Then the cloud moved, and there was Cape Horn beneath the moon, less than 10 miles away – a small, black, rocky shape against the starry sky at the edge of the dark sea. Moitessier was overcome with chills of euphoria.
The seaman’s traditional rounding of Cape Horn was really the whole passage from 50 degrees south to 50 degrees south around the bottom of South America, either from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the harder, meaner passage against the prevailing westerlies. That 1,000-mile passage contained so many attendant terrors – storms, drifting glacial ice, currents, and the screaming katabatic williwaws of Tierra del Fuego, Slocum’s white-arched squall – that could stop a ship and shove her backwards along her wake, making her lose in an afternoon sea miles that had taken weeks of desperate struggle to gain, that not until the latitude of 50 degrees south in the destination ocean had been reached could the Horn be safely said to be astern. That was the full meaning of rounding the false cape Moitessier saw across the moonlit sea.
He well knew it. He knew that so far he had been lucky. Not until he neared the Falkland Islands in three or four days’ time would he be properly past Cape Horn.
Yet he celebrated the passing of the rock. The high-wire state of mind that had gripped him for two days now eased up. He went below, turned up the cabin light, made coffee and rolled a cigarette, and allowed his thoughts at last to turn towards his destination.
24
IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY, the Sunday Times photographed Françoise Moitessier, Clare Crowhurst, and Eve Tetley together aboard the Discovery, the ship that had carried British polar hero–bungler Captain Robert Scott on his first expedition to the Antarctic in 1901. The ship, moored on the Thames near the Tower of London, had tall masts that provided a suitably nautical frame for a photograph of the three sailors’ wives. On Sunday 12 January, the newspaper ran an article with the macabre headline, ‘The Sea Widows They Left Behind’.
Françoise Moitessier, who had already sailed around Cape Horn, declared that her own ambition was to be the first woman to sail alone around the world without touching land.
Clare Crowhurst provided a more prosaic, wifely point of view. She didn’t have nightmares about her husband, she said, but her 7-year-old son, Roger, did, in which he saw his father standing at the door to his room, staring at him. Her 8-year-old boy, Simon, on the other hand, thought sailing around the world was nothing and planned to swim around when he was ‘old enough’.
Eve Tetley was confident of her husband’s chances. The racers were only just past the halfway point, and since five of the nine starters had ‘gone down’, she said, others were likely to drop out and his position would become stronger as the race went on.
The next morning her husband almost went down himself. At 0500 on Monday 13 January, Nigel Tetley was 450 miles south of Cape Leeuwin, western Australia, when a wave struck Victress along the whole length of her beam, with a single sledgehammer blow. She was lying ahull in a gale, drifting sideways at the time. Water tore through the wheelhouse curtains, through the cockpit doors, and into the cabin. Tetley, who was below, didn’t see the wave coming. He only saw it smash against the cabin windows so hard he was sure they would break. Amazingly, they held. Two hours later the wind had risen to hurricane force, and the seas, Tetley wrote in his logbook, were unlike any he had seen before.
Waves or seas ‘unlike anything I’d ever seen’ is an inadequate last-resort description, yet one frequently employed by hardened seamen in extreme conditions. Seasoned sailors come to know that their own impressions of great waves at sea, even when measured by eye against the known height of an object, such as the mast of one’s boat, tend to be exaggerated by as much as 100 per cent. More than 100 years of oceanographic studies, and now wave height measurements taken from satellite-sensitive GPS transponders on weather buoys, have shown that waves of 30 feet or higher are the rare product of unusually powerful winter storms in the high North Atlantic or the high latitudes of the Pacific. But even knowing this, what experienced sailors might rationally understand of the reality of waves at sea is driven from their minds and replaced by subjective terror. Fifteen-foot waves beneath a dark sky, driven by a shrieking wind, look terrible enough – great grey-green impersonal mountains with the density of concrete looming high overhead, and always more coming without pause or end. Being tossed about on them like flotsam removes every last vestige of a physical sense of security, so that the observer easily believes he or she may soon die in this nameless place far out at sea, far from shore and safety and loved ones. It is this dam-bursting of a lifetime of shored-up fears, reducing one to the most fearful childlike state, that makes the awful sea look at least twice as terrible as it really is.
The photographs sailors take of the great waves that impress them so at the height of a storm, are always later disappointing in their inability to convey what such a scene ‘felt like’. Ironically, the impossible and wholly unrealistic computer-generated waves and conditions depicted in a film like The Perfect Storm do in fact provide very accurate impressions of what it looks like far out at sea in a terrible storm. It is their excessive exaggeration that mirrors the subjective impression of the human observer. Yet the movie feels safe. It comes without the horrifying realisation that this is real, there’s no way out, nothing in all the world will save you now but luck. This is what turns big waves into the vertiginous forms and shapes found only in nightmares.
Nigel Tetley, an experienced seaman, guessed that the great waves he saw that day in the Southern Ocean south of Australia were 80 feet high. He may have been right – maybe they looked 160 feet high. His writing is plain and not given to embellishment.
His great Southern Ocean storm continued all day. All day he believed that Victress would break up at any moment and he would be drowned. At the same time, the persistently hopeful side of human nature in him vowed that if he didn’t die he would sail north to Albany and give up. But he didn’t die, and the wind blew the trimaran away over the sea almost as fast as the onrushing waves, few of which hit her with any force after the first smash.
The next day the wind dropped to normal gale force, and when he saw how remarkably little damage had been done – the torn wheelhouse curtain, a soaked battery charger – he decided to carry on, if he could, as far as New Zealand, and see what things looked like then.
This was a starkly courageous decision. When Suhaili had finally lost her self-steering rudder a little further east in the Great Australian Bight, Knox-Johnston had wavered and thought about giving up in Melbourne. It was the knowledge that he was in the lead, that he stood a chance of winning the race, that had pushed him on. Nigel Tetley had no such encouragement. Nor, having heard from his radio contacts of Moitessier’s much faster progress, could he hope for the cash prize for the fastest voyage. He had only the cold comfort of knowing that these were the conditions he could expect now that he had left the Indian Ocean and sailed at last below the fortieth parallel. This was what the Southern Ocean was all about and he could look forward to three more months of it, with no chance of a prize at the end of it. Still he sailed east.
(Nearing western Australia a week earlier, he had contacted Perth Radio and found he had a call waiting for him. He was patched through to Dr Francis Smith, president of the Western Australian Trimaraners Association. Dr Smith sent him heartfelt greetings on behalf of all Australian trimaran owners. The safety of multihulls was then being seriously questioned in Australia; five such craft had been lost in Australian waters in the last year, fifteen dead from their crews. Authorities had demanded investigations. Nigel Tetley had appeared at a propitious moment, and found himself celebrated as the poster boy for the Aussie trimaran movement. His reluctance to let his brother multihullers down was probably a factor in his decision to keep going, along with his amazement at how well Victress had stood up to her first Southern Ocean drubbing.)
Most of the Golden Globe racers exhibited an abundance of Ulysses factor traits, but Tetle
y did not conform to the profile. He was a man with a steady job who one day simply read about a race and decided instantly to join it. He was often frightened and perhaps less sure of the reasons for his circumnavigation than the others, but once he had decided to go – very late and almost impulsively compared to the long-planned campaigns of his rivals – he stuck to his course. In his deceiving ordinariness, in the apparent wispiness of his motivation, and in the extraordinary steadiness of his resolve, he was the strangest of the nine.
Rough weather followed him across the Great Australian Bight. Like Moitessier, unlike Knox-Johnston, he passed to the south of Tasmania, a more direct route towards New Zealand. His sponsor, Music for Pleasure, hired an aeroplane to take pictures of Victress as she sailed south of Hobart, but the aeroplane couldn’t find him. Tetley didn’t wait around but headed across the Tasman Sea. Approaching New Zealand, he thought about sailing through Foveaux Strait, like Knox-Johnston, as a shortcut rather than going around Stewart Island, but overcast conditions gave him poor sextant readings and he wound up off the south side of Stewart Island. He cut between North and South Trap reefs and the southern tip of the island, then steered northeast for a day, close to the New Zealand coast, feasting on the green and rugged scenery that reminded him of the Scottish coastline he had seen from Victress on the Round Britain race. On 2 February, he rounded Tairoa Head into Otago Harbour, where Suhaili had gone aground, and found a small fishing boat to take his package of mail and photographs. The fisherman offered him a crayfish, but the Sunday Times race rules, which would have termed such a gift ‘material assistance’, forced Tetley to decline. His package was quickly forwarded to England, and the photograph of Tetley eating his lonely Christmas Day lunch appeared in the Sunday Times on 9 February.
The New Zealand radio stations were forecasting a hurricane approaching from the north, so Tetley tacked back out of Otago Harbour and headed Victress out to sea. Hours later, at sunset, he had his last sight of green New Zealand, now a grey shape astern, disappearing into rain clouds. Four thousand seven hundred miles of Southern Ocean lay between him and Cape Horn.
Donald Crowhurst’s position was cloudier.
Newspapers reporting on the race could give only the same hazy locations that Crowhurst was sending to Rodney Hallworth, his sole media contact, who in turn issued his bullish Crowhurst bulletins to the press. On 5 January, the Sunday Times stated that he was ‘reported’ to be past Tristan da Cunha, which would ‘indicate’ that he was sailing at over 1,000 miles per week.
He was, in fact, sailing slowly and desultorily off the Brazilian coast.
The Sunday Times published something about ‘its’ race every week: this might be a half-page spread of the latest photographs it had received (Tetley at Christmas dinner, Moitessier practising yoga on deck); or a breakdown of the latest positions, with headshots of the four sailors; or a learned essay by Sir Francis Chichester on the men’s chances and the future of single-handed voyaging. Despite being advised by Captain Rich and Chichester that Crowhurst’s positions were almost certainly impossible, the paper could hardly ignore the whereabouts of its fourth and last-place competitor; but it could not openly suggest scepticism. So it took the news it got from Hallworth, couched it inconclusively, and stuck it in a small paragraph at the end of its race reports.
Thus on Sunday 12 January, Crowhurst was reported to be in the Indian Ocean ‘by now’. The following week he was ‘well into the Indian Ocean’. The paper noted that his voyage’s daily average was now up to 100 miles per day, and his expected date home was advanced to 19 August.
Hallworth, with little or nothing to dress up his scanty information, plaintively cabled Crowhurst asking for weekly positions and mileage. On 19 January, Crowhurst obliged with a reply, giving a position and weekly mileage as ‘100 southeast Gough 1086’. (Gough is a small island south of Tristan da Cunha.) This was the transmission as written in Crowhurst’s neatly maintained radio log. However, by the time it reached Hallworth, it read ‘100 southeast Tough’. Hallworth, for whom the glass was always half full, took this to mean that Crowhurst was having a tough time southeast of Cape Town – 1,200 miles further east than Gough Island, and 4,000 miles from his true position.
In this cable Crowhurst also advised that he was sealing the cockpit floor hatch over his generator, and that future radiotransmissions, both radio-telephone and cable, would come much less frequently.
On the same day Crowhurst sent a cable to Stanley Best, mentioning damage to the boat’s ‘skin’, resulting in an ‘ill-found’ boat. In few and ambiguous words, he implied he could only keep going towards the Horn, risking further damage, if Best would let him out of the clause in their contract that could require him to repay Best for the cost of the boat – forcing him, in other words, to buy back what could result in a worthless, half-wrecked boat if he pressed on at speed.
Then he closed down communication from the world. Nothing more was heard from him for eleven weeks.
His dizzyingly false positions reported in the press were now in excess of 4,000 miles away from his true location. It had become increasingly difficult to maintain and transmit a steady supply of false data, although he continued to record radio weather forecasts for areas far away, where he was supposed to be; he wrote these weather reports in painstaking detail in his radio log, often in triplicate as he received identical reports from other stations. But the emotional burden of this effort was proving too much for him, and he wanted to stop.
It has been suggested that Crowhurst initiated radio silence at this point to overcome the apparent obstacle of sending radio messages to stations in faraway Australia and New Zealand, as though he were in the Pacific, while all the time remaining in the Atlantic. But this would not have been a problem. On a Mercator-projected map of the world, his position off the coast of South America, roughly near Buenos Aires, does seem a long way from Australia or New Zealand. But on the true, round earth, he was no further, as the signal flew across Antarctica, from Sydney (7,300 miles away) or Wellington (6,200 miles) than from Portishead Radio, north of London (7,000 miles), which he was able to reach without difficulty. Crowhurst knew this. He had simply lost the heart to make up positions to feed Rodney Hallworth and an eager press on a regular basis. Silence and presumption, after the steady apparent gains of the past few weeks, would now do a far better job of slipping him ever eastward than he could.
Rodney Hallworth provided additional grease. Crowhurst could not have had a better unwitting partner in deception than his zealously boostering publicist. With nothing but these two last cables to go on, Hallworth inferred a dramatic episode to pass on to the papers, and a perfect cover for prolonged radio silence: a huge wave had crashed over the stern of Teignmouth Electron, damaging the cockpit and stern of the boat. Repairs had required Crowhurst to drop sail for three days and seal off his generator compartment. In order to conserve his batteries, he would make only two more radio transmissions before arriving home.
‘Crowhurst Limps On After Battering by Giant Wave’, was the bold headline in the Sunday Times of 26 January. The article said that Crowhurst was in serious trouble in the Indian Ocean, 700 miles east of the Cape of Good Hope. The following Sunday, 2 February, he was ‘estimated’ to be 1,300 miles east of Cape Town.
In that same 2 February issue of the Sunday Times, in an article about the race and the future of single-handed sailing, Sir Francis Chichester wrote, with great restraint, that there had been some ‘loose’ claims for speeds and distances sailed, and he hoped that some sporting club would check and verify such claims. His cool scepticism, coming at the end of a long, windy, slightly pedantic article, was at variance with the more exciting race reports, and his lone voice went publicly ignored.
On board Teignmouth Electron, Crowhurst did have a real problem. The plywood skin of the starboard hull was indeed split, in several places, and a frame inside that hull had separated from the skin. The hull was leaking, and the trimaran could no longer be considered seawor
thy. No great extremes of weather had been met with so far, so the damage, it would seem, was the result of poor construction, undoubtedly exacerbated by the rush of production spread between two different boatyards, which almost guaranteed problems. These might have been ironed out with the normal sea trials that any new boat needs to reveal and attend to problems. Teignmouth Electron was clearly far weaker and more vulnerable than Nigel Tetley’s Victress.
Crowhurst now had the best possible and most honourable reason of all to give up. No shame would have come from putting into port with a damaged boat, but he was too deeply entrenched in deception now, and Rodney Hallworth’s embellishment had given it a momentum of its own. Geographically he was too far from any port to limp into from his last supposed position. Thirteen hundred miles east of Cape Town would make Madagascar the most reasonable port to show up at, a long hike from the coast of Brazil. He could not give up now without exposing the whole sham.
Slowly he headed his boat for the South American coast.
Donald Crowhurst’s route — 31 October 1968 — 8 March 1969
25
FOR MOST OF JANUARY and February 1969, Crowhurst steered Teignmouth Electron in a slow zig-zag, moving roughly south off the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay. His daily mileages dropped to dawdling distances of 20 and 30 miles or less. His course was dictated more by which way the wind was blowing than a resolve to move in any direction. He had by this time abandoned any attempt at a circumnavigation.
A Voyage For Madmen Page 21
