A Voyage For Madmen
Page 25
‘Give over, Vicky, I have to leave you!’ Tetley yelled. He found the line holding him to his sinking boat, cut it, and soon drifted clear.
The waves were still high and the life raft went spinning and dipping away like an amusement park ride. Lights shone aboard Victress a moment longer, but then the sea closed over the batteries and they suddenly went out, and Tetley lost sight of her in the moonless dark.
He had no time for feelings just then. His predicament drove thoughts of Victress from his mind, and he busied himself trying to get the small emergency transmitter working. He continued sending his Mayday through the dark night but got no response.
When daylight came, he was able to read the transmitter’s instructions and saw that he hadn’t rigged the set’s aerial. Once he’d done that and started transmitting again, he immediately made contact with an American rescue plane alerted by the Dutch ship and already searching for him. By midday, the Hercules aircraft from the US Air Force 57th Rescue Squadron based in the Azores was circling overhead. At 1740 he was picked out of the sea by the nearest available ship, an Italian tanker, Pampero, on charter to British Petroleum. They were happy to rescue him.
After eight months on his own, Tetley found that once he started, he could not stop talking; he chattered compulsively to Pampero’s captain and crew. It kept him from brooding over the loss of Victress, except at night when he was alone in the small cabin they gave him. Then his mind flew back to his voyage, and the agonising closeness of its completion. Victress had sunk a bare thousand miles from England.
Eight days later, Pampero docked at Trinidad in the West Indies. Eve had flown out to meet her husband and was there when he arrived.
It was over, Tetley thought. But he was to find that the Golden Globe race threw a long shadow.
30
NEWS OF NIGEL TETLEY’S SINKING reached Donald Crowhurst two days later, on 23 May, in a cable from Clare. He was now the only remaining competitor in the race.
If no accident or mishap disabled Teignmouth Electron before reaching England, Crowhurst would be the winner of the Sunday Times’ £5,000 cash prize. He would join Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Sir Francis Chichester, and the other Sunday Times judges and experts for the Golden Globe celebratory dinner aboard the tall ship Cutty Sark, where they would swap stories about their trials in the Southern Ocean and confirm their standing in the small company of men that has been called the Cape Horn breed. Of these, Knox-Johnston, Tetley, and Crowhurst would be placed among the rarest of the elite, the solo Cape Horners.
It was the sort of glory Crowhurst had always yearned for. The notoriety and speed of his voyage would turn his company Electron Utilisation into a solid success. Book and merchandising deals would be forthcoming. The brilliance and superiority of Donald Crowhurst would be acknowledged by the world.
Also, Captain Craig Rich of the London Institute of Navigation, Sir Francis Chichester, and others would examine his logbooks and navigation records.
In fact, Chichester was already drafting a letter to Robert Riddell, the Sunday Times race secretary, asking for details of Crowhurst’s messages and position statements, particularly his last message before leaving the South Atlantic and entering the Southern Ocean near the Cape of Good Hope and his next message about nearing the Horn (‘Digger Ramrez’). ‘We need to know why the silence from the Cape to the Horn (from an electronics engineer too) … Why did he never give exact positions? It also appeared that he had an extraordinary increase of speed on entering the S. Ocean; I think he claimed 13,000 miles in ten weeks, or something, which seems most peculiar considering his slow speed for the previous long passage to the Cape, and the succeeding 8,000 miles (Horn-home).’ Claimed. Chichester had put the numbers and his own sea sense together and the conclusion was, to him, inescapable.
Crowhurst already felt the weight of scrutiny that awaited him. It was one thing to make up a story in the lonely, solipsistic space of Teignmouth Electron’s cramped cabin and feed it to the ecstatically credulous, geographically ignorant Rodney Hallworth, who passed it on to an equally gullible and wanton press. It was quite another to lay the lie before a committee of sea dogs and savants who had really done what he had only guessed at and pretended. Crowhurst knew this; he was a highly intelligent man. But he had chosen not to dwell on it. Now, only a few weeks away from stepping ashore into a klieg light of illumination and surrendering his logbooks, the fullest ramifications of his deception swept over him.
Crowhurst began to coast. He delayed, he zig-zagged, he let the wind blow the boat where it would. In the preceding weeks, since breaking radio silence, he had sailed faster and more steadily than at almost any other period of his voyage, even clocking a genuine 200-mile-plus run in the twenty-four hours between noon of 4 May and 5 May. But from 23 May – the day he learned of Tetley’s sinking – onward, his progress up the Atlantic became erratic. He passed out of the steady southeast trade winds and entered the Doldrums, the hot, steamy, thundery band of stagnant air and light and fluky winds either side of the equator. Teignmouth Electron ghosted through the water while Crowhurst, naked and streaming sweat, sat in the messy overheated cabin amid the detritus of his grand plan – wires snaking to nowhere, radios, boxes of spare parts, and a contradictory set of logbooks – trying to see his way home and clear.
Early in June, his Marconi transmitter failed. Suddenly his newfound voice, which he had been exercising since ending his self-imposed radio silence, the precious link to the world outside the claustrophobic cabin, beyond the empty horizon, was taken from him. For Crowhurst, the breakdown of his core electronic device was unhinging. For the next two weeks Teignmouth Electron drifted slowly north, largely untended, while he devoted all his efforts to fixing the transmitter. He spent sixteen hours a day sitting in the boiling cabin, surrounded by the cannibalised innards of radios and open tins of food, while he soldered and tinkered with wires and transistors, ate when he remembered to, lost in his work, fascinated, challenged, sustained by the one realm he truly understood.
The sea – the watery blue reality beyond the cabin, the discipline of seamanship, the purpose of his adventure – receded.
In the cooler, dark, early hours of 22 June, Crowhurst fixed his radio and finally made Morse contact with Portishead Radio. He immediately sent cables to his wife Clare and to Rodney Hallworth.
Then, as the sun rose, the cabin temperature increased, and so did the heat coming from the repaired radio. For much of the rest of that day, Crowhurst sat hunched beside it, exchanging cables with Hallworth, who was already working on deals and syndication rights, and with Donald Kerr of the BBC, who wanted to arrange a rendezvous for boats and helicopters to meet Crowhurst offshore. The welcome, the clamour, the end of the voyage, the end of the game, loomed.
On Tuesday 24 June, Donald Crowhurst turned away from it all. He turned away from the world and plunged deep into himself.
At the top of a clean page in his logbook – following weeks of comment-free mathematical workings of his celestial sights – he wrote a title: ‘Philosophy’.
He began by discussing Einstein, whose book, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, was one of the few he had brought along on his voyage to read. Einstein had written the book to explain his theory to a general audience; in its day it was as well-known and as widely unread as Stephen Hawking’s later explanation of the universe, A Brief History of Time. But for Crowhurst, reading it over and over in the isolation chamber of Teignmouth Electron’s lonely cabin, Einstein’s statements took on the truth and gravity of holy writ.
One paragraph made a profound impact on him:
That light requires the same time to traverse the path A to M as for the path B to M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.
Einstein was only stating, or appropriating, a definition of the word ‘simultaneity’ for the purpose o
f his argument. But to Crowhurst this Einsteinian exercise of free will appeared to be a godlike control of physics, of the universe. ‘You can’t do that!’ wrote Crowhurst, imagining a dialogue between himself and Einstein. ‘Nevertheless I have just done it,’ answered Albert. Crowhurst did not doubt Einstein’s authority to take such control. He took it as an example of the power of a superior mind. This led him deep into a maze of tortured logic.
He was soon writing this:
I introduce this idea because [it] leads directly to the dark tunnel of the space-time continuum, and once technology emerges from this tunnel the ‘world’ will ‘end’ (I believe about the year 2000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extraphysical’ existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.
As he wrote, Crowhurst was listening to the radio. Beside his philosophical writing, he now made annotations of what he was hearing: ‘1430 gmt, 24th, Radio Volna Europa. 1435: Hysterical laughter.’
He continued writing. Through the day, into the night, all through the next day.
At 1700 on 25 June, when he had been writing for about thirty hours, a Norwegian cargo ship, Cuyahoga, passed close by Teignmouth Electron. Crowhurst appeared on deck and waved cheerfully as the ship steamed by. The Cuyahoga’s captain wrote in his logbook that the man on the trimaran had a beard, wore khaki shorts, and appeared to be in good shape. Crowhurst had spent the day writing a history of the past 2,000 years, with a further look back to the time of cavemen, illustrating the way exceptional men have, through the shock of their genius, changed society through the ages. At some point in this history, he put down his pencil, climbed up on deck, and waved at the Cuyahoga.
Over the next week, for eight days from Tuesday 24 June, to midday Tuesday 1 July, Crowhurst wrote 25,000 words in his logbook (equivalent to almost a third of this book), stopping only to eat or nap as need overtook him. His hand flew across the pages, bearing down hard, the urgency of what he had to say outstripping the need to sharpen his pencil. His neat engineer’s handwriting now grew large and irregular, the strokes thick with emphasis. The pages became dense with notes crawling around the margins, circled and crammed between distant paragraphs, as insight upon insight struck him and deepened his revelations. He wrote in a white heat of possession.
Stuff like this:
The arrival of each parasite brings about an increase in the tempo of the Drama, causing first-order differentials in its own lifetime within the host, and second-order differentials within the host to the host, etc, etc …
And yet, and yet – if creative abstraction is to act as a vehicle for the new entity, and to leave its hitherto stable state it lies within the power of creative abstraction to produce the phenomenon!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We can bring it about by creative abstraction!
Now we must be very careful about getting the answer right. We are at the point where our powers of abstraction are powerful enough to do tremendous damage … Like nuclear chain reactions in the matter system, our whole system of creative abstraction can be brought to the point of ‘take off’ … By writing these words I do signal for the process to begin …
Mathematicians and engineers used to the techniques of system analysis will skim through my complete work in less than an hour. At the end of that time problems that have beset humanity for thousands of years will have been solved for them.
Despair and the moral burden of deception had lifted and been replaced by the exhilaration of seeing a great truth. ‘I feel like somebody who’s been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message – some profound observation that will save the world,’ he’d confided to his tape recorder months before. It was something he had always wanted, believing himself cleverer than the normal run of men, and ready for a chance to prove it. Now that message had been delivered to him in the peculiarly receptive vessel that he had made for himself, and he was in a fever to write it down and pass it on to the world.
Was it another fake? A pose? A few pages of such writing could be made up by anyone with an ear for the the ravings of psychotic breakdown. Novelists and screenwriters do it all the time, sometimes convincingly. Nothing, however, but a genuinely deranged mind could spend 150 consecutive hours producing 25,000 words of such passionately insane verbiage.
There was, however, a consistent theme to Crowhurst’s psychosis: that in the end, by an act of will, a person of superintel-ligence – a great mathematician – could alter, and deliver himself from, the bonds and rules and obligations of the physical world.
Crowhurst went from a functioning, if cheating, competitor, a sender of rational cables, to the total abandonment of navigation and boat-handling, and deep into scribbling madness, in the space of a few days. But it had been long in coming, since his earliest days at sea when he had faced the ‘bloody awful decision’. From that point on, when he made the most rational and sane appraisal of his impossible situation, he had seen no way to go forward, yet no way to retreat. It was, at its root, a moral dilemma, and there his reason had foundered. Crowhurst had the cleverness, possibly, but not the conscience to carry off his hoax.
When Crowhurst looked up a week later, he had no idea what time it was. Nor even what day. His Hamilton chronometer and both of his (pre-quartz) wristwatches had run down and stopped. His last navigational entry had been on 23 June.
He went up on deck. It was daylight, but he saw the moon – full – just above the horizon. He went below and opened his nautical almanac, which contained tables giving the phase of the moon and times, of its rise and set in Greenwich mean time. He concluded that it must now be 30 June. He worked out the time to be 0410 GMT. He added an hour to make this British standard time to conform with the times of BBC broadcasts. It was 0510, then, on 30 June. He wrote the time and date in his logbook, with the note that he was starting the clocks again.
Then he realised he must be mistaken: if it was five in the morning English time, it would still be dark where he was, 40 degrees of longitude west of Greenwich, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He had made the stupidest mistake.
He wrote in his logbook:
June 30 5 10 MAX POSS ERROR
After studying the nautical almanac again, he decided it must now be 1 July. And as close as he could gauge, it was ten in the morning, British standard time. As a navigator, for whom time, accurate to the second, is of religious importance – the navigator’s life literally depends upon it – he had slipped up badly. Now he watched every second, for time was ticking to a countdown.
He wrote:
EXACT POS July 1 10 03
It was a position in time. He had no need of a geographic position. He was past all that.
The minutes and seconds ticked by. Twenty minutes later, he wrote:
10 23 40 Cannot see any ‘purpose’ in game.
10 29 No game man can devise
is harmless. The truth is that there
can only be one chess master …
there can only be one perfect beauty
that is the great beauty of truth.
No man may do more than all
that he is capable of doing. The perfect
way is the way of reconciliation
Once there is a possibility of reconciliation
there may not a need for making
errors. 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
I will only resign this game
if you will agree that
the next occasion that this
game is played it will be played
according to the
rules that are devised by
my great god who has
revealed at last to his son
not only the exact nature
of the reason for games but
has also revealed the truth of
the way of the ending of the
It is finished –
It is finished
IT IS THE MERCY
Against a great truth, the petty rules and structure of his voyage now seemed to Donald Crowhurst, as they had to Bernard Moitessier, irrelevant. Now that the truth had been revealed to him, and he had written it down for the world to find, his voyage was over. Finished.
The minutes and seconds had got away from him. He recorded them again:
11 15 00 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
11 17 00 It is the time for your
move to begin
I have not need to prolong
the game
It has been a good game that
must be ended at the
I will play this game when
I choose I will resign the
game 11 20 40 There is
no reason for harmful
He had reached the bottom of the logbook page. There was no more room to write, and time was ticking along.
Time might, if he didn’t watch it, even get away from him. So he unscrewed his round brass chronometer from the bulkhead and took it with him.
31
IT WAS 0750 ON 10 July when the Royal Mail vessel Picardy’s officer on watch spotted the yacht. The weather was fine, the wind light, the sea almost flat, but the boat had only its mizzen sail up and appeared to be drifting aimlessly. The ship and the yacht converged at 33°11’ N, 40°28’ W – roughly in the middle of the Atlantic, halfway along the shipping lane between Europe and the Caribbean; about 600 miles southwest of the Azores or 1,800 miles southwest of England. The officer on watch called the captain to the bridge.
Captain Richard Box ordered his ship slowed and its course altered to pass close by the drifting yacht. It was a trimaran. The name, Teignmouth Electron, was clearly visible, painted on the stern and bow of its main hull. No one was on deck. Its crew was keeping a poor lookout for the Picardy to be able to get so close without being seen. Box ordered the foghorn sounded – that would get them out of bed. But the three loud blasts in the still morning produced no activity aboard the yacht. Now Captain Box was concerned; the yacht’s crew might be ill or incapacitated. He ordered the engines stopped.