A Voyage For Madmen (38 page)

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Despair and the moral burden of deception had lifted and been replaced by the exhilaration of seeing a great truth.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

next game that

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.

I
T 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.

Chief Officer Joseph Clark and three crewmen were lowered overside in the ship's boat. They motored over the calm water
to the yacht, and Clark climbed aboard. He stepped below into the cabin.

He found a squalid scene. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink; three large radio transmitter/receivers lay on the table and shelves, their insides exposed, wires, components scattered everywhere. A filthy sleeping bag lay on the bunk in the narrow forward cabin.

Clark found three blue foolscap books – two logbooks and a radio log – stacked neatly on the chart table. Beside them, carefully arranged, lay two navigation plotting sheets with positions worked out on them. Clark flipped through the logbooks. They were both full of writing. In one he found the last navigation entry; it was dated 23 June, two weeks earlier.

Back on deck, Clark saw that the life raft was still lashed in place. The situation appeared tragic, but not mysterious: a lone yachtsman had fallen overboard – but not as a result of bad weather. Sitting next to the radios on the cabin table, a soldering iron still lay balanced on a milk tin: no unexpected wave had toppled the skipper off the deck.

Aboard the
Picardy
, a crewman remembered the yacht's name. He produced a clipping from the London
Sunday Times
. There was a drawing of the same yacht in an article about the Golden Globe race:
Teignmouth Electron
, a trimaran; Donald Crowhurst was its captain, from Bridgwater, Somerset.

Captain Box sent a cable to his ship's owners in London, describing the situation. Lloyds was notified. The US Air Force, which had found Nigel Tetley, began an air search.
Teignmouth Electron
was hoisted aboard the
Picardy
, which then began a search of the surrounding ocean.

That evening, two Bridgwater policemen drove to the Crowhursts' house with the news. Clare took the children upstairs. They sat on the bed and she told them that the boat had been found and their father wasn't on it. But there would be a search, and he would be found. Then she began to cry.

Soon other cars, driven by reporters, began arriving. Clare Crowhurst would make no statement other than to say that she knew her husband was alive.

The next day the search for Donald Crowhurst was called off.

Two days later, Sunday 13 July, London's newspapers were full of the tragedy. The
Sunday Times
launched the Donald Crowhurst Appeal Fund for Crowhurst's widow and children. Robin Knox-Johnston, now the default winner of the £5,000 cash prize for fastest time, donated the money to the fund. The
Sunday Times
kicked in another £5,000. Mr. Arthur Bladon, chairman of the Teignmouth Finance and General Purposes Committee, declared he would recommend the launch of a local fund. The BBC announced it would donate the fees it would have paid Crowhurst for the film he was shooting on his voyage. The Royal Mail Line said it would return the trimaran to England at its own expense. Stanley Best waived his claim to the boat in favour of the Crowhurst fund.

The
Sunday Times
suggested that a guardrail, something
Teignmouth Electron
did not have, might have saved Crowhurst from falling overboard. There was speculation that he had not worn a harness (film taken by Crowhurst aboard – in fair weather – shows him not wearing one). Sir Francis Chichester always wore one, the
Sunday Times
noted. But Robin Knox-Johnston was quoted saying that he seldom wore a harness, finding that it hampered his movement around the boat. But even without a harness, he thought it unlikely that Crowhurst could come so far and simply fall overboard. He believed the only explanation could be ‘some dreadful accident'. The paper noted that weather reports indicated calm conditions had prevailed at the time of Crowhurst's disappearance in the area where his boat had been found. Quotes from Clare Crowhurst and Rodney Hallworth summed up Donald Crowhurst as an adventurer who lived life to the fullest and followed his dream.
Il faut vivre la vie
.