Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  There was a constant drudgery and discomfort – of damp clothes, of insufficient sleep punctuated by crises, a hand badly scalded by boiling porridge, the failure of a succession of parts on the boat, the struggle with contrary winds which came in against him from the east almost as often as they swept round from the west.

  Cape Horn, which he reached on 17 January, was almost an anticlimax – he coasted past it in an almost dead calm. There was no one to meet him, no aircraft flying out from the land: he slipped past unnoticed up into the South Atlantic, past the Falkland Islands and on up the coast of South America towards the equator. He was on the home stretch, though still had a long way to go. The only person who had any chance of catching him up was Moitessier, who had handed some letters to a fisherman in a bay near Hobart, Tasmania, on 18 December. Moitessier was next spotted off the Falkland Islands on 10 February, but had the variables where he could expect contrary winds before him, while Knox-Johnston had reached the South-East Trades. It is unlikely that Moitessier would have caught up with Knox-Johnston, but he almost certainly would have had a faster time round the world, having set out more than two months after him.

  The question was to be academic. The next time Moitessier was sighted was off the Cape of Good Hope, when the rest of the world believed he was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic approaching the equator, nearing the final run for home. He sailed into the outer reaches of the harbour and, using a slingshot, catapulted a message for the Sunday Times on to the bridge of an anchored tanker. It read: ‘The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea and perhaps also to save my soul.’

  His message was received with incredulity. How could anyone, with success and glory in his grasp, reject it like this? The Sunday Times tried to get a message from his wife through to him by having it broadcast on South African news bulletins: ‘Bernard – the whole of France is waiting for you. Please come back to Plymouth as quickly as possible. Don’t go round the world again. We will be waiting for you in England, so please do not disappoint us – Françoise and the children.’

  Moitessier never heard this message, and it is impossible to guess how he would have responded if he had. He had contemplated calling in at Plymouth to claim the reward, collect all the equipment he had left there and reassure his family, but then he rejected the thought, afraid that he would be drawn back into a way of life he felt was false and into a society that he considered was destroying itself with materialism, pollution and violence. Sailing on round the Cape of Good Hope for the second time, into the savage winds and seas of the Southern winter, it was a much rougher voyage than his first through the Southern Ocean. He was knocked down on four different occasions as he sailed past Australia, past New Zealand and then on up into the Southern Pacific towards Tahiti.

  Moitessier finally reached Tahiti on 21 June 1969, having sailed one and a half times round the world, further than anyone had ever done single-handed. On arrival he told journalists that he had never intended to race:

  ‘Talking of records is stupid, an insult to the sea. The thought of a competition is grotesque. You have to understand that when one is months and months alone one evolves; some people say, go nuts. I went crazy in my own fashion. For four months all I saw were the stars. I didn’t hear an unnatural sound. A purity grows out of that kind of solitude. I said to myself, “What the hell am I going to do in Europe?” I told myself I’d be crazy to go on to France.’

  To him, the voyage was sufficient in itself; he did not need the embellishments of competition, rejected both the material rewards and the accolades of fame. There had even been talk of him being awarded the Legion of Honour in France. He displayed an independence that is rare. Most mountaineers, for instance, have consistently rejected formalised competition but, in most instances, have accepted any plaudits bestowed on them on their return to their homeland. Moitessier, however, was not so much rejecting the rewards of a society wanting to adulate its heroes; rather, he was saying, ‘I am not going to play your games. I am going to do exactly what I want and lead my own life in the way I choose.’ He preferred the simplicity of life in the Pacific Islands, the freedom to sail where and when he would.

  With Moitessier out of the race there were only three left. Knox-Johnston had last been seen at Otago and now, in mid-March, should be somewhere in the Atlantic, though his family and sponsors were becoming increasingly worried about his survival; ships and planes in the mid-Atlantic were asked to keep an eye out for him. Crowhurst also had gone off the air. The only competitor still in contact was Nigel Tetley. He had made steady, but nerve-wracking progress across the Southern Ocean, nursing his trimaran through the gigantic rollers that all too easily could have capsized him with fatal results. It appears that he picked the ideal time to sail through the ocean, for the weather seems to have been kinder to him than to the others, particularly around the Cape of Good Hope where all other circumnavigators experienced the appalling storms which forced Blyth and King to abandon their voyages and which very nearly scuppered Knox-Johnston. Tetley had his narrowest escape when nearing Cape Horn; caught by a storm with sharp, choppy waves, he was very nearly pitchpoled, the cabin damaged and one of the windows smashed. In the aftermath he thought of giving up, sailing for Valparaiso, but then obstinacy set in and he turned the boat to head for Cape Horn. His passage round the Horn also was anticlimactic – he was almost becalmed.

  He now turned north-east to pass the Falklands on the east, for the long run home. Tetley’s achievement in sailing a trimaran through the Southern Ocean was considerable, but the stress on his boat was now beginning to tell. Both the floats and the main hull were letting in water, sure signs of structural damage caused by the months of hammering but, provided he nursed Victress carefully, she should get back to England and might even be the only boat to complete the voyage. Then, on 5 April, the tanker Mobil Acme sighted Suhaili to the west of the Azores. Knox-Johnston was on the home stretch and would undoubtedly be first home. Tetley, on the other hand, had a better average speed and – in all probability – would win the prize for the fastest voyage, even if he had to nurse Victress very carefully those last few thousand miles up the Atlantic.

  Nobody had heard anything from Donald Crowhurst since 19 January, when he had reported his position a hundred miles south-east of Cough Island in the South Atlantic to the west of the Cape of Good Hope. It could be assumed, therefore, that by this time he should be somewhere in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Cape Horn. In fact he was still in the South Atlantic and had never left it.

  We shall never know exactly what went through Crowhurst’s mind as he dallied hesitantly down the Atlantic through December 1968 and the early months of 1969. The only evidence are the logs and casual notes he left in Teignmouth Electron and which Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin, two Sunday Times writers, sifted and analysed in a brilliant piece of detective work, described in their book The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. It seems unlikely that he planned his deception from the very start of the voyage – or even from the moment when he concluded that there was no way his boat could survive the seas of the Southern Ocean. Both Tetley and Knox-Johnston had had moments when they decided their voyages were no longer possible, had resolved to give up, then decided to keep going until the next landfall and to take a decision there. The big difference was that their decisions were all in the open; it never remotely occurred to either of them to practise any form of deception.

  With Crowhurst, the deception seems to have built up over a period, from the original germ of the idea to final, absolute commitment. It started in early December with a spectacular claim to an all-time speed record of 243 miles in the day. (This almost certainly would have been a record, since the best run previously publicised was that of Geoffrey Williams who had logged about 220 miles in the Observer single-handed Atlantic race.) It certainly got Crowhurst the headlines he probably sought and was accepted, without comment by nearly a
ll the media, though Francis Chichester was suspicious, phoning the Sunday Times to advise them that they should watch out for Crowhurst – he could be ‘a bit of a joker’. At this stage it is possible that Crowhurst was still thinking of abandoning the voyage at Cape Town; the claim, which the calculations found in his cabin show was false, would have given him a bit of glory with which to face his backers on return to England.

  But then, as he sailed on down the Atlantic, the moment of irreversible commitment came ever closer. He had already started a new logbook, even though his existing one still had plenty of empty pages, the inference being that he intended, at a later date, to write out a false log of his imagined circumnavigation through the Southern Ocean, while he used his second logbook for his actual calculations which, of course, he needed to know from day to day. He also started to mark out on his chart a series of false positions, well to the west of his actual route, which was taking him down the South American coast. He could still, however, have brought his actual route and faked course together at Cape Town and it is unlikely that anyone would have bothered to scrutinise his calculations sufficiently closely to see that there were discrepancies.

  There would come a point soon, however, when if he tried to fake his voyage through the Southern Ocean there was no way that he could suddenly appear at a port in South Africa or South America without exposing his fraud. He must have devoted hours to working out all the pros and cons of trying to carry out the deceit. For a start he would have to close down his radio since any call he made would give a rough indication of where he really was. But the biggest problem of all was that of writing up the false log with all the navigational calculations he would need, in a way that would satisfy the examination by experts on his return to Britain.

  There have been challenged claims in the past. There is doubt about the claims of both Cook and Peary to have reached the North Pole in 1908 and 1909. The claim of the former was widely rejected, while the latter was generally accepted, even though there were several contradictions in his account. The distances Peary claimed to have made each day in his dash for the Pole seem far-fetched. If he did fabricate, however, it was a relatively simple operation, since it represented only a few days and, after all, nobody could challenge conclusively whether or not the bit of featureless ice on which he had stood was or was not the North Pole. There have also been several cases of disputed mountaineering ascents, but these also have usually involved a push from a top camp towards a summit, as often as not in cloud or storm. One of the most notorious is that of the first ascent of Cerro Torre by Cesare Maestri and Toni Egger. They were gone from Base Camp for a week; on their way down, in a violent storm, Egger slipped and fell to his death, Maestri staggered back down and was found semiconscious and delirious. He claimed they reached the top, though this was disputed. Whether he did or not can never be proved conclusively, but if he did fabricate the story, again it was comparatively easy to do so, since he only had to imagine a few days’ climbing and could be excused lapses of memory in the struggle he had for survival.

  But Crowhurst was embarking on a massive fraud. He would have to spend several months circling the empty wastes of the South Atlantic, carefully avoiding all shipping lanes, while he forged a log, day by day, across the Southern Ocean. On his return he would have to sustain the lie in all its details. From the scrap sheets he left in his cabin, he had obviously spent a great deal of time and thought in taking his speed record. Falsifying a circumnavigation represented an infinitely greater challenge. Doubtless he must have been wrestling with this as he sailed down the South Atlantic. His radio reports were consistently vague, but by 19 January he realised that the distance between his actual position, a few hundred miles east of Rio de Janeiro, and his claimed position approaching the Cape of Good Hope, was becoming too great and that it was time to close down his radio. He sent a message to Rodney Hallworth, his agent and promoter back in Teignmouth, for once giving a positive position a hundred miles south-east of Gough Island and, at the same time, warned him that the generator hatch was giving trouble, to create a reason for going off the air. This was his last call for three months – three months of complete isolation, denied the stimulus of pushing a boat to its limit or of a real goal.

  He had started the journey with four logbooks; the first had entries up to mid-December and then, even though there were still plenty of blank pages, had been abandoned. The second was a working log, giving the day-to-day details of his actual voyage. In it he had recorded his thoughts as the voyage progressed, and it is these which give the clearest indication of his state of mind. He used the third book as a wireless log, in which he recorded not only his own messages but also detailed weather reports from stations in Africa, Australia and South America, presumably to help him falsify his log in a convincing manner. The fourth book was missing when the boat was eventually recovered. It is possible that he kept this as the false logbook. On a practical level, working out the false sun sights in reverse would take considerably longer than doing it for real; also, of course, it would only be by doing it from day to day that the appearances of the log could have been at all convincing.

  The nervous stress of living out this solitary world of make-believe must have been immense, but there are few records of direct introspection in his logbook over this period; it is full of observations of the sea life around him, of the birds and porpoises that kept him company, and yet through these emerge glimpses of his state of mind. On 29 January an owl-like bird, which was almost certainly from the land, managed to reach the boat. He wrote a short piece about it, entitled ‘The Misfit’:

  ‘He was unapproachable, as a misfit should be. He flew away as soon as I made any effort to get near him, and on to the mizzen crosstrees where he hung desperately to the shaky stays with claws useless for the task he had set himself.

  ‘ ... Poor bloody misfit! A giant albatross, its great high-aspect wings sweeping like scimitars through the air with never a single beat slid effortlessly round the boat in mocking contrast to his ill-adapted efforts of survival.’

  And then a poem:

  Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart,

  Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight.

  Save, save him some pity. But save the greater part

  For him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit’s guiding light.

  It is a poignant cry for understanding and sympathy, stripped of all the shallow bravado that appears in his taped commentaries for the outside world.

  And then a real crisis presented itself. The starboard float of Teignmouth Electron was seriously damaged, letting in the water. The spare pieces of plywood he needed for repairs had been left behind. There seemed no choice; he would have to put into port to get the boat repaired. This presented a huge problem. Even had he wanted to use this as an honourable excuse for retiring from the race, he was now so far from where he had said he was, that his fraud would inevitably have been exposed. He seems to have dithered for several days, zigzagging off the coast of Argentina, before finally summoning up the resolve to get into port, and then he chose the obscure anchorage of Rio Salado, near the mouth of the River Plate. He arrived on the morning of 8 March, repaired the damage and left two days later. Although the arrival of Teignmouth Electron was noted in the coastguard log, it was not passed on, but Crowhurst could not be sure of this and it must have been yet another source of worry.

  As he set sail from Rio Salado, in his pretended voyage he should have been somewhere between New Zealand and Cape Horn. The time was coming close when his real self could join up with the fantasy self and, with this in mind, he started sailing south towards the Falkland Islands and the Roaring Forties. It is ironic that from 24 March, on his way south, he must have passed within a few miles of Tetley going north. He sailed to within sight of the Falklands on 29 March, but it was still too early to radio his false position approaching the Horn, and so he veered off to the north for a further ten days, zigzagging back and
forth, before sending out his first radio message for three months:

  DEVON NEWS EXETER – HEADING DIGGER

  RAMREZ LOG KAPUT 17697 28TH

  WHATS NEW OCEAN-BASHINGWISE

  The broken log line covered any contradictions there might be between his actual mileage and the one he declared, while he still avoided giving a precise position, though definitely inferred that he was approaching the small group of islands named Diego Ramirez, to the south of Cape Horn. His radio call arrived just five days after Knox-Johnston had been sighted near the Azores and inevitably the world’s press were concentrating on him, saving Crowhurst from a closer scrutiny that might have picked out some anomalies both in the apparent speed of his crossing the Southern Ocean and the timing of the resumption of radio communications. Once again, Francis Chichester was one of the few people to make sceptical comment.

  Tetley was approaching the Tropic of Capricorn, well off the coast of South America, when he heard that Crowhurst was back in contact and heading for Cape Horn. It was unlikely that Crowhurst could get back to England before him, but of course he had set out over a month later and seemed, from his report, to have caught up dramatically. If Crowhurst kept up his present rate of progress he would have the fastest time round the world. Tetley had been stoical about Robin Knox-Johnston’s reappearance, writing in his book Trimaran Solo:

  ‘Robin’s arrival would hive off most of the publicity and his position where expected made glad tidings. Donald Crowhurst’s challenge to me from the rear was a different matter. Even so, I could by then regard the possibility of his winning without envy. At the same time, I still wanted to win; or put in another way, I didn’t want anyone to beat me … least of all a similar type of boat.’