Driving Home, page 37
No man who fathers four children by his early thirties can be an isolate by nature. Crowhurst always wanted to be master of his own business and loathed being someone else’s employee, but he was never a self-sufficient loner like Moitessier or Robin Knox-Johnston. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the unbounded solitude that soon opened before him. He was a good enough seaman, an inventive Mr. Fixit, an increasingly assured navigator—but he was not created to be so utterly alone as he now found himself to be, on the face of the wintry North Atlantic.
It’s no surprise (nor does it shed serious discredit on Crowhurst) to learn that Teignmouth Electron performed miserably. Fifteen days out he was off the coast of Portugal, not much more than six hundred miles southwest of Teignmouth, giving him an average speed-made-good of just 1.6 knots, or a likely arrival home sometime in February 1971, as against his airy projected date of February 1969. It says a lot for Crowhurst that he kept his cool through this agonizingly dispiriting experience in the Channel approaches and off the Bay of Biscay, and on November 15 was able to take realistic stock of the voyage so far in terms that reflect a remarkably agile and complex grasp of the situation. He ached for the cup to be taken from him, for release from a race that had clearly become impossible for him to win or, probably, to finish. He was also—as ever—bound by obligations; to his wife, to his Teignmouth supporters, to his own reputation as a pioneering yachtsman, and to his sponsor, the trailer-home dealer Stanley Best. So far as his wife and family were concerned, he owed it to them to quit there and then. So far as Best and the larger, public world were concerned, he owed it to them to plow on, at least as far as Cape Town, if not Australia. Poor Crowhurst. He had no one to discuss his decision with except himself, and as you watch him side first with one point of view, then with the other, you might be reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence as the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once. Fitzgerald would have admired Crowhurst’s intelligence on November 15, as he juggled with opposed ideas like ping-pong balls. He so nearly made the right decision. It was a fatal, if minor, flaw in his character that made him take the wrong one.
Sometimes he called Stanley Best “Stanley”; more often, “Mr. Best.” The deferential Mr. was a measure of Crowhurst’s need for authority figures in his life. Letting down Mr. Best loomed larger, finally, in his thoughts than letting down Clare and their children. “Mr. Best” represented social convention, the world’s good opinion, and Crowhurst’s likeliest hope of escaping financial bankruptcy. “Philosophising is irrelevant, however,” wrote Crowhurst in his log; “and must stop. I have things to do!” He’d made his decision. He went on sailing—slowly—south.
With renewed determination, he tried to fling himself bodily into the role of the intrepid single-hander, which required understated bravery and a dry, English, Chichesteresque humor. Again, I differ with Tomalin and Hall in their interpretation, for I see no conscious insincerity in Crowhurst’s log entries or in the film and tapes he was making for the BBC. Putting a brave face on his predicament placed Crowhurst under enormous strain; but when he wrote cheerful verse in the style of Kipling, or attempted to joke with future TV viewers about his life aboard Teignmouth Electron, he was simply trying, as sincerely as he knew how, to become the person he needed to be in order to sail around the world. Not for the first time, he was desperately seeking the voice—the model, the conventions—that would safely see him through. Out at sea, with no responsive audience to lift his spirits and moderate his performance, he grew louder, shriller, more insistent, and less plausible, like an actor addressing a cavernously empty theatre. But he wasn’t acting. This was his only life.
Deception snuck up on him from behind. It began as mild inexactitude, a fudging of his reported positions and an unwise claim to have covered 243 miles in a day when in fact he had sailed a very creditable 170 miles. Every amateur sailor who has described seven-foot waves as ten-foot waves has been similarly guilty. Crowhurst, badly in need of a boost, received admiring headlines in the English papers—and it is hard to grudge him that fleeting moment of acclaim. Having lied once—to the joy of his press agent, Rodney Hallworth—made it easier to lie again, and Crowhurst began to feed back to England what England expected of him.
It was late in December, when he was south of the equator, that he began telling lies from which there could be no turning back. He was then as far out of society and its rules and customs as it is imaginable for any human being to be—in a corrosive solitude quite unimaginable for someone of Crowhurst’s outgoing social temperament. When Robin Knox-Johnston, the Golden Globe’s eventual winner, returned to England, he called his book about the voyage A World of My Own. More than Knox-Johnston, more even than Moitessier, Crowhurst found himself in a world truly his own: an endlessly shifting, watery, blue universe that grew more solipsistic by the day. By putting into an obscure Argentinian fishing harbor to repair his damaged starboard hull on March 6, 1969, he officially disqualified himself from the Golden Globe race. But by then Crowhurst was making up his own rules as he went along. Alone at sea, he was floating free of all the usual constraints of earth. For someone who had lived by conventions and social appearances, this was a dangerous and frightening kind of liberty.
Sir Francis Chichester had failed him as a model, but Crowhurst found a new hero to supplant him. His ship’s library was scantily supplied with books, but in Teignmouth he’d shipped a copy of Albert Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand. In the wisdom of hindsight, one wishes he had instead taken a collected edition of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. For Einstein, though a keen dinghy sailor in his time, proved to be a terrible role model, and relativity theory was the last thing that Crowhurst needed to understand at this stage in his life. His relation to the rest of the world was tenuous enough as it was; Einstein’s theory enabled him to sever the final remaining cords that connected him to society, and to sanity.
Ambling around the Atlantic, waiting for the rest of the race fleet to catch up with him as it sailed eastwards to round Cape Horn, Crowhurst apprenticed himself to Einstein, drinking in his language and preparing to go one better, just as, a year before, he’d prepared to go one better than Chichester. His quick mathematical brain responded to the book with a kind of dangerous ecstasy. On June 24, 1969, after being alone at sea for 237 days, he opened a fresh logbook, titled it “Philosophy,” and began to write.
Like most things that Crowhurst did (like the Navicator, for instance), his “Philosophy” has a jejune, homemade ring to it. One feels painfully his lack of a university education as he strains for the proper tone of the philosopher addressing Everyman (“A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand”). Yet one does not—in the early pages—see it as the work of a madman. There is intelligence in it, and at least a bare coherence. Some passages are more or less fully worked out; some are in the form of shorthand notes (I think Tomalin and Hall are too quick to detect insanity in Crowhurst’s shorthand). It probably wouldn’t muster a D in a first-year philosophy course, but nor would it earn the student a bed in a mental ward.
Crowhurst seems to have planned to return to England shortly after the arrival of Nigel Tetley in his trimaran Victress. Thus he would avoid having his logs scrutinized too carefully by the race judges (and especially by Chichester himself, who had long been skeptical of Crowhurst’s claims). When Victress sank off the Azores on May 21, Crowhurst was in effect condemned to be hailed as the winner of the Golden Globe—and to have his logbooks closely inspected by his critics. This news, however, took some time to reach him. It was not until June 25—the day after he began work on his “Philosophy”—that he received a cable from his press agent which gloatingly described the hero’s welcome awaiting him in Teignmouth, a spectacular reception that would comfortably outshine Chichester’s triumphal entry into Plymouth two years earlier.
During the course of the next six days, Crowhurst, writing at breakneck speed, plummeted into lunacy. Inspiration was upon him. He was going (or so he seems to have believed) beyond the limits of earthbound reason, into an enchanted realm of vatic revelation. It is heart-wrenching to read the last entries in the book. They are beyond paraphrase or explication. Their language is a chaos of private, incommunicable symbols, in which Einstein, religious mysticism, and celestial navigation have become impossibly tangled. Yet they don’t quite fit the notion that Crowhurst killed himself “in despair.” Rather, they convey the dizzy exaltation of mania. No problems exist. The great puzzle of existence has been solved. The author has become a master of the universe. They give rise to the suspicion that when Crowhurst stepped off Teignmouth Electron to dissolve himself into the beauty of the cosmos, he might well have believed that he could walk on water.
This is at least the sixth edition of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, and there will undoubtedly be more. For the Crowhurst story seems to speak most vividly to people too young to have known of his voyage at the time it was made. The artist Tacita Dean, for instance, was three years old in 1968. The profound solitude into which Teignmouth Electron sailed has disappeared forever in our hooked-up world, and we can only vicariously experience the oceanic isolation endured—or enjoyed—by Crowhurst and his contemporaries.
That fact was powerfully underlined when Robert Stone tried to update the Crowhurst story from the 1960s to the 1980s in Outerbridge Reach. To get around the problem that the yachts in his fictional race would all be equipped with Argos beacons, with their every move closely surveyed from the shore, Stone had to contrive a Rube Goldberg piece of plot machinery. In his novel, signals from the boats can be received only by one radio station, located in Spain, that is conveniently blown up by a gang of Basque terrorists.
The meaning of Crowhurst’s voyage has greatly altered since the book’s first publication. In 1970, Crowhurst was seen as a hoaxer who came to a pathetic end. There was sympathy for his story, but it was laced with a condescension that sometimes surfaces in Tomalin’s and Hall’s account. Now he is more likely to be viewed (as Tacita Dean sees him) as a tragic hero, a tortured soul in involuntary exile from the stable world, who holds up a mirror to us all. Teignmouth Electron has become like a ship in an allegory—a vessel to transport the reader beyond the known world into a strange and lonely realm where the reader, too, will lose his bearings and face the ultimate disintegration of the self in the cruel laboratory of the sea. For the passage of time has revealed that The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is not merely a work of graphic reportage; like the story of Icarus, it has the arc of a classic myth. In his “Philosophy,” Crowhurst fancied himself an immortal. In one way, at least, he has turned out to be right.
Introduction to The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, Sailor’s Classics Edition, 2001
Gipsy Moth Circles the World
ON THE MORNING OF July 7, 1967, an extraordinary scene took place on the south bank of the Thames at Greenwich, where an elderly man, wearing thick spectacles and looking like a frail bag of bones inside his clothes, kneeled bareheaded before the Queen and was dubbed a knight of the realm with, it is said, the same sword that the first Queen Elizabeth had used to knight Sir Francis Drake on his return, in 1580, from his around-the-world voyage in the Golden Hind.
For Britain in the mid-1960s, the occasion was richly laden with meaning. Sir Francis Chichester’s solo circumnavigation of the world, greeted with all the pomp and circumstance that Buckingham Palace could command, was seen as a precious symbol of national regeneration. This was a period in which the pound was falling, inflation rising, the last of the colonies were shaking off their bonds, and there was mounting industrial unrest. The one area in which Britain could be seen to shine was viewed by the Establishment with something close to horror. Bishops, Conservative politicians, and homegrown moralists of every hue deplored the rise of Carnaby Street, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all the rest of the triumphant youth culture of short skirts and psychedelia.
So the second Sir Francis became a conservative symbol to hold up against the decadence of Swinging Liverpool and Swinging London. Old enough to be Mick Jagger’s grandfather, he came from one of the ancient “county” families of England and spoke in the crisp accent of a true-blue gentleman. Despite lifelong myopia, and a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, Chichester had achieved something to astound the world with; a solitary, heroic feat of manly fortitude and daring. To a Britain robbed (as many then believed) of its overseas possessions, Sir Francis restored the glorious illusion of British mastery of the seven seas. As the great anthem of English jingoism has it, “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” That morning in Greenwich, with live TV coverage of the ceremony (Gipsy Moth IV looking impossibly tiny in the background), people found something to celebrate in themselves as they watched their screens in pubs and clubs across the country. Their new, stooped, shortsighted knight reminded them of the salt in their veins, their brave historic past, their English mettle. Sir Francis stood as a living refutation to the seedy claims of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
More than thirty years on, the meaning of Chichester’s circumnavigation has undergone a radical change. Yet it means hardly less in the twenty-first century than it did in 1967, for Chichester (as we see only now) decisively altered the terms on which lone sailors would put to sea. He has turned out not to be a sentimental throwback to the past (as I saw him that morning), but a harbinger of the future.
He was by no means the first person to sail alone around the globe. Nearly all his predecessors, though, like Joshua Slocum, Harry Pidgeon, Alain Gerbault, and many others, treated their voyages as extended cruises, and were as interested in the earthy parts of the world as in its watery ones. They took their time. The palm for leisurely circumnavigation must surely go to the redoubtable British yachtsman Edward Allcard, who took thirteen years to complete the circle, at an average speed of a little over one quarter of a knot. Chichester defined his “wonderful venture,” as he calls it in Gipsy Moth Circles the World, as a race against time, a merciless test of personal endurance and boat speed. His wife, Sheila, spoke of his voyage as “a pilgrimage,” and one needs the language of religious austerity and ritual suffering to properly describe Chichester’s peculiar achievement.
From the start, he was determined to pit Gipsy Moth IV against the Victorian clipper ships which traversed the world on the same course that he would take. It was a punitive and quixotic challenge. Since the speed of a sailing ship is a function of its wetted length,* and Gipsy Moth, at 53 feet overall, was only a fraction as long as, say, Cutty Sark, at 212 feet, there could on the face of it be no competition. If both vessels were sailing at their optimum speeds, Gipsy Moth would be doing something over eight knots, while Cutty Sark would romp past at around seventeen knots. It’s true that the Bermuda-rigged racing yacht could sail far closer to the wind than the square-rigged clipper; but in the southeast trades or in the savage westerlies of the Southern Ocean, this would be a trifling advantage.
Small as Gipsy Moth was when set beside a clipper, she was a gigantic handful for a single man as old and slightly built as Chichester. To get her going at her best, he would often have to set a total of about 1,500 square feet of terylene sails, distributed around the rig like so many pieces of washing. When a squall hit, the labor of taking down so much sail was both exhausting and dangerous. By contrast, one thinks of the small, tubby, sea-kindly ketch Suhaili, in which Robin Knox-Johnston sailed nonstop around the world in 1968–69. Knox-Johnston, less than half of Chichester’s sixty-four years, carried barely half of Chichester’s daunting sail area. He spent more days at sea (313, as against Chichester’s total of 226), but as Knox-Johnston’s book A World of My Own makes plain, his days were vastly more comfortable. He could find serenity in his solitude on the ocean; to the hard-driven, hard-driving Chichester, serenity was alien to his nature.
It was Chichester who set the records and the times to beat, and in the years since his pioneering voyage, single-handed circumnavigations have been done in Chichester’s style, not Knox-Johnston’s. With successive leaps and bounds of marine and electronic technology, boats have grown longer, sails bigger, times (much) shorter. Global single-handed races are organized on an industrial scale, as trials of stamina and feats of athletic survival. Nothing could be further from that idyllic world of the unhurried lone sailor, conjured so infectiously by Joshua Slocum in Sailing Alone Around the World:
I learned to sit by the wheel, content to make ten miles beating against the tide, and when a month at that was all lost, I could find some old tune to hum while I worked the route all over again, beating as before … The days passed happily with me wherever my ship sailed.
Tell that to Francis Chichester.
His biographer, Anita Leslie, records a childhood of classic English misery. Francis’s father, the ninth son of a philoprogenitive baronet, was a cold and steely Anglican clergyman who took no pains to conceal the fact that he found his own second son by far the least lovable of his four unlovable children. The Georgian rectory, in the village of Shirwell, Devon, was an emotional icehouse. Francis Chichester became a goggle-eyed self-communing solitary, happiest outdoors, where he kept the company of birds and fish. Boarding school (he was sent away from home at age six) was no escape: thrashed and bullied, he learned to bully in his turn. At thirteen he went to Marlborough College, a famously tough establishment. During the First World War, when Chichester was a pupil there, the school’s general atmosphere was that of a particularly brutal prisoner-of-war camp, in which the boys were flogged, usually by one another, and starved into severe malnourishment. Chichester showed no academic talent, and his poor eyesight ensured his humiliating failure on the playing fields. This grim upbringing and education might be calculated to produce, with equal chances of success, either a sedated wreck in a psychiatric ward or a phenomenally hardy and competitive loner.
