A Voyage For Madmen (27 page)

Captain Craig Rich, an instructor at the School of Navigation in London, who was advising the
Sunday Times
on navigational matters, had been keeping a chart of the competitors' progress. Their speeds had all been generally consistent from the very beginning of the race. After his very slow start, Crowhurst's performance was the conspicuous exception. It had been fluctuating wildly, and Captain Rich now told the reporters that he was surprised by this record-breaking run.

Sir Francis Chichester was sceptical. He telephoned the
Sunday Times
to say that Crowhurst had to be ‘a bit of a joker' and that his claims needed close examination. But there was no way any examination could be made until Crowhurst returned to England. Until then, they would simply have to take his word for it.

The
Sunday Times
and the rest of the national Sunday and daily papers reported the record-breaking run, and Crowhurst's cheeky comments, with gusto. The report cranked up the excitement of the race and increased speculation about its possible outcome. It was good news for everyone, and the sort of fanfare Donald Crowhurst had always hoped and expected for himself.

After concluding that he could not sail around the world in his faulty boat, Crowhurst had sailed on, unable to face going home.

He made radio-telephone calls to Clare and to Stanley Best, but to neither did he voice his dilemma. He spoke of the boat's problems matter-of-factly, and of his efforts to fix them, and gave every indication of an unswerving intention to keep going.

Yet between 19 and 21 November he slowed almost to a stop, sailing listlessly in a small circle north of Madeira. He got out his Admiralty pilot book of sailing directions for Portugal and its islands, and from its written descriptions drew a detailed map of Funchal Harbour: he was considering making for port there and putting an end to his ordeal. Then he changed his mind. On 22 November he began sailing at speed again, steering southwest, avoiding Madeira by a wide berth.

Sometime around the beginning of December, he came to a fateful decision. The normal daily, sometimes hourly, comments confided by all navigators to their logbooks – a ship's primary record of events, which Crowhurst too had made from the very beginning of his voyage: the sea state, frustrations with the boat, anxieties, problems, and successes – had by now vanished from his logbook. By December, he no longer cared to muse to himself on his bloody awful options. His logbook entries were reduced to the mathematical workings of his celestial sights: page after page of neat, pencilled calculations. No word of inner torment.

On 6 December he opened a clean logbook – although the first was only half full – and in this second logbook he began keeping track of his navigational progress, his actual positions, a continuation of the record started in the first book. In the first logbook, from 6 December, he began plotting a second record: a carefully detailed series of fake positions, each day placing
Teignmouth Electron
further and further from his actual location.

The business of celestial navigation is intricate but not difficult. It is part science and part seat-of-the-pants instinct, and the latter
part is what makes it interesting and breeds pride and vanity in navigators. It begins with a sextant measurement of the angle between the navigator, the horizon, and a celestial body – sun, stars, or moon. Skill in the use of the sextant is acquired gradually with time and practice. Accuracy with the instrument depends on one's familiarity with it under a wide range of conditions and the experience to judge the quality of each reading. A navigator's proficiency with a sextant is like that of a gunslinger's with a pistol, something that over the course of time and many different situations breeds an instinctive ease of handling and nicety of result. It is said that a navigator's second thousand sights show a considerable improvement over the first thousand.

The maths is the straightforward part. The sextant reading is taken through a series of corrections for height of eye above the sea surface, atmospheric refraction, time of day at one's own location, and Greenwich mean time; that altered set of numbers takes the navigator into a book of gloriously precomputed tables of spherical trigonometry that are no harder to use than a telephone book.

That is what Donald Crowhurst – and all the Golden Globe sailors – did to determine true positions, and which he continued to do to know where he actually was. But to calculate the second, fraudulent series of positions, based on imaginary extrapolations of geography and mathematics, is a formidably daunting exercise that would stump most honest navigators. Crowhurst, an able mathematician with a ready grasp of both the technical and the abstruse, was up to it. But it made a lot of work for him and added immeasurably to the deepening stress of his situation.

He began preparing the fake record for eventual scrutiny. It had to appear seamless, so from 6 December, in the logbook he had been keeping since the beginning of the voyage, he wrote his false positions, and the calculations for them, and specious, salty descriptions of his day.

Crowhurst's working methods, bred and polished in the scientific laboratories of the military and private electronics companies, were neat and meticulous. He made notes for himself about
everything; even before he had begun his deception, he wrote outlines of what he wanted to say when making innocuous radiotelephone calls to Clare. By the time he cabled Rodney Hallworth on 10 December with news of his record run, he had a neatly transcribed table of fake and actual positions for each day worked out. The remarks alongside the fake positions were descriptions of shipboard routine, difficulties, and food he had prepared, much of it written in the sort of gruff heroic tone used by Chichester in his book Gypsy Moth IV
Circles the World
. Crowhurst had read that book over and over, and now he was creating his own mythology.

On 12 December,
Teignmouth Electron
was becalmed 400 miles north of the equator. During the morning, an ordinary tropical rain squall swept over the yacht, and its winds of perhaps 20 knots damaged a part of the Hasler wind vane. This became fodder for a heroic report for the media. The next day, 13 December, Crowhurst cabled Rodney Hallworth that a 45-knot line squall had smashed the wind vane, but he thought repairs were possible. Four days later, while he was still 180 miles north of the equator, he cabled Hallworth that he was ‘over' the equator and sailing fast. On 20 December, he cabled again saying that he was off the coast of Brazil and averaging 170 miles daily.

His true mileage for that day was 13.

He was stuck in the Doldrums, a band of calms or light and flukey winds, generally 600 to 800 miles wide, which lies roughly along the equator between the trade wind belts of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Wind-ship sailors have always hated this area, where they can drift for days while making no progress. Yachts – unless they are racing, when use of an engine is cheating – have always tried to carry enough fuel to power through the Doldrums. Crowhurst's phoney reports gave no evidence of his being slowed down at all here, as were the other competitors. He appeared, to those at home, to have experienced no Doldrums at all, but amid the press excitement generated by his progress, no one, except Craig Rich and Sir Francis Chichester, wondered at his marvellous luck.

How much of his deception was, at this stage, real intent, or still simply a feasibility study, the sort of thing Crowhurst's engineer's mind would readily tackle, is uncertain. At least one other Golden Globe competitor admitted to toying with the same idea.

I even considered the idea of simply resting in the sun for a year and then returning home to say that I had been all the way round the world …

This popped into John Ridgway's mind as he grew unbearably lonely and anxious and thought about giving up, and the shame of abandoning his project, of disappointing all the people who had helped him. Out of sight, in a remote corner of any ocean or up a jungle river, such a thing might have been possible. But Ridgway quickly discounted it.

First, I doubted if it could be carried off, too many people would see through the story. Second, and more important, it would not be possible for me to live with such a fabrication.

But Crowhurst's cabled positions were not simply wishful chunks of mileage that sounded good. He had started working out consistent dates and positions for his fake voyage that stretched out for weeks ahead. He plotted them directly on to a routing chart. What began as a discrepancy of a few hundred miles between his actual and fake positions quickly grew to projections of thousands of miles away. By drawing a line between these points, connecting the dots on the chart, he could then tell at any time on any day where he was supposed to be and what his course was. This would be a necessity for keeping Hallworth and the world informed of his progress.

Yet at the same time he was also making a detailed map of the harbour at Rio de Janeiro. Like the one he had drawn of Funchal in Madeira, this was full of information taken from small-scale charts and his Admiralty pilot books, showing lights, landmarks,
navigational hazards. This is what a navigator must do when making for a port he hasn't planned to visit, and for which, therefore, he is carrying no large-scale charts aboard his vessel. There would be no other reason to make such a harbour chart.

Crowhurst would certainly not have thought of putting in at Rio on the quiet to make repairs and then returning to the race. His boat would instantly have been seen and visited by harbour police and immigration officials. The only reason for going into Rio would have been to give up.

Whatever torments of indecision still plagued him, he soon sent another cable to Rodney Hallworth. This did not give a sailorly latitude and longitude position; few of Crowhurst's cables did. Instead, they invariably named or suggested a location – ‘off Brazil' – that implied a position from which tremendous progress could be inferred. On this cable he wrote that he was sailing ‘towards Trinidade'. He meant Trindade, which both Moitessier and Tetley had sighted. This was even getting ahead of his fakery, for it was 350 miles south of the false position he had worked out for 24 December. Somewhere, either in the radio transmission of the cable to England (all the cables were sent by Morse code, at which Crowhurst was highly proficient) or in its transcription, by the time the cable reached Hallworth at his Devon News office, the
e
had fallen off Trinidade. Hallworth knew Crowhurst didn't mean Trinidad in the West Indies, so, with a hazy but convenient grasp of geography and unbounded optimism and pride in his client, he remembered another island somewhere down there in the South Atlantic, where Donald surely was now that he had crossed the equator, which had figured in the reports of other Golden Globe racers: Tristan da Cunha. That's where Donald was, Hallworth realised. Tristan da Cunha. About 2,500 miles beyond Crowhurst's carefully calculated fake position and 3,000 miles from his actual position – and, better still, at 38 degrees south, at the very edge of the Roaring Forties.

Hallworth's boy was doing sensationally, and he made sure the press knew it.

A
T 7.51 A.M
. EST
ON
S
ATURDAY
21 December 1968,
Apollo 8
took off from Cape Kennedy, heading for a drive-by on the dark side of the moon. It was the
Apollo
programme's final run-up to the epochal voyage that President John Kennedy had decreed must be made before the decade was out: the landing of a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.

Apollo 8
carried three brave astronauts: Frank Borman, 40, James Lovell, 40, and William Anders, 35. Their journey of half a million miles, there and back, and ten orbits of the moon, would be made, if all went well, in six days. They sped towards the moon at 24,000 miles – a distance equal to a little more than the circumference of the earth – per hour.

This was naturally the front-page story in the
Sunday Times
on 22 December.

Deep inside the paper a single column gave the latest details of the much dodgier business of getting a man alone in a sailboat around the world in ten months.

Robin Knox-Johnston, who had not been heard from since tacking out of Otago Harbour on 20 November, was thought to be halfway across the Pacific, in a region where gale-force winds occurred with ‘disconcerting frequency'. His sponsor, the
Sunday Mirror
, expected him to round Cape Horn sometime in early January.

Of Moitessier there was fresh news. He had been sighted off the coast of Tasmania four days before, on Wednesday 18 December. The Indian Ocean had slowed him down: he had covered the 6,000 miles between the Cape of Good Hope and Tasmania at an average of 100 miles per day. Nevertheless, his overall daily average was 128.4 miles, and the gap between him and Knox-Johnston was closing by 210 miles per week. It still looked to be a photo finish in England sometime in April.