A Voyage For Madmen Read online

  Sir Francis Chichester, chairman of the Committee of Judges, has … expressed concern about the hazards that lie ahead on such a voyage. It cannot be stressed too often that while, in theory, any person may take part in this event … only men with considerable long distance ocean-yachting experience should consider competing.

  Elsewhere in the paper, Chichester, the paterfamilias seadog, was quoted:

  Some of these chaps don’t know what they are letting themselves in for. If any of them succeed in getting round it will be remarkable. By comparison the Atlantic is about on the level of a canoe trip across the Serpentine.

  The list of competitors was impressive: Bill King, the former submarine ace, and his revolutionary Galway Blazer II; John Ridgway, the supremely fit army captain who had already rowed across the Atlantic; Tahiti Bill Howell, the sailing dentist, 20,000 miles of Pacific cruising in his wake, most of it single-handed, making him the most experienced single-hander of all the competitors, sailing potentially the fastest boat; Robin Knox-Johnston, the merchant navy captain, about whom little else could be said; and Bernard Moitessier, the famous French yachtsman, known for his epic Tahiti–Alicante voyage in his yacht Joshua and (reported the Times) for his dry sense of humor.

  Another sailor who had caught the bug of the great voyage was Donald Crowhurst, an electronics engineer and manufacturer of the Navicator, a radio navigation device designed for the yachting market, which he was selling from a booth that January at the boat show. He had no boat of his own, so he tried to convince the Cutty Sark Society, which was planning to purchase Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV (and mount it beside the square-rigged sailing ship Cutty Sark near the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich), that he, Crowhurst, should sail it around the world again, nonstop.

  Crowhurst appeared to be an experienced yachtsman. He had impressed a number of people, including Angus Primrose (the codesigner of Gypsy Moth IV and now Galway Blazer II) with his arguments for the loan or charter of Gypsy Moth IV. At the time, there was considerable public and yachting community antipathy to the idea of retiring such a famous yacht to a permanent cement berth. Many felt Gypsy Moth IV should be kept afloat and used for precisely the sort of noble and epic voyage Donald Crowhurst was proposing. The Cutty Sark Society eventually refused him, and Gypsy Moth IV became a soot-covered museum display. But Crowhurst was not put off.

  Four days after the Sunday Times announcement, Donald Crowhurst declared himself a competitor in the race. Few paid attention. In the following six months he was mentioned only once by the Sunday Times in a roundup of possible competitors. No information was given about him, except that he planned to sail in September and that his boat was a ‘revolutionary ketch’.

  Here was the dark horse. Here was the story that would steal the show.

  4

  IN 1968, DONALD CROWHURST was 36 years old. This is an age when most men – that is, business and professional men, not artists or bohemians or mystics, but men with families, responsibilities, and middle-class aspirations – are beginning to have some success in their work, if they are ever to have any at all. And it’s an age when most people are beginning to see themselves clearly, whether they like what they see or not.

  In a modest way, Donald Crowhurst had been doing well: after an uneven career, he appeared to be on the verge of success as an electronics engineer, and by the mid 1960s, his company had achieved a flurry of profitability. He was a happy family man with a wife and four young children and a large rambling house in a pretty country town in Somerset. He was a popular, charismatic figure in his community, involved with the local amateur dramatics society, and he’d been voted a councilman for his hometown of Bridgwater.

  But Crowhurst’s early life had been marked by setbacks and crushed aspirations, so when his business took a downward slide in the late 1960s, and his visions of solid success began to waver and vanish, he felt with awful familiarity the creeping pinch of failure. He looked around, and then into himself, to find something that would stop his fall.

  He was born in India, the son of a superintendent with the North Western India Railway Company; his mother was a schoolteacher. Their comfortable raj lifestyle (complete with servants and pretensions unsustainable elsewhere) came to an abrupt end in 1947, the year of India’s independence from British rule. The Crowhursts returned to England to find themselves, like so many English colonials when they returned to the ‘home’ that had never been home, in severely reduced circumstances.

  Donald’s father, John Crowhurst, had put all his retirement savings in a sporting-goods factory in Pakistan which was burned down in a riot soon after they reached England. With what money they had left the Crowhursts bought a small house at Tilehurst near Reading, and then John went looking for work. The only job he could find was as a porter in a jam factory. Donald’s mother, Alice, a highly strung, hypochondriacal woman, was appalled by their debasement and anxious at the sudden burdens placed on her husband.

  She was right to worry. The following year, John Crowhurst died of a heart attack while digging in his garden. Alice was left with the house, but little money. She found it necessary to borrow from relatives; this brought her a few pounds and much humiliation. She became filled with a bitter sense of superiority blighted by circumstance. She passed a heavy dose of this on to her son.

  At the age of 16, Donald Crowhurst was forced to leave school. He had hoped to go to Cambridge University but instead became an apprentice in electronic engineering at a technical college. In England’s then rigidly stratified social structure, he keenly felt his family’s series of falls from an early position of privilege and his own dashed hopes of a good education and the elevated status that would have come with it. He spoke with an ‘upper middle class’ accent and was not prepared by temperament or upbringing to settle for a station that he felt was beneath him.

  At 21, he embarked on a series of false career starts. He joined the Royal Air Force, learned to fly, and assumed the social role of a young officer, tearing about in a sports car, drinking too much, inciting others to wild times. But he got a reputation as a troublemaker and was dismissed from the RAF. He joined the army, specialising in electronic equipment, and continued his performance as the racy officer. But again he was constantly in trouble: he smashed up his car, was caught trying to hot-wire another car to get back to his barracks after a late night out, and was finally asked to leave the army. He found a job with an electronics firm, crashed the company car, was reprimanded, and quit. Meanwhile, he got married, continued to jump from job to job, moving his growing family around southern England. They came to rest in Bridgwater, in Somerset, where Crowhurst landed a job as chief design engineer with another electronics firm. It was not far from the Bristol Channel. Donald’s wife, Clare, was a Catholic, and children began to arrive at regular intervals. Money was always tight; nevertheless, about this time Crowhurst bought himself a small 20-foot sloop and started sailing.

  The only constant, apart from his inability to work well for others, was his interest in electronics. At home, he would spend hours in his workshop, bent over wires and circuitry, attempting to invent clever devices. Combining this with his growing interest in sailing, he eventually produced a radio-direction-finding instrument (RDF).

  Navigating a boat using the RDF was becoming popular and widespread in the 1960s. An RDF instrument is tuned like a radio (essentially, it is just a radio with a compass mounted on it) to the frequency of a known signal at a known location ashore, then swung by hand until the signal direction is determined (actually by finding the null, or least evidence of the signal), and a compass bearing taken. Two such bearings, from different stations, can provide a fairly accurate offshore position. To the sailor wrapped in fog, foul weather, or darkness, many hours past the last visual fix on a sea buoy or a piece of coastline, RDF added a considerable measure of safety and relief. Like many other navigational devices and systems, it has now largely been supplanted by the ease and fantastic accuracy of the satellite-enable
d global positioning system (GPS). But in its day, RDF, along with other radiowave navigational systems, like Decca and Loran, represented the greatest leap in navigation since accurate timepieces made possible the determination of longitude.

  Yachting has long been ruefully likened to standing in a cold shower while tearing up money. It’s a famously uncomfortable and expensive recreation. But RDF devices, when they appeared, were hardly more expensive than small transistor radios, and soon became standard equipment aboard yachts – particularly those sailing in English waters, where any uncertainty of position is compounded by strong tides and a coastline that looks much the same in one place as another and is easily lost sight of in habitually murky weather.

  Crowhurst called his RDF a Navicator. It was not innovative in any way, but it was well-designed and conveniently shaped like a pistol. With its little compass mounted on top, it looked like a ray gun from a 1950s space movie. The user could simply and easily aim and take a bearing.

  At about this time, Alice Crowhurst, Donald’s mother, swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt. She was taken to a hospital and thereafter remained in institutional care. Her house was sold and Crowhurst decided to use some of the money to start his own electronics business. He called the company Electron Utilisation. It was launched with the manufacture of his Navicator.

  It was the right product at the right time. Crowhurst soon had six full-time workers in a small factory. Pye Radio, then a household name in Britain as a manufacturer of radios, televisions, and gramophone players, began negotiations with Crowhurst to buy the Navicator. They paid him £8,500, a sum that would have felt like fifty times that amount today. He bought a house, Woodlands, in Bridgwater, and turned its small stable into his workshop. Donald Crowhurst had arrived.

  Crowhurst was well aware of the larger world, the bigger ideas, the brighter people beyond his immediate provincial horizons deep in the English countryside. He was more intelligent than most of his acquaintances, and they knew it. ‘I did not worship Donald Crowhurst,’ said a friend. ‘I recognised him – as the most vivid and real person I have ever met.’

  He carried people away with his brilliance. With no one to match him intellectually or egotistically, no one to shoot him down, deflate him, or burst the bubbles he blew, he carried himself away too. He joined the local amateur dramatic society and became one of its stars, but the wider world stage on which he wished to strut seemed out of reach.

  His Navicator, his endless tinkering with wires and transistors in search of other inventions, his interest in amateur theatricals, his dominating, supercharged personality, were all symptoms of his great urge to leave his mark. Crowhurst believed he had something important to give the world, and he was constantly trying to find it.

  On Sunday 28 May 1967, as Francis Chichester approached Plymouth – which was only 70 miles from Bridgwater – Donald Crowhurst spent the day sailing with a friend. But they headed out into the Bristol Channel, the other side of England’s southwestern peninsula, far from the waters that filled throughout the day with boats waiting for the first sight of Gypsy Moth IV. Crowhurst admired Chichester. He had read his earlier books about his lone transatlantic crossings and had closely followed his voyage around the world. Yet that day he turned his back, becoming aloof and scornful. As the two men listened to the BBC’s coverage over their boat’s radio, Crowhurst derided Chichester’s accomplishment. Plenty of people had sailed alone around the world, he said, and Chichester had stopped for a long rest in Australia.

  Crowhurst then told his friend that for years he had thought about sailing around the world alone and nonstop. That would be something worth making a fuss about.

  Later that day, after they returned to port, they went home and, like everybody else, watched Chichester’s arrival on television.

  Crowhurst’s role as a successful businessman was short-lived. Pye Radio backed out of the Navicator deal. Their initial payment gave Crowhurst and Electron Utilisation the appearance of prosperity for a while, but he was eventually forced to abandon his small factory and cut his workforce from six to one part-time assembler in his stable-workshop. The Navicator was not, as he had hoped, to be widely distributed to every ship chandlery in Britain. He was reduced to hawking it from a booth at boat shows.

  But his self-belief, his intelligence, his ideas, and his charm were persuasive. Looking for new backers, he was introduced to Stanley Best, a buinessman from nearby Taunton, who had become wealthy selling caravans. In 1967 Best made a first tentative investment in Electron Utilisation. It was in the form of a loan of £1,000. Crowhurst’s undaunted and enlarging vision held Stanley Best in thrall long past the point where his pragmatic business sense should have stopped him.

  ‘I always considered Donald Crowhurst an absolutely brilliant innovator,’ Best said later, ‘but as a businessman … he was hopeless. He seemed to have this capacity to convince himself that everything was going to be wonderful, and hopeless situations were only temporary setbacks. This enthusiasm, I admit, was infectious. But as I now realise, it was the product of that kind of overimaginative mind that was always dreaming reality into the state it wanted it to be.’

  5

  JOHN RIDGWAY SAILED from remote Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, 40 miles off the Galway coast of northwest Ireland, at 11.38 a.m., Saturday 1 June 1968, the first Golden Globe sailor to depart.

  It was a hell of a place to take off from. To get there, Ridgway had sailed his little 30-footer almost 1,000 sea miles from its builder’s yard in Portsmouth, down the English Channel, across the Irish Sea, up the wild western coast of Ireland, taking himself far to the north of the departure points of all his rivals, and in the wrong direction for his route down the Atlantic.

  He and Chay Blyth had made landfall on Inishmore at the end of their epic row across the Atlantic almost two years earlier, and Ridgway told the reporters who had gathered to record his departure that he felt an affinity for the local islanders, ‘who live so closely with the sea, good people, who know what suffering is’. The locals reciprocated his feelings. They had erected a plaque in Kilronan Harbour to mark the spot where he and Blyth had come ashore, and danced jigs and reels in his honour at the local parish hall the night before he sailed. But Ridgway had not come all this way to make Inishmore his port of departure entirely for sentimental reasons. This was a talismanic choice, its inconvenience and geography strongly at odds with the hard pragmatism of his army training, and in making it he proved himself as classically superstitious as all those seamen who will not begin a voyage on a Friday, or who stab their knives into wooden masts for wind when becalmed. He had come all this way for luck.

  Sailing Route Down the Atlantic Ocean

  But minutes after leaving his mooring he found bad luck at sea. A BBC camera boat, trying to outmanoeuvre its rival ITN boat, came too close and hit the stern of English Rose IV. Ridgway, already anxious and struggling for composure in front of cameras and well-wishers, lost control and screamed abuse at the BBC boat. There appeared to be no damage.

  About twenty minutes later, the ITN boat, a chartered 25-ton trawler carrying his 23-year-old wife, Marie Christine, and a boatload of press and well-wishers, ranged up alongside English Rose IV, and the sea swell threw the two boats together, making a heavy bump felt by those aboard the trawler. This time, Ridgway was so upset he couldn’t talk. But his silence was admiringly noted by newsmen on the trawler, who took it as an indication of considerable aplomb, a glimpse of the tough silent stoicism with which he would meet graver conditons later on.

  This collision split English Rose IV’s wooden rubrail near the rigging, superficial and mainly cosmetic damage, but it left Ridgway badly unnerved: ‘I looked down at the splintered strip of wood … defeat filled my mind.’

  Ridgway finally left the pestering boats astern as he sailed out into the empty Atlantic. His voyage had begun inauspiciously, and he couldn’t forget it.

  Chay Blyth, John Ridgway’s partner
on the row across the Atlantic, was a man in whom the Ulysses factor coursed thick and strong. He was the perfect example of the way this factor excites and stimulates others who wish to see such a man rise to his singular calling, who gather around him and urge him on to do something none of them would dream of doing themselves.

  Much shorter than his 6-foot-tall captain, stocky, and inferior in rank, Chay Blyth was no less an adventurer. He was mentally tougher, and far less given to doubts and introspection than Ridgway. Years earlier, paired as a team, the two had won an arduous 75-mile overnight army canoe race only because of Chay Blyth’s unfaltering determination. After capsizing in frigid water and being flushed through the white water of a lock and almost drowning, emerging only to face the quick onset of hypothermia, Ridgway suggested they give up. ‘No! We’re going to win,’ said Blyth. He pushed them on and they did win. It was a revelation to Ridgway, the degree to which Blyth’s absolute mindset had so altered their apparent situation. Before their transatlantic row, the two had shared survival training in Middle Eastern deserts and the Canadian Arctic. Ridgway always acquitted himself well, but Blyth positively embraced hardship.

  Blyth had watched Ridgway first prepare for the OSTAR and then set his sights on a nonstop circumnavigation with irresistible envy. It seemed to him the grandest survival test of all. Ridgway had done some sailing and had made his 500-mile solo passage to Fastnet Rock and back, but Blyth had never sailed a mile. It didn’t faze him; before he set off to row across the Atlantic, Chay Blyth had never even been aboard a boat. When he decided that he too wanted to sail alone around the world, nobody thought to ask a man who had rowed across the Atlantic what his qualifications were. If Ridgway could do it, so could Blyth.

  Exactly as happened with Ridgway, Blyth was readily offered the use of a boat by a company eager to see its product tested in the high-stakes arena of a round-the-world race. The boat, named Dytiscus III, was a Kingfisher 30, another bilge-keeler, almost identical to Ridgway’s English Rose IV.