by Jonathan Coe
Keeping two entirely different sets of logbooks – one recording his real journey, one containing the fake records – would require considerable skill and ingenuity, but Crowhurst was capable of it. At any rate, he obviously found this idea preferable to the prospect of humiliation and bankruptcy. So he made up his mind, and the great deception began.
Back in Shaldon, I had not been giving Donald Crowhurst an enormous amount of thought. The ramshackle, undignified nature of his departure had somewhat shaken my faith in my hero. What’s more, he had barely been mentioned in any of the newspaper reports covering the first few weeks of the race. Several of the competitors had already dropped out and, of those that remained, it seemed to be Robin Knox-Johnston, Bernard Moitessier and Nigel Tetley who were capturing the journalists’ imaginations. I can remember getting very excited, though, one day in December when Crowhurst was suddenly back in the news – and, indeed, dominating that weekend’s sporting headlines – with a Sunday Times story reporting that he had claimed a world record for the furthest distance travelled by a single-handed yachtsman in one day – something in the region of 240 miles, I think. This, of course, would have been just after he had made his decision to start keeping false records of his progress.
After that, I kept following the race as best I could, cutting out the latest reports from the newspaper every Sunday and pasting them into the new scrapbook which my mother had bought me for this purpose from Teignmouth post office; but again, things began to go pretty quiet on the Crowhurst front. That spring was when I was selected as goalkeeper for the school football team, and an obsession with football began to supplant my obsession with yachts. Also, my mother and father bought their first caravan, and we took it on a trip to the New Forest during the Easter holidays. I remember being upset because your mother (who would have been almost ten) spent the whole week reading Mallory Towers stories and wouldn’t play with me. I remember The Move playing ‘Blackberry Way’ on Top of the Pops, and Peter Sarstedt with his interminable ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’. These are the things that survive, in my mind, from the early months of 1969. Family life, ordinary life. A life spent surrounded by other people.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, Donald Crowhurst was going slowly mad.
Chillingly, the encroaching madness was chronicled in his logbooks. I suppose with no human company whatsoever, and no opportunity to communicate with his wife and children by radio in case it gave his position away, it’s not surprising that he attempted to find solace during those long, lonely months in the silent communion between pen and paper. At first, alongside the details of his position – real and fake – he would just write rambling assessments of his current situation, reflections on the nautical life, or even the occasional poem. This one, for instance, was written after a bedraggled, shivering owl had perched for a while on Crowhurst’s rigging, prompting him to think that this might perhaps be the weakling of a migrating flight, ‘a misfit, in all probability destined like the spirit of many of his human counterparts to die alone and anonymously, unseen by any of his species’:
Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart;
Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight.
Save, save him some pity. But save the greater part
For him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit’s guiding light.
But later, as the horror of his predicament began to bear down on him more heavily, Crowhurst’s logbook entries became still more peculiar. Quite apart from the intense isolation to which he was subjecting himself – months of absolute solitude, with nothing but the rolling immensity of the ocean on every side to distract his eye – there would also be the dawning awareness that, if he carried this hoax off, he was going to have to live an enormous lie for the rest of his life. It would be one thing to tell lies to journalists, or even to saloon-bar yachting friends – thrilling tales of bravado on the high seas – the horrors of the Southern Ocean – the exhilaration of rounding Cape Horn – Crowhurst could spin these by the dozen – but what was he going to tell his wife, for instance? Could he lie next to her, night after night, knowing that her love and admiration for him were based, in part, on acts of heroism which he had shown himself far from capable of performing? Could he keep that truth hidden from her for the next forty or fifty years? I have written of the ‘terrible privacy’ of his cabin. Could Crowhurst’s lies survive the even more terrible privacy of family life?
And then, a few months later, towards the very end of the race, his situation grew even more desperate. He found himself destroyed, in effect, by the very success of his own fabrications and exaggerations. For when he had rejoined the race, and telegraphed his position to an astonished Rodney Hallworth (who had assumed – not having heard from Crowhurst for months – that he must probably be dead), the news of his supposed progress was radioed on to Nigel Tetley – now the only other yachtsman, apart from Robin Knox-Johnston, who was still in the running. (Moitessier, remarkably, had rounded Cape Horn in good time but had then turned his back on the race altogether, protesting that the cash prize and attendant publicity were an affront to his spiritual values.) Knox-Johnston, then, was a certainty to win the prize for first man home; but the problem was that he had set out months before the others, so he was not going to win the £5,000 prize for fastest circumnavigation. That now seemed to be a toss-up between Tetley and Crowhurst. Tetley was in the lead but Crowhurst – apparently – was gaining on him fast. Tetley decided that he could take no chances. He began to push his own trimaran (the ironically named Victress) harder and harder on the home stretch. But it had already suffered badly in the Southern Ocean, and it was coming apart. Late one night – while he was sleeping – the port bow came away and smashed a hole in the bow of the main hull. Water was pouring into the boat. He could immediately see that there was nothing for it but to send a Mayday message and abandon ship. He took his camera film, logbooks and emergency radio transmitter with him into the inflatable life raft, and then spent the best part of a day drifting anxiously in the Atlantic before an American rescue plane appeared in the late afternoon to pick him up. For Tetley, the race was over and his dream was shattered.
But for Crowhurst, too, this was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. It meant that he would be the clear winner of the prize for fastest voyage, and would come under intense media scrutiny. Already Rodney Hallworth was telegraphing him with news of the hero’s welcome that awaited him: the circling helicopters, the TV camera crews, the boatloads of newspaper reporters. His logbooks would soon be examined in the minutest detail – and he must have known, in his heart, that they would not pass muster. Unmasked as a fraud, how would he survive? Stanley Best would want his money back. Hallworth himself would be a laughing stock. His own marriage might even crumble under the strain …
Faced with the impossibility of his position – realizing that his audacious ‘Third Way’ had turned out to be just another cul-de-sac – Crowhurst simply gave up. Instead of racing, he began to coast. He drifted into the Doldrums and allowed the yacht to plod its way through those stagnant, seaweed-infested waters untended while he sat below deck, naked in the steaming heat, methodically trying to repair his broken radio transmitter – a task which involved rebuilding it from scratch, at some risk of severe electrical shocks and injuries from his soldering iron, and which took almost two weeks to complete. But at least this project kept him, for a while, from too much introspection. When it was finished, in the hot, lonely days that followed, Crowhurst blocked off all thoughts of the reception waiting for him at home, and retreated into a fantasy world of pseudo-philosophical speculation. Inspired by the only book he had thought to bring on the voyage with him (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), he began to pour out words on to the pages of his logbooks, scoring the letters so deeply with his pencil that he frequently tore the paper. Thousands and thousands of words. Viewed now, they show in stark detail the process of a mind quickly unravelling under pressure.
He began by addressing one of the greatest riddles of mathematics – the impossible number: the square root of minus one.
I introduce this idea √-1 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 2,000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extra physical’ existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.
Continuing this theme, but descending further into fantasy, he started to believe that the human race was on the verge of an enormous change – that a chosen few, like him, would soon be mutating into ‘second generation cosmic beings’, who would exist outside the material world altogether, thinking and communicating in a way that was entirely abstract and ethereal, breaking through the boundaries of space, so that there would no longer be any need to exist in a physical, bodily relationship with other people at all. As the bearer of this momentous news he began to see himself as a personality of huge importance, a kind of Messiah, while remaining aware that, to the rest of the world, he would always appear much less than that: he was resigned to being viewed as a ‘Misfit’ – ‘the Misfit excluded from the system – the freedom to leave the system’. Finally, on the last day of his life, his scrawls became even more incoherent and abstract (‘there can only be one perfect beauty/that is the great beauty of truth’), and his sense of having sinned, having lied, having let everybody down, became overwhelming:
I am what I am and I
see the nature of my offence
In his last writings, Crowhurst had also become obsessed with time – months of notating his real and fake positions on the earth’s surface having made him weary, perhaps, of thinking in terms of the space dimension any more. He had begun to preface every sentence with an exact note of the time at which he was writing it. And so we know that it was at some moment between 10:29 and 11:15 on 1 July 1969 that he wrote what were almost his final words:
It is finished —
It is finished —
IT IS THE MERCY
– and then, after scribbling a few more tortured phrases, he took his chronometer, and the logbook containing his false record, climbed on to the stern of Teignmouth Electron, and disappeared, never to be seen again.
We were not short of real heroes, in the summer of 1969. The news that Crowhurst’s yacht had been discovered in mid-ocean, and that he was missing believed dead, appeared in the Sunday newspapers on 13 July. Two weeks later, on the 27th, the front pages were dominated by him again, but this time, his logbooks had been read, his fraud unmasked, and all the stories were of his attempt to perpetrate a remarkable hoax on the Sunday Times and the British public. I read these stories with bewilderment, I remember, and perhaps a certain sense of youthful betrayal. But then, sandwiched neatly between those two Sundays, on 20 July 1969, came another story, not unrelated to man’s hunger for exploration, for feats of heroic achievement, for redefining his own position in the dimension of space: Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the moon.
It was a summer of wonders, in other words. But strangely, the wonder of my erstwhile hero, Donald Crowhurst, and his tragic downfall, is the one which has stayed with me and haunted me most insistently over the years. Which is why I am fascinated, now, to see that other people – including Tacita Dean – have been haunted by it, too. Where does its resonance lie, I wonder? Crowhurst is hardly an admirable figure, after all. The men who emerge with the greatest stature from the Golden Globe saga are Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. The most heartbreaking story, in a way, is the story of Nigel Tetley – the ‘forgotten man’ of the race, who so nearly bagged that £5,000 prize, and who quietly – without leaving any messages or any trail of newspaper headlines – committed suicide in a wood near Dover two years later.
So … why Donald Crowhurst? Or, to put it another way, what does it say about our own time, the time we are now living in, that we find it easier to identify, not with Robin Knox-Johnston – an almost comically stubborn, courageous, patriotic sportsman – but with a lesser figure entirely: a man who lied to himself and those around him, a little man in the throes of a desperate existential crisis, a tormented cheat?
Well, Poppy, I have no doubt that we will not find the answer to these questions during our visit to the show on Saturday. And I’m sorry to have written to you at such length on a subject which, although it has always been very important to me, can hardly strike the same chord with you, or perhaps with anyone of your generation. But I think we will have an interesting morning anyway, and I hope a good lunch afterwards. Temperatures are due to go down at the end of the week, though, so we’ll not be dining al fresco – and remember to bring your scarf and gloves!
Looking forward to seeing you again.
Your always loving Uncle,
Clive.
5
When I finished reading this letter for the first time, my left shoulder was numb from the weight of Poppy’s head leaning against it. I gently eased her off, and instinctively she shifted her weight, leaning over to the other side of her seat, away from me. I took her pillow and, carefully raising the back of her head, slid the pillow behind it, until she was ready to settle down upon it. Her mouth was half-open and there was a little bubble of saliva at one corner. I rearranged her blanket, making sure that both of her shoulders were covered, and tucked it in around the edges of her body. She gave a little sigh and slipped even deeper into untroubled sleep.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes and listened for a while to the steady drone of the aircraft engines. Most of the passengers were asleep, and the cabin lights were giving out a strange, muted sort of twilight glow. On the screen in front of me, a perpetually shifting map showed the plane’s progress towards London: it told me that we were, at that moment, somewhere over the Arabian Sea, a few hundred miles west of Bangalore. As with anything technological, I had no idea how this miraculous device worked. Forty years ago, it seemed Donald Crowhurst could hide out for months in the mid-Atlantic, a speck in the ocean, surrounded by limitless miles of open sea but somehow hidden from everyone else on the planet. Nowadays, any number of orbiting satellites were trained on us every minute of the day, pinpointing our locations with unimaginable speed and accuracy. There was no such thing as privacy any more. We were never really alone. That should have been a comforting thought, really – I’d had enough of loneliness, more than enough, over the last few months – but somehow it wasn’t. After all, even when he’d been thousands of miles out to sea, even when there had been whole oceans lying between them, Crowhurst had still been bound to his wife, by invisible cords of feeling. He could have been certain, at almost any time of the day or night, that she would have been thinking of him. Yet here I was, with a kind, affectionate young woman sitting right next to me, sleeping by my side (the most trusting and intimate thing you can do with another person, I sometimes think) and the sad truth was that any closeness I felt between us was likely to be temporary. At the end of the flight, it would probably be gone.
I read the letter from Poppy’s uncle again, during those wakeful hours, and then a third time. It left me with far more questions than answers. Had Donald Crowhurst been a coward to do what he did? I found it hard to see it that way. He’d been only thirty-six when he set out on his voyage, and for my own part I still felt like a child by comparison, even though I was now forty-eight (having celebrated my birthday in Australia two weeks earlier, at a budget-priced Greek restaurant in Sydney, struggling to keep a conversation going with my father as usual). To be the master of a boat like that – let alone to convince yourself (and others) that you could pilot it single-handed around the globe, through the most dangerous seas on earth – suggested … what? Self-delusion? No, I didn’t think that Crowhurst had been deluded. Quite the opposite: by today’s standards, he seemed almost inconceivably mature and self-confident. Thirty-six years old! When I’d been in my mid-thirties, I was – like most of my friends – stil
l agonizing over whether I was ready to have kids or not. Crowhurst had tackled that one long ago: he already had four. What was it about my generation? Why were we so slow to grow up? Our infancy seemed to stretch into our mid-twenties. At the age of forty we were still adolescents. Why did it take us so long to assume responsibility for ourselves – let alone for our children?
I yawned and felt my eyelids beginning to weigh heavy. The battery on Poppy’s computer was almost exhausted, too – about eight minutes to go, the meter said. I pressed the forward button in Picture and Fax Viewer and looked for one last time at the pictures of Donald Crowhurst she had scanned in. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about them that bothered me; something that gave me a little shiver of unrest. Besides the photo of the abandoned yacht, there were three other pictures: Crowhurst in his weatherproofs, setting sail from Teignmouth – the scene Poppy’s uncle had witnessed himself; Crowhurst towards the end of his voyage, a self-portrait, with moustache, and a new, sun-hardened look to his face; and a startlingly younger-looking Crowhurst on dry land, in front of the BBC cameras, being interviewed prior to his departure.