A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Moitessier had found a very different Indian Ocean to the one that had pummelled Robin Knox-Johnston and Suhaili. Calms and winds too light had been his portion. He spent weeks sailing slowly if steadily, spending a lot of time on deck watching the ever-present albatrosses, mollymawks, Cape pigeons, and shearwaters. He practised yoga daily. He sat meditating for hours on Joshua’s deck, his long skinny legs easily pretzelled into the full lotus position.

  Once into the Tasman Sea, however, the Southern Ocean winds found him again and his speed picked up. With sails reefed and water tearing past Joshua’s hull, he made daily runs of 164, 147, 153 miles. He now religiously listened to the BBC World Service for news that he had been sighted off Tasmania, hoping that this might prompt a mention of Fougeron, Tetley, and King, but he heard nothing.

  Nowhere in Moitessier’s writing is he as respectful and affectionate as with his sailor friends, with whom he formed his closest bonds. They alone, he believed, shared and understood what he felt and knew about the sea – they understood him in ways his wife, girlfriends, and children did not. He was well aware that the greatest sailorly skills could mean nothing on the wrong day at sea, and he was constantly anxious about the welfare of the three men with whom he had shared plans, techniques, and hopes at Plymouth. His daily hope of hearing any word about them went unsatisfied. Whether because of this, or his brief contact with the Wisbys, or because he was less self-sufficient than he liked to think, with the approach of Christmas Moitessier was uncharacteristically overcome with loneliness.

  On Christmas Day he sighted the Cameron Mountains on New Zealand’s South Island. In unusually clear conditions, they stood up above the horizon, 50 miles away. Usually spartan and routine with his food, Moitessier took pains to make himself a Christmas dinner. Into a pot went a smoked York ham, a can of hearts of lettuce, garlic, onions, a can of tomato sauce, a quarter of a can of camembert cheese.

  Still he felt blue. He missed his friends and his family. And to torture himself, he remembered with remorseful detail a rat he had killed years before in Tahiti. He had found it on board and caught it by jamming it against the floor with a book. As he put a stone to his slingshot and took aim, the rat had given him a look that was haunting him still. Moitessier knew how the rat had felt: when the Japanese captured Saigon near the end of the Second World War, he had been imprisoned with his family. One day a Japanese guard came into the 20-year-old Moitessier’s cell intending to kill him. He raised his pistol, but they locked eyes until, inexplicably, the guard lowered the pistol and walked away. Now, years later, tenderised by solitude, Moitessier wished he had spared the rat.

  He drank away his guilt and grief and loneliness with a bottle of champagne given to him by Joshua’s designer, Jean Knocker, and went to bed with Joshua ghosting again over a calm sea.

  Two days later, the animal kingdom reappeared with an unequivocal message that the business with the rat was forgotten. The west wind was freshening and Joshua was sailing fast, passing south of Stewart Island (which Knox-Johnston had passed to the north during his storm in the Foveaux Strait). Moitessier’s dinner was growing cold in the pressure cooker on the stove because he wanted to pass the longitude of South Trap, a dangerous outlying reef below Stewart Island, before relaxing his vigilance and eating and sleeping. South Trap would mark his entrance to the Pacific Ocean, the last rocky obstacle between him and Cape Horn. He hopped up and down between deck and cabin, listening to and watching the sea, tweaking sheets for speed, rolling cigarettes below. Joshua sped on, steered as always by her vane gear.

  In the afternoon dark clouds obscured the horizon to the north, where he might have seen Stewart Island, and a large school of porpoises, perhaps a hundred of them, appeared around the boat, whistling and clicking, turning the water white with their breaching and splashing. Usually, these ‘playful’ (we anthro-pomorphically like to suppose) creatures swim alongside a yacht, criss-crossing singly or in synchronised groups in front of the bow wave. But that afternoon they gave Moitessier a show he had never seen before.

  A tight line of twenty-five porpoises swam abreast off his starboard side, rushing from stern to bow, and then veering off sharply, always to the right. Again and again and again, more than ten times, they regrouped and made this same manoeuvre, while the rest of the school behaved in a manner Moitessier construed as nervous: they moved erratically, they beat their tails on the surface, they created pandemonium around the fast-sailing Joshua. All the while, a single platoon continued its streaking, abrupt right-hand-turn manoeuvre. To the right. To the right. Moitessier watched astounded.

  Finally, instinctively, he looked at the compass, something he had not done in a while with the wind vane doing the steering. The west wind had shifted into the south without his noticing it, and Joshua was racing north, not east, towards the reefs of South Trap. Normally a shift in wind will alter the wave patterns of the surface, and very soon have them running at an angle to the older swell, a visible alteration of the sea state, and immediately felt by a sailor aboard a boat. But that afternoon there was, unusually, little or no swell, and Moitessier, not for the first time in his wreck-strewn life, had been fooled. He altered course to starboard, to the east – to the right, the direction of the porpoises’ abrupt turn.

  Their behaviour changed immediately. Their nervousness, their disruption of the sea surface, disappeared. Now they swam in their usual playful way. And as Moitessier watched them, wondering but not wondering at all about what had happened, one large black-and-white porpoise leapt clear of the water and somersaulted twice in the air before flopping back on to the surface. Twice more it leapt out of the sea to perform its ecstatic double somersault. The school remained swimming alongside Joshua for another three hours, for a total of five hours, an extraordinary length of time for such a visit. At dusk, when he was well past South Trap, the porpoises disappeared.

  On Monday 23 December, a strong gale overtook Nigel Tetley and Victress. At noon the thin PVC-coated wire connecting the steering wheel to the rudder parted. The same thing had happened 8,000 miles earlier, on 11 October, when he had been off the Cape Verde Islands. This time he replaced it with heavier rigging wire, hoping it would last longer. Victress was doing well in the strong winds, being steered by her wind vane, but Tetley, still getting used to Southern Ocean conditions, went to bed fully dressed in rain gear and sea boots, ready to jump on deck for anything.

  At nightfall on Christmas Eve the wind moderated, and Tetley began preparing his Christmas Day dinner. He had decided on a mushroom sauce for his roast pheasant and soaked some dried mushrooms. He tidied the cabin, baked bread, and got out his two presents to be opened in the morning.

  The weather cooperated with his Christmas plans. The moderate wind settled into the west, and Tetley raised his twin running sails, which helped the wind vane, and the boat steered itself all day.

  He opened his presents: a pewter tankard from Eve, a stainless steel comb from his son Mark. Strong metal from both. He drank sherry before lunch. He listened to a tape of Christmas carols from Guildford Cathedral.

  He took a photograph of himself tucking in to his Christmas dinner. It shows that he has done his best to make the occasion and his surroundings as civilised as possible. The cabin table is decorated with his last two or three oranges, the contents of his last packet of nuts, some raisins and sweets. There is his roast pheasant in his mushroom sauce on a small plate, Eve’s tankard partially filled with champagne from the bottle that also sits on the table. There is little in the spacious cabin to indicate that he is far out at sea, or even (if one ignores the Indian Ocean chart partially visible in the foreground) on a boat at all. He looks for all the world like a man sitting down to his solitary Christmas dinner in a rather cramped but neat bedsit in London’s Earl’s Court, filled with dutiful Christmas spirit, and he couldn’t look any lonelier.

  Further astern of him than anybody knew, Donald Crowhurst was struggling to hold on to himself over Christmas.

  On Ch
ristmas Eve he recorded a rambling monologue on the tape recorder given to him by the BBC. He talked, trying for a Chichesterian tone, about the incessant work to be done aboard a yacht out at sea, but loneliness was on his mind and he couldn’t keep it out of his Christmas musings. ‘There is something rather melancholy and desolate about this part of the Atlantic Ocean … Not that I’m depressed or feeling sorry for myself by any means, but … Christmas … does tend to make one a little bit melancholy. And one thinks of one’s friends and family, and one knows that they’re thinking of one, and the sense of separation is somehow increased by the – by the loneliness of this spot …’ Then he played ‘Silent Night’ on his harmonica, remarking afterwards that it was a ‘melancholy’ carol. He was a fair harmonica player, able to invest tunes like ‘Summertime’ with a sad, bluesy feeling. He then tried to cheer himself up by playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’.

  Later he made a radio-telephone call to Clare. She asked him for a latitude-longitude position, which Rodney Hallworth badly wanted instead of the vague but suggestive geographics Crowhurst had been cabling him. He answered that he hadn’t had a chance to take recent sights. Then – forgetting or ignoring his own well-calculated fake progress – he told her that he was ‘somewhere off Cape Town’. He was well south of the equator now, but this wild exaggeration, thousands of miles beyond his actual or falsely plotted positions, was so impossible that it suggests a hopeless abandonment of any effort at pretence or reality.

  Then he asked Clare how she was coping at home. The children, who had been following his progress on a chart taped to a wall, missed their father badly. There had been problems with the slow but supposedly ongoing manufacture and sales of his Navicator, the money from which they had both hoped would help keep her and the family going while he was away. In truth, hardly any money was coming in and Clare’s position was approaching desperate; she would soon be forced to go on the dole. And two days earlier there had been a fire in the stable behind the house that had been his workshop. At this point, Crowhurst would almost certainly have sped happy and relieved straight for the nearest port if Clare had told him things were difficult or pleaded in any way for him to stop and come home. But she did not. She bravely mentioned nothing of these troubles to her husband, and he lied back to her that all was well with him. The impossibility for each of them of being honest with the other made for a strained call.

  After they disconnected, Crowhurst could not leave the radio alone. He was desperate for human contact. He stayed up all night tuning into various shortwave frequencies, picking up news bulletins from around the world. He had been hoping for messages from Rodney Hallworth, Stanley Best, or even the town councilmen of Bridgwater, to all of whom he had sent Christmas cables, but he received nothing. At 0527 he recorded in his radio log: ‘Sighs heard.’

  From his night of loneliness and scrambled radio voices carrying snippets of dire news from around the world, he wove a tortured Christmas poem.

  Keeping a sort of watch on sails by night,

  Alone,

  The rigging sighs a sigh of cosmic sorrow

  For weeping doves that die maybe tomorrow

  On 12.7 × 105 irradiated olive trees.

  A sigh to fill a man’s soul with melancholy.

  Waves! Sweep away my melancholy!

  My footstool’s a 10 lb case of rice

  To the North-east 2.5 × 103 miles,

  250 × 103 babies will slowly die, too weak to fuss

  (Carbohydrate deficiency, they tell us

  on 15.402 mHz)

  Herrod, would you not solve overpopulation thus?

  Please, be informed, there is a Santa Claus!

  After his call to Clare, he steered southwest towards land, closing with the northeast Brazilian coast, coming within 20 miles of João Pessoa. Going on deck every now and then for a lookout, it’s possible that he saw the loom of shore lights that night. He had not been this close to land since leaving England.

  Then he altered course again, away from shore and people, heading southeast down into the South Atlantic.

  Only Robin Knox-Johnston found within himself the makings of a merry Christmas. He began by feeling slightly put out at the idea of spending Christmas alone, but after he opened the whisky, thoughts of his family and Christmases past soon had him laughing out loud. After two glasses he went out on deck, climbed on the cabin top, and belted out his own carol service. He ended Christmas Eve feeling ‘quite merry’.

  On Christmas Day he took care over the preparation of his dinner: he fried tins of stewed steak, potatoes, and peas, ‘cooked separately for a change’, and made a currant duff. At three in the afternoon – the time of the Queen’s speech, one of the special charms of Christmas for Knox-Johnston and his family – he drank a Loyal Toast.

  That evening he tried contacting radio stations in New Zealand and Chile but was unable to get through. However, conditions were perfect for signals from AM stations in Texas, Illinois, and California to bounce off the atmosphere and reach him in the far South Pacific, and from one of these that night he first heard about the Apollo 8 moon journey.

  It gave me food for thought. There they were, three men risking their lives to advance our knowledge, to expand the frontiers that have so far held us to this planet. The contrasts between their magnificent effort and my own trip were appalling. I was doing absolutely nothing to advance scientific knowledge … True, once Chichester had shown that this trip was possible, I could not accept that anyone but a Briton should be the first to do it, and I wanted to be that Briton. But nevertheless to my mind there was still an element of selfishness in it. My mother, when asked for her opinion of the voyage before I sailed, had replied that she considered it ‘totally irresponsible’ and on this Christmas Day I began to think she was right. I was sailing round the world simply because I bloody well wanted to – and, I realised, I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

  His voyage might have been a small one compared to the Apollo flight, but he was driven by the same genetic impulse that powered NASA, and in his own way he was exploring the same boundaries of human endeavour. Furthermore, he was enjoying himself. That was Knox-Johnston’s special adaptation and qualification. He was at home at sea.

  John Ridgway was not. Nor was Chay Blyth. Both soldiers, brutally tough men, saw a circumnavigation as an ordeal to be endured, and both hated being at sea. Bill King enjoyed his voyage until he saw that others would probably beat him home; he lost heart long before he was capsized. Fougeron lacked the genetic impulse – he didn’t want it badly enough. Crowhurst had devised a personal hell. Tetley was plugging away despite boredom and loneliness with a peculiar, dogged determination.

  Only Moitessier equalled Knox-Johnston for the sheer pleasure he derived from his epic voyage. Only these two were really happy aboard their boats at sea.

  22

  IN 1842, AN AMERICAN NAVAL OFFICER, Matthew Fontaine Maury, took charge of the US Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments. There he began collecting and collating weather observations recorded by sea captains in their logbooks. He looked beyond the information gathered by naval ships to search out the logbooks and diaries of merchant ship masters. He found a treasure trove.

  By the early nineteenth century, whaling ships – half the world’s fleet being American vessels from two towns, Nantucket and New Bedford – were poking their bluff-bowed noses into every corner of the known and unknown world. As whales grew scarcer in the historic grounds long plundered by whalers, these heavy, unhandy ships ventured perilously deep into the Arctic and Antarctic, becoming in every respect vanguard explorers of the furthest reach of the earth’s oceans. No less bold than explorers like Cook, they found little or no fame for their voyages, only the product sought by their industry. Assiduously, the whaling masters and their equally intrepid brethren aboard sealing vessels made notes and surveys, maps, drawings, and watercolour paintings of their newfound territories; and every day, throughout voyages lasting three and four years at a time a
way from their home ports, they wrote up morning, noon, and evening observations of the weather they were experiencing. ‘Heavy snow all morning with gales from W. snow and wind fell off in the pm. seas down with short fetch now in lee of Pt. Barrow. Fog in the evening, a warm breeze from direction of land to the S. So end these twenty-four hours.’

  Maury and his team gathered thousands of such observations and made of them wind and current charts covering the known world, with accompanying explanations and sailing directions. For the first time mariners had available to them reams of written and diagrammatic information about the seas they intended sailing to, rather than the useful but limited oral lore handed down from old salt to young.

  Maury’s work was the basis for the pilot charts and sailing directions now carried aboard all ships at sea. Today, instant weather faxes tell sailors what’s coming their way, but at the time of the Golden Globe race, pilot charts were the main predictor of the weather and sea conditions a ship, or a yacht, would encounter.

  Pilot charts are the visual opposite of land maps: the land masses at their perimeters are blank, but the sea spaces are crammed with information. Oceans are divided into a grid of near-squares, 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude (at the equator, this square is 300 by 300 miles; the longitude distances progressively diminish going further north and south), and in each square is a ‘wind rose’ giving the average wind strength and direction that will be found there, and the percentage of time when gales and calms can be experienced. They also show where icebergs may be encountered, the path of tropical and extratropical cyclones, atmospheric pressure, the direction of ocean currents, air and sea temperatures, magnetic variation, and the routes across the ocean taken by full- and low-powered ships. There are charts containing all this information for all the world’s seas and oceans for each month of the year. They are the essential tool used by navigators, shipping companies, and lone yachtsmen to determine the optimum route across an ocean.