A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Thus a pilot chart can tell a sailor in the middle of the Pacific stretch of the Southern Ocean in January, heading for Cape Horn, what to expect in every 5-degree square along the way.

  They will also guarantee his disappointment and frustration. All the information is statistically averaged from millions of observations, and on any given day the weather at sea, as ashore, can confound all predictions.

  All through December 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston experienced winds in the Southern Ocean contrary to everything he had been expecting, and despite a break for Christmas cheer, this proved the most frustrating and anxious period of his whole voyage. In an area where the pilot charts, and every written account of passages made there, practically guaranteed the famous westerlies of the Roaring Forties, he was met with days and weeks of easterly winds blowing in his face, slowing him down, at times stopping him. Beating his way east against infuriating head winds, he was convinced that not far behind, and getting closer every day, ‘the Frenchman’ was surfing downwind towards him, getting the favourable conditions touted by the pilot charts. It drove him mad. It made his British blood boil. It brought out his best English schoolboy xenophobia:

  December 9th, 1968 … Of all the lousy things to happen; easterlies in an area which is renowned for westerlies … If the Frogs are meant to win – OK, but there is no need to torture me as well as allowing me to lose, and the Chinese could hardly have thought up a slower, more destructive method of torturing a person than this …

  December 10th, 1968. No change still. I cannot make it out at all … Perhaps if I decided to turn round and head back to New Zealand I’d get westerlies! …

  December 29th, 1968 … I just give up! Someone is going to have to rewrite the books! …

  December 30th, 1968 … Tacking north and south and making no progress at all, whilst somewhere to the west and probably not far away now, I’ll bet the Frenchman is having beautiful westerlies.

  For Knox-Johnston, who could not accept that anyone but an Englishman should be the first to make a solo nonstop circumnavigation, the spectre of ‘the Frenchman’ having all the luck with the weather and sailing hard up his backside was probably a great boon. From New Zealand onwards, after Bruce Maxwell had told him of Moitessier’s pace and position, Knox-Johnston’s logbook makes frequent reference to this hard-pressing threat to his lead. It’s unlikely that he would have driven himself and Suhaili quite so hard without it.

  Tacking northeast and southeast, according to whichever slant was more favourable, adverse winds drove him north above the fortieth parallel. When he slept, he began to be tortured by a recurrent nightmare that his entire voyage was simply a qualifying preliminary to the real race, which would begin once they had all returned to England. Finally, when he reached 37 degrees south, he altered course in disgust and headed south, even a little west of south, for three days until he found the consistent westerlies he’d been looking for. He concluded that he had strayed too far north and should have turned south much earlier, and had wasted ten days. For the rest of December he tried to keep to 48 degrees south. This was close to the dotted line on his chart that showed the northerly limit where icebergs might be encountered, but he felt he had lost so much ground to Moitessier that he would chance it.

  Although it was now midsummer in the Southern Hemisphere, the weather remained grim. Gales and hail-hurling squalls regularly overtook Suhaili. The seas were still high, throwing the boat around, and Knox-Johnston inside it. Water still poured in through the closed hatches and around the edges of the cabin, and he lived and slept surrounded and clothed by constant wet and damp. He thought longingly of the tropics, which were, as they seemed, half a world away. He had by now read all the novels aboard, so when he huddled in his sodden sleeping bag reading for escape, it was now Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy that he waded through.

  Early in January he added more south to his course, crossing into the fifties, and began his descent towards the Horn, which lay 1,500 miles away at 56 degrees south. As he neared South America and dropped further and further south, the weather brought authentic Cape Horn conditions: depression followed depression racing east, overtaking the boat, bringing gale-force winds that boxed the compass, epic crashing waves, and a steep drop in temperature. He had a heater aboard but stopped using it after 13 January because it was consuming too much kerosene. Wet clothes hung everywhere in the streaming cabin, and Knox-Johnston smoked, drank coffee, and upped his whisky intake in a vain effort to stay warm.

  In the early hours of 10 January, he was awakened by the boat’s violent motion as it lost way and luffed up into the wind. On deck he found the mainsail had split in half along one seam. It would take hours of sewing to repair, but he had an older mainsail aboard which he raised in its place – the older one now didn’t look so bad compared to the frayed and damaged ‘new’ one. Later, as he was making breakfast, the boat lurched and steaming hot porridge covered his hand. Large blisters rose over the burn, which he soon broke during hectic sail-handling, leaving the raw skin exposed to icy sea spray.

  Repeated soakings and constant wet had taken their effect on his Marconi radio. It would still receive, but seemed no longer able to transmit. Daily he tried placing calls to stations he could hear, but none could hear him. The British newspapers reported that although he was expected off the Horn around 12 January, he had not been seen or heard from since leaving Otago on 21 November. Knox-Johnston heard on the shortwave Voice of America that the Chilean Navy was looking out for a ‘damaged’ ketch battling towards Cape Horn.

  On Sunday 12 January the Sunday Mirror, Knox-Johnston’s sponsor, took the optimistic line that he had rounded the Horn and was already heading north in the Atlantic. Falkland Islands Radio was listening for him. The Sunday Times speculated that he could still be in the Pacific, with ‘the hour of his trial’ still awaiting him. In fact, that Sunday he was still 480 miles from the Horn, painfully breaking the repaired blisters on his burned hand.

  On Monday, he noticed that the jib stay was stranding – its wires breaking and unraveling. In 40-knot winds and above, Knox-Johnston crawled out on to the bowsprit with wrenches in both hands – ‘hanging on with my eyelashes’ as the boat lifted and plunged him in and out of drenching waves – while he unscrewed the bottom of the stay, lashed it back on board out of the way, and set the jib ‘flying’, supported only by its own luffwire.

  On Tuesday, the gooseneck of the main boom broke again. The metal casting where it was bolted to the fitting on the mainmast had sheared. The flying jib had flogged and opened a seam in its foot, and Knox-Johnston crawled to the bow to sew a few stitches in place.

  Wednesday he made a crude but ingenious repair to the broken gooseneck, pirating a metal plate from the defunct self-steering system, sawing a slot into the end of the boom into which he bolted one end of the plate, bolting the other end on to the mainmast. He reinforced the jury-rigged end of the boom with a wrapping of fibreglass, and when that had hardened, rove around the repair two ‘turk’s heads’, decorative-looking rope whippings that were in fact stronger than the fibreglass. He finished the ropework as the wind and sea rose and waves began breaking over the boat. He was now 200 miles from Cape Horn.

  Thursday, another depression brought storm-force winds of 50 knots. While he was sail-handling on deck, hail drove into the raw, weeping flesh exposed beneath the blisters on his burned hand.

  Early on Friday morning 17 January, he spotted the lonely Horn outrider islands of the Diego Ramirez group 15 miles to the south. The drowned chain of the southernmost Andes appeared to the north a few hours later. The day was squally, but with clearing periods between the squalls, when Knox-Johnston could gaze at the rugged cordilleras capped with glacial ice and think about the immensity of his voyage and the home stretch awaiting him after rounding this last and greatest marker on the race course. The cold wind backed from the west-northwest to the west during the day, and dropped in strength through the afternoon until it blew a
t a gentle 5 knots by early evening.

  At 1900 a brief rain squall passed over the boat and when it cleared, Cape Horn – a false cape, for it is really a small island with a sphinxlike profile, far less impressive in appearance than Gibraltar – was clearly visible to the north. He had already passed it.

  ‘Yippee!!!’ Knox-Johnston wrote in his logbook. Then he had a drink and opened his Aunt Aileen’s fruit cake. It had spent seven months wrapped in foil inside a cake tin and was in perfect condition. Also in the tin was a page of the Times. He had something new to read.

  Sailing Route Across the Pacific Ocean

  Cope Horn passages: Robin Knox-Johnston, 17 January 1969

  Bernard Moitessier, 5 February 1969

  Nigel Tetley, 18 March 1969

  23

  BERNARD MOITESSIER CROSSED the Pacific fast. Daily runs: 146, 148, 143, 149, 148, 152, 166, 158, 147, 162, 169, 130, 111, 147, 142, 166. A thousand miles a week, week after week. The lightened Joshua was far fleeter than she had been three years earlier on the Tahiti–Alicante passage. Moitessier had evolved as a seaman. His daily runs through this same stretch of ocean were 20 to 40 miles greater than on the earlier voyage.

  He had reduced Knox-Johnston’s original nine-week lead to only two and a half weeks, and as the Englishman had suspected, he’d been luckier with the weather. He had the westerlies, but for many days past New Zealand they were light. However, Moitessier coaxed consistent runs out of Joshua. The midday temperature in his unheated cabin was in the 70s. He walked about the deck barefoot and was able to do his yoga exercises naked in the cockpit. He was more than halfway between New Zealand and the Horn before his first Pacific gale found him. It turned the sea white with foam, but it was not on a scale to trouble Joshua or elicit high-flown prose from her captain. The wind vane steered. Moitessier sat on his perch inside the hatch staring out of his turret at the fast-passing seas.

  He ate well. Skinny all his life, with a tendency to lose weight, he began to gain, always for him a sign of a sympathetic environment. His unceasing close communion with the three constant physical elements of his world – his boat, the sea, and the weather around him – filled him with joy. And to complete the picture of happy asceticism, his hair and beard had grown long and matted until he resembled a sailing holy man.

  Not since Captain Nemo had a man felt so comfortable and self-sufficient at sea. He had entered into a kind of seagoing stasis. The beginning and end of his long voyage grew remote, and deep in the vast middle he was untroubled by anything but the daily concerns of sailing ever onwards. The rhythm of the sea, the endless passing of waves, the daily surging progress of Joshua, the now perfect vessel, and his own highly attenuated skills and sensations all blended into a harmonious chord that pealed loud and clear inside Moitessier and gave him peace. He was a man who had gone to the mountaintop and found the elusive thing he had been looking for, and he had grown reluctant to think much beyond the looming milestone of Cape Horn.

  On 21 January, after his first Pacific gale had passed, the course turned more southerly as Moitessier began his descent towards the Horn. As he dropped through higher latitudes, he left the fine weather behind. The sky grew overcast and the temperature fell. Waves broke over the boat and sluiced along the deck. Now he wore foul-weather clothing and seaboots outside. When he came below with soaking socks, he changed into dry ones to wear in the cabin and tried to discipline himself to put the wet socks back on before going topside to handle sails, but it was too easy not to. Socks and wet clothes now hung in the cabin, the hatches remained closed, and it grew damp below. Southern Ocean conditions prevailed.

  He started wearing a safety harness, something he was not used to. Loïck Fougeron had given him one of the two harnesses that had come with Captain Browne. These were made of nylon webbing, and in the 1960s they were becoming popular on yachts, replacing the sailor’s old standby, at extreme moments, of tying a rope around the waist. Once a harness comes aboard a boat, it seems foolhardy not to wear it, but it comes at a price. A harness interferes with one’s natural and unconscious accommodation to a boat’s movement, something acquired after a few days at sea. It makes one move awkwardly, stopping and starting to clip on and off every few feet. Harnesses have unquestionably saved people from going overboard, but they have also failed, come undone, broken, chafed through, and sent people to their deaths. An overreliance on them breeds an atrophy of the best of all devices to keep a sailor aboard: a fully developed horror of going overboard. A thoughtful, determined refusal to go overboard, a most careful premeditation and visualisation of one’s movements on deck, lines strung around the perimeter of a boat, and an overall design to ensure staying aboard put the occasional wearing of a safety harness in its proper place: an additional measure, rather than a single fallible device.

  Moitessier’s harness bore the name ‘Annie’ marked with indelible ink. It had belonged to Annie Van de Wiele, an accomplished cruising voyager who, with her husband Louis, had sailed around the world in the steel yacht Omoo before they had built and sailed Captain Browne to the West Indies and sold her to Fougeron. Moitessier wore it mostly during the heaviest weather, when he clipped its snap-shackle to 3/16-inch steel wires stretched flat on deck, running from bow to stern on both sides of the boat. He learned the wire trick from Bill King, who used it aboard Galway Blazer II, which had no guardrails at the edge of its rounded decks. This allowed Moitessier to clip on once and move fore and aft while handling sail. He appreciated the harness and this wire system, but he also felt less mobile using it, and he felt the loss of his own more sensitive and certain link to his boat. He felt foolish ignoring the harness, however, so he tried to keep it with him – mostly in the pocket of his foul-weather jacket.

  As Joshua drove further south, the cold night sky made the stars and moon unusually luminous. Sometimes at sea, the moon’s first appearance above a dark horizon can have a startling effect. The points of its early or late crescents can resemble bright, unearthly horns coming out of the ocean a short distance away. It can suddenly pierce a clouded horizon and take on the characteristics of a city or an ocean liner. When one has been surprised by more than a few of these creepy apparitions, one reacts to weird night lights at sea by thinking, ‘Oh, yes, the moon doing one of its numbers again.’ So Moitessier thought one night close to Cape Horn when a slender spire of light rose from the sea into the clouds like a spotlight. How did the moon do that? he wondered. Then the ‘moonbeam’ widened and glowed and played among the clouds until he realised the phenomenon he was seeing had nothing to do with the moon. He wondered, with a chill, if it was the ‘white arch’ that Joshua Slocum had written about, the spectral white-squall forerunner of a great Cape Horn gale that had almost ended Spray’s voyage by carrying her into the ‘Milky Way’, a cluster of reefs and white water at the edge of the Straits of Magellan.

  Another spire rose, then another, and branches beamed out, spread, and soon covered half the southern sky, glowing and pulsating in pink and bluish tones like cold fire, and finally Moitessier knew that he was seeing the aurora australis, the southern sister of the northern lights. It lasted for nearly an hour, and he watched, dazzled, riven by its beauty.

  Strong winds, but still no great gales pushed him on down towards the Horn. As he grew closer, he spent more and more time on deck, day and night, held by the sea, the heavens, the weather, his boat, taking it all in. He stood on Joshua’s cabin top, or on her plunging, twisting bow, holding on to the steel pulpit or the inner forestay, wild hair and beard streaming, staring ahead, upwards, and at the sea around him, for hours, until driven below only by cold or hunger or exhaustion. These tended to, he returned to stand and watch again. The Ancient Mariner on a surfboard.

  None but the callowest sailor can pass Cape Horn without gratitude and trembling, without being acutely aware of its history, of all the ships, seamen, and civilian passengers, men, women, and children wrecked, smashed, and drowned there. Deaths that often came at the end of weeks of
the vilest discomfort and despair imaginable. For most sailors the Horn is their Everest; for Moitessier, it was Mount Olympus, a holy place, a crucible in which he, his seamanship, and the sea gods he believed in converged. For him it was Ultima Thule, to which he brought the eastern imagination of his childhood. It was going through the wardrobe to Narnia. He had passed it by once before, but after only twenty days at sea, and with his wife Françoise aboard to comfort and worry and distract him. Now after more than five months alone, he realised it was this totemic coordinate in time and place that he had been aiming for all along – not the race’s end. As he flew towards it, he stood exposed and raw at the centre of his world, sucking in every strand of sensation available to him.

  He sailed through a very different sea than Knox-Johnston. There was not a whit of fancy in the Englishman’s prosaic view of things, even when sighting the Horn. By comparison, Moitessier could have been on LSD. The beads of moisture on his sails were ‘living pearls’; phosphorescence in the waves became ‘globes of fire’, reminding him that he had once tried harpooning such lights, thinking they were the eyes of giant squids.

  Joshua drives towards the Horn under the light of the stars and the somewhat distant tenderness of the moon … I no longer know how far I have got, except that we long ago left the borders of too much behind.

  On 5 February the strong winds finally increased to gale force, yet under a blue sky and a brilliant sun that turned the sea a deep violet. He had covered 171 miles in the previous twenty-four hours, and now drove on faster. Feeling no hunger, he ate nothing all day.

  The Diego Ramirez islands appeared, a blue spot on the sunny horizon, in mid-afternoon. By twilight they were a speck far astern. The wind eased off with the coming night. Moitessier set his alarm for 0100 to be woken 20 miles from the Horn and turned in to sleep. When he woke, he knew from the angle of the risen moon through the portholes that he had slept through the alarm and possibly even passed the Horn. He went on deck and looked away to port, where he knew it lay. The night was clear, full of brilliant stars, and he saw only the moon with a cloud draping its moonshadow over the sea beneath it. The wind was lighter and had backed from the west to southwest, angling Joshua’s course 15 degrees closer towards the little island, the false cape.