Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  The way in which the ambitions of a few sailors to out-sail Chichester developed into a formalised race undoubtedly added extra pressures. It also attracted others who might never have set out without the focus given by the race and its associated publicity. There is a temptation to condemn the very concept of a formalised race, as something that sullies the purity of adventure, and yet this is an almost inevitable manifestation of the compulsive competitiveness built into so many people. The sailor or, for that matter, most adventurers, has an ego that requires the approval of others; he also needs money just to launch the venture and one way of getting it is through sponsorship or the media. They, in turn, need a story and look for ways of building one, whether it be a round-the-world race, the first to the top of Everest or the first across one of the polar ice caps. And so the merry-go-round of the big adventure is built.

  Some, like Robin Knox-Johnston, can ride it to attain their ambitions. Others, like Crowhurst, are not strong enough, and are destroyed.

  – Chapter 4 –

  Ice Bird

  David Lewis sails round Antarctica, 1972–1974

  The waves reared up, chaotic, boiling white, like huge breakers on a reef; foam and windblown sleet made it difficult to tell where ocean ended and sky began. The roar of breakers intermingled with the high-pitched scream of wind in the rigging, as the little boat was hurled up on to the crest of a wave, before lurching crabwise down into the trough, where for a few strange moments she was becalmed, sheltered by the breakers around her from the noise of the wind. But somehow that only amplified the crash of collapsing rollers; sooner or later one of these must hit Ice Bird.

  Once already, the boat had been knocked down; the self-steering vane had vanished and what little sail he had left up had been ripped away. David Lewis was now crouched, braced on the wet bunk in the cabin, his state of mind not so much fearful as beyond fear, for there was very little he could do to control his fate. He still clutched the tiller lines, which he could operate from within the shelter of the cabin, but the boat barely answered to their call.

  Then suddenly, at about two in the morning, it happened. It was like a gigantic hand that picked the boat up, tossed and then rolled it; everything went black, water roaring in, clothes, tins, books tumbling around him; he was lying on the roof, then almost in the same instant on the floor among the swilling waters and flotsam of what had been his home. By the light of the sub-Antarctic dawn he saw that the tore hatch had been ripped away, but when he struggled from under the table that had collapsed on top of him and poked his head out of the hatchway, his worst fears were confirmed. The mast had been ripped out of its seat in the huge vortex of the roll and was trailing over the side, held only by the festoons of knotted rigging.

  David Lewis was as alone as anyone has ever been on this earth. He was on his way to the Antarctic Peninsula, the first solitary yachtsman ever to attempt to reach the most inhospitable coast on earth. Six weeks out from Sydney, he was about halfway there, far south of the route taken by round-the-world sailors, on the sixtieth line of latitude, nudging down towards the Antarctic Circle where cold and ice compound the threat of 100 mile an hour winds and freak waves 100 feet high. His boat was a wreck; he was without a mast and his chances of survival were minimal.

  David Lewis was born in Plymouth in 1917, but his parents emigrated to New Zealand when he was only two. Agonisingly shy as a child, awkward at organised games, he naturally turned to the untracked forests, mountains and white water rivers of this exciting, only partly-tamed land. At the age of seventeen he built a canoe and paddled home from his boarding school, 450 miles by river, portage and lake. He was bright academically and studied medicine; he joined the university mountaineering club and made nineteen first ascents in the Southern Alps of New Zealand.

  At the start of the Second World War, like most of his generation, any adventurous instincts were absorbed by the ugly, compulsory adventure of war and he took part in the Normandy landings as a member of an airborne ambulance unit. The war left him with the compulsive need to do something socially useful so, after a short period in the West Indies, he went into practice in the East End of London. Now married with two children, he worked hard and conscientiously at his practice and regained a touch of adventure with a sailing dinghy he built himself. It was the conventional pattern of the professional man and weekend sailor but, in David Lewis, part Welsh, part Irish, the pent-up, restless passion was too great. It exploded with the break-up of his marriage and saw him acquiring the twenty-five-foot yacht, Cardinal Vertue, and entering the first Observer single-handed trans-Atlantic yacht race. Fourteen miles from the start his mast broke but he returned to Plymouth with a makeshift rig, had the mast repaired and set out once again, finishing third behind Francis Chichester and Blondie Hasler in fifty-four days.

  Lewis next put everything he had into building a catamaran of revolutionary design, Rehu Moana, sailed her to the Arctic, then entered her in the second Observer race and sailed on to New Zealand with his second wife and two infant daughters, down through the Magellan Straits and on across the Pacific.

  In Lewis there has always been the combination of extreme adventurer and romantic scientist. He was not content just to sail or venture for its own sake or aim towards a purely competitive goal; even the single-handed race had been for him as much an exploration of solitude as it had been a race, finishing, and what he learned from the experience, was more important than winning. His main purpose in crossing the Pacific was to try to emulate the navigational methods of the Polynesians, who had neither compass nor sextant and guided their great canoes by star paths, the pattern of ocean swells and the birds that signpost the way to land.

  In many ways, the course of his life has been very close to that of Thor Heyerdahl, but in Lewis there is a harder, wilder streak of a man who courts the extreme. He had settled in Australia and was a research fellow with the Australian National University, studying the methods of the traditional star path navigators of the Pacific. He had always been fascinated by the harsh empty wastes of the Poles, and dreamt as snarly as 1964 of making a solo circumnavigation of the Antarctic continent. His motives were twofold, as in the case of almost every adventurer – the competitive urge to be first and the need to plumb his own personal unknown.

  He had what appeared a suitable boat, a thirty-nine-foot yacht, Isbjorn, which had replaced his catamaran, Rehu Moana. Isbjorn was based on Tawara, in the Gilbert Islands, under the command of Lewis’s son, Barry, who was doing a bit of trading between the islands and also preparing her for the Antarctic for his father. Bringing Isbjorn back to Sydney, Barry was caught in a severe gale and the boat foundered. The insurance had just lapsed and David Lewis had to start again from scratch.

  He wanted an all-steel boat that would stand up to the huge seas and ice of Antarctica, but very few are built and Lewis had neither the time nor the money to have one specially designed. But his luck changed at last when, after searching every yard in Sydney, he stumbled upon the perfect boat. A thirty-two-foot sloop, built throughout of one-eighth-of-an-inch steel, she was tiny and yet ideal for what he wanted to do, being compact, immensely strong and easy to sail single-handed. Even more important, she was comparatively cheap – just under £4,000. If one compares this to the £60,000 that Chay Blyth’s British Steel had cost a couple of years earlier, one can see just how small a budget David Lewis was working on. Everything had to be skimped, improvisation being the order of the day, but this was something that Lewis both excelled at and enjoyed. There were no luxuries, no heat for the cabin, the most basic of galleys, a complete dearth of electronic gadgets, except for a powerful radio transmitter and receiver. He ensured, however, that the boat herself was thoroughly sound. The hull was inspected and strengthened, every wire and rope checked and replaced where necessary, extra-strong sails were especially made. Every window was covered by a plate of one-eighth-of-an-inch steel, leaving only tiny Perspex rims. This meant that the interior of the cabin was in permanent
gloom, apart from a small Perspex viewing dome, fitted so that he could actually steer from within the cabin, pulling on lines attached to the tiller.

  Lean, muscular but slight of build, David Lewis at fifty-five was a grizzled leprechaun of the sea, with a fey quality accentuated by a dark pointed beard and deep set eyes. Softly spoken, very intense yet diffident, he has a lurking sense of humour. There is a modest, yet charismatic quality to him that people find difficult to resist. Every expeditioner is indebted to a mass of voluntary helpers, and David Lewis never had any difficulty in finding and using these. It was largely due to their help that he was ready to sail on 19 October 1972.

  He settled quickly to the routine of solitary sailing, irregular sleep, the constant round of make and mend, and was at one with the sea. But only a hundred miles out of Sydney, he found his new Racal radio was barely getting through, even though he had installed heavy-duty batteries to power it. So he called at Stewart Island, off the southernmost tip of New Zealand’s South Island, where he replenished water and fuel, and called Sydney, warning them it was unlikely he would be able to maintain radio contact. He could not find anything wrong with his set, yet his engine failed to generate even enough power to make contact with radio stations in the South Island. When he set off once again, his next landfall was to be the Antarctic Peninsula, 5,000 miles away.

  Much more serious than the lack of radio contact was his next discovery, that his bilge pump would not work. He had fitted a new one in Sydney but, in the rush to get ready, had not tried it out. In Lewis’s life there is a recurring theme of disasters, some great, some small, but all of which – admittedly at the cost of vast discomfort and danger – he overcomes, almost as if he wanted the challenge to his ingenuity presented by each calamity. The solution to the bilge pump failure was irksome and potentially dangerous. The wells beneath the floorboards were packed with his tinned food. This meant he had to clear the deepest well, repacking the tins into the forepeak lockers, so that he could bail out the water with a bucket. This then had to be carried down the companion way, rested on the bottom step and then heaved up at just the right moment to coincide with the roll of the boat, to be emptied into the cockpit – a slow, laborious process.

  But he sailed on into the west, forever edging southward towards the Antarctic continent. It got progressively colder, flurries of snow replacing the squalls of rain. Storm followed storm and the seas got even higher. He wrote in his log:

  ‘I have been running undercanvassed, being awed by the latitude – but not too over-awed, I know now. I was reading, the moan of the wind muted in the cabin. It rises to a shriek; we are pushed gradually but firmly over, as if by a hand and race ahead, luffing (storm trysail and storm jib only). I put the helm up from the cabin with the tiller lines, gasping in the spray showers even here. Ice Bird tore crashing along until the squall was past. Then I shook with reaction.’

  But Lewis was still in control; Ice Bird was making good, if uncomfortable progress towards her goal; but everything changed on 27 November. That was the date of the capsize. The barometer had dropped so low that it went off the scale; it was a hurricane more fierce than anything Lewis had experienced in his long years at sea. In the immediate aftermath of the capsize there seemed little chance of survival. He was dismasted, Ice Bird’s shell ruptured by the colossal force of the water, and 2,500 miles from the nearest port, which was only a tiny Antarctic base on a rocky, ice-bound coastline. And yet the instinctive will to survive immediately took over.

  Lewis stuffed some rags into the split in the cabin wall, searched around for his gloves but failed to find them in the appalling shambles of the waterlogged cabin, so started bailing without them, bucket after bucketful, stumbling over the debris, trying to avoid spilling the painfully collected water in the wildly bucking boat. After five hours’ continuous bailing, at last the boat was nearly empty and then – crash! Ice Bird had been smashed down once again, the ice-cold sea gushed in through the damaged hatchways and the partly repaired gash in the side. He had to start all over again.

  At last the storm moderated to a mere force ten and Lewis collapsed in his sodden clothing on to the bunk. He had been bailing, non-stop, for ten hours. But he did not rest for long: the smash and crash of the mast against the hull got him back on deck. He had to clear the mast before it did real damage. There was no way he could recover the mast by himself; releasing it with his numbed fingers on the tossing wave-swept deck was difficult enough. The mast was imprisoned by a tangle of stainless steel wire rigging, anchored to the deck by split pins that were now twisted and jammed. Hammering and levering at them, he managed to clear all but two of the wires which fortunately sheared. His hands were torn, but he did not feel anything. He could do no more and staggered back into the ruin of the cabin.

  It was only the following morning that he realised that his hands were badly frostbitten. He could now take stock and his findings were appallingly bleak. His radio receiver had packed up completely, which meant that he could not get any time signals, essential for accurate navigation. He had only the one Omega wristwatch, knew that it was gaining time, but was not sure just how much. With his frostbitten fingers he was barely able to manipulate the winder or, for that matter, use his hands effectively for the many other functions vital to his survival. He could neither handle the sextant nor even pick up a match dropped on the floor.

  By now his boat was a piece of flotsam, adrift in the Southern Ocean. Somehow he had to find a way of building a jury mast. Protecting his hands with wet woollen gloves, he salvaged a ten-foot-long spinnaker pole, somehow erecting it, and staying it with what was left of the rigging and some old climbing rope. But it could only take a pathetic amount of sail, barely enough to keep him under way, as Ice Bird plodded crabwise, towards his haven of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was a desperate, yet hopeless struggle for survival, for he still had 2,500 miles to go and, at that speed, he would have run out of water long before he got there. And yet he kept struggling on, spending up to fourteen hours at a time operating the tiller lines from the shelter of the cabin, to claw his way in the right direction, tacking painfully, first north-east, then south-east, to gain a few precious miles. The numbness of his hands had now given way to intense and growing agony. They were soft, swollen, beginning to suppurate. He took massive doses of antibiotics to stop them becoming gangrenous but even touching anything was agonisingly painful. Despite this he had to bail out twenty or thirty bucketfuls of bilge water each day, struggle with the Primus stove, go out on deck to readjust his pathetically inadequate sail or repair the fragile mast. The position was hopeless. He commented in his log:

  ‘A shutter has closed between a week ago when I was part of the living and since. Chance of survival negligible but effort worth it in spite of pain and discomfort. These last are very great. Must go on striving to survive, as befits a man. Susie and Vickie without a daddy is worst of all.’

  He continued to strive, even though the aluminium jury mast was slowly buckling and then, a week later, the barometer dropped once again. He battened down for another storm, stowing everything away, tying down the table, stuffing the ventilators with rags, and then waited.

  ‘After watching in helpless misery while the remains of the self-steering gear broke up and was swept away, I made one more attempt to steer. It was hopeless. We lay helplessly, starboard side to, rolling the decks under. I cowered down on the port bunk, back braced against the cabin bulkhead – as if to seek companionship from the kangaroo and kiwi painted there – about as far into the depths of the cabin as it was possible to get.’

  He did not have to wait for long; it was almost inevitable that sooner or later one of the huge waves would break over the helpless boat. Once again she was smashed and tumbled over, but Lewis’s preparations had paid off; his sleeping bag was soaked and his typewriter smashed into pieces in a corner of the cabin, but most of the gear and food had been held in place. Most important of all, his jury mast was still standing; the hatches an
d roof of the cabin had withstood yet another hammering. The most serious damage was to the main hatch, which would only open a foot before jamming. For a second he was caught by panic; he was entombed in the cabin, but then common sense took over, for he could always escape from the fore hatch. But with a struggle he found that he could just wriggle through anyway. He was unable to clear the hatch, however, so his bailing problems were compounded:

  ‘How on earth could I lift a bucket of bilge water past me when I was wedged in the hatchway, not to mention the far more delicate manoeuvre of lifting the toilet bucket out into the cockpit? The answer was found by trial and error. I was able to evolve a set of co-ordinated movements that, when I removed my parka and exhaled deeply, just sufficed to squeeze the bucket up past my chest and, balancing it precariously above my head lift it out of the hatch. Bilge water could then be unceremoniously tipped into the cockpit, though the toilet required further contortions before I could gain the bridge deck and empty it safely overside.’

  It was so difficult to light the cooking stove and then prevent the pot on top of it being hurled to the other side of the cabin, that Lewis had hot food or drink only at intervals of several days. The temperature of the cabin was barely above freezing and his clothing and sleeping bag were permanently damp, and yet he still struggled on with a dogged, Herculean ingenuity, buoyed by his own fierce spirit of survival and the thought of his two young daughters who so depended on him. It was the kind of desperate situation in which almost anyone would be tempted to look for help from a source outside himself. Lewis wrote: ‘Did I pray? people ask. No, I longed to be able to but, not being religious at other times, I had just enough dignity left not to cry out for help when the going got a bit rough. A higher power, should one exist, might even appreciate this attitude.’