A Voyage For Madmen

‘As a carpenter purrs over perfect dovetailing, so I rejoiced in the craftsmanship of this book.'
Simon Barnes,
The Times

‘What a fascinating book this is, a combination of
Moby Dick
and a Boy's Own Adventure story – and what an apt title.'
Beryl Bainbridge,
Mail on Sunday

‘This is the one that people will read and pass on to friends, and the one that they will pass on safe in the knowledge that they will
never
get it back again.'
Danny Kelly, Judge,
William Hill Sports Book of the Year

‘If you are new to Moitessier, Knox-Johnston, Crowhurst and the rest, it will grip you from start to finish.'
Libby Purves,
Daily Mail

‘Nichols produce[s] an exciting story, salted with his own sea-going experience.'
Financial Times

‘… the author sucks the reader into the story with ease, to the point where each man's fate becomes of the utmost importance'
Scotland on Sunday

‘A classic. A must for would-be sailing adventurers …'
Chay Blyth

‘An epic story of courage, heroism and utter madness.'
Bookseller

‘This story is by turns inspiring, terrifying and lyrical and combines elements of the best thrillers with a perceptive examination of what drives people to undertake adventures of this kind'
Books Magazine

‘I started the book after dinner (with Mozart on Radio 3) and read non-stop till sleepy time, then started again on Sunday morning and read non-stop to the finish at 11am (in bed). A great read indeed. Bravo.'
Richard Hooper,
Chairman, Radio Authority

‘A compelling tale.'
Country Life

‘A cohesive, gripping sea saga […] Nichols chronicles this extraordinary endurance event with a novelist's insight and sensitivity.'
Yachting Monthly

‘An enthralling tale of human endeavour and courage in the face of adversity … you don't need to know your spinnaker from your mainsail to enjoy this book.'
Tatler

‘Nichols succeeds brilliantly in conveying the destructive lure of the sea.'
Independent

‘In a world full of synthetic heroes, delve into this and enjoy the real thing.'
Evening Herald

A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

Peter Nichols
spent ten years at sea working as a professional yacht captain, living and cruising aboard his own small wooden sailboat, before turning to writing full time. He is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. He has taught creative writing at Georgetown University in Washington DC and New York University in Paris. He divides his time between Europe and the United States.

A
LSO BY
P
ETER
N
ICHOLS

Evolution's Captain

Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

Lodestar (a novel)

PETER NICHOLS

This edition published in Great Britain in 2011

Paperback edition first published in 2002

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Profile Books Ltd
3
A
Exmouth House
Pine Street
London
ECIR OJH
www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States in 2001 by
HarperCollinsPublishers

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © Peter Nichols 2001, 2002

Typeset in Sabon
Designed by Sarah Gubkin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84668 443 2
ISBN 978 1 84765 466 3

For Marion and Jeric Strathallan

Everything can be found at sea,
according to the spirit of your quest
.

- J
OSEPH
C
ONRAD

The nine competitors in the Golden Globe race, and their boats, in order of departure:

J
OHN
R
IDGWAY
, 29, captain in the British Army. Rowed across the Atlantic with Chay Blyth in a 20-foot open boat in 1966. Departed Inishmore, Ireland, 1 June, 1968. Sloop
English Rose IV
, 30-foot-long twin-keeled fibreglass.

C
HAY
B
LYTH
, 27, former British Army sergeant. Ridgway's transatlantic rowing partner. Departed Hamble 8 June. Sloop
Dytiscus III
, fibreglass, twin-keeled 30-footer, very similar to
English Rose IV
.

R
OBIN
K
NOX
-J
OHNSTON
, 28, British Merchant Marine captain. Departed Falmouth 14 June in the 32-foot-long ketch
Suhaili
, built of teak in India.

B
ERNARD
M
OITESSIER
, 45, French sailor-author. Sailed with his wife nonstop from Tahiti to Spain, via Cape Horn, in 1965–6 aboard his 39-foot-long steel ketch
Joshua
. Departed Plymouth, Devon, 22 August aboard
Joshua
.

L
OÏCK
F
OUGERON
, 42, French, manager of a motorcycle
company in Casablanca, Morocco. Friend of Moitessier's. Departed Plymouth 22 August in the 30-foot-long, gaff-rigged steel cutter,
Captain Browne
.

B
ILL
K
ING
, 57, farmer, former British Navy submarine commander. His 42-foot-long, junk-rigged, cold-moulded wood schooner,
Galway Blazer II
, was designed and built expressly for a nonstop circumnavigation, but not for a race. Departed Plymouth 24 August.

N
IGEL
T
ETLEY
, 45, Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Sailed in his live-aboard home, a 40-foot-long, 22-foot-wide, plywood trimaran ketch,
Victress
. Departed Plymouth 16 September.

A
LEX
C
AROZZO
, 36, Italian single-hander who had previously sailed alone across the Pacific, in the 66-foot cold-moulded wooden ketch
Gancia Americano
built for the Golden Globe race. He ‘sailed' – that is, he removed to a mooring at Cowes, Isle of Wight, to continue preparations – on the final deadline date set by the race sponsor, the London
Sunday Times:
31 October. He put to sea a week later.

D
ONALD
C
ROWHURST
, 36, English electronics engineer. His 40-foot-long, ketch-rigged, plywood trimaran,
Teignmouth Electron
, was a modified sister ship to Tetley's
Victress
. He too sailed on 31 October, within hours of the
Sunday Times
deadline.

T
OWARDS THE END OF THE
1960s, as Mankind closed in on its goal of voyaging to the moon, nine men set out in small sailboats to race each other around the watery earth, alone and without stopping. It had never been done before. Nobody knew if it could be.

It was dubbed by its eventual sponsor, the
Sunday Times
, the Golden Globe race. It was the historical progenitor of modern single-handed yacht racing, to which it bears almost no resemblance. Today, high-tech, multimillion-dollar, corporate-sponsored sailing machines race around the world in 100 days or less. Their captains talk by phone and send e-mail to their families and headquarters ashore. They receive weather maps and forecasts by fax. They navigate using the global positioning system (GPS), their locations determined by satellites and accurate to within yards. These positions are simultaneously transmitted to race organisers ashore. Today's racers cannot get lost or file false reports of progress. If they get into trouble, rescue aircraft can often reach their exact locations in a matter of
hours. They may race through the most dangerous waters in the world, but their safety net is wide and efficient.
*

The Golden Globe racers sailed in the age before satellites provided pinpoint navigation and verification of positions. Like Captain Cook in the eighteenth century, they navigated by sextant, sun, and stars. Their world at sea was far closer to that earlier age than to ours today. When they sailed, heading for the world's stormiest seas in a motley array of new and old boats, they vanished over the horizon into a true unknown. The only information of their whereabouts and what was happening to them came from their own radio transmissions. In time, the radios broke down; several sailors carried no radios at all. One man, sending reports of tremendous progress that made him appear a likely winner, never, in fact, left the Atlantic Ocean, but tried to fake his passage around the world.

Compared with the yachts of today their boats were primitive and unsophisticated – and small: the living space in which the sailors planned to spend the better part of a year was about the size of a Volkswagen bus.

These men sailed for reasons more complex than even they knew. Each decided to make his voyage independent of the others; the race between them was born only of the coincidence of their timing. They were not sportsmen or racing yachtsmen: one didn't even know how to sail when he set off. Their preparations and their boats were as varied as their personalities, and the contrasts were startling. Once at sea, they were exposed to conditions frightening beyond imagination and a loneliness almost unknown in human experience.

Sealed inside their tiny craft, beyond the world's gaze, stripped of any possibility of pretence, the sailors met their truest selves. Who they were – not the sea or the weather – determined the nature of their voyages. They failed and succeeded on the grandest scale. Only one of the nine crossed the
finish line after ten months at sea and passed through fortune's elusive membrane into the sunny world of fame, wealth, and glory. For the others the rewards were a rich mixture of failure, ignominy, sublimity, madness, and death.

The race was the logical inevitability of the first tentative passage made by a man daring to float across a lagoon on a log: in the end, alone and without stopping, he floated so far that he arrived back at the place from where he started, there being no farther earthbound voyage.

Like the first ascent of Everest, it was a feat without any larger purpose than its own end. But like a trip to the moon, it was a voyage that provided Man with another benchmark of the far reach of his yearning endeavour.

The Golden Globe race happened in a different world, as distant, in terms of our experience with the sea, as Joseph Conrad's. The story of that race now has the feel of an older romance of the sea, a tale of unlikely, heroic, desperate, and tragic characters.