A Voyage For Madmen (32 page)

The New Zealand radio stations were forecasting a hurricane approaching from the north, so Tetley tacked back out of Otago Harbour and headed
Victress
out to sea. Hours later, at sunset, he had his last sight of green New Zealand, now a grey shape astern, disappearing into rain clouds. Four thousand seven hundred miles of Southern Ocean lay between him and Cape Horn.

Donald Crowhurst's position was cloudier.

Newspapers reporting on the race could give only the same hazy locations that Crowhurst was sending to Rodney Hallworth,
his sole media contact, who in turn issued his bullish Crowhurst bulletins to the press. On 5 January, the
Sunday Times
stated that he was ‘reported' to be past Tristan da Cunha, which would ‘indicate' that he was sailing at over 1,000 miles per week.

He was, in fact, sailing slowly and desultorily off the Brazilian coast.

The
Sunday Times
published something about ‘its' race every week: this might be a half-page spread of the latest photographs it had received (Tetley at Christmas dinner, Moitessier practising yoga on deck); or a breakdown of the latest positions, with headshots of the four sailors; or a learned essay by Sir Francis Chichester on the men's chances and the future of single-handed voyaging. Despite being advised by Captain Rich and Chichester that Crowhurst's positions were almost certainly impossible, the paper could hardly ignore the whereabouts of its fourth and last-place competitor; but it could not openly suggest scepticism. So it took the news it got from Hallworth, couched it inconclusively, and stuck it in a small paragraph at the end of its race reports.

Thus on Sunday 12 January, Crowhurst was reported to be in the Indian Ocean ‘by now'. The following week he was ‘well into the Indian Ocean'. The paper noted that his voyage's daily average was now up to 100 miles per day, and his expected date home was advanced to 19 August.

Hallworth, with little or nothing to dress up his scanty information, plaintively cabled Crowhurst asking for weekly positions and mileage. On 19 January, Crowhurst obliged with a reply, giving a position and weekly mileage as ‘100 southeast Gough 1086'. (Gough is a small island south of Tristan da Cunha.) This was the transmission as written in Crowhurst's neatly maintained radio log. However, by the time it reached Hallworth, it read ‘100 southeast Tough'. Hallworth, for whom the glass was always half full, took this to mean that Crowhurst was having a tough time southeast of Cape Town – 1,200 miles further east than Gough Island, and 4,000 miles from his true position.

In this cable Crowhurst also advised that he was sealing the
cockpit floor hatch over his generator, and that future radiotransmissions, both radio-telephone and cable, would come much less frequently.

On the same day Crowhurst sent a cable to Stanley Best, mentioning damage to the boat's ‘skin', resulting in an ‘ill-found' boat. In few and ambiguous words, he implied he could only keep going towards the Horn, risking further damage, if Best would let him out of the clause in their contract that could require him to repay Best for the cost of the boat – forcing him, in other words, to buy back what could result in a worthless, half-wrecked boat if he pressed on at speed.

Then he closed down communication from the world. Nothing more was heard from him for eleven weeks.

His dizzyingly false positions reported in the press were now in excess of 4,000 miles away from his true location. It had become increasingly difficult to maintain and transmit a steady supply of false data, although he continued to record radio weather forecasts for areas far away, where he was supposed to be; he wrote these weather reports in painstaking detail in his radio log, often in triplicate as he received identical reports from other stations. But the emotional burden of this effort was proving too much for him, and he wanted to stop.

It has been suggested that Crowhurst initiated radio silence at this point to overcome the apparent obstacle of sending radio messages to stations in faraway Australia and New Zealand, as though he were in the Pacific, while all the time remaining in the Atlantic. But this would not have been a problem. On a Mercator-projected map of the world, his position off the coast of South America, roughly near Buenos Aires, does seem a long way from Australia or New Zealand. But on the true, round earth, he was no further, as the signal flew across Antarctica, from Sydney (7,300 miles away) or Wellington (6,200 miles) than from Portishead Radio, north of London (7,000 miles), which he was able to reach without difficulty. Crowhurst knew this. He had simply lost the heart to make up positions to feed Rodney Hallworth and an eager press on a regular basis. Silence and presumption, after
the steady apparent gains of the past few weeks, would now do a far better job of slipping him ever eastward than he could.

Rodney Hallworth provided additional grease. Crowhurst could not have had a better unwitting partner in deception than his zealously boostering publicist. With nothing but these two last cables to go on, Hallworth inferred a dramatic episode to pass on to the papers, and a perfect cover for prolonged radio silence: a huge wave had crashed over the stern of
Teignmouth Electron
, damaging the cockpit and stern of the boat. Repairs had required Crowhurst to drop sail for three days and seal off his generator compartment. In order to conserve his batteries, he would make only two more radio transmissions before arriving home.

‘Crowhurst Limps On After Battering by Giant Wave', was the bold headline in the
Sunday Times
of 26 January. The article said that Crowhurst was in serious trouble in the Indian Ocean, 700 miles east of the Cape of Good Hope. The following Sunday, 2 February, he was ‘estimated' to be 1,300 miles east of Cape Town.

In that same 2 February issue of the
Sunday Times
, in an article about the race and the future of single-handed sailing, Sir Francis Chichester wrote, with great restraint, that there had been some ‘loose' claims for speeds and distances sailed, and he hoped that some sporting club would check and verify such claims. His cool scepticism, coming at the end of a long, windy, slightly pedantic article, was at variance with the more exciting race reports, and his lone voice went publicly ignored.

On board
Teignmouth Electron
, Crowhurst did have a real problem. The plywood skin of the starboard hull was indeed split, in several places, and a frame inside that hull had separated from the skin. The hull was leaking, and the trimaran could no longer be considered seaworthy. No great extremes of weather had been met with so far, so the damage, it would seem, was the result of poor construction, undoubtedly exacerbated
by the rush of production spread between two different boatyards, which almost guaranteed problems. These might have been ironed out with the normal sea trials that any new boat needs to reveal and attend to problems.
Teignmouth Electron
was clearly far weaker and more vulnerable than Nigel Tetley's
Victress
.

Crowhurst now had the best possible and most honourable reason of all to give up. No shame would have come from putting into port with a damaged boat, but he was too deeply entrenched in deception now, and Rodney Hallworth's embellishment had given it a momentum of its own. Geographically he was too far from any port to limp into from his last supposed position. Thirteen hundred miles east of Cape Town would make Madagascar the most reasonable port to show up at, a long hike from the coast of Brazil. He could not give up now without exposing the whole sham.

Slowly he headed his boat for the South American coast.

Donald Crowhurst's route — 31 October 1968 — 8 March 1969

F
OR MOST OF
J
ANUARY
and February 1969, Crowhurst steered
Teignmouth Electron
in a slow zig-zag, moving roughly south off the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay. His daily mileages dropped to dawdling distances of 20 and 30 miles or less. His course was dictated more by which way the wind was blowing than a resolve to move in any direction. He had by this time abandoned any attempt at a circumnavigation.

But he was still at sea, and in a vessel that was taking on water. This presented him with a real problem that no deception or fantasy could push away.

One reason for his reduced mileage was that sailing the boat at any speed drove more water through the hull leaks. The longer this went unattended, the worse it would get. The split plywood skin, or sheathing, of the starboard hull was the sort of problem that might have been readily fixed at sea – Knox-Johnston's underwater caulking job was far trickier – if
Teignmouth Electron
had carried the tools, wood, screws, bolts, and general mix of chandlery and hardware that amount to basic and essential stores for any boat heading out to sea. Most of these supplies had been bought or provided for
Teignmouth Electron
, including spare pieces of plywood from Eastwoods
yard in Norfolk, but in the confusion of his departure, it had all been left on the dock at Teignmouth – or unloaded from the boat – and Crowhurst had sailed without it. The cargo he had paid most attention to – the boxes and boxes of electrical and radio parts, the unfinished ‘computer', the dense spaghetti weave of wires going nowhere – were no help to a leaky boat. Crowhurst had overlooked two fundamental points reiterated over and over by the experts and sailors he most admired and read, Chichester and Eric Hiscock: (1) Keep it simple, and (2) Sailing and electronics are, in the long run, incompatible. Electric systems on boats are under constant assault by the marine environment, and failure is their most consistent condition (or certainly was in the 1960s).

Crowhurst's ‘revolutionary ketch' leaked and could not be patched. Its bilge pump was inoperable.
Teignmouth Electron
was a fool's ship, a fact Crowhurst knew all too well by now.

At the beginning of February, he began heading slowly towards land. As he went, he studied his Admiralty pilot book of sailing directions for South America, much as he had done when considering putting into Madeira. He read up on every small port, bay, and possible landing site along the Argentine coast. Due west of his present position was the heavily trafficked Rio de la Plata, the wide sea entrance to Buenos Aires, where a tattered trimaran would not go unnoticed. Much better was the quieter Golfo San Matías 600 miles to the south. The pilot book promised a small settlement, where he would surely find materials to repair the leaking hull, and a good anchorage. He made pencilled marks in the book beside this section. But at 42 degrees south, Golfo San Matías was technically in the Southern Ocean. At his present 36 degrees south, Crowhurst was already experiencing strong weather; he could easily encounter ship-battering conditions in the week or more of sailing south into the forties that it would require to get there.

Eventually, proximity decided him. He closed with the coast at the wide bay of Bahia Samborombón, just south of the mouth of Rio de la Plata. The pilot book described an anchorage off a small
river, Rio Salado, near the top of the bay. A group of sheds and buildings stood on the south bank of the river – a small nondescript place but with some signs of life. This sounded perfect. He made a list for himself of what he needed to find ashore: plywood, screws, and vindaloo paste for the curries he liked to make. He might as well have hoped for Marmite.