A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  But he was now very aware that the prizes that had so recently seemed within his grasp were slipping away. He would not be first home, and it looked as if Crowhurst, on elapsed time, might overtake him. He would be out of the money, effectively in last place.

  So he pushed on harder than ever. Victress was now so damaged as to be a write-off by the time he reached England. He accepted that; her last and only remaining function now was to get him there. The worst seas and weather were behind her. She had only the gentle tropics and spring in the North Atlantic to face. His job was not to spare her, nor even, any longer, to save her – only to keep her afloat long enough to complete the voyage while moving as fast as possible.

  But what had begun as the slow, steady, normal attrition of breakage and failure – bits of moulding coming off, windows leaking, decks and outer hulls leaking – had been accelerated and made worse by the hard months and hammering damage of the Southern Ocean. The self-steering rudder had vanished into the deep shortly past the Horn; Tetley didn’t have a spare, but by then he had become, like Knox-Johnston, so adept at balancing the boat with sails under a variety of conditions that this was a slight loss, more of a nuisance. The wire cable between the wheel and the main rudder broke again, but he replaced the wire as he had before. The fibreglass sheathing had begun to delaminate from the side of the port hull, long flaps of it had peeled away revealing the bare wood beneath. The plywood had no seams, like those in a rounded, conventionally planked hull, only a few joints where sections of plywood met over the frames; but without the watertight barrier of the fiberglass, seawater began to seep through those joints and undermine the strength of the glue and fastenings there. At this moment, when Victress needed all the sparing and gentleness he could give her, Tetley found himself forced to drive her on harder than ever if he was to keep ahead of the relentless gaining of Donald Crowhurst.

  She couldn’t take it. One morning at dawn, he found that a large section of deck between the main and port hulls was disintegrating. The beams beneath the deck, supporting it, were splintered and broken. More importantly than supporting the deck, these beams were part of the once rigid cross-arm structure keeping the port hull attached to the main hull.

  Just as bad, the plywood in the bow of the port hull was holed and split, frames were broken and separated from the hull skin, and water was filling the hull. When he climbed down into the port hull and squatted knee-deep in water, he could see the deck lifting overhead, the frames broken away from the hull sides, and the plywood skin flexing in and out with each wave. The trimaran was coming apart, literally separating into its components.

  It appeared that Tetley’s race was over. A bitter blow, and all the more so since he was at that point only 60 miles short of crossing his outward track and circling the world. But Victress was not actually sinking – not yet. Tetley thought he could patch the bow and stiffen the hull sufficiently to allow him to make Recife, 200 miles away on the Brazilian coast.

  Like all his fellow competitors (except Crowhurst), Tetley had loaded Victress with a supply of wood, tools, nuts, bolts, odd pieces of metal – that well-found boat’s portable hardware store – and as he began to patch the port hull, he pondered the larger damage. He rooted through his materials, found what he needed, and the job stretched across two days – two days in which to think of how far he had come, how close he was to home. When he was finished, the structure between the port and main hulls was strengthened with jury-rigged cross beams. The worst of the holes in the port hull were patched, but so much water was still coming in that he drilled holes below the waterline in the port bow’s forward compartment to let water out – the water inside now stayed at sea level.

  The repair was rough, but if he could now sail on towards Brazil, Tetley decided, he could bloody well sail towards England.

  And he would tie the knot. On the evening of 22 April, at 6°50’ South, 30°38’ West, Victress reached a place on the featureless ocean where she had been exactly six months earlier and crossed the track of her outward-bound route. Nigel Tetley had sailed around the world, the first person to do so in a multihull. But coordinates of latitude and longitude are abstractions, and when they represent nothing but stretches of seawater they don’t make good newspaper and television pictures. Port-to-port is the proper framework for such a voyage, the tidy start-and-finish that record books, newspaper rules, and a hero-worshipping public all recognise. Tetley was 4,200 miles from Plymouth – 5,000 as the sailor sails, following a course for the fairest winds. His voyage would come to its proper end in another month and a half, if luck and Victress held up.

  28

  ALONE AMONG HIS COMPETITORS, the ‘distressingly normal’ Robin Knox-Johnston had never doubted himself. Blinkers at the periphery of his imagination had precluded any glimpse of inner failings, equivocation, or uncertainty that might have given him pause or made him give up. He had worried only about his cuts and bruises, his eye, the symmetry of his moustache, his water supply, and whether Suhaili and her gear would last the distance. He and the boat had endured, and 1,000 miles from England, after 29,000 sailed, these worries began to recede.

  Early on the morning of 7 April, he saw land for the first time since passing Cape Horn two and a half months earlier on 17 January. A smudge appeared on the southeast horizon; it was Flores and Corvo, the small northwestern outriggers of the Azores.

  Five days later, on Saturday 12 April, another ship, Mungo of Le Havre, came up astern and began to overtake Suhaili. Knox-Johnston – still unable to raise anybody on the radio – had no confirmation that Mobil Acme had passed on his signals, so he began signalling to Mungo, but the ship appeared, as usual, to ignore him and steamed past. Five minutes later he looked up and saw that she had turned around and was coming back. Soon, Mungo began signaling him. When Knox-Johnston sent Suhaili’s name, the crew on the bridge began to wave – they knew him. Moments later, talking with Mungo’s radio operator over the radio (on a short-range frequency), he heard the astonishing news that Moitessier, whose red ketch he had long feared he might see coming up over the horizon astern of him any time, was actually in the Indian Ocean heading around the world a second time. He could hardly believe it, hardly allow himself the rush of relief.

  The radio operator clearly knew all about the race, and when Knox-Johnston confirmed the name of his boat, he said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He agreed to pass on a message to the Sunday Mirror. The two men chatted for a while and then Mungo steamed away. But the news was out. In the middle of the afternoon another French ship, a tanker, Marriotte, steamed close by and gave Suhaili three blasts of its horn.

  Knox-Johnston’s solipsistic shell was broken at last. For five months – since saying good-bye to the crayfishermen at Otago Harbour, New Zealand – he’d had no contact with the remembered world beyond the horizon, no tangible proof that anyone knew of him or cared what he was up to with this insane business of slogging across oceans at a walking pace. Now ships came out of their way to hoot at him, and he had regained a connection with the world.

  The next evening – that Sunday 13 April, when many newspapers were reporting that Donald Crowhurst had rounded Cape Horn – Knox-Johnston tried calling the General Post Office high-frequency station at Baldock in Hertfordshire. Months of attempting to contact the station had brought no result, but that night he magically got through. After chatting for a few minutes, the Baldock operator asked him if he wanted to speak to anyone on the phone, and Knox-Johnston gave his parents’ number. His younger brother Mike picked up the phone and ‘nearly went through the roof’. Now he knew they could stop worrying about him, and after hearing that everyone at home was well, he could stop worrying about them.

  Mike confirmed what he’d learned from Mungo, that Moitessier was still heading east in the Southern Ocean – Knox-Johnston had half-wondered if this was true or whether the French radio operator had fed him a story so that he might relax his effort. He heard that the two trimarans were in the South Atlantic, Nigel Tet
ley off the coast of Brazil, and Donald Crowhurst past the Horn and pressing hard behind him, racing each other for the elapsed time prize. Mike also told him about the boats carrying the press and his family that would be coming out to meet him when he neared land.

  Suddenly it all seemed real. After ten months of a journey whose end had always stretched incomprehensibly far ahead in time and distance, Knox-Johnston allowed the full realisation and thrill of what he had done, and what was coming, to wash over him. Unless anything very unusual now happened, it looked as though he would reach England in about a week’s time, the first person to sail around the world alone, nonstop. He got out the whisky bottle, went on deck, and poured a dram for Suhaili over her stern. He poured another into the sea for Shony, an ancient English god of the sea. Then he raised the bottle to his lips.

  With the isolation of months now past him, ships and radio stations seeing and hearing him, Knox-Johnston suddenly found himself feeling like a sailor again, a land-linked fellow between ports, instead of a boundlessly pelagic creature. And very shortly afterwards, like a fox chased by hounds. He was now in regular radio contact with the Sunday Mirror, passing them his positions and ETAs (constantly revised as weather conditions affected his progress) in code, so the Mirror could get its boat to him first and scoop its rivals with the first photographs of the returning hero.

  At noon on Friday 18 April, Suhaili was 280 miles from Falmouth. Knox-Johnston was closing with the western approaches, the sea area west of Britain and France where shipping lanes bearing traffic from all points of the Atlantic converge into a narrowing stream. That night he was surrounded by the lights of many ships and had to remain awake in the cockpit, flares at hand, ready to take evasive action if any other vessel came too close. Soon after midnight (Saturday morning) a well-lit ship that had been overtaking Suhaili slowed and took up station half a mile astern. Another smaller vessel approached, slowed, and fell in with the first. Knox-Johnston signalled the larger one with his Aldis lamp, requesting its name. Queen of the Isles, the ship answered. It was one of the vessels his brother Mike had said would be meeting him. It moved in close, cameras flashing along its deck in the dark. Knox-Johnston’s mother and father were aboard and the three of them shouted hellos across the dark water. The smaller boat was Fathomer, a former rescue launch chartered by the Sunday Mirror and carrying the Suhaili Supporters Club – Knox-Johnston’s crew that had sailed with him from London to Falmouth ten months earlier: the Sunday Mirror reporter and photographer covering his story and his editor from the publishing firm of Cassell.

  Queen of the Isles and Fathomer then stood off and kept pace with Suhaili through the remaining hours of darkness, alerting other shipping while Knox-Johnston went below and got some sleep.

  When he woke in the morning he found the two escorts gone. The weather had deteriorated and a gale was blowing from the southeast, pushing Suhaili off course to the north. Frustrated but unable to make much headway in the right direction, he hove to. During the afternoon Queen of the Isles and Fathomer reappeared. Now he was able to see his parents for the first time in 310 days, and wave and shout to the Supporters Club. And they were able to see him: Suhaili was streaked with rust, her paint chipped, hull sprouting seaweed along the waterline; and the returning hero was bearded, unwashed, and wearing filthy oilskins, but immensely cheerful.

  Then the wind eased sufficiently to allow Knox-Johnston to raise sail and the little fleet proceeded towards England at the speed of its smallest member.

  ‘Round-World Robin Battles to the End’ was the front page, front-and-centre headline in the Sunday Times the next morning, beneath a photograph of the bearded sailor aboard his battered ketch. The front-page article described his struggle so near home against a rising gale. The paper noted that if Bernard Moitessier had not given up the race, he might easily have been nearing Plymouth at the same moment.

  Inside, on page 2, was a profile of ‘Solo Robin: The Surprising Hero’. The boy who built a canoe while on holiday; the student who failed A-level physics but turned into a ‘brilliant’ navigator; the stubborn Merchant Marine captain who had soaked up generations of sea lore. It was written by Murray Sayle, the Sunday Times reporter who had favoured Tahiti Bill Howell for sponsorship over the unknown Knox-Johnston, who might have been a surprising hero to Sayle and the yachting experts who had dismissed his chances a year earlier but not to those who knew him. Again and again, his friends and family described him in the same stolid terms: ‘He is the sort of bloke who does what he sets out to do.’

  The full force of the stubbornness that had taken him around the world against everything the wind and seas could throw at him was needed to carry him through the last few hundred miles. The weather was not cooperating with homecoming plans. Suhaili, as doughty a sea boat as a hero could want, was a poor performer to windward in the strong conditions of England’s spring weather and the racing channel tides. At the centre of a growing armada of well-wishers’ yachts and boats chartered by the press, Knox-Johnston tacked slowly toward Cornwall all Sunday and Monday. The wind abated Monday night, but at 0900 on Tuesday 22 April, when he was 6 miles from Pendennis Point at the entrance to Falmouth Harbour, the wind rose again to gale force, blowing directly off the shore he was trying to reach, and pushed Suhaili away to the east. All morning and through the afternoon, Knox-Johnston beat the last few miles into Falmouth.

  At 1525 he sailed between Black Rock and Pendennis Point at the harbour entrance. A cannon fired. People on boats and ashore cheered. The surprising hero in his rough Indian boat had won the great race.

  Shortly afterwards, when Knox-Johnston had smoothed his water in the lee of land, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise launch ranged alongside Suhaili. Officers leapt aboard the battered ketch to perform their mandatory duty.

  ‘Where from?’ asked the senior officer, struggling with his composure.

  ‘Falmouth,’ said Robin Knox-Johnston.

  29

  NIGEL TETLEY DROVE Victress north through the northeast trades and on into the belt of variable winds around the North Atlantic’s mid-ocean ridge of high pressure, sometimes given the attractive-sounding name, the ‘Bermuda high’. But for sailors, this is no holiday spot: it is a place of light and fluky winds from all directions, where progress slows and frustration mounts.

  So it was for Tetley, always aware of Donald Crowhurst in the other, apparently much faster trimaran behind him; and his tantalising closeness to home and the end of his long voyage. Through the early part of May he moved from the western to the eastern half of the North Atlantic, climbing slowly north through the latitudes of the Cape Verde and Canary Islands, often having to beat into the northerly winds that streamed down the eastern edge of the Bermuda high, like morning fog drifting around the base of a mesa.

  In the third week of May, as he reached the Azores, the wind strengthened. A fresh northwesterly on the beam pushed Victress fast through the 60-mile-wide channel between São Miguel and Terceira, a welcome burst of speed in the right direction. Tetley hoped the wind would hold. But on Tuesday 20 May – four weeks to the day after Knox-Johnston had reached Falmouth – the wind strengthened and reached force 7 (about 30 knots). A heavy sea built up on the port side and jolted the boat with each wave. Worried about the boat’s weakened state, Tetley reefed the sails, but Victress sailed on almost as fast. It was just a short summer blow, he believed, looking at his May pilot chart, which showed no winds above force 7 for the sea area he was sailing through. But as the afternoon wore on, the wind rose steadily to force 9, a strong gale. In her present condition, he didn’t want to run the trimaran through heavy seas in the dark, so at nightfall he lowered all sail and Victress lay ahull, drifting quietly away before the wind as she had so often before in much severer weather. Tetley turned in to catch some sleep.

  He woke at midnight. He heard a scraping, wracking sound in the bow. Knowing his boat and its every piece so well, the sound conveyed a picture to his mind of what had happened: the damaged b
ow of the port hull had broken away and was caught between the hulls. He had already drilled holes in the bow, so it didn’t really matter if it fell off; the watertight bulkhead just aft of the bow would keep water out of the rest of the hull, but the opened hull would certainly slow him down. He had to get up and clear away the wreckage. All this he thought in a moment. Then he reached for the light switch.

  Water was pouring into the main hull. This he hadn’t pictured. Dashing up on deck, he saw the port bow was gone, as he had thought, but in going it had smashed a hole in the bow of the main hull. When he returned to the cabin it was flooding at a rate that told him instinctively not to bother locating the leak – quantity told him everything. He reached for the radio and broadcast every sailor’s most awful message.

  There is a form to it. Somehow one already knows it by heart. Mayday Mayday Mayday. This is the sailing yacht Victress at latitude thirty-nine degrees ten minutes north, longitude twenty-four degrees thirty minutes west. I am sinking and I request assistance. Mayday Mayday Mayday …

  An immediate, crisp, professional reply from a Dutch vessel allayed panic. But by the time he had finished speaking with the ship’s radio operator, water was swirling around his legs. It was time to get out the life raft. Still in the dark of night, he dragged it on deck, tied off its painter, and heaved it overboard where it began automatically to inflate. Into the raft he threw the film and logbooks that contained the record of his voyage; his sextant, chronometer, camera, binoculars, and a handheld radio transmitter; and some warm clothes. By then water had filled half the main cabin and the boat’s movement was sluggish and dead.

  As he climbed into the raft, some piece of the trimaran snagged its sea-anchor line and held it close.