A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  But he was still at sea, and in a vessel that was taking on water. This presented him with a real problem that no deception or fantasy could push away.

  One reason for his reduced mileage was that sailing the boat at any speed drove more water through the hull leaks. The longer this went unattended, the worse it would get. The split plywood skin, or sheathing, of the starboard hull was the sort of problem that might have been readily fixed at sea – Knox-Johnston’s underwater caulking job was far trickier – if Teignmouth Electron had carried the tools, wood, screws, bolts, and general mix of chandlery and hardware that amount to basic and essential stores for any boat heading out to sea. Most of these supplies had been bought or provided for Teignmouth Electron, including spare pieces of plywood from Eastwoods yard in Norfolk, but in the confusion of his departure, it had all been left on the dock at Teignmouth – or unloaded from the boat – and Crowhurst had sailed without it. The cargo he had paid most attention to – the boxes and boxes of electrical and radio parts, the unfinished ‘computer’, the dense spaghetti weave of wires going nowhere – were no help to a leaky boat. Crowhurst had overlooked two fundamental points reiterated over and over by the experts and sailors he most admired and read, Chichester and Eric Hiscock: (1) Keep it simple, and (2) Sailing and electronics are, in the long run, incompatible. Electric systems on boats are under constant assault by the marine environment, and failure is their most consistent condition (or certainly was in the 1960s).

  Crowhurst’s ‘revolutionary ketch’ leaked and could not be patched. Its bilge pump was inoperable. Teignmouth Electron was a fool’s ship, a fact Crowhurst knew all too well by now.

  At the beginning of February, he began heading slowly towards land. As he went, he studied his Admiralty pilot book of sailing directions for South America, much as he had done when considering putting into Madeira. He read up on every small port, bay, and possible landing site along the Argentine coast. Due west of his present position was the heavily trafficked Rio de la Plata, the wide sea entrance to Buenos Aires, where a tattered trimaran would not go unnoticed. Much better was the quieter Golfo San Matías 600 miles to the south. The pilot book promised a small settlement, where he would surely find materials to repair the leaking hull, and a good anchorage. He made pencilled marks in the book beside this section. But at 42 degrees south, Golfo San Matías was technically in the Southern Ocean. At his present 36 degrees south, Crowhurst was already experiencing strong weather; he could easily encounter ship-battering conditions in the week or more of sailing south into the forties that it would require to get there.

  Eventually, proximity decided him. He closed with the coast at the wide bay of Bahia Samborombón, just south of the mouth of Rio de la Plata. The pilot book described an anchorage off a small river, Rio Salado, near the top of the bay. A group of sheds and buildings stood on the south bank of the river – a small nondescript place but with some signs of life. This sounded perfect. He made a list for himself of what he needed to find ashore: plywood, screws, and vindaloo paste for the curries he liked to make. He might as well have hoped for Marmite.

  Crowhurst sailed into Bahia Samborombón on 2 March. He saw lights ashore. Perhaps in indecision, he sailed out again, heading offshore for two days. Then he turned back into the bay. He lowered his sails off a resort town, Clemente de Tuyu, didn’t like the look of it, raised sail again and headed further up the bay to Rio Salado. He finally dropped anchor off Rio Salado at 0830 on 6 March. There was deeper water around him, but Crowhurst had unwittingly anchored on a sandbank. The tide was ebbing; Teignmouth Electron was soon aground.

  The trimaran was spotted by Nelson Messina, a 55-year-old fisherman who lived in a small house on the north bank of the river. He saw that the boat was aground and presumed its crew needed assistance. He set off to inform his neighbour, Santiago Franchessi, senior petty officer of the local Prefectura Nacional Marítima, whose post was one of the sheds mentioned by the pilot book: Crowhurst had run himself aground right under the nose of the local coast guard station. The job of Franchessi and his staff of two men and one dog was to observe the shipping entering and leaving Rio de la Plata. However, Rio Salado was a sleepy place with no telephone and only a dirt road winding up the coast to more prosperous parts. The coast guard station was a lowly, unimportant one.

  Messina took Officer Franchessi and his junior recruit, Rubén Colli, out to the foreign yacht in his fishing boat. They were surprised to find only one man aboard. He had a patchy beard, and wore khakis and a red shirt. Franchessi greeted the sailor in Spanish; he responded in English, and they did not understand each other. The sailor gestured to the damaged starboard hull, and the point of his visit was immediately clear. Messina stepped aboard the yacht and tied his line to Teignmouth Electron’s mooring cleat. Then he stepped back aboard his own boat and pulled the trimaran into deeper water. According to the Sunday Times rules, this short tug off the sandbar knocked Crowhurst out of the race.

  At 1100, they towed the yacht up the Rio Salado and moored it to the coast guard dock. Crowhurst noted the time and fact in his logbook.

  The Prefectura’s third man, Petty Officer Cristobal Dupuy, who had remained ashore manning the station, recorded the arrival of the yacht and the visitor’s name in the station’s logbook. He examined Crowhurst’s passport, which gave the name of the bearer as Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst. Dupuy dispensed with ‘Donald’, which he took as an honorific similar to the Spanish Don. And he also left off the last name, which in a Spanish name is the unused matronymic, or mother’s maiden name. ‘Charles Alfred of English nationality’ was the name recorded in the Prefectura’s log, and Donald Crowhurst didn’t point out the mistake.

  Señor Alfred spent half an hour trying to convey to the Argentinians the materials he wanted to repair his boat, but he could not make himself understood. He tried French, too, but this also was not understood, although Officer Franchessi recognised it as French. He took the foreigner outside to his Jeep and drove him 17 miles north along the coast road to Rancho Barreto, a former henhouse where Hector Salvati and his wife, Rose, and daughter, Marie, ran a small roadhouse restaurant. The Salvatis were French. Hector had once been a sergeant in the French army and had emigrated with his family to Argentina in 1950. Señor Alfred, it turned out, spoke excellent French.

  He told them he was in a ‘regatta’, that he had sailed from England on 31 October, had rounded Cape Horn, and was on his way back to England, and would win the regatta if he could repair his boat.

  Hector Salvati asked him how anyone would know he had sailed around Cape Horn, and the Englishman told him there was a machine on Cabo de Hornos that identified passing ships.

  He then drew a map on a piece of wrapping paper showing them the sailing course around the world. He drew a second picture for the Salvatis, showing his trimaran, from the side, and from above. He wrote on this ‘Octobre 31–68’. Then he drew a third picture, a rough map of the Atlantic, but showing a different route: England to a small island off South Africa, then to South America, then, in a lighter line, back to England – perhaps an attempt at confession. But neither the Salvatis nor Officer Franchessi understood the meaning of this last drawing, and the Englishman, talking excitedly and disconnectedly, wasn’t making much sense.

  Franchessi bought him a beer and explained that he had to use the Rancho’s pay phone to call his superiors in La Plata and ask them what to do. Señor Alfred became disturbed, saying that if anybody knew he had stopped here, he would be disqualified from the regatta. But Franchessi made his call anyway, and the Englishman seemed to calm down.

  His mood ashore was almost manic. He was very excitable, the Salvatis said much later, up and down in mood and laughing a great deal.

  ‘Il faut vivre la vie,’ he said to Rose Salvati a number of times, laughing almost hysterically. ‘Life must be lived.’ She thought he was laughing at them, and she didn’t believe his story. She thought he might be a smuggler.

  Franchessi’s superior
s thought nothing of the stranded yacht. He was told to give the captain whatever he needed and let him sail when he was ready. Franchessi and the Englishman said good-bye to the Salvatis and returned to Rio Salado.

  Crowhurst spent the night aboard his boat, tied to the coast guard dock. The next day, using materials given to him, he screwed two 18-inch-square pieces of plywood side by side over the splits in the starboard hull and painted them white. That evening, Petty Officer Dupuy and recruit Colli invited him to eat with them in the coast guard shed, where they lived. Franchessi, who was married, lived in a small house nearby. Crowhurst shaved for dinner, and the coast guard men fried him a steak of good Argentine beef and gave him wine. But the men couldn’t understand each other, and they ate mostly in silence.

  In the morning, Nelson Messina towed Teignmouth Electron back down the river to the sea. At 1400, the trimaran sailed away. Crowhurst had not found his vindaloo paste.

  26

  ‘ROUND THE WORLD! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started.’

  So mused Ishmael in Moby Dick.

  This was what Bernard Moitessier had been thinking. ‘Leaving from Plymouth and returning to Plymouth now seems like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere,’ he wrote after he rounded Cape Horn.

  But he was eager to let friends and family know that he had safely passed the great rock. He sailed to the Falkland Islands, hoping to pass another packet of mail and photographs to a boat there, but by the time he closed with the islands, four days past the Horn and sleepless after another gale, he felt too exhausted to sail down the long narrow fjord into Port Stanley and back out to sea. He hove to for a time off Port Stanley Lighthouse, hoping to be seen, but he saw no sign of activity and turned away, heading north into the Atlantic.

  But the red-hulled Joshua was sighted. Her position was reported to Lloyds in London and passed on to the Sunday Times. This confirmed glimpse was fat meat for a starved press. With no word from Knox-Johnston in four months, Crowhurst’s radio now silent, and only Tetley able to radio-telephone his occasional messages, the Sunday Times bulletins had been floundering for want of hard news about its race competitors. Here was real and exciting information at last: Moitessier was past the last great obstacle of the course and bound for home. His speed and position looked set to get him back to England first and fastest, a clean sweep of both prizes.

  For the next few weeks his estimated positions – based on his consistent overall voyage mileage of 120 miles per day, run along his presumed track from the Falklands towards England – were confidently printed by the Sunday Times. On 23 February, he was reported to be 1,250 miles east of the Plate River (Rio de la Plata). On 2 March, the cunning Frenchman was 650 miles southeast of Trindade Island and was presumed, that weekend, to be crossing his outward track, making him the fastest nonstop circumnavigator, beating Chichester’s record, and perhaps the first nonstop sailor around the world. ‘Moitessier on Last Stretch’ was the paper’s headine on 9 March, predicting his arrival in Plymouth in just six weeks’ time, on 24 April.

  France was readying itself for the homecoming of a national hero. Once Moitessier had accepted the Golden Globe and the £5,000 cash, an armada-sized fleet of French yachts and naval warships would escort Joshua back across the English Channel – or La Manche, as the French knew it – into home waters. Ashore, Moitessier would be awarded the Legion d’Honneur. He would eclipse Chichester, and even Tabarly, France’s single-handed OSTAR hero. He would become the most famous yachtsman in the world.

  And he knew it. That was the problem. Moitessier appreciated what his fame and books had brought him. More – much more – was coming, but he was afraid of its seductive hold on him. The yin and yang of his Asian-bred asceticism and his Westerner’s worldly ego had always battled for supremacy in him, but seven months on his own at sea, his world stripped clean to the spare onward rush of his voyage, had tipped the scales heavily toward the unworldly, Buddhistic side of his nature.

  ‘I am really fed up with false gods, always lying in wait, spiderlike, eating our liver, sucking our marrow,’ he wrote in his logbook.

  Moitessier had been happiest in his early ‘vagabond’ days at sea. It’s those simpler times – the places, the people, the boats – he writes about most affectionately in his books that deal with his later, more famous exploits. He had found a measure of that simpler peace on his long, long voyage. He didn’t want to give it up. He didn’t want to lose himself for ever in celebrity.

  On Tuesday 18 March, Moitessier sailed into Cape Town Harbour, South Africa, 3,500 miles from where everyone thought he was, halfway up the Atlantic. It was almost exactly five months since Joshua had collided with the freighter Orient Transporter in Walker Bay, 50 miles southeast down the coast. Now, as the port captain’s small launch circled Joshua, he heaved into a crewman’s hands a 3-gallon plastic jerry can full of mail, his logbooks, rolls of still film, and ten reels of 16-millimetre movie film. He asked that it be delivered to his publisher, Robert Laffont at Editions Arthaud, Paris. Then he headed back out to sea. He passed close by a British Petroleum tanker, British Argosy, and slingshot a smaller can on to its deck, with a message to the Sunday Times.

  My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, towards the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record. ‘Record’ is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.

  What he was saying was clear enough, but its meaning was almost too astounding to be grasped. It was repeated over and over as the story broke in the press: Moitessier was not returning to England. He was abandoning the race, and his almost certain chance of being the double winner. He was sailing past South Africa for the second time and continuing on around the world.

  Had he gone mad, the newspapers, sailors, people everywhere who had followed the race wondered. Françoise Moitessier, hearing the news out of the blue at the same time as everyone else, was shocked.

  No, he wasn’t mad, not by his lights. He had looked clearly into himself and seen the humbug of his ambition, the arbitrariness of the race’s design. Plymouth meant nothing to him. Plymouth to Plymouth was going nowhere. Far better to go some place he might enjoy. Better still if it was another 10,000-mile sail away and would extend his voyage. He was happy, and he wanted to stay that way.

  A fresh southwesterly wind was blowing outside Cape Town Harbour. Moitessier hardened sheets and Joshua beat southeast towards the Cape of Good Hope. And the Indian Ocean, and beyond.

  On that same day, Nigel Tetley rounded Cape Horn, turned the last corner, and headed with unequivocal desire for home.

  He was more than ready to sail north out of the Southern Ocean. Victress had suffered two frighteningly violent episodes in the last few weeks, and the trimaran was no longer in any shape to please her Australian multihull boosters.

  Three weeks earlier, on the evening of 26 February, in not particularly large seas, a rogue wave (one much larger than those around it) reared up underneath Victress’s stern, hurtling her forward at tremendous speed on its crest. The steering cables broke (again) and she slewed sideways before the breaking crest. It smashed into the upper hull pushing it high into the air, until Tetley believed the boat tilted over on her side to an angle of 50 degrees, and he felt that she was about to cartwheel. Every movable object inside the cabin was hurled to the low side, and then the great wave boiled away beneath the trimaran and it slowly righted. It was the nearest he had come to a capsize, and it left him wondering, shakily, if he had simply been lucky so far or if this was a freak occurrence that would not happen again – not soon, at any rate. He couldn’t know. He chose the latter explanation and pressed on.

  On 4 March, Victress was lying ahull, beam-on to seas, in storm conditions, and Tetley was inside the cabin, when an
other rogue wave struck the starboard side. This time the 6-foot-wide Perspex saloon window shattered before the weight of the solid sea that poured into the boat. At the same moment, the canvas curtain shielding the starboard side of the wheelhouse was blown away like tissue paper before a giant sneeze, and more water flooded into the wheelhouse and down into the cabin through the cockpit doors. The interior was awash with icy seawater.

  Reading this, in a chair or tucked safely in bed, one tries to conjure the scene, the awfulness of what it must have been like. But the hours following such a catastrophic smash-up inside a boat can scarcely be imagined. The sea that flooded the cabin, inundating everything, was perhaps 52°F. The air temperature outside Victress was around 48°F. The frigid water sloshed through the boat, drenching Tetley, mixing food, bedding, charts, books, clothes, his music tapes, kerosene, every large and tiny object into a swirling, lurching, icy stew. The gale that blew outside now blew into the former haven of the cabin through the cockpit doors and the 6-foot-wide smashed window. Tetley was as soaked through with seawater as if he’d jumped overboard. But there was no way to dry off, no dry clothes to change into, no way to get warm except by the frantic effort to save his life. Gone, utterly, was the thin membrane of shelter that permits the preposterous but precious and necessary illusion of security inside a boat, that sustains the warm life-force, bolstered by pictures of loved ones, books, music, the feasibility of making a hot meal, the unreasonable but persistent hope for one’s chances, the barrier against despair and raw fear. All of that was swept away in an instant. At such a moment, the sailor fights for his life with all the desperation of a man in combat against a force he knows to be overwhelming. Still he struggles, and the struggle is what saves him. It gets him through the next few hours.