Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  He managed to get a sun sight, took some more shots and, at last, came to the point where, according to his dead reckoning and after working out his sun sight, he should make his right-angled turn. He was now going to put this theory into practice:

  ‘The moment I settled on this course, nearly at right angles to the track from New Zealand, I had a feeling of despair. After flying in one direction for hour after hour over a markless, signless sea, my instinct revolted at suddenly changing direction in mid-ocean. My navigational system seemed only a flimsy brain fancy: I had been so long on the same heading that the island must lie ahead, not to the right. I was attacked by panic. Part of me urged, for God’s sake, don’t make this crazy turn! My muscles wanted to bring the seaplane back on to its old course. “Steady, steady, steady,” I told myself aloud. I had to trust my system, for I could not try anything else now, even if I wanted to.’

  He made his landfall at both Norfolk and Lord Howe Island before disaster struck. A squall during the night sank the seaplane at its anchorage in the harbour. It seemed a complete write-off, but Chichester would not accept defeat and resolved to rebuild the plane and its engine, sending for what parts he needed, even though he had very little experience of the necessary practical mechanics. The wings alone had about 4,000 separate wooden struts, some of them no thicker than a pencil. He had to take them to pieces, repair or remake the damaged parts and put them together again. He also had to strip and clean the engine – ironically, the only part to give serious trouble was the brand-new replacement magneto. With the help of the islanders, he took just ten weeks to do it and complete his crossing of the Tasman Sea, staking his life on makeshift repairs.

  But this, of course, was only the start of his odyssey. He was determined to fly to Britain across the Pacific and might have if his journey – and very nearly his life – had not been terminated when his plane hit some unmarked electricity cables across the mouth of a Japanese harbour.

  Back in England he met Sheila. His first marriage had been unhappy and short-lived. His marriage to Sheila, however, was to be the bedrock of all his further achievements. But these were still far away. In 1939 the war intervened, putting a stop to any ideas he, or anyone else, had of adventure. Chichester volunteered for the Royal Air Force but was told that his eyesight was not good enough and he was too old. He refused to be rejected and finally managed to find himself a niche, teaching navigation to flyers.

  At the end of the war he started a map publishing business which commanded all his energies until 1953, when he became restless for adventure. He abandoned the idea of flying as being too expensive and now lacking in adventure. He liked the idea of sailing, however, particularly as it was something he could share with his wife and son, Giles. But he had not the temperament of a casual weekend yachtsman. Almost immediately he started racing, first crewing for experienced skippers, but as soon as possible entering his own boat, which he had named Gipsy Moth II. At first he had little success but he learnt fast, using his skill and knowledge as a navigator as well as his inventive ingenuity to improve his boat’s chances. He was leading a similar life to that of many active, successful businessmen, working hard through the week, then stretching himself at weekends and holidays on the yachting circuit.

  But this regime took its toll. Chichester was a worrier over business matters; while decisive, with superb split-second judgement at the controls of a plane or helm of his yacht, he could be indecisive when it came to decisions over money or long-term planning. I can sympathise with this seeming contradiction, being very similar in temperament. The world of the sea, air or mountain is wonderfully simple, a place of black and white, or life or death, but the world of commerce, or even everyday life, is so much more complex.

  He became very run down and, in 1957, he faced the greatest crisis of his life. A massive cancerous growth was discovered in his lung. His chances of survival seemed slight. The surgeons wanted to operate but Sheila Chichester stood out against it, feeling that it would almost certainly kill him and sensing, perhaps, that even if it did not, it would leave him an invalid. With the help of his family he fought through the illness, going to the very brink of death before the cancerous cells became inactive and he was back on his way on the road to recovery. He commented: ‘When I was a boy at home, I used to hear my father pray every Sunday, “From sudden death, good Lord deliver us.” This had always puzzled me; sudden death seemed a fine way to go out. Now the meaning seemed clear, the prayer should read, “From death before we are ready to die, good Lord deliver us.’”

  As soon as he finished a short convalescence he started crewing for fellow yachtsmen as navigator, but during his illness he had seen a notice on the board of the Royal Ocean Racing Club, proposing a single-handed race across the Atlantic. This immediately appealed to him as having all the right ingredients, the huge scale of the challenge, the need for innovation and the fact that it was for an individual solo effort. He instinctively knew from his flying days that he functioned best working by himself. Later, in Alone Across the Atlantic, he wrote: ‘Somehow I never seemed to enjoy so much doing things with other people. I know now I don’t do a thing nearly as well when with someone. It makes me think I was cut out for solo jobs and any attempt to diverge from that lot only makes me half a person. It looks as if the only way to be happy is to do fully what you are destined for.’

  Already, he had on the stocks a new boat, Gipsy Moth III, which was bigger and faster than his previous one, and just thirty-two months after being taken ill, only fifteen from a shaky convalescence, he was on the start line with three other boats. At the age of fifty-eight, when most other men have long before slowed up, he was about to enter the most exacting race that had ever been devised. Pushing himself and his boat to the limit, using his cunning as a navigator and his ingenuity in designing the solo sailing devices, particularly his self-steering gear, Miranda, he won the race in forty and a half days.

  Most men would have been content with such a record, but not Chichester; convinced that he could improve on it, he did not want to wait for the next trans-Atlantic race and, in 1962, set out on his own to try to beat his own record, cutting it down to thirty-three days fifteen hours. He was already looking for other challenges and it was at this stage that he started thinking of circumnavigating the globe on the old clipper trail. In 1964 he entered the trans-Atlantic race once again but, although he broke his own record by coming in a few minutes short of thirty days, he was beaten by the outstanding French sailor, Eric Tabarly. Gipsy Moth III was now just four years old, while Tabarly’s boat was very much lighter and had been specially designed for the race, but more than this, Tabarly – besides being a superb sailor – was a very much younger man and single-handed racing is a ferociously strenuous game, demanding not only skill but also tremendous stamina. After this race Chichester saw, perhaps, that he could no longer compete with a rising generation of experienced sailors in this particular field, but he was already one step in front of it with his plans to circumnavigate the globe, thus confirming not just his ability but also his position as a great innovator and pioneer.

  Chichester’s aim was almost unbelievably ambitious; in wanting to race the clippers round the world, he was taking on three- or four-masted boats of up to 300 feet in length with crews of over forty. A fast time for a clipper was around a hundred days. To equal this Chichester would have to sail around 137.5 miles a day, averaging six knots, day and night throughout the voyage to Sydney. To do this, he wanted an even bigger and faster boat than Gipsy Moth III; she would have to be robust enough to face the ferocious seas of the Southern Ocean and yet be a craft which he, now aged sixty-five, could handle on his own.

  Speed in a yacht is determined by the length of the boat on the waterline, combined of course with the design of the hull and its sail area. Gipsy Moth III had been built while he was ill, practically without supervision, and, but for a few almost inevitable teething problems, she had proved an excellent boat of which Chichester had
been very fond. His new boat, Gipsy Moth IV, suffered perhaps from over-supervision, with the ideas of the designer, John Illingworth, and those of Chichester at times coming into conflict.

  The whole project was obviously going to cost a great deal of money – more than Chichester could afford to pay out of his own pocket. He was grateful, therefore, when his cousin, Lord Dulverton, offered to pay for the boat. There were changes and modifications throughout, and as a result it took longer to build, cost considerably more than had been planned and even when it was launched finally, in the spring of 1966, only a few months before he was due to sail, there seemed to be some serious faults. At the launch, several things went wrong; the bottle of champagne, swung by his wife Sheila, did not break on first impact, the boat stuck on the launching ramp and Chichester had to leap down to give it a push to make sure it slid down the greased way and then, when it hit the water, in Chichester’s words, ‘There, the hull floated high on the surface; she didn’t look right. Then, two or three tiny ripples from a ferry steamer made folds in the glassy surface, and Gipsy Moth IV rocked fore and aft. “My God,” Sheila and I said to each other, “she’s a rocker!’”

  They barely had time enough left to correct her tendency to rock and heel or to sort out all the other problems, some of which appeared to have been fundamental to the design of the boat. Chichester describes all these troubles at length in his book Gipsy Moth Circles the World and grumbled about them at the time, earning a fair amount of criticism from both friends and the press for what, at times, sounded like peevish recrimination. On the other hand, one needs to understand how he must have felt, trying to combat these faults on his own over a long period, across thousands of miles of storm-wracked ocean.

  He was ready to sail from Plymouth on 27 August 1966. Sheila, his son Giles and a close friend had crewed the boat with him from London to Plymouth; they sailed with him out into the harbour and were taken off by boat. Left on his own, he tacked up and down behind the start line, competitive as always, determined to cross the line the very moment the start-gun fired, even though he was racing against no one but himself and the voyage ahead was over 14,000 miles.

  At sixty-five, despite age and his struggle against illness, he was extraordinarily fit and trim. He had become a vegetarian, mainly to combat arthritis, and regularly undertook yoga-based exercises, becoming a great believer in the benefits of standing on his head. Chichester was only around five foot nine and yet, because he was lithe and thin and wiry and through the sheer vibrant energy of his personality, he gave the impression of being a much taller man, with his strong face, firm jaw, thin lips that almost vanished when he smiled and prominent nose, framed by glasses. A laconic, dry sense of humour made him good company. I only met him once, when he took me out to lunch in 1972; he wanted to learn as much as possible about the climber’s use of jumar clamps in climbing a rope. He thought he might be able to use them to climb his mast, if he had to do any work on it. He was a delightful host but it was easy to see the single-minded determination below the surface. It was that of someone who would use anyone and anything to the full to achieve his objectives and, of course, without this drive he would not have achieved a fraction of what he had done in a uniquely full life.

  As he set sail from Plymouth there were no regrets and few doubts. He was used to being alone – indeed he welcomed it. Very matter-of-factly he had got down to the business of solitary sailing. The key challenge of the voyage was the empty windswept seas of the Southern Ocean and, in a way, the run down the Atlantic was a time to shake down, to sort out problems, work out systems, even to get one’s sea legs. During the first few days Chichester suffered from seasickness. At the same time, being in the shipping lanes, he had the constant worry of being run down by an unobservant merchant ship, one of the greatest hazards of the yachtsman, particularly a solitary one. In a normal race Gipsy Moth IV would have had a crew of six, taking turns to sleep, change the sails, run watches, cook the meals and take care of the endless round of minor repairs and maintenance that beset any yacht being driven hard.

  Chichester was racing himself on the longest race that anyone had ever undertaken, intensely aware of each day’s progress, setting himself targets that he was determined to attain, fifty-one days out, he reached the latitude of the Roaring Forties, the great Southern Ocean where the winds, uninterrupted by land, are spun by the revolution of the earth in a westerly direction and the seas are driven up by the winds into fifty-foot waves. It is a watery wilderness of chill winds and rain, of successive depressions that carry violent storms, where there is very little let-up for a solitary yachtsman. This is where the stress to man and boat is at its most acute. With day after day of high seas everything becomes damp; there is no opportunity for drying out sleeping bags and the only way to dry out one’s clothes is to go to bed wearing them, still damp, and dry them by one’s own body heat. On wild nights the solo sailor usually goes to bed fully clad in oilskins, to avoid the delay of getting dressed each time some emergency summons him on deck through the night. The boat itself is permanently heeled, when it isn’t being tossed all over the place by squall or storm. There is little or no relaxation, rarely an uninterrupted sleep of more than a few hours, the agony of time and time again forcing oneself out of the comparative warmth of a damp sleeping bag, into the savage wind, spray and rain of a pitch-black night to adjust sails, to put the boat back on course. This means stumbling across a bucking deck in the dark, waves smashing in from all sides, struggling with ropes and winches, clearing fouled yards with numbed fingers.

  Chichester wrote:

  ‘I was fagged out and I grew worried by fits of intense depression. Often I could not stand up without hanging on to some support and I wondered if I had something wrong with my balancing nerves. I felt weak, thin and somehow wasted, and I had a sense of immense loneliness and a feeling of hopelessness, as if faced with imminent doom. On November 5th I found that I could not stand on my legs without support, just as if I had emerged from hospital after three months in bed. I was exhausted after a long struggle with the radio on the previous evening, and a long-drawn battle with the mainsail during the night finished me off. Then I thought, “Husky young men on fully-crewed yachts during an ocean race of a few days have been known to collapse from sheer exhaustion. I have been doing this single-handed for more than two months. Is it any wonder that I feel exhausted?” That cheered me up a bit, and I made two resolutions: firstly to try to relax and take some time off during the day; secondly to eat more nourishing food.’

  He managed to keep going through a combination of determination and self-discipline, but the boat’s gear was now beginning to fall apart. One of the most important pieces of equipment, and certainly the most fragile, is the self-steering. This is a small vane or even sail, usually at the stern, which is either linked to the rudder itself or sometimes to a small extra rudder, which reacts to any change of course the boat takes to bring it back on to its original heading in relation to the wind; it enables the solitary yachtsman to get some sleep at night, to work on maintenance jobs during the day and even to relax occasionally to read a book. It is not the complete panacea, however, and to get the best from the boat the sailor must constantly check the trim of the sails and make minor adjustments to the course, even in a steady wind. Chichester’s self-steering gear was slightly damaged in the first storm to hit him in the Roaring Forties and, some days later, was completely destroyed – an experience shared by almost all single-handed circumnavigators. It was a grim moment for Chichester:

  ‘The sight of the self-steering gear broken beyond repair acted like a catalyst. At first I turned cold inside and my feelings, my spirit, seemed to freeze and sink inside me. I had a strange feeling that my personality was split and I was watching myself drop the sails efficiently and lift out the broken gear coolly. My project was killed. Not only was my plan to race a hundred days to Sydney shattered, but to take a non-stop passage there was impossible too. Then I found that I was not real
ly crestfallen; it was a relief. I realised that I had been waiting for this to happen for a long time.’

  He altered course to head for Fremantle, Western Australia, and started to adjust his tackle to try to make the boat sail on its own without the self-steering. On 17 November his resolve returned. His habitual ingenuity had, at least partly, solved the problem. He swung the boat back on course for Sydney. He realised that now he had little hope of reaching his target of a hundred days, but he came extraordinarily close to it, pulling into Sydney harbour on 12 December to find a hero’s welcome on his 107th day.

  The first part of his journey was over. He had made both the longest and fastest ever non-stop, single-handed voyage. But it had taken a severe toll; he was undoubtedly weakened and tired, both physically and mentally. He was very sensitive about two pictures taken on his arrival in Sydney, one of him embracing his son, Giles, who towered over him, making him look like a frail old man in tears, and another of him seeming to be helped by a policeman off the boat. As a result of these there was a strong outcry both in the press and from close friends. Lord Dulverton, the principal owner of the Gipsy Moth IV, sent a telegram urging him to abandon his circumnavigation, newspaper columnists and prominent members of the yachting world foretold doom but Chichester, although needled by the constant sniping, was determined to go on. To this end he had the boat completely overhauled, altered the shape of the keel, increasing its weight and changing the stowage.

  After seven weeks he set out from Sydney on 29 January with a boat that was improved. Both he and his boat were put to the test all too soon. A tropical storm was forecast in the Tasman Sea, but this had not deterred him. He was buffeted throughout the day by violent winds and mounting seas, and was feeling queasy from what, at the time, he thought was sea-sickness, though later decided was the after-effects of Australian champagne. As a result he could not bring himself to secure with a rope the net carrying his two big genoa sails, which were stowed amidships. He fled below from the bucking deck, took off his oilskins and lay down on the bunk, the only way of withstanding the violent rocking of the boat. Switching off the light he dropped off into the fitful sleep of the sailor who, rather like a wild animal, probably always has some level of consciousness to detect any change in the state of the boat. He did not hear the huge wave which must have hit the boat, but was conscious of her rolling over. It just did not stop.