by Derek Wilson
Another motivation for long-distance voyaging, alongside restlessness, adventure and keeping ahead of the Joneses, was the romance of sail. The tall ships had not only been replaced by steamers, they also belonged to an age which seemed far away beyond the gulf of the unspeakable 1914–18 conflict. There grew up a profound nostalgia for that age, whose gracefulness and leisure, unbesmirched by the smoke and noise of steam propulsion, seemed to be typified by the sleek old clippers.
In 1923 the cult of the sailing ship, a purely archaeological interest, be it understood, was flourishing; and like many another devotee I was scouring second-hand bookshops in seaport towns for logs of the colonial passage. There was a good deal of sentiment in the impulse that sent me forth, as far as my circumstances permitted, in the wake of the Lightning or the Oweenee; together with a certain amount of curiosity as to what a really big sea looked like . . .3
That was how the Irish nationalist Conor O’Brien described the urge that sent a former gun-runner and blockade buster around the globe in the 1920s.
In a changed world the practicalities of oceanic voyaging were also changing. The demise of the commercial sailing vessel had diverted generations of design and construction expertise into the yacht-building industry. Pleasure boats were better made than ever before and anyone with the necessary capital and sense of adventure could buy a craft that would enable him to give substance to his dreams. For those whose courage or foolhardiness fell short of braving the terrors of the Horn one of the wonders of modern engineering had come to their aid. August 1914 went down in history for two great events: the opening of World War I and the opening of the Panama Canal. Europeans and east coast Americans could now reach the Pacific islands without having to face the perils of the high south latitudes and most escapist circumnavigators took the Panama route.
Escapism was strong in the inter-war years and particularly the desire to visit the ‘paradise’ islands in which beautiful, smiling natives welcomed the white man to a land where palms and rippling waves exchanged sibilant whispers across swathes of white sand. It was a world away from the harsh realities of western so-called civilisation, where men stood on bread lines, went on strike for a living wage, took part in the mass hysteria of Nazi rallies or the mass-slaughter of the Spanish Civil War. Herman Melville was one of the most widely read authors. As well as his most famous book, Moby Dick, he offered the public in Typee and Omoo a romanticised picture of South Sea islands life, based on his own early experiences in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Some went in search of this idyll, the advance guard of the twentieth century’s tourist migrations, like the two American young men who stopped off in the Society Islands:
They had lost track of time and their upbringing faded away in Gauguinian euphoria. Others had done the cooking. The girls took care of their clothes and their sex life. A food surplus meant more pigs and more pigs meant more feasts.4
The world that emerged from the 1939–45 conflict was psychologically far removed from that which followed the earlier twentieth century demonstration of mass insanity. There was little evidence of nostalgic dreamers, footloose adventurers or gentlemen mariners attended by fawning servants. Men and, increasingly, women still encircled the globe in small craft but the new adventurers were of a different order. In the 1960s and 70s circumnavigation took on a new identity; it became a sport. That brought a new raison d’être to the business of sailing round the world. For all sportsmen and women the biggest questions demanding answers are those arising from their own physical, mental and spiritual limitations. Thus, it was no longer sufficient to battle against the realities of wind and wave and perilous shores. The mariner had to set himself new challenges – non-stop voyages, solo voyages, speed records.
One man provided the link between the heroes of the great era of circumnavigation and a younger generation of competitive racers. And a single moment focussed attention dramatically on that link. On 7 July 1967, at Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth II tapped a sword on the shoulders of a lean, elderly man kneeling before her and commanded, ‘Rise, Sir Francis’. It was the reprise of a scene played out in the same place by another Queen Elizabeth and another Francis 386 years earlier. The twentieth century hero was Francis Chichester and he had, at the age of sixty-six just completed the fastest solo circumnavigation. By nature a loner, a rebel, a misfit, Chichester was a man who always needed a challenge. There had to be something new to attempt. ‘If your try fails,’ he wrote, ‘what does that matter – all life is failure in the end. The thing is to get sport out of trying.’ That spirit enabled him to become the second aviator to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930 and to conquer lung cancer in 1960.
Chichester set out eastabout on 27 August 1966 in his Gipsy Moth IV and reached Sydney after 107 gruelling days. He was exhausted and the boat needed substantial repair. The southern ocean had been a severe test of man and vessel and more than once the voyage had come close to ending in disaster. As soon as he stepped ashore the sailor faced a new hazard – the concerned advice of friends and wellwishers. Press photos of his arrival, telegraphed around the world, showed or seemed to show a weary, little (he had lost three stone in weight) old man close to breaking point. Urgent messages arrived begging him to give up. ‘Experts’, writing in the newspapers and pontificating on television, echoed this advice and millions of ordinary people shared their concern. All this emphasised the fact that a new age had begun in the history of adventure. Now, more than ever before, the bold pioneer was public property. Even for a naturally solitary man like Chichester there was no avoiding the communication age. He needed financial support and that meant acquiring media sponsorship. Throughout the voyage he had to make regular radio reports to the Guardian and the Sunday Times. On landing he was pledged to provide television interviews. That meant that, while part of him was all too conscious of his aches and pains and the battering Gipsy Moth had sustained, and quite ready to be satisfied with what was already a considerable achievement, his iron determination had to resist the temptation and the blandishments of hundreds of people, known and unknown, who had his best interests at heart.
He threw himself into the boat’s refit. She had been the cause of much of his distress during the outward voyage. Anxious to be away from England, he had not left adequate time for sea trials and only discovered Gipsy Moth’s many defects when it was too late to do anything about them. Chichester spent five and a half weeks in Australia, doing everything that could be done to his floating home and then set out once more on a calm, sunny summer’s morning escorted by a flotilla of Sydney harbour craft. Next day two things happened: Chichester was prostrated by food poisoning and Gipsy Moth was capsized by a cyclone. She righted herself but much of the laborious work of five and a half weeks had been wiped out. Several pieces of equipment had gone overboard. The self-steering gear was damaged, as was the electric pump. The cockpit was badly gashed. Below decks food, tools and clothes were sloshing about in salt water. Feeling like death, Chichester had to set to pumping out the cabin by hand and making running repairs. For many brave sailors this would have been the last straw. They could have put back into Sydney without dishonour. The world would still have applauded a gallant effort. But Francis Chichester was one of a special breed. He sailed on.
The next hazard he had to face was the Horn. It was the one part of the journey he had always dreaded but there was never any thought in his head of steering for the Panama Canal; that, to his mind, would not have qualified as part of a true circumnavigation. When it came to it, the rounding of the awesome southern cape passed off without serious incident. Indeed, the only remarkable thing that happened underscored the way that deep sea adventure had changed. While Chichester was enjoying his private view of the Horn, standing out of the sea, as he later described it, like a black ice cream cone, a light aircraft full of press photographers zoomed down from the clouds and circled the boat before heading back to land with a cheery waggle of its wings. It was a foretaste of things to come. The closer he got to ho
me the more intrusive became the newshounds. Chichester was pestered by fatuous radioed questions, such as, ‘What did you eat for your first meal after rounding the Horn?’, and whenever he was near land boatloads of journalists and sightseers came to gawp and prevent him getting on with the necessary routines of running the boat.
Like many solo voyagers Chichester found it hard to make the adjustment to being with other people after months of isolation. In some ways the enthusiasm of the crowds was more difficult to deal with than the savagery of the waves. But he had to live with it because, of course, he returned to be acclaimed as the greatest Englishman of the age. Thousands thronged Plymouth Hoe on 28 May 1967, as Gipsy Moth slipped back into the harbour nine months and one day after her departure. More taxing celebrations were to come. The boat made a triumphant progress along the coast to the Thames estuary and thence to the Port of London, where she arrived to the wail of ships’ sirens and the plumes of water cannon. Chichester was fêted at the Mansion House and the pageantry of his investiture at Greenwich was watched on television by almost as many people as had witnessed the queen’s coronation.
It had been a magnificent achievement but, as the international yachting community fully realised, it pointed the way to something even more spectacular. Chichester’s voyage had been in two stages. The ultimate challenge was a non-stop solo circumnavigation. The sportsmen were not the only ones to realise the potential of such an enterprise. Chichester’s backers had profited handsomely from his headline-grabbing adventure. Books, newspapers, television films and various kinds of dedicated merchandise had made lots of money. A circumnavigation bandwagon had been set rolling and a host of marketeers were eager to keep it on the move. In less than a year the ‘Golden Globe Race’ was organised. It became one of the most dramatic maritime enterprises of all time – but not in the way the money men envisaged. In fact it was to demonstrate, tragically, that solo circumnavigation was only for the mentally strong and that big business and maritime adventure were not natural partners. The scores of entrants for the race, lured by prize money and fame, were whittled down to four. Of those four, two who failed to finish committed suicide, one during the race and one afterwards.
Of the remaining two, one deliberately cocked a snook at the race. Bernard Moitessier, having rounded the three southern capes in record time, calmly radioed the organisers that he had no intention of heading for the finishing line. In the 39-foot Joshua, named after his hero, Joshua Slocum, he sailed on – round Africa, round Australia, round New Zealand and fetched up, at last, in Tahiti, where the gods of commercial profit he so much despised had no power. He later tried to explain his decision in a book, the proceeds of which were donated to charity:
[Joshua] sailed round the world . . . but what does that mean, since the horizon is eternal? Round the world goes further than the ends of the earth, as far as life itself, perhaps further still . . .5
He was describing the boundless ocean within.
The winner of Golden Globe, Robin Knox-Johnson, completed his voyage in 313 days, a considerable achievement. However, it was destined to be overshadowed by the other events connected with the race. The celebratory dinner was postponed when news arrived of the death of competitor Donald Crowhurst, who had jumped overboard somewhere in the southern Atlantic and Knox-Johnson presented his prize money to the appeal fund which was set up for Crowhurst’s family. Many of the yachting fraternity shared Moitessier’s instinct that there was something tawdry about turning the supreme test of seamanship into a competition. It was comparable to organising a race up Everest.
But we live in a world in which marketing is king and, therefore, as long as there is profit to be made from promoting major sporting events, high profile competitions which capture the public imagination continue to be organised. The boat-building industry needs exciting exploits to ensure sales to new generations of sportsmen and pleasure yachtsmen. Money from big-business is vital to sustain research and development, for today’s ocean-going craft are the products of high technology, equipped with sophisticated satellite navigation gear, computers and communication apparatus. Nor is it only the boats which attract investment. The courageous and skilled men and women who sail them are, like all sporting stars, highly bankable commodities. Publishers, newspaper editors and TV programme planners compete with each other to sign them up. The last quarter of the twentieth century, therefore, saw the establishment of regular circumnavigation races – the Whitbread (later Whitbread/Volvo) for fully manned yachts, single-handed contests such as the British Oxygen, BT Global Challenge and Vendée Globe events. Commercialism, with all the ambiguities it involves, has become an integral part of sailing, as of all sports.
That can create problems for competitors, who, unlike their backers, are not motivated by money. Those men and women who aspire to the highest accolades their chosen profession can bestow are still driven by the same demons that propelled so many of the mariners of the great age of circumnavigation. For them records exist for one reason and one only – to be broken. They long to pit themselves and their vessels against the worst conditions that nature can summon from its cauldron. They are impelled by the need to explore the ocean within; to discover how they will cope with weariness, pain, loneliness and fear. Yet what really drives them is, ultimately, beyond definition. A few years ago a teenage girl was studying for her A levels, the first hurdle on her chosen course to becoming a vet. Yet something inside tormented her with doubt.
I was exhausted and felt pulled in opposite directions. I’d swing from happiness to misery with frightening speed. I would lie on the ground and sob . . . I wished I knew the solution. But I couldn’t even figure the problem.6
It took a bout of glandular fever, during which she lay moodily watching television coverage of the Whitbread race, to pierce the fog of uncertainty.
With a feeling of most intense energy and clarity, I suddenly realised that there was another way. In an instant my exam pressures evaporated. The world was out there, and there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind that I was ready to take it on . . . The sea was waiting.7
In 2001, that girl, Ellen MacArthur, now a young woman of twenty-four, came second in the Vendée Globe race and sailed into the record books as the fastest woman circumnavigator and the youngest competitor to complete the race.
It was a stunning achievement, in some sense worthy to be set alongside those of Elcano, Cavendish, Slocum and ‘Bully’ Forbes. For all the achievements of modern technology, mountainous seas are not a whit less frightening nor lee shores less perilous than they were a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago and the best equipped boat is still a matchstick on the shifting dynamic of ocean.
Yet, for the modern circumnavigator, the adventure is different. Everything that can be done is done to provide for the safety of skippers and crews. Race organisers were not slow to learn the lessons of the Golden Globe race. By the time of the 1985–6 Whitbread race regulations demanded that every boat be equipped with an Argos satellite tracking system and an elaborate radio checking routine was in place for purposes of both safety and news-gathering. As long as the equipment did not fail, every person aboard the seemingly-isolated boats was in touch with family, friends, sponsors and media personnel at home. In the event of disaster, rescue attempts could be rapidly launched to stricken vessels even hundreds of miles from land. And the race is not over when the crews return to port. They have to submit to demands for books, articles, interviews, talks and ‘promo’ tours. They belong to their sponsors, and very few modern heroes and heroines can afford the luxury of a purist approach to their adventures.
Every modern circumnavigator would acknowledge that he or she stands on the shoulders of giants. Those ancient mariners were a different race of men. They truly were alone on the high seas, seas whose boundaries were uncharted, and whose terrors were not fully understood. They sailed from horizon to horizon aware only that death or glory might embrace them in the tumult of the waves. They were the true her
oes of what we justifiably look back on as the great age of circumnavigation.
SOURCE NOTES AND REFERENCES
Chapter 1
1. Antonio Pigafetta, A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, translated and edited by R. A. Skelton, Yale, 1969, pp. 156–7.
2. Cf. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825, 1969, pp. 36–7.
3. Cf. C. McK. Parc, Ferdinand Magellan Circumnavigator, 1964, pp. 23–7.
4. F. Chichester, Gipsy Moth Circles the World, 1967, p. 21.
5. J. and M. C. Ridgway, Round the World with Ridgway, 1978, pp. 273–4.
6. Joshua Slocum, SailingAlone Around the World, 1907, p. 84.
7. Pigafetta, op. cit.
8. Ibid., p. 102.
Chapter 2
1. Cf. D. Wilson, The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great Voyage, 1577–1580, 1977, p. 26.
2. W. S. W. Vaux (ed.), The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, Hakluyt Society, 1854, p. 237.
3. E. G. R. Taylor, ‘More Light on Drake’, Mariner’s Mirror, XVI, 1930, p. 150.
4. Vaux, op. cit.
5. Ibid., pp. 143–4.
Chapter 3
1. R. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1589, pp. 801ff.
2. F. Mulville, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Sailor’, Yachting Monthly, May, 1972.
3. Hakluyt, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Antonio de Morga, Succeros de las Islas Filipinas, translated by J. S Cummins, Hakluyt Society, 2nd Series, No. 140, 1971.