, sort and re-pack everything. I have rarely had less spirit in me. I longed to be back in Sydney Harbour, tied up to the jetty. I hated and dreaded the voyage ahead. Let’s face it; I was frightened and had a sick feeling of fear gnawing inside me. If this was what could happen in an ordinary storm, how could a small boat possibly survive in a 100-knot greybearder?