A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  In one place all these terrors were magnified and concentrated into a ship’s single greatest trial. At 57 degrees south, Cape Horn forced ships to their farthest, coldest, stormiest south in order to pass into the Atlantic Ocean. Here, Southern Ocean winds and waters are funnelled through a relatively narrow gap, Drake Strait, the 600-mile-wide sea passage between Cape Horn and the Antarctic peninsula. The sea bottom shoals off the Horn, raising the already enormous waves, and williwaws of hurricane-force winds scream down off the Andean glaciers; wind, towering waves, and ferocious currents collide, turning Cape Horn waters into a maelstrom. For 400 years, until the construction of the Panama Canal, Cape Horn was a ship’s most convenient exit from the Pacific, and many never made it out. It became known as the ‘graveyard of the sea’.

  Once around the Horn, square-rig sailors proudly called themselves ‘Cape Horners’; and those whose fancy permitted it could then wear with pride a single gold ring through the left, portside, ear – the ear that had passed closest to the Horn while bound east out of the Pacific.

  This was Chichester’s route around the world. His voyage was a savage intensification of the trials faced by a transatlantic single-hander. His stated purpose was to beat the times of the old sailing ships; alone he would race them in a small modern yacht. It was a simple concept, dangerous and daring, and Chichester significantly upped the ante by stopping only once, in Australia. Not only sailors, but the greater mass of the non-sailing public understood perfectly what was really going on here: it was an ordeal of the first magnitude. It was like climbing Everest alone.

  For the British in particular, whose stature on the world stage had been severely reduced since the Churchillian glory of the Second World War, who had no plucky astronauts, whose government had recently been scandalised by an association between politicians and two prostitutes who had also been sharing their favours with the KGB, Chichester represented a longed-for but not forgotten ideal of heroic endeavour. British newspapers carried front-page photos of the deeply reefed Gypsy Moth IV battling gales off Cape Horn (taken by British warships and aircraft standing by, to Chichester’s annoyance, to keep an eye on what had suddenly become a national interest). A quarter of a million people filled Plymouth Harbour on the May evening he sailed home. National television schedules were abandoned to cover the event live, and an entire nation watched hour after hour of Gypsy Moth IV sailing the last miles through a great fleet of ships and local boats that stretched from shore far out to sea, waiting through the long English twilight to see the lone sailor step ashore. (Television commentators, speculating on his first rocky steps ashore after months at sea, raised the unseemly possibility that the 65-year-old hero might fall flat on his face with the nation looking on. They mused on air about the probability that the welcoming dignitaries would grab him at the earliest moment and prop him up at all costs. In the end, Chichester acquitted himself well, stepping ashore as if getting out of a golf cart.)

  Later, in a ceremony consciously echoing the knighting of Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I at Plymouth Hoe 400 years earlier, Chichester stepped ashore at Greenwich, London, and knelt before Queen Elizabeth II, who dubbed him with a sword and granted him a knighthood. It was a masterstroke in a jaded era: every Briton knew the scene from school history books; here was myth made real on television, and an intense frisson of national pride swept across the land.

  Chichester did not beat the clipper ships’ record sailing times, but nobody cared. He was a national hero even before he was knighted by the queen. His book of his voyage, Gypsy Moth Circles the World, published that same year, was an instant and lasting best-seller. What he had done had thrilled the public and resurrected glory for the diminished island race.

  Why had he done it? Chichester didn’t give a hoot about beating the clipper ships – it was just an excuse to go. It was the glib answer he needed when people asked why. The comparison of passage times between a yacht and a clipper ship is the sort of dry, dull detail that might interest a naval architect, historian, maybe even a few sailors, but this wasn’t what whipped millions to a national frenzy and drove a middle-aged man to risk his life. Chichester didn’t care why. He only knew that he had to go.

  In his book The Ulysses Factor (published just before the Golden Globe race), British author J. R. L. Anderson writes about the lone hero figure in society, the rare character who by his or her exploits stimulates powerful mass excitement. Homer’s Ulysses is the classic archetype. Anderson believes this ‘Ulysses factor’ – a powerful drive made up of imagination, self-discipline, selfishness, endurance, fear, courage, and perhaps most of all, social instability – is a genetic instinct in all of us, but dormant in most. Yet we respond strongly and vicariously to the evidence of it in the few whom this instinct drives to unusual endeavours.

  ‘The Devil drives,’ was Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton’s inadequate answer to why he persisted in going off to Africa and Asia, enduring great hardship, disfiguring pain (a spear through his face), and a constant threat of violent death when he could have stayed home in England and risen to prominence in any number of ways. He felt the urge to be off, to test himself to the brink of tolerance, and he was unable to resist. Brave, indomitable, elusive and unrestrainable; women found him irresistible, men admired him, the public hungrily consumed every account of his exploits. The lone hero of myth and stories from all ages and cultures, described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, is a character driven by the Ulysses factor. So is the movie cowboy: a romantic, socially unstable character who appears at the fringes of town, throwing men and women into turmoil before satisfying an underlying social need and then disappearing. His motives are entirely personal; he acts selfishly in his own interest, but his actions have a profound effect on the society around him. Polar explorers Peary, Scott, and Amundsen; Charles Lindbergh, who made the first transatlantic solo flights, mountain climbers and single-handed sailors – they are all archetypes of the lone hero.

  Part of the attraction of these loners is that they invariably look and sound normal: they look like us. They’re usually modest when asked how they survived their terrible ordeals, they readily admit their fear, and in so doing they fool the rest of us into thinking that they are like us – or more accurately, that we could be like them. They become our idealised selves, and so they take us with them, in a way, when they climb Mount Everest or sail around Cape Horn.

  But they can’t answer the question why. They can’t make people who couldn’t do what they do understand. When asked, before he disappeared on Everest, why he wanted to climb the mountain, George Mallory gave what is still perhaps the best answer, as simple as the solution to a Zen koan: ‘Because it’s there,’ he said.

  The mass adulation provoked by Chichester’s voyage, the inspiration he provided the men who sailed in the Golden Globe race, and the fervent efforts of those who readily aided them in risking their lives are clearly responses to this Ulysses factor. Sailors and would-be hero-adventurers everywhere saw what Chichester had reaped in spades – fame and money – and they were aware of what still remained to be accomplished.

  In March 1967, while Chichester was still two months from home, Robin Knox-Johnston, a 28-year-old English merchant marine officer, was on leave at his parents’ home in Downe, Kent, before joining the merchant ship Kenya as its first officer. One morning, his father read of OSTAR victor Eric Tabarly’s new trimaran in a newspaper. Over breakfast they speculated about the Frenchman’s plans. Knox-Johnston didn’t think the boat would be a good choice for the transatlantic. His father suggested Tabarly might be thinking of another circumnavigation.

  ‘I wonder if he is going to try and beat Chichester’s time, or perhaps even go round nonstop,’ said Knox-Johnston senior. ‘That’s about all there’s left to do now, isn’t it?’

  After his father left for work, Robin Knox-Johnston sat at the kitchen table, stirring his coffee and pondering what had just been said. Sooner or later, someone w
as bound to do exactly that: sail around the world alone, nonstop. Tabarly could pull it off, but the idea of his winning another big sailing prize rankled. ‘Frenchman Supreme on the Anglo-Saxon Ocean’ the French papers had proclaimed when Tabarly had won the OSTAR, and it had infuriated the young Englishman. ‘By rights,’ he thought, ‘a Briton should do it first.’

  By rights? In England at that moment, young people were marching against the bomb; in the United States, they were protesting against the Vietnam War. It was the sixties, a time when young people were turning, virulently and often violently, against the establishment. Not Robin Knox-Johnston. He was the same age as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but he was an unfashionable, almost eccentrically square young man from another era. His heroes were Drake and Frobisher, Elizabethan England’s famous sea-dog privateers, whose exploits form venerated chunks of the history syllabus absorbed by English schoolchildren, whose land-grabbing, pillaging, and slaughter were characterised by an imperious and peculiarly English sense of God-given superiority. This tradition, this assumption of the English moral right to trail-blaze and conquer, characterised Captain Robert Scott’s sense of rightful claim to the South Pole. He and all England were affronted by the sudden arrival in the Antarctic of Roald Amundsen and his crack polar crew who, in 1912, beat Scott to the Pole by a month, dogsledding there and back like extreme excursionists, without a man lost. Amundsen, to England’s horror and revulsion, had eaten his dogs one by one en route back – he had been pulled to the Pole by his rations; brilliant perhaps, but he was a cold, ruthless, foreign rotter. Scott and his team, burdened by their romantic notions of man-hauling their sleds, all died on the return from the Pole. An epic bungler, Scott was afterwards portrayed to generations of schoolchildren in England as the apotheosis of the hero. In England, he won by dying nobly, beaten by the unscrupulous, dog-eating, trespassing Norwegian. Dieu et mon droit– ‘God and my right’ – is the motto on the royal arms of England. By rights.

  At 17 Knox-Johnston flunked the exams for the Royal Navy, so he apprenticed himself to the British India Steam Navigation Company and joined the merchant service instead. He learned knots and splices and marlinspike seamanship unchanged from the time of Nelson. He learned to navigate by sextant, as had Captains Cook and Bligh. He acquired his sailorly arts aboard ships running between London and ports in East Africa, India, and the Persian Gulf – ports that were still outposts of the British Empire, in spirit if no longer in fact. This was the classic POSH route taken by the Empire builders of the British raj, so called because the favoured, more expensive cabins were on the shaded side of the ship: port side going out, starboard coming home. But probably no place the young seaman sailed to preserved this vanishing world as authentically as aboard the insular, tradition-steeped ships of the British Merchant Marine, which produced sailors and officers as hidebound in their ways as Old Etonians. It was a tough, exacting, nineteenth-century British seaman’s training.

  While stationed in Bombay, Knox-Johnston and a fellow officer decided to commission a local Indian boatyard to build them a yacht. They sent away to a design office in England for the plans of a sleek ketch they had seen in a yachting magazine, but what came back in the mail was a much older, slower design, a tubby, bluff-bowed double-ender, drawn by American yacht designer William Atkin in 1924 for Motor Boat magazine. Based on a type of Norwegian lifeboat known as a red-ningskoite, it was an indisputably seaworthy shape of hull, but a long way from a slick design in a modern yachting magazine. However, time being short, and the plans in hand appearing sturdy and seaworthy, Knox-Johnston and his partner went ahead with the older design.

  The Indian carpenters used adzes, axes, and hand-powered bow drills, the same tools and techniques used to build a dhow. The boat was entirely and massively built (overbuilt, modern yacht designers and builders would say) of Indian teak. Her construction and finish were more like a tugboat’s than a yacht’s. She was christened Suhaili, the name given to a southeasterly wind in the Arabian Gulf, and at her launch a coconut was cracked open on her bow while the men who built her chanted ancient blessings.

  A third officer had bought a share in the boat a-building, but life interrupted their sailing plans, as always seems to happen around boats. Knox-Johnston’s two partners left the project, and his marriage fell apart, perhaps a casualty of the long absences from home that are a fact of the professional seaman’s life. Yet through these upheavals he managed to hold on to his new boat. He bought out his ex-partners, and in 1966 he sailed Suhaili from India to South Africa in stages with his brother and another merchant officer, all three working at jobs ashore during stops. Then, in November of that year, they set sail for England. Their final passage was a nonstop, 8,000-mile, seventy-four-day voyage from Cape Town to London.

  Suhaili had proved herself seaworthy, but as a boat in which to race alone, nonstop, around the world – possibly against Tabarly’s 67-foot trimaran – Knox-Johnston thought she was all wrong. Anybody would have agreed with him.

  Could he possibly do it? He began imagining what sort of boat he would need for a voyage of seven to ten months at sea. He wondered too if he could stand being alone all that time without anyone to talk to. A sociable man from a happy middle-class family, with brothers and a sister, the longest he had ever been on his own was twenty-four hours. Maybe he’d go mad. Such a voyage, he knew, would resemble the most brutal prison sentence: solitary confinement with the hardest of labour and the constant possibility of death by drowning. But he soon realised he didn’t care. He wanted to go.

  The decision was almost instantaneous. He saw the shape of the voyage, and he wanted to do it. For him, and for the others who would come to the same decision, there was no deliberation, no deeper rationale or reason. The process was identical in each case: once the idea was grasped, the decision was made. Let others reason why.

  In early April 1967, while Francis Chichester was still far down in the South Atlantic, seven weeks from home, Robin Knox-Johnston put Suhaili up for sale and went to see Colin Mudie, a preeminent English yacht designer, to talk about a boat for a round-the-world voyage. Mudie was enthusiatic and began sketching a boat as they talked.

  Chichester’s voyage, with its single stop, provoked the same musings in others. A gauntlet had been thrown down to adventurous dreamers everywhere, and a zeitgeist fantasy of a nonstop solo circumnavigation spread through the sailing world. Many people talked about it throughout 1967 – at home, in yacht clubs, on weekend cruises, at work – much as Knox-Johnston and his father had done that morning at breakfast. ‘Someone’s bound to do it,’ they said, and many imagined doing it themselves. For most it remained a pipe dream, but by the time Chichester arrived home in May 1967, at least three other men were making serious plans for nonstop circumnavigations. All of them seemed better prospects for a successful voyage than Knox-Johnston.

  The oldest, at 57, was Bill King, a former submarine commander who had joined the Royal Navy in 1924 at the age of 14. He had been the first man to be catapulted in an aeroplane off the deck of a ship, and he had seen hard service, mostly beneath the sea, through the whole of the Second World War. Since then he had lived on his farm in County Galway, Ireland, where he raised black cattle and rode to hounds in top hat and knee boots with the Galway Blazers hunt. He had once raced aboard yachts with friends and sailed his own boat, Galway Blazer, across the Atlantic and through the West Indies, yet for the previous eighteen years family life had kept him largely anchored to his farm. But a man who has once been catapulted off the deck of a ship will not slide somnolently into retirement, and Francis Chichester’s voyage had fired his imagination.

  ‘It struck me that I could sail alone around the world without stopping to refit in Australia.’ Gripped by his idea, King approached his friend ‘Blondie’ Hasler for help in designing and preparing the ideal boat for such a voyage. Hasler was a former Royal Marine, a Second World War hero, and one of the participants of the first OSTAR. He had sailed alone across the Atlanti
c four times in his own small boat. He agreed to help King and brought in yacht designer Angus Primrose, codesigner of Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV, whose design office, Illingworth and Primrose, had turned out a number of famous English racing yachts.

  What they came up with was something strikingly unusual: a 42-foot-long schooner with a rounded, turtle-backed deck. The idea behind such construction – the same as for an egg, a bottle, or a submarine – is that there are no potentially weak right-angle joints bolted into the boat, no deck-to-hull or cabin side-to-deck joints, which seas can smash against and weaken or possibly break. It might look odd and humpbacked, but sailors and designers could appreciate and generally agree with the thinking that produced such an appearance. It also offered maximum protection for its captain: The cockpit was below deck, sealed off by two small round hatches, port and starboard, each about the size of the hole in the middle of a kayak; King could do all sail-handling from the waist up from here without actually climbing out on deck. The whole boat was to be built of thin layers of wood laminated together with glue and wrapped around sectional frames and bulkheads, a sound (and today very popular) wooden boatbuilding technique known as cold-moulded construction. The rounded deck and hull would form one integral structure, rather like a plywood tube. This would make for an immensely strong boat.

  But this was strength through engineering. Textbook strength. At 4½ tons, King’s lightweight, easily driven 42-footer would weigh almost exactly half the weight of Robin Knox-Johnston’s slow, fat, 32-foot-long Suhaili.

  The rig Blondie Hasler drew up for King’s boat was a much more radical and iffier proposition for a long voyage through the Southern Ocean. It was an unstayed, junk-rigged schooner: that is, two masts, tapered like flagpoles, stepped on the keel at the bottom of the hull, and secured only where they passed through the deck. No wire rigging would hold the masts in place; their own flexibility was supposed to keep them upright and absorb the loads transmitted by the sails. A single folding Chinese lugsail, easily reefed and handled by one man, would sit on each mast – the same rig as a Chinese junk. Hasler’s own boat, Jester, a single-masted sloop, was similarly junk-rigged, and the system had by then proven itself on two round-trip Atlantic crossings. But whether masts with no wires to support them would stand up to the winds of the Roaring Forties or a possible capsize could not be known. It was a bold and adventurous choice.