A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  But the very next day, he believed he had cured himself of his melancholy. He had been neglecting his daily milk-and-vitamins drink, he wrote, which, once taken up again, magically lifted his mood of depression. It’s possible that Nigel Tetley’s low spirits were revived by vitamins and minerals, as he believed, but there would come a time when no amount of milk would save him.

  20

  ON 15 DECEMBER, the Sunday Times reported that Donald Crowhurst’s speed had increased again, dramatically.

  His name – largely ignored through the long months leading up to the start of the race – now led the news of the fleet.

  CROWHURST WORLD SPEED RECORD?

  Donald Crowhurst, last man out in the Sunday Times round-the-world lone-man yacht race, covered a breath-taking and possibly record-breaking 243 miles in his 41-ft. trimaran Teignmouth Electron last Sunday. The achievement is even more remarkable in the light of the very poor speeds in the first three weeks of his voyage; he took longer to reach the Cape Verdes than any other competitor.

  Is the 243 miles in one day a world record? Captain Terence Shaw, of the Royal Western Yacht Club, Ply-mouth, says: ‘If anyone has bettered it, and I doubt if they have, they can come forward with a counter claim.’

  The 36-year-old Bridgwater man now feels he has a fair chance of being the first home … His message ended: ‘I have been listening to the European money crisis on the BBC and you can tell the Sunday Times that if I win they can pay me in Deutschmarks.’

  Crowhurst had cabled the news of his record-breaking run to Rodney Hallworth on 10 December. The short cable also gave his daily mileages for the preceding four days: Friday (6 December) 172, Saturday 109, Sunday 243, Monday 174, Tuesday 145. He made a radio-telephone call to Hallworth the following day, Wednesday, during which he made the comment about the Deutschmarks, which Hallworth could not resist passing on. It made great copy.

  Captain Craig Rich, an instructor at the School of Navigation in London, who was advising the Sunday Times on navigational matters, had been keeping a chart of the competitors’ progress. Their speeds had all been generally consistent from the very beginning of the race. After his very slow start, Crowhurst’s performance was the conspicuous exception. It had been fluctuating wildly, and Captain Rich now told the reporters that he was surprised by this record-breaking run.

  Sir Francis Chichester was sceptical. He telephoned the Sunday Times to say that Crowhurst had to be ‘a bit of a joker’ and that his claims needed close examination. But there was no way any examination could be made until Crowhurst returned to England. Until then, they would simply have to take his word for it.

  The Sunday Times and the rest of the national Sunday and daily papers reported the record-breaking run, and Crowhurst’s cheeky comments, with gusto. The report cranked up the excitement of the race and increased speculation about its possible outcome. It was good news for everyone, and the sort of fanfare Donald Crowhurst had always hoped and expected for himself.

  After concluding that he could not sail around the world in his faulty boat, Crowhurst had sailed on, unable to face going home.

  He made radio-telephone calls to Clare and to Stanley Best, but to neither did he voice his dilemma. He spoke of the boat’s problems matter-of-factly, and of his efforts to fix them, and gave every indication of an unswerving intention to keep going.

  Yet between 19 and 21 November he slowed almost to a stop, sailing listlessly in a small circle north of Madeira. He got out his Admiralty pilot book of sailing directions for Portugal and its islands, and from its written descriptions drew a detailed map of Funchal Harbour: he was considering making for port there and putting an end to his ordeal. Then he changed his mind. On 22 November he began sailing at speed again, steering southwest, avoiding Madeira by a wide berth.

  Sometime around the beginning of December, he came to a fateful decision. The normal daily, sometimes hourly, comments confided by all navigators to their logbooks – a ship’s primary record of events, which Crowhurst too had made from the very beginning of his voyage: the sea state, frustrations with the boat, anxieties, problems, and successes – had by now vanished from his logbook. By December, he no longer cared to muse to himself on his bloody awful options. His logbook entries were reduced to the mathematical workings of his celestial sights: page after page of neat, pencilled calculations. No word of inner torment.

  On 6 December he opened a clean logbook – although the first was only half full – and in this second logbook he began keeping track of his navigational progress, his actual positions, a continuation of the record started in the first book. In the first logbook, from 6 December, he began plotting a second record: a carefully detailed series of fake positions, each day placing Teignmouth Electron further and further from his actual location.

  The business of celestial navigation is intricate but not difficult. It is part science and part seat-of-the-pants instinct, and the latter part is what makes it interesting and breeds pride and vanity in navigators. It begins with a sextant measurement of the angle between the navigator, the horizon, and a celestial body – sun, stars, or moon. Skill in the use of the sextant is acquired gradually with time and practice. Accuracy with the instrument depends on one’s familiarity with it under a wide range of conditions and the experience to judge the quality of each reading. A navigator’s proficiency with a sextant is like that of a gunslinger’s with a pistol, something that over the course of time and many different situations breeds an instinctive ease of handling and nicety of result. It is said that a navigator’s second thousand sights show a considerable improvement over the first thousand.

  The maths is the straightforward part. The sextant reading is taken through a series of corrections for height of eye above the sea surface, atmospheric refraction, time of day at one’s own location, and Greenwich mean time; that altered set of numbers takes the navigator into a book of gloriously precomputed tables of spherical trigonometry that are no harder to use than a telephone book.

  That is what Donald Crowhurst – and all the Golden Globe sailors – did to determine true positions, and which he continued to do to know where he actually was. But to calculate the second, fraudulent series of positions, based on imaginary extrapolations of geography and mathematics, is a formidably daunting exercise that would stump most honest navigators. Crowhurst, an able mathematician with a ready grasp of both the technical and the abstruse, was up to it. But it made a lot of work for him and added immeasurably to the deepening stress of his situation.

  He began preparing the fake record for eventual scrutiny. It had to appear seamless, so from 6 December, in the logbook he had been keeping since the beginning of the voyage, he wrote his false positions, and the calculations for them, and specious, salty descriptions of his day.

  Crowhurst’s working methods, bred and polished in the scientific laboratories of the military and private electronics companies, were neat and meticulous. He made notes for himself about everything; even before he had begun his deception, he wrote outlines of what he wanted to say when making innocuous radiotelephone calls to Clare. By the time he cabled Rodney Hallworth on 10 December with news of his record run, he had a neatly transcribed table of fake and actual positions for each day worked out. The remarks alongside the fake positions were descriptions of shipboard routine, difficulties, and food he had prepared, much of it written in the sort of gruff heroic tone used by Chichester in his book Gypsy Moth IV Circles the World. Crowhurst had read that book over and over, and now he was creating his own mythology.

  On 12 December, Teignmouth Electron was becalmed 400 miles north of the equator. During the morning, an ordinary tropical rain squall swept over the yacht, and its winds of perhaps 20 knots damaged a part of the Hasler wind vane. This became fodder for a heroic report for the media. The next day, 13 December, Crowhurst cabled Rodney Hallworth that a 45-knot line squall had smashed the wind vane, but he thought repairs were possible. Four days later, while he was still 180 miles north of the equ
ator, he cabled Hallworth that he was ‘over’ the equator and sailing fast. On 20 December, he cabled again saying that he was off the coast of Brazil and averaging 170 miles daily.

  His true mileage for that day was 13.

  He was stuck in the Doldrums, a band of calms or light and flukey winds, generally 600 to 800 miles wide, which lies roughly along the equator between the trade wind belts of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Wind-ship sailors have always hated this area, where they can drift for days while making no progress. Yachts – unless they are racing, when use of an engine is cheating – have always tried to carry enough fuel to power through the Doldrums. Crowhurst’s phoney reports gave no evidence of his being slowed down at all here, as were the other competitors. He appeared, to those at home, to have experienced no Doldrums at all, but amid the press excitement generated by his progress, no one, except Craig Rich and Sir Francis Chichester, wondered at his marvellous luck.

  How much of his deception was, at this stage, real intent, or still simply a feasibility study, the sort of thing Crowhurst’s engineer’s mind would readily tackle, is uncertain. At least one other Golden Globe competitor admitted to toying with the same idea.

  I even considered the idea of simply resting in the sun for a year and then returning home to say that I had been all the way round the world …

  This popped into John Ridgway’s mind as he grew unbearably lonely and anxious and thought about giving up, and the shame of abandoning his project, of disappointing all the people who had helped him. Out of sight, in a remote corner of any ocean or up a jungle river, such a thing might have been possible. But Ridgway quickly discounted it.

  First, I doubted if it could be carried off, too many people would see through the story. Second, and more important, it would not be possible for me to live with such a fabrication.

  But Crowhurst’s cabled positions were not simply wishful chunks of mileage that sounded good. He had started working out consistent dates and positions for his fake voyage that stretched out for weeks ahead. He plotted them directly on to a routing chart. What began as a discrepancy of a few hundred miles between his actual and fake positions quickly grew to projections of thousands of miles away. By drawing a line between these points, connecting the dots on the chart, he could then tell at any time on any day where he was supposed to be and what his course was. This would be a necessity for keeping Hallworth and the world informed of his progress.

  Yet at the same time he was also making a detailed map of the harbour at Rio de Janeiro. Like the one he had drawn of Funchal in Madeira, this was full of information taken from small-scale charts and his Admiralty pilot books, showing lights, landmarks, navigational hazards. This is what a navigator must do when making for a port he hasn’t planned to visit, and for which, therefore, he is carrying no large-scale charts aboard his vessel. There would be no other reason to make such a harbour chart.

  Crowhurst would certainly not have thought of putting in at Rio on the quiet to make repairs and then returning to the race. His boat would instantly have been seen and visited by harbour police and immigration officials. The only reason for going into Rio would have been to give up.

  Whatever torments of indecision still plagued him, he soon sent another cable to Rodney Hallworth. This did not give a sailorly latitude and longitude position; few of Crowhurst’s cables did. Instead, they invariably named or suggested a location – ‘off Brazil’ – that implied a position from which tremendous progress could be inferred. On this cable he wrote that he was sailing ‘towards Trinidade’. He meant Trindade, which both Moitessier and Tetley had sighted. This was even getting ahead of his fakery, for it was 350 miles south of the false position he had worked out for 24 December. Somewhere, either in the radio transmission of the cable to England (all the cables were sent by Morse code, at which Crowhurst was highly proficient) or in its transcription, by the time the cable reached Hallworth at his Devon News office, the e had fallen off Trinidade. Hallworth knew Crowhurst didn’t mean Trinidad in the West Indies, so, with a hazy but convenient grasp of geography and unbounded optimism and pride in his client, he remembered another island somewhere down there in the South Atlantic, where Donald surely was now that he had crossed the equator, which had figured in the reports of other Golden Globe racers: Tristan da Cunha. That’s where Donald was, Hallworth realised. Tristan da Cunha. About 2,500 miles beyond Crowhurst’s carefully calculated fake position and 3,000 miles from his actual position – and, better still, at 38 degrees south, at the very edge of the Roaring Forties.

  Hallworth’s boy was doing sensationally, and he made sure the press knew it.

  21

  AT 7.51 A.M. EST ON SATURDAY 21 December 1968, Apollo 8 took off from Cape Kennedy, heading for a drive-by on the dark side of the moon. It was the Apollo programme’s final run-up to the epochal voyage that President John Kennedy had decreed must be made before the decade was out: the landing of a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.

  Apollo 8 carried three brave astronauts: Frank Borman, 40, James Lovell, 40, and William Anders, 35. Their journey of half a million miles, there and back, and ten orbits of the moon, would be made, if all went well, in six days. They sped towards the moon at 24,000 miles – a distance equal to a little more than the circumference of the earth – per hour.

  This was naturally the front-page story in the Sunday Times on 22 December.

  Deep inside the paper a single column gave the latest details of the much dodgier business of getting a man alone in a sailboat around the world in ten months.

  Robin Knox-Johnston, who had not been heard from since tacking out of Otago Harbour on 20 November, was thought to be halfway across the Pacific, in a region where gale-force winds occurred with ‘disconcerting frequency’. His sponsor, the Sunday Mirror, expected him to round Cape Horn sometime in early January.

  Of Moitessier there was fresh news. He had been sighted off the coast of Tasmania four days before, on Wednesday 18 December. The Indian Ocean had slowed him down: he had covered the 6,000 miles between the Cape of Good Hope and Tasmania at an average of 100 miles per day. Nevertheless, his overall daily average was 128.4 miles, and the gap between him and Knox-Johnston was closing by 210 miles per week. It still looked to be a photo finish in England sometime in April.

  Nigel Tetley had made contact with Perth Radio, Australia, even more recently, on Friday 20 December, giving a position in the middle of the Indian Ocean, not far from Amsterdam Island and St Paul’s Rocks. He had covered a fast 185 miles in the previous twenty-four hours. His total distance sailed was now 9,900 miles at an average of 100 miles per day. Tetley’s steady, dogged, seamanlike progress provided little in the way of exciting copy, so the Times noted that both Amsterdam Island and St Paul’s Rocks were uninhabited but stocked with depots containing clothing and provisions for castaways.

  Rodney Hallworth had not yet turned Trindade into Tristan da Cunha, and the Sunday Times, while reporting that Donald Crowhurst had crossed the equator, gave only his last known position, several hundred miles north of the equator. Despite his surging progress, Crowhurst’s daily average was still far below Tetley’s, at 79 miles per day. But his every communication was more exciting, and the newspaper was able to relate the damage done by the 45-knot wind that had smashed his self-steering gear and a jib pole.

  It was a week before Christmas when Varley Wisby and his two sons, fishing off the southwest coast of Tasmania, saw a red-hulled ketch coming straight for them. On deck a lone man was flashing a small mirror, catching the sunlight – he was signaling to them. They steered for the sailboat, then slowed, manoeuvring their fishing boat carefully until it ranged alongside the ketch, close but not too close, matching its speed.

  The sailor, a Frenchman, who looked emaciated beneath a filthy wool sweater and baggy black trousers, his hair and grey-streaked beard as long and wild as a yogi’s, tossed a metal film can across the water to the Wisbys. He told them he was in a yacht race and asked them t
o give the can to someone who would pass it on to the Sunday Times in England. Varley promised to give it to the commodore of the Royal Tasmanian Yacht Club when they returned to shore in three days’ time.

  The Frenchman asked the whereabouts of three other racers – Bill King, Nigel Tetley, Loïck Fougeron – but the Wisbys knew nothing of them. One of Varley’s boys had heard something about an English yachtsman who had sailed past New Zealand without stopping. When? the Frenchman asked eagerly. The Wisby boy didn’t know. He’d heard it on the radio sometime in the past month maybe. The sailor thanked them, turned his boat by fiddling with the little vane at its stern, and veered off towards open water. Varley and his boys watched him go.

  Moitessier had sworn to himself he would not risk his boat and voyage again to send word to his family and the press, but he also hungered for news of his friends and rivals, and he had spent a long day and a sleepless night sailing through rain squalls in the Entrecasteaux Channel, off Hobart, Tasmania, in hopes of finding a boat. During the black night, the phosphorescence in the water was so bright and glowing that he repeatedly believed it to be breakers on a reef. He hove to half a dozen times to listen for any sound of danger. He was breaking all his own well-learned rules to be here, and all through the night he feared the price was waiting for him somewhere in the darkness.

  But then dawn came and he found the fishing boat, delivered his can of film and letters and messages, and made his getaway without mishap. The sky cleared, the wind fell away to a breeze from the west, and he headed offshore, gliding close enough to a lighthouse to hear the ratcheting of a cricket ashore. Anxiety gave way to joy as he sailed into the Tasman Sea.