‘Quick!’ he shouted to Françoise. ‘Take the helm for two seconds.’
He grabbed his Opinel, the little wooden-handled French pocket knife with a steel blade that keeps a wonderful edge, climbed out on deck, and quickly cut away all five trailing lines.
Back at the helm, he immediately noticed the change. Gone was Joshua’s sluggishness. No longer a sitting duck to be pounded and swept by the great seas, she now raced away before them. He ran the boat downwind as before, but as each wave approached, he gave the wheel a slight turn at the last minute and took the wave at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees. The wind hit her side, heeled her over, and off she flew, planing across the surface of each wave. The speed gave her rudder greater control and she responded instantly to the helm when the wave was past as Moitessier brought her stern into the wind again. The enormous waves, their apparent force reduced by Joshua’s speeding away from them, now rolled harmlessly beneath her quarter.
The storm lasted six days and six nights. Bernard Moitessier steered through more heavy weather, and learned more about handling it, in those six days than most sailors do in a lifetime: a compression of experience that turned him into a master mariner in a single week; a man who had spent a short eternity at the furthest reach of all sailors’ fears.
Four months later, the Moitessiers dropped anchor in Alicante, Spain, their first stop, 14,216 miles from Tahiti. Without intending to, trying simply to get home fast because they missed the kids, they had made the longest nonstop voyage in a yacht to date – a world record, and by way of the dreaded Horn.
Moitessier very quickly wrote another book, his second, about their voyage, Cap Horn à la voile (titled in English: Cape Horn: The Logical Route), which was published in time for France’s premier boat show, the Salon Nautique. It became a huge best-seller. In France, where long-distance sailors enjoy the sort of movie star celebrity known only to sports figures like David Beckham today in Great Britain, Moitessier became a national hero. Awards were heaped on him. In England, the ‘Moitessier method’ was discussed at a Yachting World forum on heavy-weather tactics, where it was pronounced ‘rather startling’. By the end of 1966 he was world-famous.
And very unhappy. He felt he had dashed off his book too fast, rushing it to coincide with and augment the glory of the Salon Nautique. He felt, he wrote later, that in so doing he had committed a crime. Moitessier experienced nothing in moderation. His books are written with an ingenuous, exuberant lack of restraint (and editing), full of a sensual exultation of sea. When he was up, he was way up. But when he was down …
October (’67) was devastating. Wrapped in total silence, sucked down by a huge inner emptiness, I sank into the abyss … I felt madness burrowing into my guts like some hideous beast. I found myself wondering what last thoughts come to someone who has swallowed a lethal dose of poison.
This goes beyond remorse for skimping on a book. It seems more likely that following his epic voyage and starburst of fame and glory, he was experiencing a pronounced bipolar slump.
He got himself out of it with a typically intense swing back into the stratosphere.
I must have been on the point of suicide when … in one blinding flash … I saw how I could redeem myself. Since I had been a traitor by knocking off my book, what I had to do was write another one to erase the first and lift the curse weighing on my soul.
A fresh, brand-new book about a new journey … a gigantic passage….
Drunk with joy, full of life, I was flying among the stars now. Together, my heart and hands held the only solution, and it was so luminous, so obvious, so enormous, too, that it became transcendent: a non-stop sail around the world! … And this time I was setting out for the battle of my life alone.
He doesn’t mention Chichester. But his blinding flash seems to have come around the end of 1967. Chichester had sailed home that May.
3
WINTER IS A DISMAL SEASON for sailors in England. The weather offshore is bad, even dangerous, and the misty coastal glim has become impenetrable and uninviting. Boats are cold and damp and under wraps in their mud berths or puddled boatyards. But in January the gloom is pierced by the arrival of the annual London Boat Show. Boaters, boatbuilders, yacht designers, ship chandlers, brokers, and sailing journalists from all over the country come in out of the rain and look at new boats and hardware. They finger the new rain gear, talk about anchor chain, and try to find some aspect of it all that might appeal to their wives and girlfriends. And they pore through cruising guides to Brittany, or the Bahamas, or anywhere a boat can sail to. So it is also the season of their dreams.
One of these dreams, that January 1968, was epic, Ulyssean, and talk of it passed through the yachting community like contagion. Everybody now knew what the next great voyage must be: a nonstop solo circumnavigation. So when it was rumoured at the boat show that Bernard Moitessier was preparing for another voyage, the shape of it was easily guessed at. The details of Bill King’s Galway Blazer II, then under construction, were released to the newspapers during the boat show, and his intentions became known to all. And there was talk of others making similar plans.
John Ridgway, reading of Bill King’s proposed voyage, made a ‘military appreciation of the situation’ and decided to advance his plans by a year. He would forgo the transatlantic race, which he had looked on as good experience for a circumnavigation, and concentrate wholly on the bigger voyage. His literary agent immediately contacted The People newspaper, which had sponsored his transatlantic row, and they agreed to back his circumnavigation. In order to get a jump on King and his bigger, faster boat, which wouldn’t be completed until July or August, Ridgway determined to depart on 1 June. This date would mean reaching the Southern Ocean sometime in September, rather too early for comfort, at the beginning of the southern spring, but would put him off Cape Horn in January – midsummer – the safest time for a passage south of the stormy cape.
The Sunday Times, which had sponsored Francis Chichester and reaped a bonanza with that story, was very keen to get itself linked with one of the nonstop circumnavigators. The paper dispatched Murray Sayle, the reporter who had covered the Chichester story, to assess the growing pool of possible contenders for this last great sailing ‘first’.
He liked ‘Tahiti Bill’ Howell, a 42-year-old Australian who had spent years sailing through the South Pacific supporting himself as a cruising dentist. Howell came with an admirable CV: he had sailed the 24-foot Wanderer II, a famous yacht once belonging to the venerable English sailor Eric Hiscock, from England to Tahiti with one crew, and from there single-handed to British Columbia by way of Hawaii. He had sailed a 30-footer to sixth place in the 1964 OSTAR. Now he had a 40-foot catamaran, Golden Cockerel, capable of sailing much faster than any monohull. He was planning on racing his cat across the Atlantic in that summer’s third OSTAR, then immediately turning left once he was across the finish line and heading south for his nonstop circumnavigation.
If it was to sponsor anyone at all, the Sunday Times had to act fast. King had received sponsorship from the Sunday Express, Ridgway had The People. Both men, sailing new boats, seemed like possible winners. If the Sunday Times didn’t jump on ‘Tahiti Bill,’ it could find itself rooting among the dreamers with inferior boats and untested fortitude.
But who were the others – the unknowns, the undeclared, the dark horses that would appear and steal the show? Who would sponsor them?
Murray Sayle and Ron Hall, Sayle’s department head at the Sunday Times, hit upon the idea of sponsoring a race that would include everybody. It occurred to them simultaneously but independently of each other, and initially each had different ideas for such a race. Murray Sayle correctly believed that what would matter most, to the competitors and to the public, was who would circumnavigate alone and nonstop first. That was the sailor the history books would remember.
Ron Hall thought that if there was to be a race, the sailors would have to compete in some way that would give them all an equal chance. But an o
fficial start, with everyone setting off at the boom of a gun, was out of the question. The men now anxiously preparing their boats, all of them increasingly aware of the efforts of a growing number of rivals, would certainly leave the moment they were ready, if not before. Some of them had already made arrangements with publishers and other newspapers. If the Sunday Times proposed a race, the sailors might refuse to enter. A race was in fact the last thing any of them wanted. These were not yachtsmen or sportsmen. They were hardcase egomaniacs driven by complex desires and vainglory to attempt an extreme, life-threatening endeavour. Each had powerfully visualised what must be done, and was consumed with the need to do it first. They were loners. No one would be waiting for anybody else.
Yet the race to be first had already begun.
One afternoon in March, Murray Sayle and Ron Hall sat down together and came up with an ingenious way to scoop all their newspaper rivals and put the inevitable race firmly in the hands of the Sunday Times. The newspaper would offer a trophy, which the two journalists decided then and there to call the Golden Globe, for the first sailor home. An additional award, answering Ron Hall’s wish for some sporting measure, would be a cash prize of £5,000 – a princely sum in 1968 – for the fastest voyage. Thus, if the first man home won the Golden Globe simply because he had been the first to set out, there would still be an incentive for others to race home for the fastest time and the cash prize. Contestants were not even required to enter the race. Anybody setting out, sponsored or not, whose departure and arrival dates could be verified, would be eligible for the Sunday Times prizes. This way, no circumnavigator could not take part.
The rules were simple and designed to embrace the various plans already afoot: competitors could leave from any port of their choice in the British Isles, on any date between 1 June and 31 October 1968. (To leave earlier or later could mean reaching the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn during the severer weather of the austral winter, and – in what would turn out to be its only such effort – the Sunday Times wanted to avoid encouraging undue risk.)
The route was around the world ‘by way of the three capes’, in clipper ship parlance: the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa; Cape Leeuwin, Australia; and South America’s notorious Cape Horn. Competitors would sail alone, without stopping or putting in at any port, without assistance or resupply. And they would return to their port of origin.
To give lustre and authority to its self-appointed interest, the Sunday Times quickly put together a panel of judges, made up of heavyweights from the world of yachting, with Sir Francis Chichester as its chairman.
With plans for a circumnavigating yacht drawn up for him by Colin Mudie, Robin Knox-Johnston went looking for a quote from a builder. The design, 53 feet long, simple and lightweight, though to be built of steel, was of such unusual construction that most boatyards either refused to quote at all or put him off with outlandishly high figures. He finally found a barge-building yard on the River Thames that quoted £2,800 for the hull, and even appeared interested in the project. This price meant the possibility of a complete boat ready to sail for around £5,000, which was cheap.
Around the World by Way of the Three Capes
But Knox-Johnston had no money at all. By the end of 1967, he had written over fifty letters to firms and businesses seeking sponsorship, and those who replied had all declined. Suhaili, his only asset, was still up for sale, but roughly built and old-fashioned, she was few people’s idea of a proper yacht, and there had been no takers.
Yet he had made up his mind to go. Increasingly his thoughts turned to Suhaili, the boat he had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across 10,000 miles of ocean. Between professional stints at sea, he had lived aboard her for two years. He knew her, she was a proven vessel – and she was available.
She would need a refit, new sails, new rigging, some sort of self-steering gear, and he would have to load her with a year’s supply of food – but all this seemed possible. He turned his back firmly on the sleeker pipe dream and decided to go ahead with Suhaili. He would find the money for what he needed where he could.
George Greenfield, a London literary agent, thought there might be a book in Knox-Johnston’s voyage. Greenfield specialised in adventurers – the newly knighted Sir Francis Chichester was one of his clients, as was British explorer Wally Herbert, who was then putting together the British transarctic expedition, a sledge-hauling crossing of the Arctic icecap by way of the North Pole. Greenfield thought he saw the same stuff in the young merchant seaman. He might be unknown in yachting circles, but he had sailed his boat home from India, and Greenfield was excited about the idea of his nonstop circumnavigation. He told Knox-Johnston to get on with his preparations.
Early in 1968 Greenfield sold the book rights to Knox-Johnston’s voyage to the London publisher Cassell. This brought an advance payment of enough money for Suhaili’s refit. Then he approached the Sunday Times, hoping for the same coverage he had got for Chichester, but the paper was unimpressed – it was the decidedly poor prospect of Knox-Johnston and his archaic Indian-built boat that led the Sunday Times to back Tahiti Bill Howell. Finally, Greenfield got the London Sunday Mirror newspaper interested in buying the rights to exclusive accounts radioed from Knox-Johnston at sea. Before signing, the Sunday Mirror people wanted to meet their sailor, and Greenfield set up a nautically themed lunch on a restaurant boat on the Thames. During the lunch, a tug went by on the river throwing up a wake that rocked the restaurant, and the tough young adventurer who was going to sail alone around the world lost his balance and fell out of his chair. Greenfield still made the deal.
With enough money for a full refit and all his supplies, Knox-Johnston now devoted all his free time – between Royal Navy reserve duty aboard HMS Duncan, for which he was already committed – to preparations.
Bernard Moitessier had already signed the contract with his French publisher, Jacques Arthaud, for the book he would write of his epic nonstop, single-handed voyage. He spent the spring of 1968 preparing Joshua in the French Mediterranean port of Toulon. When the Sunday Times learned of his intentions, Murray Sayle was sent to invite him to take part in its race. He found the Frenchman in a portside bistro.
Moitessier was aghast. He had made a pact with the gods (he later wrote) to make up for selling his earlier book down the river and felt that his motives for the new voyage must remain as pure as driven snow. He told Sayle that the idea of a race made him want to vomit. Such a voyage, he said, belonged to a sacred domain where the spirit of the sea had to be respected. A race for money and a gold-coloured ball would make a circus of all their efforts. He got up in a rage and left the bistro.
Sayle and his newspaper were flummoxed. Moitessier and his boilerplate-steel boat unquestionably represented the strongest effort under way. The mystic Frenchman and his Joshua were the only sailor and boat of those now preparing to have already spent any time in the Roaring Forties. Together they had been around the Horn, the great, fearful, spectral bogey of the Southern Ocean. Moitessier could sail around the world from Toulon to Toulon and make a mockery of the Golden Globe race. Unwilling to lose its most formidable competitor and see its race made redundant, the Sunday Times revised a rule for the Golden Globe trophy for first man home. It made it eligible to anyone starting from any port north of latitude 40 degrees north – that’s just below the French-Spanish border.
A few days later, Sayle cornered Moitessier again. He started by suggesting (according to Moitessier) that his famous Tahiti-Alicante voyage had been the catalyst for Chichester’s voyage (unlikely, since Chichester’s preparation for his circumnavigation had begun well before Joshua reached Alicante), and for all the voyages now being planned. But Moitessier didn’t need any sweet-talking; he had already decided to join the race. He had thought of nothing else since Murray Sayle had first spoken to him. He told the reporter that he’d join his race, and would sail Joshua to Plymouth, Devon, start from there and return to Plymouth to be eligible for both prizes. And if he came hom
e first and fastest, he’d snatch the cheque without a word of thanks, auction off the Golden Globe, and thereby show his contempt for the Sunday Times.
This was pure Moitessier, the yin and yang of his childhood influences battling within him. The pleasure and the unease he would feel all his life about the fame and money that came his way, usually from simply doing what he wanted. His ambivalence about the race certainly had much to do with his feeling that it would sully the purity of his intent and effort. But he realised that it would be a great and historic race, with worthy rivals, and that if he didn’t take part, he would be left out. He also knew he stood a very good chance of winning both prizes and seeing his star blaze brighter – and he couldn’t resist that.
On 17 March, 1968, the Sunday Times announced its Golden Globe round-the-world race.
£5,000
The £5,000 Sunday Times round-the-world race prize will be awarded to the single-handed yachtsman who completes the fastest non-stop circumnavigation of the world departing after 1 June and before 31 October, 1968, from a port on the British mainland, and rounding the three capes (Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn).
GOLDEN GLOBE
The Sunday Times Golden Globe will be awarded to the first non-stop single-handed circumnavigator of the world. The yacht must start and finish at the same port in a northern latitude (north of 40 degrees N) and must be round the three capes.
In either case, the circumnavigation must be completed without outside physical assistance and no fuel, food, water or equipment may be taken aboard after the start.
Those are the only conditions. The same yachtsman may win both awards. No formal entry is necessary … Yachtsmen of any nationality are eligible and yachts may be of any design and built anywhere. Any sponsorship is permitted and the Sunday Times asks nothing of the winners….
A Voyage For Madmen Page 4