A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  As so often happens in major swampings, the bilge pump was immediately clogged by the floating debris in the cabin. Tetley had to bail frantically with a bucket while hoping more waves didn’t quickly pour in. As soon as he was able to, he found hammer and nails and boarded up the broken window opening with plywood. Then he tried to make some sense of the disorder below. Cleaning up from such a disaster appears at first impossible: everything is everywhere, only not where it belongs, so when you try to put something away, you first have to move what’s in its place, and then find somewhere to put that. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ is how it must be on a boat that contains a thousand discrete items, each crammed into its own special nook or cranny. Losing order can be like the nightmarish unravelling of an intricate puzzle.

  Night came. Shivering uncontrollably with cold and shock, Tetley pulled his sodden sleeping bag around him and waited out the night, hoping every wave, which announced its approach with the hiss of its breaking crest, would not smash through his hasty repair and flood the cabin again.

  In the morning he found Victress seriously damaged. The starboard hull had broken frames and a sprung deck, considerably weakening its structure, and the main cabin top had separated in places from the deck – the same thing that had happened to Suhaili during her first knockdown in the Southern Ocean west of Cape Town. The main hull was flexing and its longitudinal stringers were throwing off splinters as the wood wracked and twisted.

  Tetley was amazed at Victress’s recovery from both of these hard knocks. He concluded that she was a fine seaboat, just not strong enough for the Southern Ocean. He wanted out. He decided to sail north to Valparaiso, put the boat up for sale, and fly home.

  But Valparaiso, or any port, was still a long way away. He would be around the Horn in two weeks, and beyond lay the Atlantic and better weather. The next day, when the wind and waves had subsided and some order had been restored to the cabin, ‘sheer obstinacy’ set in, and he headed east again. He pushed on hard, determined to get out of the Southern Ocean as fast as possible.

  At 1400 on 18 March, the sky cleared and Cape Horn and its island group lay ahead. As the afternoon wore on, the wind dropped and by evening Tetley was becalmed south of the fearsome rock. It was a welcome relief. He wasn’t worried it would last. He lowered sail, had a celebratory dinner with a bottle of wine, and went to bed. He had accomplished an impressive sailing first: the first multihull to round Cape Horn. The Aussies would be thrilled.

  A little over a week later, making a scheduled call to Robert Lindley, his radio contact at the Sunday Times, Tetley was stunned to learn of Bernard Moitessier’s decision to drop out of the race. But he didn’t for a moment think Moitessier had lost his mind. He knew for himself the whole story that lay behind such a decision. Moitessier had always said that such a voyage should not be considered a race; that all those who survived would be winners. He was saddened by the loss of his favourite competitor, but he thought it ‘very like Bernard’, in whom he had detected no sense of rivalry. It is touching, reading Tetley’s and Moitessier’s accounts of the race, how often and fondly these two thought of each other during their long months at sea. Moitessier was constantly anxious about Tetley’s safety in a multihull, writing at one point that he didn’t know how he could take it if he learned that he would not hear from Nigel again. And Tetley thought of the Frenchman with unenvious admiration and happiness at his seamanship and fast passages. They had found much they liked in each other as sailors and men and formed a strong bond in their weeks together at Plymouth.

  Tetley was, however, buoyed by the realisation that with Moitessier out, he was now in the running for one or both prizes. Crowhurst was evidently making a very fast passage, but the last news from him was that he had sustained damage from a ferocious wave in the Indian Ocean. He could be out or pressing on at speed again. No one knew.

  And there had been no word or sightings at all of Robin Knox-Johnston since he had sailed out of Otago Harbour, New Zealand, on 21 November, four months before. Suddenly it seemed very possible that Nigel Tetley could be the first Golden Globe sailor to return to England and glory.

  On Sunday 23 March, the same day newspapers reported Moitessier’s dramatic change of mind, thirty British, American, and Portuguese vessels began a massive mid-Atlantic search for Robin Knox-Johnston. The ships were part of a NATO fleet already on exercises in the area. Planes from the US Air Force base on the Azorean island of Terceira, which routinely made daily long-range patrols over Atlantic waters, also began looking for the small, battered ketch.

  This followed weeks of mounting apprehension. ‘Fears Grow for Knox-Johnston’ said many newspaper headlines. Even his sponsor, the Sunday Mirror, had sombrely speculated in print whether he would ever be seen again. The location of the mid-Atlantic search was based on the supposition that if all had gone well and he had continued sailing at his voyage average of about 99 miles per day, he might now be nearing the Azores. But no one knew if he had rounded the Horn, or whether, after he had last been seen in New Zealand, he had even made it across the vast Pacific in his damaged boat, which was held together in places with string. Many yachting experts, including Sir Francis Chichester, thought it would be miraculous if Knox-Johnston had been able to keep going without putting in to some South American port for repairs.

  Robin Knox-Johnston had kept to his 99-mile-per-day average, but Suhaili was too far away, about 1,000 miles southwest of the Azores, for the NATO search to find her.

  He had sailed a lonely ocean, seeing no ships at all between New Zealand and Cape Horn. He was deeply aware of the anxiety his family would be suffering for him, and once round the Horn he planned to sail into Port Stanley to signal his position. But northeasterly winds blew him away as he approached the Falklands, and the spectre of the Frenchman close astern stopped him from taking several days to beat in against the weather. He headed north, hoping instead to find a ship. In the South Atlantic he spotted a single freighter too far away to be seen or attract its attention. Once across the equator, however, his route began to intersect shipping lanes, and Knox-Johnston grew confident that he would soon be able to send word of his whereabouts back to England. He was in for a shock.

  At last, on the night of 10 March, a day after crossing the equator, he saw a ship coming towards him from the north. When it got close, he began signalling with his high-powered Aldis lamp, but there was no answer from the bridge. What the bloody hell was the officer on watch up to? Merchant Captain Knox-Johnston wondered. He lit a handheld flare and continued signalling. When there was still no response, he took the drastic measure of setting off a distress rocket flare. The whole sky around the ship was lit up in the sulphurous glow for three minutes as the flare drifted slowly down on to the sea in its small parachute. Knox-Johnston aimed the Aldis at the bridge again and finally there was a flickering answer. But as he started signalling his boat’s name and identification numbers, the ship lost interest and steamed away. He set off another flare, and continued signalling until the ship disappeared over the horizon.

  Knox-Johnston was outraged. He had given every proper indication of being a vessel in distress and had been ignored – worse, briefly acknowledged and then ignored. The nameless ship, too dark to identify, had also ignored a sacred tradition of the sea, backed by maritime law, that unless a vessel must put itself in danger to do so, it will always go to the assistance of another ship in distress.*

  Knox-Johnston also had real cause to be alarmed at being so ignored. He had a stomach ache. At first he thought it was indigestion, but when the pain persisted and then moved into the side of his abdomen he feared it was appendicitis. He had foolishly overlooked antibiotics when taking aboard his medical supplies and had no way of checking such an infection. The nearest port was Belem, 1,000 miles to the west – ten days’ sailing – though if he really did have appendicitis, it could kill him before he reached land. His only hope at sea would be help from a passing ship. The failure of this
one to stop, despite distress flares, appalled him.

  He was then crossing a shipping lane and saw a number of ships in the next few days, several of which came within half a mile of Suhaili (which by now, even without trying to attract attention, presented a desperate sight). None of them answered his signals. He was either not seen or seen and ignored. To an officer well and thoroughly trained in the venerable rules of the sea, this behaviour was a ‘shattering revelation’, Knox-Johnston wrote in his logbook. He came to the unhappy conclusion that the tradition of a fraternity of seamen watching out for one another on the high seas was no longer something that could be depended on, an unhappy thought for a single-hander.

  He didn’t have appendicitis.* The ‘bully beef’ had started to go off. He left this out of his diet for a while and got better – except for a recurrence on 17 March, his thirtieth birthday, which he celebrated with a mixed grill.

  On 6 April, in light winds, he crossed another shipping lane, a busy one. All afternoon, ships passed him and ignored his constant efforts to signal them and attract their attention. Finally, late in the day, the British tanker Mobil Acme took proper notice of him. Knox-Johnston and the officer on the bridge ‘spoke’ to each other by Aldis lamp, with courtesy and efficient professionalism. Knox-Johnston gave Suhaili’s name and an ETA in Falmouth of two weeks. Mobil Acme responded with a ‘will-do’ and ‘good luck’. The ship radioed London immediately, and within two and a half hours of his sighting, Knox-Johnston’s family received a phone call from Lloyds. It made the front page in every British Sunday paper.

  What splendid news for England. The Frenchman was out; the three courageous Brits were now racing for home. Barring mishaps, Knox-Johnston now seemed certain to win the Golden Globe trophy for the first person to sail alone around the world without stopping. Nigel Tetley, heading north in the South Atlantic, looked good for the cash prize for fastest time, but Donald Crowhurst, the dark horse of the race, who ‘should now be approaching New Zealand’, could still overtake him in elapsed speed.

  At the other end of the earth, at the furthest reach of each sailor’s due north, the British transarctic expedition, led by English explorer-author Wally Herbert, was at the same time approaching the North Pole after more than 400 days on the polar ice cap. For what? Another first in the annals of Arctic achievement: the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by way of the North Pole. Never mind that it was not especially important or useful; it was wonderfully demanding. Herbert’s team was travelling in the classic mode of men pulled by dogsled, evoking the glory years of England’s heroic failures in polar exploration. It was another glorious, brutal, Ulyssean endeavour, and, pointless or otherwise, the island nation was showing that it still had, in spades, the stuff of which heroes are made.

  Donald Crowhurst’s route 10 March 1969 – 1 July 1969

  27

  AFTER WAVING adiós to Nelson Messina at Rio Salado, Donald Crowhurst headed north – towards England, of course, to win his regatta. But once over the horizon, beyond the eyes of Nelson Messina or the patrols of the Prefectura Nacional Marítima, he turned south. He was planning to rejoin the race.

  His idea was to reappear at some point in April, break his radio silence, announce his position, and continue racing for home. Where, when, and how exactly he did this was crucial to his deception. He did not want to be spotted and identified by a ship before he was in the right position, and he had to work out his fake passage time across the Pacific and his ostensible date for rounding the Horn. He also hoped to get some 16-millimetre film footage of Roaring Forties conditions, and perhaps of the Falkland Islands. They might not be the Horn, but they were down there. It could be credibly easy, even commendably safe, to pass Cape Horn far enough offshore not to sight it: a glimpse of the Horn would be an almost irresistible temptation to a circumnavigator, but in thick weather even a minimally safe offing could leave the fabled rock hidden in stormwrack. A shot of the Falklands could vouch for a Southern Ocean passage to minds otherwise undisposed to serious doubts. Lastly, he wanted to send a radio message home, supposedly from the Pacific, via Wellington, New Zealand, before his arrival date at the Horn. This might be easier, he thought, if he got far enough south to bounce a signal over the lower, narrower spine of the Andes. So on 10 March, he turned south from his position off Rio Salado and sailed down into the empty, loneliest region of the South Atlantic, away from the world’s eyes, to plot his reemergence and strategy for taking the cash prize from Nigel Tetley.

  His last purported position before initiating radio silence had been Gough Island, west of Cape Town, on 15 January. From there to Cape Horn was approximately 13,000 miles. He decided to allow ninety days from Gough Island to Cape Horn, supposedly reaching there on 15 April – an average of 144 miles per day; incredible but not quite impossible (Moitessier’s monohull Joshua often did better). A reappearance shortly thereafter in the South Atlantic would put him – on elapsed time – comfortably ahead of Nigel Tetley. Then he would race for home as legitimately fast as he could.

  He crossed the fortieth parallel around 16 March and continued zig-zagging south. He still had almost a month before reappearing more or less where he was. He soon ran into several days of Roaring Forties storm conditions, but by the time he was off the northern shores of the Falkland Islands on 29 March, the weather had become unusually quiet. He shot some footage of a quiet sunset near Port Stanley. Then two more days of strong westerlies carried him away from the islands, northeast up the Atlantic.

  Early in April, he began transmitting Morse cables on the frequency serving Wellington Radio, New Zealand, but with no success (not necessarily due to distance, but to atmospheric conditions). However, Radio General Pacheco in Buenos Aires picked him up on 9 April and repeatedly asked for his position. Typically, Crowhurst would not oblige with hard information. Instead, he used Radio General Pacheco to send his first words to England after eleven weeks of silence. It was a Morse message for Rodney Hallworth.

  DEVON NEWS EXETER – HEADING DIGGER RAMREZ LOG KAPUT 17697 28TH WHAT’S NEW OCEANBASHINGWISE.

  The cable was phoned to Hallworth as he was shaving on the morning of 10 April. He immediately phoned Clare Crowhurst to give her the great news. Later, he sat down to work out what he could from this short, enigmatic message. How characteristic of Donald: the spare humour, the frustrating lack of detail, and a pinpoint position. But this one was better than most: Crowhurst’s log or logline had broken at 17,697 miles on 28 March; ‘Digger Ramrez’ was obviously the Diego Ramirez group, a scant 60 miles or so from Cape Horn. Why, Donald was sailing past the Horn as he read this! Hallworth realised. He prepared his press release.

  Two days later, Sunday 13 April, half the London papers reported that Donald Crowhurst had rounded Cape Horn – almost a week before his intended date. The Sunday Times allowed that Crowhurst might have already rounded the Horn, but the paper also thought he could still have as much as 1,000 miles to go. At any rate, if he kept up his current speed, he could be back in Teignmouth sometime between 24 June and 8 July. This would mean a circumnavigation of about 250 days – ten days faster than the current estimate for Tetley of 260 days. This would win Crowhurst the £5,000 cash prize.

  Nobody seemed concerned that this message had come from Buenos Aires, the other side of the Andes from Crowhurst’s supposed location somewhere in the Pacific. Radio contact at sea, as everyone knew by now, was a fluky business. Crowhurst’s radio silence had been a month less than Knox-Johnston’s, who had reappeared in the middle of the Atlantic. And Crowhurst was still the smaller story in the race. The papers were now full of news about Robin Knox-Johnston, ‘the surprising hero’ in his small, Indian-built ketch, and his arrival any day now in Falmouth.

  On board Teignmouth Electron, Crowhurst awaited Hallworth’s reply with considerable anxiety. It was a month since he had sailed from Rio Salado. He’d had no news of the race since his last radio communications three months earlier. Now, having sent an ambiguous position, he waite
d to hear if he had been spotted at sea or reported ashore or if suspicions at home had been aroused and the game was up. The reply, three days later, contained no hint of trouble.

  YOU’RE ONLY TWO WEEKS BEHIND TETLEY PHOTO

  FINISH WILL MAKE GREAT NEWS STOP ROBIN DUE ONE TO TWO WEEKS – RODNEY

  Encouraged, and suddenly freed from his isolation chamber, Crowhurst became relatively garrulous on the radio. He sent back cables describing the smell of wood smoke on the wind off the Falkland Islands. (Hallworth heard poetry in the spare lines; Wood Smoke on the Wind should be the title of Crowhurst’s book, he thought.) In another, he peevishly quibbled with the term ‘race-winner’ when applied to Knox-Johnston, suggesting an even distinction between first home and fastest time.

  In frequent if not regular communication with both General Pacheco Radio in Buenos Aires, and now Portishead Radio in England, he learned of Moitessier’s abandonment of the race and Tetley’s position, supposedly far ahead of him. (Bizarrely, the tracks of the two trimarans came so close together on 24 March that the two men might actually have passed within sight of each other, Crowhurst headed south towards the Falklands, Tetley past them going north. The weather at the time was stormy and visibility would have been poor – but what a surprise that would have been for both men! And perhaps a much different ending.)

  Heading north, now ‘past’ Cape Horn, Crowhurst’s fake and true positions merged, and in the middle of April he began to race home for real.

  Nigel Tetley felt him coming. He had heard that both Knox-Johnston and Crowhurst had reappeared after months of silence and doubt, and were alive and well and bashing on. Like Moitessier, Tetley felt the rarest of kinship for his fellow racers, like soldiers facing a common enemy, and he was always happy and relieved to hear that they were alive, safe, and doing well.