Rounding Cape Horn (Sunday Times)
When my pilot waggled his wings in salute we were rewarded by a wave of greeting. ‘Muy hombre,’ said the pilot, which I freely translate as ‘What a man’.
On the flight home we had severe turbulence as we threaded our way back through the mountains, and we lost an engine over the Strait of Magellan. It was a flight I am not too anxious to repeat, but the sight of Gipsy Moth ploughing bravely through this wilderness of rain and sea was well worth it.
A week later Francis himself filed a report: ‘Hot news! At noon today I passed half-way! I had sailed 7,673 miles from Sydney, and the distance along the Clipper Way to Plymouth was 7,634 miles by my measurement’.
Unbeknown to Francis, The Sunday Times had given Murray Sayle’s piece the full works: two front-page columns and eight columns across pages 8 and 9. The splash had caused a stir and pretty soon a features editor was looking for some human interest – a quality, it has to be said, lacking from Francis’s own despatches to the newspaper, which tended to be facts, facts and then more facts. One night over the long-distance radio came this question ‘from a girl reporter working for the Sunday Times’: ‘What did you eat on your first meal after rounding the Horn?’
Francis could deal with facts but this was too personal. He radioed back:
I strongly urge you stop questioning and interviewing me, which poisons the romantic attraction of this voyage. I am beginning to dread transmitting nights, and I fear losing my enthusiasm for worthwhile dispatches. Maybe this is because I have been alone for 58 days; I do not feel the same as I would if leading an office life. I have my hands full driving this boat efficiently and maintaining the gear in good order. Difficult radio communication is a great strain anyway. Interviewing makes it intolerable. I do not want to hurt your feelings but hope you can sympathise with my state of mind.
As if to compensate for such trivialisation, Francis made himself the very meal the reporter – and of course all her readers – wanted to know about. Not many really cared about what he gave them: how he changed the genoa for a storm jib at 3.19 am with two hanks [sail to wire clips] missing – but everyone wanted to know what he ate, how he kept clean, tidied the boat, put up with himself, stuff they could all relate to on dry land. To drum home his ‘mind your own business’ bloody-mindedness, he shared the news they all wanted to hear only with his log:
To make up for these frustrations, I stood myself a notable lunch – I think it was the one I had enjoyed most on the passage. Here is the menu: A clove of garlic, with a hunk of Gruyère cheese and a glass of Whitbread; a tin of Australian peas, a tin of salmon, and three potatoes in their jackets with plenty of butter; a tin of pears.
Not for the first time, it seems that Francis thought PR stood for Privacy Removal and not Public Relations.
And so the passage home passed under the keel, mile by mile. One evening Francis noted that he had sailed out of the Forties, sharing that anyone who sailed there was bonkers – but that he knew that before he started, adding: ‘It was one of life’s great experiences, and I would feel unsatisfied if I had not done it’. A week later he was digging out his light clothes and washing in warmer, equatorial sea water.
Soon it was Sheila’s birthday, 11 April, and Francis tried a long-range call to London, still 4,700 miles away. Messages had to be passed through a licensed operator and he heard that Sheila was having dinner with Edward and Belinda Montagu at Palace House in Beaulieu, helping them celebrate their wedding anniversary. 11 April was a bumper day: Sheila’s birthday, the Montagus’ anniversary and the completion of his circumnavigation – so inbound crossing his outbound track.
But of course these halcyon sailing days would have to come to an end. For Francis it was a double blow: the end of sailing and the start of people. The first sign of trouble came on 7 May, when he was hailed by the Esso Winchester oil tanker, heading for the Western Approaches. It was the first ship he had seen since Cape Horn. He had been alone for three months and the thought of having to deal with the world’s pettiness and triviality after living not just in but with Nature, at one with her and himself, filled him with the dread of paradise lost.
His sense of foreboding was confirmed when a few days later he found that the Sea Huntress was bearing down on him. She had been chartered by The Sunday Times to hunt him down. There were still 1,500 miles to go but the newspaper had invested heavily in Francis’s voyage and wanted to scoop as much as it could. The encounter confirmed all his worst fears about the outside world. Coming alongside to take photographs and ask questions, typical of which were not about the voyage or the boat or his health but to see if he wanted a bottle of gin. It was as if some features editor in London had already angled the story ‘Old soak sails home’ – as indeed they had. Francis declined the gin and waved cheerfully, his first pretence for months. Equally annoying, he needed to gybe, a long and complicated procedure with all the foresails flying and one that a photograph could easily make look clumsy and unseamanlike.
He knew that worse was to come – and come it did, from the sky. The RAF had decided to use finding Gipsy Moth IV as a training exercise; early on 13 May two Shackleton maritime patrol planes swept low overhead. Francis was deep in sleep and soon cursing. The Shackletons flew by low again. This time Francis was on deck. The pilot dipped his wings. The crew waved at him through the windows. Later that day one of them told the Guardian: ‘He just sat there looking ahead as if we didn’t exist, not waving back or anything’. If he knew Francis as we do, he would count himself lucky not to have been on the wrong end of a digital gesture.
View from the RAF Shackleton
It was just as well that Francis was not aware of the worldwide interest his voyage had generated. Ever since Murray Sayle’s report and photographs from Cape Horn, the media appetite had grown and grown. Down below he composed himself for dealing with the relatively limited media interference that he was expecting, writing in his log:
One soon forgets that there is not only the boat to worry about on this sort of long adventure; there are attitudes of mind, which one wishes to suppress by trying not to think of them, an obvious one being fear. At times one is attacked by the futility of making an effort incessantly, day and night for four months. It is difficult to keep up an effort incessantly by day and night.
A whole new incessant effort was about to need hoisting up the mast.
He also worried about habits formed in four months of being alone:
What effect had four months of solitude had on me? What habits had I developed? One unsociable habit, which had become strong by then, was that of dropping asleep at any time of day. I never had enough sleep. I would eat huge breakfasts, and often have to stop in the middle of breakfast and sleep before the end of it. I reflected: ‘If I am dining out in London in a few days’ time, what will my hostess think if at the end of the soup I say I must sleep for ten minutes before the next course?’
The next morning two more Shackletons woke him again. This time, having already found him, they were using him as anti-submarine attack practice, perhaps in revenge for his unfriendliness the previous morning. By noon a BBC launch arrived, joined in the evening by one from ITV. There were still 200 miles to go and quite a media flotilla was forming to welcome him home. Francis counted thirteen ships escorting him in but they all gave way for the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, her 2,500 strong crew lining the deck and giving Francis three cheers. He dipped his White Ensign in salute.
This was a great honour, which I found most moving. It must surely be unique in the history of the British Navy for a warship with a complement as big as the population of a small town to salute so ceremoniously a ship with a crew of one!
I think it was at this point that Francis felt his voyage was complete.
Sunset arrival in Plymouth
Not so the rest of the world. Back in Plymouth, half a million people had gathered to welcome him home. With perfect sunset timing on a beautiful Devon evening, at 9.00 pm
Francis sailed Gipsy Moth IV past Rear-Commodore Colonel Jack Odling-Smee and the finishing guns of the Royal Western Yacht Club – guns plural because Smee feared that one would not be loud enough to be heard over the tumult. It seemed that everyone Francis had ever met was there to greet him: Geoffrey Goodwin had flown in from New Zealand, Tony Dulverton been chauffeured down from London – and, of course, Sheila. Francis tried to absorb every moment of the spectacular welcome, a different kind of solo endeavour – all directed towards him and him alone. Sheila and Giles climbed aboard Gipsy Moth IV. Francis was overwhelmed, bewildered at the other extreme he now faced.
‘It’s strange,’ he said to Sheila, ‘but I don’t feel anything at all.’
‘One can’t’, Sheila replied. ‘There’s too much to feel.’
The toll taken on his body by the months of vigour and fear, damp and cold, lack of sleep and square meals, and on his mind by the demands of media, trivia and celebrity soon laid Francis low. Already frail, after a week of being the focus of civic receptions and private parties in Plymouth, always on parade, always the star attraction at events he felt he couldn’t decline, he collapsed. At the Royal Naval Hospital they demanded complete rest – and rest alone – for three weeks. As we saw in Chapter 1, this caused organisational problems in Buckingham Palace; but rest and recover he must.
Actually, Francis later revealed that he enjoyed the rest more than he cared to let on to Sheila at the time. He was meant to be ill, only he didn’t feel ill, just deeply tired. While the doctors fretted about doing tests and Sheila did her best to keep them at bay, he knew that the original diagnosis and cure were correct: three months of exhaustion and three weeks’ rest. Whenever he was feeling glum, he could always cheer himself up re-reading his Medical Officer’s report:
The fact remains that apart from emphysema and bronchitis the lungs are at present moment free from any disease. If Sir Francis had been in the Navy he would have been invalided out on this account. On the other hand, had he been seen as a civilian his doctor would probably have recommended that he take a long sea voyage!
Three weeks later he was released but only into Sheila’s care. She certainly wasn’t going to put up with any unnecessary parting shenanigans. But even she could not keep Father Time at bay – and from now on Francis’s health would be in decline. She was now tending a frailer husband than she had been used to.
And so they set sail for Greenwich and our opening chapter.
Francis and Gipsy Moth IV’s voyage of 29,630 miles had taken just nine months and a day, beginning and ending in Plymouth. Of these, 226 were sailing days. Perhaps not equally amazingly, but still amazingly, Francis had logged more than 200,000 words during that time, for which I at least am immensely grateful.
NOTES:
16. Claimed by Greenwich to be Francis’s favourite tipple. It wasn’t; he preferred whisky and soda but, like your author, if pushed would drink almost anything.
17. In Hong Kong Sheila had met Capt. Adie of the 28,000-ton liner Himalaya. He had been en route from Sydney to Hong Kong the same night as Tamara hit Gipsy Moth IV. He told Sheila about a rogue wave that had sent her over to 25 degrees; they reckoned that this was the one that capsized Francis. Adie told Sheila: ‘Chichester can keep the bloody Tasman Sea!’
Nothing equals apprehension of the future for making one enjoy the unparalleled beauty and charm of the present.
CHAPTER 10
Gipsy Moth V
IT SEEMED TO SHEILA THAT IN THE MONTHS that followed Francis was the most famous man in the world. She cared nothing for fame, of course, with a Christian’s eye for the perils of vanity and she considered fame’s demands as a curse on Francis’s delicate health. She was less dismissive about the newly found money, which was now pouring in. After all the years of being the sole source of their wealth, Francis was now in what she called the ‘lovely lolly’, a bestselling author with Gipsy Moth Circles the World, a top performer on the lecture circuit with newspaper fees and endorsements topping up the coffers.
In the days before the cult of celebrity, he was celebrated around the world. Rolex paid handsomely for them to fly to Switzerland to present him with a new Rolex watch to replace the one that had been his chronometric companion, getting him in and out of fixes across the oceans. Their hosts then laid on a short break for them at Survretta House in St Moritz, only to be greeted with full fanfare and municipal honours as they stepped off the famous mountain railway. Everywhere they went it was the same. At San Remo Francis was awarded the Polano Trophy, followed by a huge dinner. The Chichesters hid Francis’s health concerns as best they could, he wishing that he was strong enough to stay later and join in with the boys, Sheila always keeping a wary eye on him and pushing him off to bed as soon as was polite.
Gipsy Moth IV’s homecoming on the Beaulieu River
Of all the celebrations they particularly enjoyed the one given for Gipsy Moth IV and themselves at Buckler’s Hard, a kind of nautical homecoming. On Francis’s sixty-sixth birthday, 17 September 1967, he was presented with the Freedom of the Beaulieu River – so no more mooring fees – and driven from the dock up the Buckler’s Hard Maritime Museum by Lord Montagu in his 1909 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. There Francis presented the Museum with the charts he had used on his circumnavigation. They are still there, proudly displayed on the walls. At dusk the Soho Concertante played Handel’s Water Music; Gipsy Moth IV was bathed in floodlight; the sky sparkled with spectacular fireworks. Francis loved it all (albeit feverishly, thanks to the flu), greeting and thanking his faithful friend the harbour master Bill Grindey, then Bill Martin, who had mended numerous mechanical breakages, and Mrs Martin, who had victualed many a Gipsy Moth from the village shop.
Barnstaple claimed him as their son too. His childhood friend – his only childhood friend – the gardener’s son Bill Wilkie, was now an MBE and Mayor of Barnstaple. How well they had both done these past sixty years, these two boys who once played in the clerical tyrant’s garden and ran free through the Devon woodlands. In his acceptance speech Francis said: ‘I did love your father. If only he could see us both today.’
Arrival at Buckler’s Hard with the Montagus, Francis carrying the charts he was to present to the Maritime Museum there
After finishing Gipsy Moth Circles the World in three months, Francis went on a nationwide lecture tour to promote the book, culminating in a talk to 3,000 people at Royal Festival Hall just before Christmas 1967. He and Sheila then left for a quick tour of New Zealand, another version of the triumphant homecoming tour, and returned to find the book still top of the non-fiction bestseller list. Back in St James’s Place lay a long pile of unopened invitations from yacht clubs, lecture halls and colleges from around the world. Francis did his best to answer, and if possible accept, them all; Sheila watched nervously lest his days in the sunlight of fame stretched his increasingly fragile health too far.
The ‘Welcome Home’ programme at Buckler’s Hard
One invitation gave him particular pleasure: the Yacht Club de France had made him a Membre d’Honneur. Francis would never admit it except to himself, but the Tabarly defeat in the 1964 OSTAR still rankled – and this great honour was some sort of recompense. The British Embassy hosted his stay in Paris. The Chichesters sat with the self-exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor for dinner: Francis had not seen HRH since the Duke had presented him with the Johnson Memorial Trophy for the Tasman Sea flight thirty years earlier. Comparing their lives as the centres of attention, the Duke commented dolefully to Francis: ‘At least you have achieved something’.
The Sunday Times, too, noticed its circulation rising with Francis’s fortunes, firstly as his media partner as he rounded Cape Horn and headed for home, then later reporting on the ‘victor takes the spoils’ angle of his new-found fame and comparative fortune. A year after Francis completed his circumnavigation, Sir Alec Rose on Lively Lady completed his. In many ways Sir Alec’s voyage against all odds was more remarkable than Francis’s. Either way, single-ha
nded racing had caught the public’s imagination and the Sunday Times made the next logical leap: in late 1967 it decided to sponsor a non-stop around the world single-handed yacht race.
Francis first heard about this in a telephone call from the newspaper when he was on his victory tour of New Zealand in early 1968. The race was to be called The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. There would be no fixed starting date; instead all competitors could set off whenever they were ready, as long as it was between June and end October that year. There were to be no rules and no handicap. Given his distinguished record, they asked whether Francis would do them the honour of being Chairman of the Committee. Tired and a long way from home, and no doubt a little flattered, he said he would. ‘Marry in haste, repent in leisure’, as Sheila no doubt was soon reminding him.
By the time the Chichesters came home in March it was too late for him to quit, no matter how unsettling he found the lack of necessary qualifications or even basic experience among those who were entering the race. And of course history proved all his fears to be right. The tragedy of the resulting race has been well told in Peter Nichols’s A Voyage for Madmen and movingly portrayed in Deep Water, Louise Osmond’s drama documentary about Donald Crowhurst. Suffice to say here that of the nine runners at the start only one finished and therefore won: Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in Suhaili.
Never Fear Page 31