A Voyage For Madmen Read online

  ‘As a carpenter purrs over perfect dovetailing, so I rejoiced in the craftsmanship of this book.’ Simon Barnes, The Times

  ‘What a fascinating book this is, a combination of Moby Dick and a Boy’s Own Adventure story – and what an apt title.’ Beryl Bainbridge, Mail on Sunday

  ‘This is the one that people will read and pass on to friends, and the one that they will pass on safe in the knowledge that they will never get it back again.’ Danny Kelly, Judge, William Hill Sports Book of the Year

  ‘If you are new to Moitessier, Knox-Johnston, Crowhurst and the rest, it will grip you from start to finish.’ Libby Purves, Daily Mail

  ‘Nichols produce[s] an exciting story, salted with his own sea-going experience.’ Financial Times

  ‘… the author sucks the reader into the story with ease, to the point where each man’s fate becomes of the utmost importance’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘A classic. A must for would-be sailing adventurers …’ Chay Blyth

  ‘An epic story of courage, heroism and utter madness.’ Bookseller

  ‘This story is by turns inspiring, terrifying and lyrical and combines elements of the best thrillers with a perceptive examination of what drives people to undertake adventures of this kind’ Books Magazine

  ‘I started the book after dinner (with Mozart on Radio 3) and read non-stop till sleepy time, then started again on Sunday morning and read non-stop to the finish at 11am (in bed). A great read indeed. Bravo.’ Richard Hooper, Chairman, Radio Authority

  ‘A compelling tale.’ Country Life

  ‘A cohesive, gripping sea saga […] Nichols chronicles this extraordinary endurance event with a novelist’s insight and sensitivity.’

  Yachting Monthly

  ‘An enthralling tale of human endeavour and courage in the face of adversity … you don’t need to know your spinnaker from your mainsail to enjoy this book.’ Tatler

  ‘Nichols succeeds brilliantly in conveying the destructive lure of the sea.’ Independent

  ‘In a world full of synthetic heroes, delve into this and enjoy the real thing.’ Evening Herald

  A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

  Peter Nichols spent ten years at sea working as a professional yacht captain, living and cruising aboard his own small wooden sailboat, before turning to writing full time. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. He has taught creative writing at Georgetown University in Washington DC and New York University in Paris. He divides his time between Europe and the United States.

  ALSO BY PETER NICHOLS

  Evolution’s Captain

  Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

  Lodestar (a novel)

  A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

  PETER NICHOLS

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2011

  Paperback edition first published in 2002

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London ECIR OJH

  www.profilebooks.com

  First published in the United States in 2001 by

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Peter Nichols 2001, 2002

  Typeset in Sabon

  Designed by Sarah Gubkin

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 443 2

  ISBN 978 1 84765 466 3

  For Marion and Jeric Strathallan

  Everything can be found at sea,

  according to the spirit of your quest.

  - JOSEPH CONRAD

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  The nine competitors in the Golden Globe race, and their boats, in order of departure:

  JOHN RIDGWAY, 29, captain in the British Army. Rowed across the Atlantic with Chay Blyth in a 20-foot open boat in 1966. Departed Inishmore, Ireland, 1 June, 1968. Sloop English Rose IV, 30-foot-long twin-keeled fibreglass.

  CHAY BLYTH, 27, former British Army sergeant. Ridgway’s transatlantic rowing partner. Departed Hamble 8 June. Sloop Dytiscus III, fibreglass, twin-keeled 30-footer, very similar to English Rose IV.

  ROBIN KNOX-JOHNSTON, 28, British Merchant Marine captain. Departed Falmouth 14 June in the 32-foot-long ketch Suhaili, built of teak in India.

  BERNARD MOITESSIER, 45, French sailor-author. Sailed with his wife nonstop from Tahiti to Spain, via Cape Horn, in 1965–6 aboard his 39-foot-long steel ketch Joshua. Departed Plymouth, Devon, 22 August aboard Joshua.

  LOÏCK FOUGERON, 42, French, manager of a motorcycle company in Casablanca, Morocco. Friend of Moitessier’s. Departed Plymouth 22 August in the 30-foot-long, gaff-rigged steel cutter, Captain Browne.

  BILL KING, 57, farmer, former British Navy submarine commander. His 42-foot-long, junk-rigged, cold-moulded wood schooner, Galway Blazer II, was designed and built expressly for a nonstop circumnavigation, but not for a race. Departed Plymouth 24 August.

  NIGEL TETLEY, 45, Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Sailed in his live-aboard home, a 40-foot-long, 22-foot-wide, plywood trimaran ketch, Victress. Departed Plymouth 16 September.

  ALEX CAROZZO, 36, Italian single-hander who had previously sailed alone across the Pacific, in the 66-foot cold-moulded wooden ketch Gancia Americano built for the Golden Globe race. He ‘sailed’ – that is, he removed to a mooring at Cowes, Isle of Wight, to continue preparations – on the final deadline date set by the race sponsor, the London Sunday Times: 31 October. He put to sea a week later.

  DONALD CROWHURST, 36, English electronics engineer. His 40-foot-long, ketch-rigged, plywood trimaran, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified sister ship to Tetley’s Victress. He too sailed on 31 October, within hours of the Sunday Times deadline.

  INTRODUCTION

  TOWARDS THE END OF THE 1960s, as Mankind closed in on its goal of voyaging to the moon, nine men set out in small sailboats to race each other around the watery earth, alone and without stopping. It had never been done before. Nobody knew if it could be.

  It was dubbed by its eventual sponsor, the Sunday Times, the Golden Globe race. It was the historical progenitor of modern single-handed yacht racing, to which it bears almost no resemblance. Today, high-tech, multimillion-dollar, corporate-sponsored sailing machines race around the world in 100 days or less. Their captains talk by phone and send e-mail to their families and headquarters ashore. They receive weather maps and forecasts by fax. They navigate using the global positioning system (GPS), their locations determined by satellites and accurate to within yards. These positions are simultaneously transmitted to race organisers ashore. Today’s racers cannot get lost or file false reports of progress. If they get into trouble, rescue aircraft can often reach their exact locations in a matter of hours. They may race through the most dangerous waters in the world, but their safety net is wide and efficient.*

  The Golden Globe racers sailed in the age before satellites provided pinpoint navigation and verification of positions. Like Captain Cook in the eighteenth century, they navigated by sextant, sun, and stars. Their world at sea was far closer to that earlier age than to ours today. When they sailed, heading for the
world’s stormiest seas in a motley array of new and old boats, they vanished over the horizon into a true unknown. The only information of their whereabouts and what was happening to them came from their own radio transmissions. In time, the radios broke down; several sailors carried no radios at all. One man, sending reports of tremendous progress that made him appear a likely winner, never, in fact, left the Atlantic Ocean, but tried to fake his passage around the world.

  Compared with the yachts of today their boats were primitive and unsophisticated – and small: the living space in which the sailors planned to spend the better part of a year was about the size of a Volkswagen bus.

  These men sailed for reasons more complex than even they knew. Each decided to make his voyage independent of the others; the race between them was born only of the coincidence of their timing. They were not sportsmen or racing yachtsmen: one didn’t even know how to sail when he set off. Their preparations and their boats were as varied as their personalities, and the contrasts were startling. Once at sea, they were exposed to conditions frightening beyond imagination and a loneliness almost unknown in human experience.

  Sealed inside their tiny craft, beyond the world’s gaze, stripped of any possibility of pretence, the sailors met their truest selves. Who they were – not the sea or the weather – determined the nature of their voyages. They failed and succeeded on the grandest scale. Only one of the nine crossed the finish line after ten months at sea and passed through fortune’s elusive membrane into the sunny world of fame, wealth, and glory. For the others the rewards were a rich mixture of failure, ignominy, sublimity, madness, and death.

  The race was the logical inevitability of the first tentative passage made by a man daring to float across a lagoon on a log: in the end, alone and without stopping, he floated so far that he arrived back at the place from where he started, there being no farther earthbound voyage.

  Like the first ascent of Everest, it was a feat without any larger purpose than its own end. But like a trip to the moon, it was a voyage that provided Man with another benchmark of the far reach of his yearning endeavour.

  The Golden Globe race happened in a different world, as distant, in terms of our experience with the sea, as Joseph Conrad’s. The story of that race now has the feel of an older romance of the sea, a tale of unlikely, heroic, desperate, and tragic characters.

  At the time of the Golden Globe race, I was a schoolboy in England. I knew nothing of sailboats and sailing. But a few years later I took a brief (disastrous, frightening, and wildly exciting) trip aboard an old wooden schooner and my life derailed and spun away seaward. I spent a decade and a half seriously afloat. I worked my way up from paint-scraping grunt to licensed professional yacht captain, delivering sailboats for owners in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic. Eventually my wife and I bought our own small wooden sailboat and moved aboard it full-time.

  During those years I collected and read every book I could find about the sea and small-boat voyaging. The literature of the sea, I found, interested me as much as the sea itself. In time I came across a few books about the Golden Globe race and became fascinated – obsessed – by this story. I scoured newspaper libraries for articles about the race. I wondered what it was like to be alone at sea for long stretches of time, and I wondered about those men. I decided I wanted to try single-handed sailing, to get a little taste of what they had experienced, alone and far out at sea.

  I got it – more than I bargained for. After the breakup of my marriage, I started across the Atlantic, bound from England to the United States, alone in my 27-foot-long, 44-year-old wooden sailboat, Toad. It was an eventful, bittersweet voyage that ended with Toad sinking a week short of reaching the American shore.

  Reading of the Golden Globe race as I learned to sail, the story became a core ingredient of my fascination with small boats and the sea. Crossing most of an ocean alone and having my boat founder beneath me only intensified my obsession. This book is the result of a deep investigation into that race, and my efforts to put myself aboard each of those boats and into the minds of those nine very different men.

  A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

  1

  IN 1966-7, A 65-YEAR-OLD ENGLISHMAN, Francis Chichester, sailed alone around the world. He stopped only once, in Australia.

  A tall, thin, balding man with thick-lensed glasses, Chichester looked more like a prep school headmaster than an adventurer. He owned a small book and map shop in London. He was a vegetarian. But the urge to subject himself to extreme tests characterised his life. In his youth he made a pioneering flight in a small aircraft from England to Australia. In 1960, at the age of 59, he and four friends made a wager to race each other single-handedly in their four very different boats across the Atlantic. The course began at Plymouth’s Eddystone Lighthouse and finished at the Ambrose light vessel off New York Harbour; the route between these two points was up to the racers. There were no other rules. The winner would receive half a crown.

  Francis Chichester won the bet and the race. Sailing his 39-foot sloop Gypsy Moth III, the largest boat of the five, he made Ambrose in forty days. But winning was not enough; he thought he could do it faster. Two years later, racing nobody but himself, he crossed the Atlantic again, cutting more than six days off his earlier voyage. Still he was not happy with his time; he believed a crossing of less than thirty days was possible.

  The Observer had covered the 1960 race and found that it owned a story with major and growing public interest. Four years later, in 1964, the Observer sponsored a second single-handed transatlantic race (now famously known by its acronym, OSTAR). Ten additional competitors joined the original group. One of the newcomers, the Frenchman Eric Tabarly, trounced the fleet and took the honours in 27 days, 3 hours, 56 minutes. Chichester came second, 20 hours and 1 minute later. He beat his personal target time handily, but second was a new place for him, an ignominious position for a lone adventurer.

  Tabarly was awarded the Legion of Honour and became a national hero in France: ‘Thanks to him it is the French flag that triumphs in the longest and most spectacular race on that ocean which the Anglo-Saxons consider as their special domain,’ proclaimed the Paris Jour.

  Single-handed racing hit the big time. National pride on both sides of the English Channel, from two nations famous for their sense of superiority, xenophobia, and rivalry, now focused on the third OSTAR, due to be held in 1968. At least forty sailors announced plans to compete. Many had new, experimental craft designed and built solely for the purpose of winning that one race. Eric Tabarly was building a new 67-foot trimaran, capable of tremendous speeds; at the time this was a radical reappraisal of the size of boat one person could handle. These boats, with their size and gear and engineering, became so expensive that they were beyond the reach of ordinary sailors. Yacht racing began to resemble motor racing, and the long, increasingly ugly hulls were plastered with commercial logos.

  A few sailors felt this was veering too far from the notion of ‘sport’. They wrote disapproving letters to yachting magazines, dropped away, and left the field to younger sailors who were learning to navigate the tide rips and currents of commercial sponsorship.

  Chichester decided not to compete with the pack in 1968. He would be up against younger men sailing larger boats, and the outcome must have been clear to him: he would be the game old campaigner who would manage a respectable placing halfway through the fleet. He quietly set off to do something else.

  Sailing alone around the world was nothing new. The Nova Scotian-born American Joshua Slocum, a sailing ship master beached in his middle years by the steam age, was the first to do it, in 1895–8. He sailed from Gloucester, Massachusetts, west-about around the globe, against ferocious prevailing winds through the Strait of Magellan, north of Cape Horn, in a seemingly unhandy, fat-hulled, engineless old oystering sloop that he had rebuilt himself and christened Spray. The Spray’s seagoing abilities, and what Slocum managed to do with her, have been wondered at and argued over
by sailors ever since. Slocum (who couldn’t swim and nearly drowned trying to set an anchor off the Uruguayan coast) stopped in many places and wrote a drily humorous yet thrilling book of his adventure, Sailing Alone Around the World. One hundred years later it is still the standard by which all other sailing narratives are gauged.

  Eighteen other men had circumnavigated alone by the time Chichester set out in 1967, but his voyage caught the public imagination as perhaps none other since Slocum’s. It was no pleasure cruise. His route was down the Atlantic, east-about around the bottom of the world, back up the Atlantic. Virtually all the east-to-west part of his circumnavigation took place in a sea not found on most atlases but infamously known to all sailors as the Southern Ocean: the windswept southerly wastes of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans between latitudes 40 and 60 degrees south, between the habitable world and the Antarctic, where storm-force westerly winds develop and drive huge seas around the globe, unimpeded by land except at one fearsome place, Cape Horn, the southernmost rock of the Andes, the scorpion-tail tip of South America.

  Sailors have respectfully and fearfully labelled the latitudes of this global band of turbulent water the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. The tea clippers from India and China and the square-rigged grain ships from Australia took this route back to Europe because, blown by the westerlies through the desolate seas of the Forties and Fifties, circling the planet at a short, high latitude, it was the fastest way around the world.

  But it took sailors through the most isolated area of the globe, the emptiest expanse of ocean, the remotest place from land. To take this lonely shortcut, ships and sailors made a Faustian bargain on every trip. They exchanged sea miles for an almost certain hammering by the largest seas on Earth, the stormiest weather. Giant waves, sometimes over 100 feet high; sleet, hail, and snow; icebergs and fog were the conditions that could be expected in any season. Many ships disappeared in the Southern Ocean; many sailors were washed overboard, almost always unrecoverably.