A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Chief Officer Joseph Clark and three crewmen were lowered overside in the ship’s boat. They motored over the calm water to the yacht, and Clark climbed aboard. He stepped below into the cabin.

  He found a squalid scene. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink; three large radio transmitter/receivers lay on the table and shelves, their insides exposed, wires, components scattered everywhere. A filthy sleeping bag lay on the bunk in the narrow forward cabin.

  Clark found three blue foolscap books – two logbooks and a radio log – stacked neatly on the chart table. Beside them, carefully arranged, lay two navigation plotting sheets with positions worked out on them. Clark flipped through the logbooks. They were both full of writing. In one he found the last navigation entry; it was dated 23 June, two weeks earlier.

  Back on deck, Clark saw that the life raft was still lashed in place. The situation appeared tragic, but not mysterious: a lone yachtsman had fallen overboard – but not as a result of bad weather. Sitting next to the radios on the cabin table, a soldering iron still lay balanced on a milk tin: no unexpected wave had toppled the skipper off the deck.

  Aboard the Picardy, a crewman remembered the yacht’s name. He produced a clipping from the London Sunday Times. There was a drawing of the same yacht in an article about the Golden Globe race: Teignmouth Electron, a trimaran; Donald Crowhurst was its captain, from Bridgwater, Somerset.

  Captain Box sent a cable to his ship’s owners in London, describing the situation. Lloyds was notified. The US Air Force, which had found Nigel Tetley, began an air search. Teignmouth Electron was hoisted aboard the Picardy, which then began a search of the surrounding ocean.

  That evening, two Bridgwater policemen drove to the Crowhursts’ house with the news. Clare took the children upstairs. They sat on the bed and she told them that the boat had been found and their father wasn’t on it. But there would be a search, and he would be found. Then she began to cry.

  Soon other cars, driven by reporters, began arriving. Clare Crowhurst would make no statement other than to say that she knew her husband was alive.

  The next day the search for Donald Crowhurst was called off.

  Two days later, Sunday 13 July, London’s newspapers were full of the tragedy. The Sunday Times launched the Donald Crowhurst Appeal Fund for Crowhurst’s widow and children. Robin Knox-Johnston, now the default winner of the £5,000 cash prize for fastest time, donated the money to the fund. The Sunday Times kicked in another £5,000. Mr. Arthur Bladon, chairman of the Teignmouth Finance and General Purposes Committee, declared he would recommend the launch of a local fund. The BBC announced it would donate the fees it would have paid Crowhurst for the film he was shooting on his voyage. The Royal Mail Line said it would return the trimaran to England at its own expense. Stanley Best waived his claim to the boat in favour of the Crowhurst fund.

  The Sunday Times suggested that a guardrail, something Teignmouth Electron did not have, might have saved Crowhurst from falling overboard. There was speculation that he had not worn a harness (film taken by Crowhurst aboard – in fair weather – shows him not wearing one). Sir Francis Chichester always wore one, the Sunday Times noted. But Robin Knox-Johnston was quoted saying that he seldom wore a harness, finding that it hampered his movement around the boat. But even without a harness, he thought it unlikely that Crowhurst could come so far and simply fall overboard. He believed the only explanation could be ‘some dreadful accident’. The paper noted that weather reports indicated calm conditions had prevailed at the time of Crowhurst’s disappearance in the area where his boat had been found. Quotes from Clare Crowhurst and Rodney Hallworth summed up Donald Crowhurst as an adventurer who lived life to the fullest and followed his dream. Il faut vivre la vie.

  And there were these sentiments from Chichester: ‘It is very sad that such an extraordinary accident should have occurred to such a gallant sailor after such a memorable voyage and so near home. But before he was lost, he had accomplished something near to his heart, having circumnavigated the world.’

  Rodney Hallworth, together with Nicholas Tomalin and Frank Herrmann, a reporter and photographer from the Sunday Times, flew to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to await the Picardy. As their Boeing 707 flew over the water where Crowhurst had disappeared, Hallworth asked the group to observe a moment’s silence.

  When the Picardy docked, Captain Box took Hallworth alone to his cabin. He had read enough of the logbooks to know what had happened, and he urged Hallworth to rip out the ‘philosophy’ pages for the sake of Crowhurst’s family. Hallworth reflexively complied. But the next day, when the reporters read through the navigational logbooks and it became clear that Crowhurst had never left the Atlantic, Hallworth showed them the pages he was holding. They returned to England and conferred with the editors at the Sunday Times.

  It was a sensational story, but not the one the newspaper had wanted. The Sunday Times had made it all too easy for anyone, unexamined, untried, unknown, to join its race and, together with Rodney Hallworth, had been an unwitting but eager partner in Crowhurst’s great deception. The true story was also painful salt in the wound already being suffered by Clare Crowhurst and her children. But there could be no stopping it.

  Donald Crowhurst’s deception, madness, and presumed suicide were front-page news in all the national British papers on Sunday 27 July. On its front page, the Sunday Times published a sober statement about its decision to release the full story, in part necessitated by the existence of its Crowhurst Appeal Fund, which it intended to continue to support.

  In the same statement, Sir Francis Chichester now abruptly changed his tune and publicly revealed his private doubts: ‘As chairman of the judges of the Golden Globe race I had decided some time ago that Donald Crowhurst’s log must be scrutinised as soon as possible.’

  Inside the paper was reporter Nicholas Tomalin’s account of the tragic voyage of Donald Crowhurst.

  Months later, the Teignmouth Finance and General Purposes Committee officially commended Rodney Hallworth for ‘the terrific publicity reaped from the Donald Crowhurst saga’. Arthur Bladon, the committee’s chairman, estimated that the Devon town had gained £1,500,000 of free national and international publicity. ‘We have had this extremely cheaply,’ Mr Bladon told the committee, ‘and I hope the town appreciates it.’

  32

  STRANGE HOW AN ARTICLE about a race around the world, found by chance in his Sunday newspaper at the foot of his bunk, deflected the trajectory of Nigel Tetley’s life and sent it spinning away with unstoppable momentum. It was not the sea that continued to hold him in its grip long after he arrived home, but a sea change that would not give him up to his old life and loved ones ashore. He had driven himself as hard as Victress. He had come so very far – too far – to have lost so close to the end and to let it go. The race was over, but he found there was no going back to the way things had been before.

  He had wondered, often, why he was sailing around the world. But by the time of his sinking, he had found enough reason in the act of the voyage itself, and the tidy geometry of completion. A circular shape, fused without a break, had formed in his mind, and the compulsion remained to express it.

  He was awarded a £1,000 consolation prize by the Sunday Times. He put it towards the building of a new trimaran. He planned to enter the new boat in the 1972 OSTAR and then head around the world alone again, trying for a new fastest circumnavigation record.

  The boat was built by sailor and boatbuilder Derek Kelsall, at Sandwich Marina, Kent. Tetley had met Kelsall several years earlier, when they had both sailed their trimarans in the Round-Britain Race, which Kelsall’s yacht, Toria, had won. They became good friends.

  ‘Nigel’s circumnavigation was never recognised for what it was,’ Kelsall recalled later, ‘a truly remarkable effort in a most unsuitable craft. I can think of nothing that was right about that boat for that race. The outcome could have been so different if he had not been pushing hard to beat Crowhurst back to the UK.’
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  The new boat, Miss Vicky, a 60-foot trimaran, was finished and completed sea trials by the end of 1971. Tetley and Eve moved aboard and moored it on the River Stour at Sandwich.

  Now retired from the navy, Tetley wrote a book about his part in the Golden Globe race. It was full of the decency and generosity he had felt for his fellow racers, but it was too modest and told little of his inner voyage. It was about as dull as a boating book can be, and it sold poorly.

  After the cost of the new boat, Tetley didn’t have any money left for the sails, food, and equipment needed for his new transatlantic and round-the-world efforts, so he again looked for sponsors.

  Kelsall saw Tetley daily at this time: ‘Nigel came to my office most days to get his mail, and he often talked about the latest potential sponsor letter he was waiting for. The one thing that Nigel did, that did not make sense to me, was that he would write to one potential sponsor at a time and then wait for that reply. He seemed to put all his faith in the last company he approached, but it was one letter only. I told Nigel that a couple of years before, Geoffrey Williams had successfully got Sir Thomas Lipton sponsored (for the 1968 OSTAR), but Geoff had written 2,000 letters.’

  Perhaps Tetley sent prospective backers his book, for he met with uniform rejection.

  Derek Kelsall last saw Nigel Tetley on Wednesday 2 February, 1972. ‘He was his usual pleasant self the last day he collected mail, and I believe I was the last known contact before he went missing. There had never been any indication of a problem other than the search for funds. Everything was dependent on the search for a sponsor.’

  Three days later, on Saturday 5 February, Tetley was found hanging from a tree in Ewell Minnis Woods, near Dover.

  Most people are horrified by the spectre of great waves and storms at sea. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ they ask sailors again and again. The truth is that such physical dangers are readily coped with; as conditions worsen, there is much to do aboard a boat in peril at sea. Even if disaster is the final result, the steps taken to avert it are clear at the time, and keep a sailor busy. One may be afraid, but action is a blessing that usually allays the deepest fears and doubts, and once a few storms are weathered, one acquires a comforting faith in one’s efforts. After surviving the seas and terrors of Cape Horn and the Southern Ocean, Nigel Tetley’s greatest danger rose up inside him, inescapably close. It found him at home, on dry land, in the company of friends and loved ones, where most people do not fear to go.

  ‘Apart from his wife Eve, I probably knew Nigel better than anyone else at the time of his suicide,’ said Derek Kelsall. ‘That is not to say that I knew him well. Perhaps no one did. I don’t believe there ever was a reasonable explanation of the suicide. There were a few stories, as there are with most boat people.’

  EPILOGUE

  AFTER TEN MONTHS AT SEA, Bernard Moitessier finally dropped anchor at Papeete, Tahiti, on Saturday 21 June 1969. He wrote his story of the race, The Long Way, which was a best-seller in France, and has remained in print in French and English for the last thirty years. It will doubtless continue so as long as people read books about the sea. He remained mostly in Polynesia, with occasional voyages to the United States and New Zealand. He and Françoise did not stay together. Almost everybody he ever met loved Bernard Moitessier, and he loved them all back, freely. Being his woman was a tough role. There would be two more. He had a child, Stephan, by one of them.

  In 1980, he sailed Joshua to San Francisco, where he remained for two years. In 1982, he sailed south, headed back to the South Pacific. With him, just for the first leg, was actor Klaus Kinski, who was thinking at the time about sailing around the world. Moitessier dropped him off in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He stayed twelve hours too long. Before he could raise his anchor and beat out to sea, a now-famous storm tore into the fleet of yachts anchored off Cabo San Lucas and threw most of them – including Joshua – on to the beach, then buried them with sand. Moitessier couldn’t face the damage done to Joshua, and he gave the boat to friends. It was his third shipwreck, and each had propelled him into a new phase of his life, each time with a new boat. So it was again. Other friends built him a new steel cutter, Tamata, in Point Richmond on San Francisco Bay. In 1983 he sailed to Hawaii, and from there back to Tahiti.

  Moitessier died of cancer in France on 16 June 1994. He is buried in the Breton town of Le Bono, in a graveyard filled with seamen.

  In 1990, the restored Joshua was acquired by the maritime museum of La Rochelle, France, where she now sails as part of a cruising school.

  John Ridgway started an adventure school in Ardmore, Scotland. He sailed a maxi yacht, English Rose VI, around the world with a crew in the Whitbread Round-the-World-Race and circumnavigated a second time with his wife and children.

  Chay Blyth remained fascinated with the masochistic aspects guaranteed by a single-handed circumnavigation. He persuaded the British Steel Corporation to finance a new boat, a 50-footer christened British Steel (made, naturally, of steel), which he then sailed successfully alone and nonstop around the world in 1970–71 – but the ‘wrong way’. He sailed west-about, into the teeth of the westerlies of the Roaring Forties, which, despite Robin Knox-Johnston’s few weeks of frustration, are the prevailing winds of the Southern Ocean. It was a brutal voyage, and Blyth seems to have thoroughly enjoyed it. He has remained a prominent figure in British yachting circles, a patron and participant of long voyages characterised by their hardship.

  Bill King repaired Galway Blazer II and set out again in 1969 for a nonstop circumnavigation. Problems forced him to give up at Gibraltar, but he remained gripped by the adventure. He tried once more, in 1971. Off Australia, Galway Blazer was struck with great force and holed by what King later believed was a great white shark. Stuffing the hole with sails, King made it to Fremantle, Australia, where Galway Blazer was repaired. He set off sometime later, completing his circumnavigation, by way of Cape Horn, in 1973.

  Loïck Fougeron and Alex Carozzo retreated from the public eye.

  At the end of the Golden Globe race, the Sunday Mirror sent Robin Knox-Johnston to visit the psychiatrist who had pronounced him ‘distressingly normal’ before his voyage. The misdiagnosis was once again confirmed.

  Robin Knox-Johnston has made a life of being England’s preeminent yachtsman. He has become rich and famous, and has been showered with honorary degrees and every imaginable maritime award. In 1994, with New Zealand’s pre-eminent yachtsman, Peter Blake, he sailed nonstop around the world again, this time in a giant catamaran. Their seventy-four-day, twenty-two-hour circumnavigation was the fastest record – until Olivier de Kersauson, a Frenchman, shortened it by three days.

  Knox-Johnston continued to sail Suhaili, voyaging among other places to the icy seas of eastern Greenland with England’s pre-eminent mountaineer Chris Bonington. In 1995, he was knighted by the queen for services to sailing. By then, with his beard grey, the sea years showing in his face, favoured by his sovereign, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston had come to resemble exactly the Elizabethan sea heroes of his youth who had watched over him on his epochal voyage.

  After her thirty-five years of hard service, Knox-Johnston donated Suhaili to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, where she now lives, enshrined in glory, on permanent exhibition in a glass-roofed museum gallery called Neptune Court. She is heeled slightly on a 40-foot block of blue plastic waves, sails raised but slack, no one at her helm. Noble as such a berth may be, it is living death for a wooden boat. Out of her natural element, Suhaili’s planks are drying out and shrinking, her seams are opening up, the long cracks along her hull indicating the onset of decay. She is passing into history.*

  The Royal Mail Line retreated from its initial good intentions to transport Teignmouth Electron back to England. The trimaran was sold cheaply at auction in Jamaica to a man named Bunnie Francis, who used it to take tourists out day-sailing in Montego Bay. Sometimes he sailed with a calypso band aboard. But an increase in crime hit the tourist business, and Bunnie Francis sold th
e boat to a Canadian diver, Winston McDermott, for $12,000. McDermott had read about the Golden Globe race and knew what the boat had been through. It was a curiosity for him, but he also planned to use the trimaran for his scuba-diving business on Grand Cayman Island. McDermott and a young Jamaican he employed to sleep aboard the boat and look after it believed it was haunted. They said they heard footsteps walking around on deck.

  One night, the trimaran was damaged in a hurricane on the island of Cayman Brac. McDermott hired a crane to haul it out of the water to make repairs, but he never got around to doing the work. He moved to Florida and the trimaran remained high and dry on Cayman Brac.

  It’s still there, lying in the weeds near the shore, heeled over on two hulls, like a strange carcass, sun-bleached and forgotten. The name Teignmouth Electron is still just visible, in faded paint, on the bow and stern of the main hull. Over the years, people have unbolted bits of it and stripped it of any useful piece of gear. All that remains now, other than its empty plywood hulls and deck, are its galley sink and pieces of its toilet, which lie on the ground between the hulls.

  Inside the main hull are tangles of old wire, going nowhere.

  In 1999, British artist Tacita Dean, who had become interested in Donald Crowhurst’s story, was invited by the National Maritime Museum to exhibit photographs she had taken at Cayman Brac of the abandoned Teignmouth Electron. They were shown in Neptune Court, the section of the museum that houses the triumphant Suhaili.