A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  On 19 October, his fifty-ninth day at sea, Moitessier’s noon sight placed him 40 miles southwest of Cape Agulhas (the true southerly promontory of Africa, 30 miles further south than the more famous and picturesque Cape of Good Hope). He had two plastic bags full of film – he had photographed every page of his logbook – that he wanted now to throw aboard some vessel and have sent on to the Sunday Times. This closing with land and shipping, and the risks of embayment and collision, went against all his seaman’s instincts, which would have him steering clear and flying on south and east into the Southern Ocean. But letting the Sunday Times know where he was and how fast he was sailing was suddenly important to him. He had become gripped by the race; he knew he was already making a rare and phenomenal passage and he wanted the world to know it. He also wanted to tell his friends and family that he was well. Pushing his instincts aside, he headed north.

  As he did so, the wind changed from the west to the southeast, and from the appearance of the sky, his barometer, and his own beautifully attuned weather sense, Moitessier believed a southeasterly gale was imminent. To make use of the new wind, and to be able perhaps to get away before it grew stronger, he headed Joshua up the coast between Cape Agulhas and Cape Town, making for a small port he found on his chart called Walker Bay. There could be yachts there, and, it being Sunday again, he hoped he might find one sailing in the bay on to which he could lob his packets. The yacht might even have news of the locations of his friends in the race, Fougeron, King, and Tetley.

  As he neared Walker Bay on Sunday 20 October, the wind rose to about 30 knots but the sky remained cloudless, typical conditions for the Cape’s notorious ‘southerly busters’, and he grew convinced that no yachts would be out day-sailing in such weather. Meanwhile a steady stream of tankers and freighters was passing him; his MIK flags were flying and now Moitessier worried that they would all report his position and course – north, apparently Cape Town-bound – to Lloyd’s, confusing the Sunday Times and his friends and family about his intentions.

  One small freighter was slowly overhauling him and he saw that it would pass close by his starboard side. Close enough perhaps for him to throw his package aboard. It was a gamble: a ship of any size – another yacht even – can blanket a sailboat’s wind and render it unmanoeuvrable, and a sailor’s instinctive fear in such a situation is that the crew of the other ship might misjudge the distance and cause a collision. There is also the visceral, unreasoning, hackle-raising fear engendered by the unreal enormousness of a ship that close at sea, with nothing in the visible world to give it scale but one’s own tiny boat. The sailor feels like an ant negotiating space with an elephant. But with the rising wind and deteriorating weather, this one looked like today’s best bet. Quickly, Moitessier wrote out a message asking the captain to slow down and remain on a straight course so he could throw over a package. He put this message in a film can weighted with lead, grabbed his slingshot, and waited as the freighter drew up.

  The black freighter is 25 yards off to my right. Three men are watching me from the bridge. Snap! – the message lands on the ship’s foredeck. One of the officers twirls a finger at his temple, as if to say I must be a little nuts to be shooting at them … I yell, ‘Message! Message!’ They just stare at me, bug-eyed. At this range, with lead balls, I could knock their three hats off with three shots …

  The bridge is almost beyond us: I have to salvage the situation fast. I brandish the package, and make as if to give it to them. An officer acknowledges with a wave, and puts the helm over to kick the stern my way. In a few seconds, the main deck is 10 or 12 yards off. I toss a package. Perfect!

  It is time I pulled away, but I am going to make a serious mistake by throwing the second package instead of racing to the tiller to steer clear. I won up and down the line with my first package; I will lose it all with the second. By the time I dash to the tiller, it is already late. The freighter’s stern is still slewing my way. To make matters worse, she has blanketed my sails by passing me to starboard while I was on the starboard tack.

  Joshua begins to pull clear, but not fast enough. By a hair, the stern’s overhang snags the mainmast. There is a horrible noise, and a shower of black paint falls on the deck; the masthead shroud is ripped loose, then the upper spreader shroud. My guts twist into knots. The push on the mast makes Joshua heel, she luffs up towards the freighter … and wham! the bowsprit is twisted 20 or 25 degrees to port.

  The ship changed course as if to come back to help, but he waved ‘all’s well’, fearful that if it came back it would finish him off.

  Moitessier was stunned, then angry with himself, and finally grateful the damage was not worse: he was amazed that the mainmast had not snapped. At the moment of collision, the solid telephone pole had ‘looked like a fishing rod bent by a big tuna’, and had sprung back straight. The two shrouds, whose ends had only slipped in their cable clamps at deck level, were easily repaired. The spreaders were flexibly mounted on the mast and were straight and undamaged when Moitessier had tightened and reclamped the bottom ends of the shrouds.

  The bowsprit – the long spar that extends the rig forward of the bow – was the problem. A wooden bowsprit would have snapped like a dry twig as it hit the freighter’s hull, and the loss of the sprit would have seriously reduced the sail area of Joshua’s rig, and probably caused Moitessier to drop out of the race. But Joshua’s bowsprit was a steel pipe, 3 inches in diameter, with a 3/16-inch-thick wall, 6 feet 10 inches long. With the marvellous elasticity of steel, it had simply bent, severely. But it was now too bent to use effectively; the forestay, on which the big pulling sails of the rig’s fore triangle were hanked, was now canted far off centre to the left. It would not be impossible to sail in this condition, but the boat’s efficiency would be reduced, and worse, in Moitessier’s eyes, Joshua was marred, and a stain was thrown across the sharpened mystic beauty of his voyage – no little thing to this man.

  The expected southeasterly gale came in the night, and Moitessier spent it hove to, unable to sleep while thinking about the bowsprit. He spent all the next day, Monday 21 October, riding out the gale, trying to figure out what he could do to repair the bowsprit. He remembered what César, the foreman overseeing Joshua’s construction in the boiler factory, used to say about steel at moments when it appeared reluctant to take on the shapes required of it: ‘Man is always the strongest.’

  Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, with the wind and sea down, he went to work. Fixing a chain to the end of the bowsprit, he ran a four-part block and tackle between the chain and the cockpit winch. With heavy shackles, he attached the spare mizzen boom between the base of the bowsprit and the chain to act as a strut, increasing the angle of purchase. Then he went back to the cockpit and began winding the winch handle. Very slowly, to his amazement and joy, the bowsprit straightened until it was almost as it had been before the accident. He tightened the bowsprit’s bobstay and whisker stays and straightened the galvanised steel-tube pulpit in the bow where it had been bent. The boat appeared as good as new.

  Worn out by fatigue and emotion, I fall into bed after swallowing a can of soup for dinner. I am tremendously tired, yet I feel crammed with dynamite, ready to level the whole world and forgive it everything. Today, I played and won. My beautiful boat … is as beautiful as ever.

  The film cans Moitessier had tossed aboard the freighter – the Greek-registered Orient Transporter – quickly reached the Sunday Times. The following Sunday 20 October, the newspaper ran an article with photographs of Joshua rushing through the sea. The article also reported his position and the last known positions of the other competitors.

  Using their speeds to date as the basis for projections, the article ranked the competitors according to who was most likely to pick up the two prizes, the £5,000 for the fastest voyage and the Golden Globe for the first yacht home. It was immediately clear that in both cases Moitessier was the man to beat.

  The newspaper still judged that Moitessier’s overall time and spe
ed would fall below Chichester’s (who had taken 226 days), finding that his average so far was 9 per cent slower.

  What the article revealed for the first time was that the boats everyone had presumed should prove the fastest were not fulfilling their promise: Nigel Tetley’s Piver trimaran had taken eight days to cover his first 510 miles – that’s a laggardly 64 miles per day, slower even than Knox-Johnston’s first week in his tubby monohull. And Bill King, in his specially designed racing machine that displaced less than half the weight of the steel Joshua and should therefore have proved faster, was so far averaging only 110 miles per day, and was ranked behind Robin Knox-Johnston. ‘It’s not the ships but the men in them,’ the old saw goes, and it seemed to be the case still. But these averages were misleading: Knox-Johnston’s daily mileage figure reflected the great increase in his speed since he had reached the high winds of the Southern Ocean; King had actually outperformed him in the early stages. The projections were simply an exercise based on the sketchiest of details for the benefit of the newspaper and the readers it was attempting to interest in ‘its’ race. In the end, the final race result bore no resemblance to the Sunday Times’ careful calculations, or to anyone’s best guess of who might win.

  Bill King soon heard over his radio of Moitessier’s position and his dazzling runs. The news may not have surprised him, but it robbed him of an elemental requirement for bashing on alone around the world for the better part of a year when one has staked all on such a voyage: a reasonable hope of winning. He tried to shrug this off, unconvincingly, in his logbook (his daily entries were written as letters to his wife, each beginning, ‘My Darling’).

  My Darling … This evening I learnt that Bernard Moitessier has worked out a big lead. This, of course, must be a great disappointment to me and destroy my peace of mind. I built this boat specifically to pioneer this trip, not for ocean racing. When it transpired that a race was on, there was nothing else to do but join it, but now I have to realise I have little chance of winning it. Already I face the same sort of emotional situation that must have faced Scott when Amundsen reached the South Pole first … This sort of thing is a test and discipline of one’s character which must be faced, but I did not set out to test my character …

  I cannot drive Galway Blazer against faster boats. I will plod on around the world, revelling in my boat’s special poetic beauty, in her strength and power. I will put disappointments from me – but I wish now I had no radio contact.

  But he could not put away his disappointment. He later wrote:

  I had a great struggle with depression over the slowness of my progress. The peace of the long sail, of the months away from mankind with only the sea and the sky with which to battle, and my beautiful boat as a companion, this peace is wrecked by the nagging knowledge that I am in a race and reluctant to force the pace.

  That 20 October, the Sunday Times also reported that Donald Crowhurst would set sail early in the week.

  14

  AS SOON AS Teignmouth Electron reached its home port, it was hauled out of the water at the Morgan Giles boatyard. Men from the Eastwoods yard had come down from Norfolk to fix the leaking ‘watertight’ hatch on the cockpit floor (beneath which lay the boat’s generator) and, essentially, to finish building the boat. Piles of equipment, stores, spares, and donations Rodney Hallworth had secured from local merchants – wedges of cheese and bottles of sherry – began to accumulate on the dock beside the boat. Stanley Best brought in campers to house the Eastwoods, the Elliots, and himself and other Crowhurst friends. All these people turned to the enormous job of attempting to make the boat ready for sea – for a voyage around the world – in a little over two weeks.

  From beginning to end, it was chaos. The local fishermen and boatbuilders gathered in their working-men’s pub, the Lifeboat, to heap scorn and ridicule upon the man and his boat. Crowhurst, they decided, appeared to be in a ‘daze’, unable to supervise the preparation of his boat, which they described as ‘a right load of plywood’.

  Crowhurst’s friends also noticed a wholly uncharacteristic, subdued numbness settle over his normally effusive personality. The enormity of what remained to be done, the incredible range of details, overwhelmed him and scattered the focus of his mind.

  He carried around loose sheets of paper that were paradigms of the greater disorganisation around him: notes of unfinished work, diagrams made for himself and others, addresses, phone numbers, workmen’s hours, half-drafted letters, reminders, lists of things to buy – socks, blowtorch, brass strips, gloves, hacksaw blades, pencils, logbooks, lighter with fuel and flints, barometer, flares, life jacket, screws, bolts, tools. Sometimes he was able to delegate some of these purchases to others. Stanley Best was sent to a used-car dealer to buy two dozen small electrical fuel pumps, though he had no idea what they were for. Clare Crowhurst was sent to a local baker to find a recipe for baking bread at sea.

  Despite his promises of local sponsorship, Rodney Hallworth had raised only £250. Yet he would haul Crowhurst off at a moment’s notice to attend local functions that might only possibly yield more money but certainly boosted the civic pride of Teignmouth. Crowhurst continued to write letters asking for sponsorship or donations of equipment until just days before he sailed.

  Reeling from a vertigo of overwhelming details, he would fix on some item and spend hours tracking it down, even getting into his minivan and driving great distances to find some small thing he wanted. No doubt it was a relief to get away.

  A BBC television crew arrived to film the preparations. Crowhurst found time to give them a lengthy interview, during which he sounded like a Cape Horner: ‘I have felt a community with long dead seamen on many occasions … seamen who have come this way centuries before you would understand your feelings, and you understand theirs …’

  When asked by the interviewer, Donald Kerr, if he had ever faced a situation at sea when he thought he was going to drown, he recounted, in detail, an episode when he fell overboard while sailing single-handed along the south coast. Fortunately, he said, the boat headed up into the wind after a quarter of a mile and he was able to swim back to it. A quarter-mile swim in the hypothermia-inducing English Channel would be a lucky and heroic accomplishment. He had never mentioned this either to Clare or to any friends, although it was exactly the sort of tale he would have loved to tell.

  Five days before he was due to sail, Crowhurst, John Elliot, and a BBC camera crew took Teignmouth Electron out for a day of sea trials. The genoa sheet track quickly began lifting from the deck, its screws pulling up through the plywood either because they were too small or had not been sunk into backing blocks below the deck. The gasketing beneath the newly rebuilt hatch in the cockpit floor peeled away when the hatch was raised. Crowhurst spent much of the day angrily complaining to John Elliot about the hardware Eastwoods had installed and trying various sail and sheeting combinations to see if the boat’s performance to windward had improved, but it sailed no better than before.

  The BBC crew hung around through the last days before Crowhurst’s departure. At a certain point, Donald Kerr told the crew to change the emphasis of their coverage. He sensed a tragedy in the making.

  On 30 October, the day before the Sunday Times’ departure deadline, Teignmouth Electron remained an unfinished project, surrounded by piles of stores and equipment on the dock. Donald Kerr told his camera crew to stop filming and they began to help where they could through the last hours of preparation. They went off into town with lists of things to buy. At teatime Kerr pulled Donald and Clare away to a local teashop. Crowhurst was in a grim mood and kept saying, ‘It’s no good. It’s no good.’ It seemed to Kerr that Crowhurst didn’t want to go but couldn’t bring himself to call it off.

  That evening, the Crowhursts ate a last dinner at their hotel, the Royal Hotel, with Clare’s sister and Ron Winspear, one of Donald’s best friends. The hotel proprietor gave them a bottle of champagne but the mood was funereal.

  After dinner the Eastwoods,
Elliots, Beards, Stanley Best, and Rodney Hallworth joined them for a drink. Only the irrepressible Hallworth still saw the Crowhurst of his image-making: ‘He was cheery and raring to go.’ Hallworth wanted Miss Teignmouth 1968 to sail aboard Teignmouth Electron as far as the starting line, give Crowhurst a kiss, and leap overboard as a gun went off. This didn’t happen.

  After the drink, Crowhurst and Clare rowed out into the cold late October night, away from the cheery lights of shore, to where the boat was moored in the harbour. Unstowed equipment still lay piled on deck and below. They worked on the boat until two in the morning before returning to the hotel. In bed, Crowhurst was silent. ‘Darling,’ he said finally, ‘I’m very disappointed in the boat. She’s not right. I’m not prepared. If I leave with things in this hopeless state, will you go out of your mind with worry?’

  Clare bravely did what she thought was best. ‘If you give up now,’ she said, ‘will you be unhappy for the rest of your life?’

  Crowhurst didn’t answer. He started to cry. He cried all night.

  The weather was raw and drizzly in Teignmouth on Thursday 31 October 1968. It was a miserable day to go to sea.

  Crowhurst and his team spent most of the day carrying supplies aboard and rushing around town making last-minute purchases. Rodney Hallworth’s more dramatic ideas for a send-off had been vetoed, but he did inveigle Crowhurst into a nearby chapel, where he hoped to photograph the intrepid lone mariner in an attitude of prayer. Crowhurst, wearing a tie, merely sat in a pew, leaning forward slightly, looking tired and pensive.