Driving Home, page 38
He left school at seventeen to work on a Leicestershire farm, where he fell for the farmer’s daughter and took a violent beating from her father. Chichester then embarked on a ship bound from Plymouth to New Zealand, where he found a job as a hand on a sheep station. In short order, he became a gold prospector, a door-to-door subscription salesman, a real-estate agent, and the cofounder of a successful timber company. By 1929, when he was twenty-seven, he had made a small fortune, at least on paper, and when he returned to England that summer he bought a single-engined Gipsy 1 Moth that he planned to fly to Australia and, eventually, around the world.
For a man so afflicted by myopia to set out to become expert at celestial navigation is proof of ferocious willpower. Within a few months Chichester managed to transform himself into a magician with a sextant—a half-blind man who was at home with vast interstellar distances and who could work out the notoriously difficult “lunars” (as Slocum did) without recourse to Greenwich Mean Time. The pioneering English aviator Amy Johnson is reputed to have called Chichester “the greatest navigator in the world.”
His flying exploits brought him the public attention that he craved. One acquaintance would later say of him that he was “clever at backing into the limelight.” In the age of Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry, the lone pilot was a popular hero, and Chichester was bent on securing himself a place in the pantheon and the record books. But his career as a flier came to an abrupt end in 1931, when he crashed into a span of unmapped overhead telephone wires in Katsuura, Japan. He was lucky to escape with his life.
He was turning fifty-two, happily married (on his second try), and a London publisher of maps and guides when he bought his first boat, in September 1953. This was Gipsy Moth II, named in memory of his plane, an eight-ton cutter that Chichester converted for offshore racing. With the same impatient disregard for the usual learning curve that he showed when becoming a flier, he turned himself into a sailor more or less overnight. In April 1958, he was diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer (though David Lewis, a London doctor, and a fellow-competitor in the first solo transatlantic race, evidently disagreed; in his book about the race, The Ship Would Not Travel Due West, Lewis calls Chichester’s ailment a “lung abscess”). In any case, there was no surgery. Chichester took what amounts to a nature cure in the south of France, and came away healed.
In the summer of 1960, Chichester was sailing a new boat in the first single-handed race across the Atlantic. At 39 ½ feet overall, Gipsy Moth III was by far the longest and fastest boat (three were 25 feet, one was 21 feet), and Chichester arrived in New York eight days ahead of his nearest rival. Dissatisfied with his forty-day passage, Chichester sailed the course again in 1962 and shaved nearly seven days from his 1960 record. But in the second transatlantic race of 1964, he was comfortably beaten to the finish by Eric Tabarly, sailing the longer and faster Penduick II.
Length equaled speed, and so the fourth Gipsy Moth came into being, even longer, even faster. Sailing the Atlantic alone was quickly losing its glamour and originality. Five men had sailed in the ’60 race; fifteen left Plymouth in ’64. Only a world circumnavigation could now provide the blaze of glory commensurate with Chichester’s own compulsive need to shine.
Books about leisurely circumnavigations were themselves written at leisure, allowing the rose-tinted glow of comfortable retrospect to play on the experience they record. We shall never really know the truth of Slocum’s seagoing; his book is an artistic recasting of his voyage, and if Slocum was ever in a state of panic or despair, he has taken pains to cover his tracks. The extraordinary—and sometimes unsettling—candor of Gipsy Moth Circles the World is in part a product of the speed at which it was written, sometime in the crowded period between May 28, when Gipsy Moth crossed the line at Plymouth, and early September 1967, when the book went to press. Chichester came back to England with eight logbooks, filled with a total of two hundred thousand words. Writing Gipsy Moth Circles the World, he adhered closely to the language and narrative contained in the logs. There was little conscious retrospect. In his book he relives the voyage blow by blow, sail change by sail change, and in the process he allows the reader astonishingly intimate access to how it felt to be Francis Chichester. We are nakedly exposed to his explosive bursts of temper, his intimations of spiritual emptiness, his tenderest affections, his terrors—to the full force of Chichester’s unpredictable and unstable internal weather.
We have the logbooks to thank for that. Enforced solitude is often the making of a writer, and so it was with Chichester. He used his logs as confidants, trusting them with his most painful thoughts because there was no one else present to hear them. Much of what he told his logs must have been edited out when he wrote his book, yet enough has remained for the reader to feel that he is almost inside the skin of this complex, wounded, irascible, and unexpectedly touching personality.
He was more thoroughly alone than any other single-hander on record. It is a convention of sailing narratives that a bond be established between the sailor and his boat, to the point where “We” (meaning man and boat together) are the twin heroes of the story. No such bond existed between Chichester and Gipsy Moth IV. Within a few days of leaving port, he had the bitter conviction that he had the wrong boat for the voyage. It (not she) was too tender, given to violent hobbyhorsing, and inclined to veer wildly off-course when heeled. It had the wrong winches, the wrong rig, the wrong windvane-pilot, the wrong keel design, the wrong interior. Again and again, Chichester berates the boat’s designer, John Illingworth, for having talked him into accepting this temperamental racing machine, when what he needed was another boat altogether. “Vicious” is his repeated word for the boat, and his voyage is as much a lonely struggle against Gipsy Moth IV as it is against the combined forces of wind and sea.
Chasing the chimera of the clipper passages—the magic hundred days between England and Australia—Chichester tortured himself with calculations of distances run and days to go. He used the clippers as a goad to punish both himself and the boat, and one keenly feels his anguish as he sees Gipsy Moth slipping behind in its race against those phantoms from the Victorian past. It’s hard to resist guessing at the phantoms from Chichester’s own past whom he was trying to outrun as he tore down the latitudes, from the stony-faced, unforgiving rector of Shirwell to the captains of games at Marlborough who kept him off the team because he couldn’t see the ball. Whoever and whatever these phantoms might have been, they were clearly there. Something far more deeply personal than clipper-ship statistics was driving Chichester on this purgatorial voyage.
Islanded among the frustrations, tribulations, and “shemozzles” is one of the most oddly memorable scenes in sailing literature. Somewhere above the Sierra Leone Rise, six hundred miles off the African coast, and fast closing with the equator, Chichester celebrates his sixty-fifth birthday (a British milestone, because it is the date on which men can begin to draw from the state their weekly old-age pension). The new pensioner, dressed in his old green velvet smoking jacket, toasts himself with champagne-and-brandy cocktails and cherishes the pair of silk pajamas that Sheila has given him for his birthday. His mood is uncharacteristically radiant. The miles are streaming by at a steady seven knots; a tape is playing in the cabin. “This must be one of the greatest nights of my Life,” Chichester tells his log. Then, thinking of his wife and son, and imagining their deaths, he asks, “Is it a mistake to get too fond of people?” The question reveals more of the man than any other line in the book.
His birthday celebrations are rudely terminated by a squall, which lays Gipsy Moth over on its side and has Chichester, naked and hungover, fighting down 950 square feet of sail to save his boat from foundering. This is always how it seems to be for Chichester: happiness is a fleeting moment, an illusion, in a world of unrelenting harshness and toil.
The heart of Chichester’s purgatory lay in the Roaring Forties of the Southern Ocean, where his spirits reached their nadir but his writing flowered. As no other sailing author has done, he gives to the Southern Ocean a moral dimension that richly overshadows its great waves and incessant gales.
He was exhausted, “feeble as a half-dead mouse,” by the time he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and he confessed to his “intense depression” and “sense of spiritual loneliness”:
I felt weak, thin, and somehow wasted, and I had a sense of immense space empty of any spiritual—what? I didn’t know. I knew only that it made for intense loneliness, and a feeling of hopelessness …
And again:
I find hard to describe, even to put into words at all … the spiritual loneliness of this empty quarter of the world. I had been used to the North Atlantic, fierce and sometimes awesome, yes, but the North Atlantic seems to have a spiritual atmosphere as if teeming with the spirits of the men who sailed and died there. Down here in the Southern Ocean it was a great void. I seemed planetary distances away from the rest of mankind.
After his pit stop in Sydney, followed by his capsize in the Tasman Sea, Chichester confided to his log:
I could not be more depressed. Everything seems wrong about this voyage. I hate it and am frightened.
If one takes Sheila Chichester’s hint and thinks of Chichester’s voyage as a version of Pilgrim’s Progress, here was the Doubting Castle of Giant Despair.
Yet for all his loneliness, contact with other people appears to have been no balm for Chichester. When human beings—with the exception of his wife and his son—enter his narrative, they nearly always do so as nuisances and intruders. He is plagued on the radio by inquisitive ships’ captains and journalists, and he shoos them off for trespassing on his solitude. To a “girl reporter” from the London Sunday Times, who wanted to know what his first meal had been after his successful rounding of Cape Horn, Chichester tartly cabled: “Strongly urge you stop questioning and interviewing me which poisons the romantic attraction of this voyage.”
As in his boyhood, he found solace not in people but in the creatures of the sea. It is another convention of sailing narratives (especially single-handed ones) that, as the boat takes leave of the land and all it stands for, the sailor befriends a bird, or a fish, as a signal that he has forsaken civilization and entered the community of nature. In Chichester’s case, birds and fish were his best companions, and, unlike most sailors, he bestowed on them the keen attention of a lifelong amateur naturalist. In Atlantic Adventure (1962), he had “Pidge,” a stray French racing pigeon, which flew on board Gipsy Moth III and is a major character in the book. In Gipsy Moth Circles the World he dotes on storm petrels, or Mother Carey’s chickens. Twice in the voyage these birds blundered aboard the yacht, and were enthusiastically mothered by Chichester.
Something soft and warm, not cold like ropes and gear are, fluttered in my face, startling me. It was a Mother Carey’s Chick, dazzled by the light. I picked it up and put it in a safe place in the cockpit, and after I had finished my job I put it on the after deck, from which it could hop into the air or sea as it might like best when I put the lights out. A Mother Carey’s Chick is the most wild creature I know, yet it is both soft and delicate, and with most charming manners. It will not attack, and stays cosy and warm in one’s hand. It is so small that one’s hand easily closes round it.
But just as the squall spoiled his birthday party, the little bird is dead by the next morning. Back in the North Atlantic, Chichester fished two Portuguese men-of-war out of the floating sargasso weed and kept them in a bucket as pets.
Their mauve-and-blue-tinted air bladders nosed their way around the bucket, and I was surprised to see how they shot out their long dangling tendrils in a flash.
Chichester’s tenderness for warm, soft birds and stinging jellyfish is in striking contrast to his instinctive hostility to the ships’ captains and girl reporters; and in his descriptions of both creatures one senses the ghostly lineaments of self-portraiture at work, as if Chichester himself were half storm petrel, half Portuguese man-of-war.
In the end, he had rivaled the times of the clipper ships (and beaten many of the slower ones). It was a magnificent—if desperate—voyage. Laden with celebrity and honors, Sir Francis might reasonably have taken to pottering around the coast with his wife and son. But he was unappeasable in his need to prove more to the world, and to himself. As his last book, The Romantic Challenge (1971), recounts, Chichester was to be found in 1970, aged sixty-nine, aboard an even longer boat, the 57-foot Gipsy Moth V, with an even bigger sail area, thrashing back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of a new chimera—the two-hundred-mile day, two thousand miles in ten days flat. It came as no surprise that he could not—quite—match these arbitrary and quixotic numbers, and perhaps it was just as well for him that he didn’t. Heroic failure (by his own exalted lights, though by no one else’s) perfectly suited his stoic temperament. Such failure, or so I suspect, confirmed his instinctive view of the world as a hard and pitiless place, where there are no true successes and the measure of a man lies in the mettle he displays in his inevitable defeat.
Introduction to Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Sailor’s Classic Edition, 2001
* “Wetted length,” not waterline length, is the key factor, though the usual equation for hull speed is to take the square root of the length of the boat along the waterline and multiply it by 1.3, 1.35, 1.4, or even 1.5, depending on which authority you consult. When the hull of almost any sailing boat is heeled 25° or 30°, its effective waterline length is substantially increased, which explains why most boats—even my own sedate cruising ketch—can make gratifying improvements on their theoretical hull speed, given a wind strong enough to heel them over. Chichester on several occasions saw Gipsy Moth IV come within kissing distance of 10 knots, which suggests that the boat’s wetted length may have been nearly 10 feet longer than its specified length-along-the-waterline of 39.5 feet.
Too Close to Nature?
SEATTLE SUNSETS are raw and bloody things: good ones look like a busy day at the slaughterhouse, as the sun, or its refracted image, grazes the white peaks of the Olympic mountains beyond the dark industrial forests on the far side of Puget Sound. Stuck for a dramatic front-page picture, the local papers, the Times and Post-Intelligencer, regularly run photos of the previous night’s heavenly gore: in the foreground, a container ship plowing northward up the Sound; in the middle distance, low hills of second- and third-growth Douglas firs; the scissored line of background mountains; the sky a wild light show of reds, oranges, and rifts of unearthly green. There must be a cause for these sunsets: the scattering effect of salt particles from the Pacific Ocean in the air and the reflective properties of the Olympic snowfields seem the most likely candidates. Whatever their physics, the spectacular sunsets are an important part of Seattle’s claim to be “a flower of geography”—as Henry James called the city in 1907, placing it in the company of Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Naples, Sydney, and San Francisco.
With mountain ranges front and back (the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the east), puddled with lakes, and squatting on a reach of sea more than a hundred fathoms deep, Seattle is up to its ears in nature—rather too much nature for its own good. When the view is not socked in by mist and rain, you can see the great snowy heaps of Mount Rainier to the south and Mount Baker to the north, apparently suspended in midair, and even within the city nature is engaged in a perpetual guerrilla operation against culture: in this moist and temperate climate, every unattended patch of ground turns quickly into a little wilderness of bramble, vine, salal. I’ve watched bald eagles on Fifth Avenue and picked blackberries on my street.
The boosters like to say that this is a city where you can go skiing in the morning and sailing in the afternoon, which is the line that accounts for the stubbornly un-urban style affected by so many Seattleites—Gore-Tex and Velcro, Birkenstock, North Face, Patagonia, Helly Hansen. If you spot someone wearing a skimpy black cocktail number, you can bet she’s a tourist. The residents clump around in gear more suited to the piste, the marina, and the rockface than to a city. The homeless are clad in the cast-offs of these outdoor types, so that a gathering of winos in a Seattle back alley looks disconcertingly like an ad hoc convention of dinghy racers or mountaineers.
The truth is that Seattle’s intense proximity to nature makes it an unsatisfactory city. Real cities supplant nature—witness the man-made cliffs and canyons of Manhattan, or the labyrinthine, warrenlike character of central London. In a real city, the landmarks are unnatural: the Monument, the dome of St. Paul’s, Marble Arch, Nelson’s Column. Nature, where it is allowed to show its face, must be strictly gardened (St. James’s Park) or tamed with memorable architecture. When I think of the Thames in London, what springs first to mind is not the river itself but the string of bridges that traverse it, from the pretty pink-and-white confectionery of Albert to the Victorian storybook medievalism of Tower. Real cities are works of epic communal artifice, and they tend to flourish best on flat, or flattish, land that denies the citizen the chance to compare a cathedral with a living forest or a skyscraper with a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain—comparisons that are always likely to work to the city’s disadvantage, making its most audacious flights of fancy look conceited and puny. Had Wren been forced to build his Monument on the foothills of Mount Rainier, it would have had all the nobility and grandeur of a telephone pole.
