Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  Crowhurst saw the Golden Globe race with its £5,000 prize as a solution to his problems, and an opportunity to validate his Navicator. He determined to enter for it, though he had no yacht, no funds and limited sailing experience. He induced his patron, Best, not just to roll over his loan but to cover the costs of building a 40-foot trimaran, though Best expected him to raise the funds to pay for the voyage from other investors. He stipulated that if Crowhurst failed to complete the voyage he must pay him back the cost of the boat, and insisted he obtain a second mortgage on his family home.

  The yacht was built and launched. A BBC TV crew covered Crowhurst’s departure a month later. He relished the media attention, speaking at length about the electronic wizardry controlling the computer-operated craft and his excellent chances of winning the race. At 3 p.m. next day he set out alone non-stop around the world, leaving behind him a wife, four children, a house encumbered with a double mortgage, and considerable debts. In this respect his situation closely resembled that of Richard Byrd when he took off to fly to the North Pole in the race of 1926. If he succeeded in his goal he would achieve fame, and fame would enable him to sell his Navicator worldwide, bring untold benefits and solve all his problems.

  Things started to go wrong quickly on the voyage. The ‘waterproof’ hatches and twin hulls leaked, the self-steering gear broke down, the generator flooded. Yet his reported daily distances were good. The BBC had given him a tape-recorder and 16mm camera. The footage he shot pictures him fixing his position by the sun while the yacht surges on unaided, with its course and setting of its sails cybernetically controlled. The film shows the wires that run down the mast, run everywhere… all connecting to the sealed compartment which houses his state-of- the-art computer. His clipped-voice commentary modestly understates the dangers of the voyage, at moments achieving an exalted tone eerily similar to sections of Alone. ‘I feel like somebody who’s been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message,’ he confides, ‘some profound observation that will save the world.’

  In contrast to these lofty sentiments and stirring footage, Crowhurst’s reality was dire. He was in a leaking ill-fitted boat in the middle of the Atlantic while all his competitors were ahead of him. Rather than accept failure, he decided to fake his circumnavigation. He started a second log book, while in the first he marked a series of false positions placing his yacht further and further on her swift course around the world. In January he reported that he was in the Indian ocean, but having trouble with the generator. Then his transmissions ceased for eleven weeks. This did not stop his PR agent in England from feeding the media with his adventures. Crowhurst limps on after battering by giant wave was the headline in the Sunday Times.

  From mid-January to the end of March Crowhurst cruised an erratic course off the coast of South America. He’d given up on any attempt to circumnavigate the globe; he went the way the wind blew. Meanwhile, due to his agent’s releases, he was getting increasing coverage in the media. Much attention was focused on his computer, he was slicing his way around the world at the cutting edge of his own prototypal technology in an ultra-modern epic.

  All this while his yacht wallowed aimlessly off the coast of South America. In mid-April he was reported around the Horn on a course for England, now the favourite to win the race with its prize of £5,000 in cash.

  Hoisting full sail, he raced for home. On 23 May he learned that his last remaining competitor in the race had sunk. If he made it back to Teignmouth he had won.

  For Crowhurst the news was dazzling, but such triumph meant scrutiny of his log, not just by the race organisers but at the Institution of Navigation. And he knew it would not stand up. There were discrepancies, he could not get away with it. He cast off sail and began to coast. When he broke radio silence on 22 June, his agent informed him excitedly that he’d sold serial and syndication rights to Crowhurst’s story. The BBC wanted to meet him with a flotilla of boats, helicopters, and two camera crews.

  What could he do? His log book wouldn’t pass. The glittering prize and answer to his life lay only a reach away. But there was no way he could carry it off. For Crowhurst, it must have meant the most debilitating apprehension, a plunge into hell… yet his mind transcended it. The voyage had a purpose, he realised. From the start the journey had been toward Truth, and he had reached Truth; he had uncovered the cosmic message he must pass on to the world. In the yacht’s littered cabin, Crowhurst drew the (true) logbook to him, turned to a fresh page and wrote at the top: PHILOSOPHY. He wrote without stopping for thirty hours. He continued writing for the next eight days, his philosophic message extended to 25,000 words. On 1 July he came toward his conclusion:

  … Now is revealed the true nature

  and purpose and power

  of the game my offence I am

  I am what I am and I see the nature of my offence…

  It is finished

  It is finished

  IT IS THE MERCY…

  It is the end of my

  my game the TRUTH

  has been revealed and it will

  be done as my family require me

  to do it.

  On 10 July the Royal Mail ship Picardy spotted a small trimaran drifting under slack sails with no one in the cockpit. On boarding it they saw the yacht to be in bad shape, with fittings and equipment missing. The empty cabin was a squalid den, dirty dishes filled the sink. Bits of radio equipment lay scattered everywhere and coloured wires peeled loosely from the walls, leading into the computer locker. When its waterproof seal was removed, the space was found to contain only a tangled mass of wiring. The computer had only ever existed in Crowhurst’s head.

  In the Antarctic Richard Byrd had been alone at the weather station since 28 March. It was now late July. He was ill and weak, his notes on the period are sparse, and the account he wrote later in Alone is not the full record. If, like Crowhurst, he strayed into the dark forest during the long night, he destroyed those pages. We have no direct access to his true state of mind; we can reconstruct it only from his later behaviour – which we will come to in the next chapter.

  At Little America there had been growing concern about his condition since April when the pattern of his morse messages had become confused and at time indecipherable. Dr Poulter and Charles Murphy suspected he was ill and concealing the fact; they decided he must be rescued. On 4 August Poulter set out with two men in the most reliable of the snow tractors, driving along the uncertain trail by headlights, for it was still night. On 10 August they reached Bolling Advance Weather Base and retrieved Byrd, abandoning the weather station. He was gaunt, emaciated, and not a well man. While he recovered physically at Little America during the months which followed, many flights were made to the interior of the continent, proving that it was not divided into two but a single landmass. Also – as promised – discovering new lands, and asserting a territorial claim in the name of the United States to most of the Pacific quadrant of Antarctica, a landmass amounting to hundreds of thousands of square miles, together with all the mineral wealth that it contained.

  Having thus achieved its aims, in the spring of 1935 the expedition and its leader returned to America where Admiral Byrd received the welcome commensurate to his success. It was a great time to come home. Prohibition was repealed, Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President to the music of his campaign song, Happy Days Are Here Again, the New Deal was beginning to deliver and America had started on the slow climb back toward prosperity. Byrd spoke about his triumph in 156 cities to an audience of 600,000 people, and on the radio to millions, to all America. His place in history was assured. His public persona of the explorer hero had become a national brand, extending to today.

  * This is related in Jeremy Scott’s Dancing on Ice: A Stirring Tale of Adventure, Risk and Reckless Folly, Old Street, 2008.

  31.

  FINAL ACT

  The scene is the North Pole. Summer 1947.

  Wisps of flimsy cirrus cloud slowly drift away south, the
haze dissolves and the sun is revealed floating in a pale Arctic sky like an enormous fuzzy peach diffusing a glaze of radiance across the frozen ocean below, as Bernt Balchen banks the aeroplane he is piloting into a steep turn to complete a full circuit of the North Pole in less than a couple of minutes. In a four-engine C54, to fly over this spot is now a routine achievement effected regularly by the large aircraft of the day, which bear little resemblance to the primitive machines that struggled towards this same goal in the race to reach The Pole first, more than two decades ago. Yet the manner in which this particular flight will end is not routine, for it triggers events which in no way can be foreseen by Balchen when he throws the stick hard over to execute that wilful turn around the potent yet invisible icon on the ice below, in the course of a flight from Fairbanks, Alaska to Thule in Greenland. It will incite the first of a series of increasingly menacing confrontations with Admiral Richard Byrd, whom he has not seen for fourteen years…

  Balchen’s career has flourished in the long interval. In 1935 he was appointed deputy manager of the newly formed Norwegian national airline. A year later he went to Washington to look for a US airline to partner it in a regular transatlantic route. A chance encounter with Postmaster General James Farley led to a meeting with President Roosevelt and a deal with Pan American Airways. In 1938 Balchen visited Berlin to order aeroplane parts from the Junkers factory, and observed production lines staffed by 20,000 workers turning out Stuka bombers. While standing on the balcony of his room at the Kaiserhof Hotel he watched Adolf Hitler stir up a rapturous congregation of a quarter-million crowded into the square below, and glimpsed the future. In 1940 Balchen, with his family, was back in New York as Norway’s military representative in the US, and in 1941 he was given the rank of captain, assisting Major-General Arnold, head of the Air Corps, and engaged with him in the awesome task of transforming the nation’s less than one thousand planes into the most mighty air force in the world. America was about to go to war. By 1943 he was attached to the OSS, flying missions to drop arms to underground resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Norway. He was a veteran of Arctic adventure who had not lost a taste for its excitements. Up to the end of the conflict in 1945 Balchen enjoyed what was known at the time as ‘a good war’.

  After completing a lap around the North Pole, Balchen set a course for Thule, the American airbase now established in the north of Greenland. Having taken off from Fairbanks, Alaska, his flight route there was far from a direct one. The Pole was a whimsical diversion, however the way he relates his arrival in Thule that day strikes the reader as disingenuous:

  We landed on a gravel strip at the base of the mountains … As I was filling out my Form I a sergeant of the crew scratched his head. ‘Look Colonel, weren’t you pilot on the South Pole flight too?’

  I nodded absently as I was writing. ‘Ja, sure. Why?’

  ‘Well then, don’t that make you the first man who ever piloted a plane over both Poles?’

  ‘I guess it does,’ I said. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

  Balchen’s account is engagingly self-deprecatory, but is hardly rendered credible by the fact that he flew on to attend a press conference scheduled in Washington. To fly to the North Pole was no longer an event of note, but to have piloted a plane to both rated at least a paragraph and photo in the newspaper. However, on arrival at the Pentagon he found the press conference cancelled and a message to report to the office of Admiral Richard Byrd.

  Byrd did not get up from behind his desk when he came in, neither did he offer him a seat. Balchen was greatly struck by his appearance, he’d aged considerably since he’d last seen him. He’d lost flesh and shrunk within his uniform and that buoyant vitality once so electric to encounter was no longer present in his manner. His hair had thinned and his face soured, he’d become an old man with an old man’s agitated and testy bearing. Balchen’s wife, Bess, jotted down the words of this conversation when her husband described the meeting later that evening:

  Byrd asked about the flight and my work in Alaska, then about my flying status. I showed him my green instrument card. He then asked who had given me permission to make the flight. Byrd then looked at me in anger and said, ‘If you think that you will get a promotion to general in the Air Force, just forget it. Not over my dead body, I’ll see to that!’

  Balchen was startled and upset by the encounter. He had done nothing to damage Byrd’s reputation: very much the contrary, he’d always spoken highly of his remarkable ability. Bess and he discussed the matter that night, coming to the conclusion that Byrd not only resented Balchen for piloting a plane to both Poles, but feared he might reveal what he knew about Byrd’s North Pole ‘win’. For certainly he realised that, on Balchen’s extensive tour around the US in the Jo Ford which followed that ‘win’, Balchen must have figured out that the Pole flight was not possible in the time. He knew Balchen knew and was an enemy who could betray him. The demon of retribution lurking in the shadows of Byrd’s mind had taken human shape and wore Balchen’s face.

  Paranoia is a medical condition most succinctly described as a growing anxiety directed toward the future. It is usually founded on something real, people rarely become paranoid for no good reason. It can occur gradually or without warning, brought on by shock or poisoning. Carbon monoxide is known sometimes to induce psychotic symptoms. Paranoia involves guilt, shame, apprehension, suspicion, sense of persecution, jealousy and anger. With it comes an over-reaction to trivia and misinterpretation of commonplace events. The individual believes these random events relate directly to them, and that everything means something. Often this is accompanied by auditory hallucinations. The paranoid person hears various voices commenting on his/her behaviour, arguing between themselves, echoing their thoughts derisively, or instructing them to commit particular actions. Many things seem to confirm these delusions, the sufferer becomes unable to discriminate between fantasy and reality. Psychiatrists claim that deep within their subconscious the guilty individual believes he deserves to be exposed and punished.

  Following that confrontation over Balchen’s polar circuit, he and Admiral Byrd did not meet again for another three years. By then Balchen had been posted to Washington. There he was assigned a closet-sized office in the basement of the Pentagon, without a telephone or even a chair for visitors – not that he received many, for he was given no work. Frustrated, he passed his time in the Pentagon library, occasionally travelling to some city to attend a function and deliver a speech for the Air Force.

  In the spring of 1952 the Balchens attended a funeral service for Dana Coman, who had been on Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition. At the reception afterwards Balchen spotted the Admiral among a group of people. Approaching him, Balchen attempted to introduce his wife. ‘Byrd looked at us with a glare cold as all of the Polar Regions. Then he quickly turned away, chatting with everyone else,’ reports Bess Balchen. A month later Balchen was at home one weekend when he was surprised to receive a call from Byrd, who made no reference to their non-encounter but instead was oddly affable. He said he wanted to meet to discuss arrangements for the twenty-fifth anniversary of their transatlantic flight, would Balchen be in town next week? Balchen confirmed he would and Byrd said he’d be in touch to fix a date. ‘When are they going to make you a general?’ Byrd asked. ‘It won’t be long now, I know.’ Byrd never followed up on his call, no meeting took place.

  In January 1953 Reader’s Digest ran a piece titled ‘Bernt Balchen, Viking of the Air’. The magazine’s editor received a letter from Admiral Byrd, objecting to the article’s misplaced emphasis on Balchen. On 5 October Newsweek published another piece about him: ‘Will the Air Force fire a great Arctic expert? Deep in the basement of the Pentagon … sits a man with one of the great names in American aviation. Neglect and rigid military regulations may soon force him to retire in his early fifties…’ A week afterward Balchen ran into the Admiral at a ceremony at Kitty Hawk commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ flight
. Bess Balchen says that when her husband came home that night he was white with anger. Byrd had threatened him. At her insistence he sat down to document their conversation.

  As we were going out of the hall he (REB) pulled out a clipping of the article in Newsweek … He said, ‘I am going to let you know right away that the publicity you … are getting has got to stop. If you do not take care of this immediately I am going to see to it that this is done. Many of my influential friends are tired of the way you are taking credit for a lot of things you never did and are getting recognition which you do not deserve, you can include me in this too. Do not ever believe for a moment that I will stand for being stepped on by you.’ Byrd then reminded me he was the one who brought me over to the States … he could have stopped my regular commission at any time by just lifting his finger. Here he became furious and said, ‘I held it long enough.’

  Balchen was so angry he reported the encounter to the Air Force Public Relations Office, who called him in to question him on his account. Later, after discussing what he should do with Bess, Balchen wrote Byrd a letter:

  Dear Dick, This is to tell you that, as requested by you, I have related our conversation at Kitty Hawk to the USAF public relations office … I believe that after you have given more thought to this matter you will realise that I have never said or done anything that could have been detrimental to you. Quite the opposite. Sincerely, Bernt.