A Voyage For Madmen (29 page)

Further astern of him than anybody knew, Donald Crowhurst was struggling to hold on to himself over Christmas.

On Christmas Eve he recorded a rambling monologue on the tape recorder given to him by the BBC. He talked, trying for a Chichesterian tone, about the incessant work to be done aboard a yacht out at sea, but loneliness was on his mind and he couldn't keep it out of his Christmas musings. ‘There is something rather melancholy and desolate about this part of the Atlantic Ocean … Not that I'm depressed or feeling sorry for myself by any means, but … Christmas … does tend to make one a little bit melancholy. And one thinks of one's friends and family, and one knows that they're thinking of one, and the sense of separation is somehow increased by the – by the loneliness of this spot …' Then he played ‘Silent Night' on his harmonica, remarking afterwards that it was a ‘melancholy' carol. He was a fair harmonica player, able to invest tunes like ‘Summertime' with a sad, bluesy feeling. He then tried to cheer himself up by playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'.

Later he made a radio-telephone call to Clare. She asked him for a latitude-longitude position, which Rodney Hallworth badly wanted instead of the vague but suggestive geographics Crowhurst had been cabling him. He answered that he hadn't had a chance to take recent sights. Then – forgetting or ignoring his own well-calculated fake progress – he told her that he was ‘somewhere off Cape Town'. He was well south of the equator now, but this wild exaggeration, thousands of miles beyond his actual or falsely plotted positions, was so impossible that it suggests a hopeless abandonment of any effort at pretence or reality.

Then he asked Clare how she was coping at home. The children, who had been following his progress on a chart taped to a wall, missed their father badly. There had been problems with the
slow but supposedly ongoing manufacture and sales of his Navicator, the money from which they had both hoped would help keep her and the family going while he was away. In truth, hardly any money was coming in and Clare's position was approaching desperate; she would soon be forced to go on the dole. And two days earlier there had been a fire in the stable behind the house that had been his workshop. At this point, Crowhurst would almost certainly have sped happy and relieved straight for the nearest port if Clare had told him things were difficult or pleaded in any way for him to stop and come home. But she did not. She bravely mentioned nothing of these troubles to her husband, and he lied back to her that all was well with him. The impossibility for each of them of being honest with the other made for a strained call.

After they disconnected, Crowhurst could not leave the radio alone. He was desperate for human contact. He stayed up all night tuning into various shortwave frequencies, picking up news bulletins from around the world. He had been hoping for messages from Rodney Hallworth, Stanley Best, or even the town councilmen of Bridgwater, to all of whom he had sent Christmas cables, but he received nothing. At 0527 he recorded in his radio log: ‘Sighs heard.'

From his night of loneliness and scrambled radio voices carrying snippets of dire news from around the world, he wove a tortured Christmas poem.

Keeping a sort of watch on sails by night,

Alone,

The rigging sighs a sigh of cosmic sorrow

For weeping doves that die maybe tomorrow

On 12.7 × 10
⁵
irradiated olive trees.

A sigh to fill a man's soul with melancholy.

Waves! Sweep away my melancholy!

My footstool's a 10 lb case of rice

To the North-east 2.5 × 10
³
miles,

250 × 10
³
babies will slowly die, too weak to fuss

(Carbohydrate deficiency, they tell us

on 15.402 mHz)

Herrod, would you not solve overpopulation thus?

Please, be informed, there is a Santa Claus!

After his call to Clare, he steered southwest towards land, closing with the northeast Brazilian coast, coming within 20 miles of João Pessoa. Going on deck every now and then for a lookout, it's possible that he saw the loom of shore lights that night. He had not been this close to land since leaving England.

Then he altered course again, away from shore and people, heading southeast down into the South Atlantic.

Only Robin Knox-Johnston found within himself the makings of a merry Christmas. He began by feeling slightly put out at the idea of spending Christmas alone, but after he opened the whisky, thoughts of his family and Christmases past soon had him laughing out loud. After two glasses he went out on deck, climbed on the cabin top, and belted out his own carol service. He ended Christmas Eve feeling ‘quite merry'.

On Christmas Day he took care over the preparation of his dinner: he fried tins of stewed steak, potatoes, and peas, ‘cooked separately for a change', and made a currant duff. At three in the afternoon – the time of the Queen's speech, one of the special charms of Christmas for Knox-Johnston and his family – he drank a Loyal Toast.

That evening he tried contacting radio stations in New Zealand and Chile but was unable to get through. However, conditions were perfect for signals from AM stations in Texas, Illinois, and California to bounce off the atmosphere and reach him in the far South Pacific, and from one of these that night he first heard about the
Apollo 8
moon journey.

It gave me food for thought. There they were, three men risking their lives to advance our knowledge, to expand the frontiers
that have so far held us to this planet. The contrasts between their magnificent effort and my own trip were appalling. I was doing absolutely nothing to advance scientific knowledge … True, once Chichester had shown that this trip was possible, I could not accept that anyone but a Briton should be the first to do it, and I wanted to be that Briton. But nevertheless to my mind there was still an element of selfishness in it. My mother, when asked for her opinion of the voyage before I sailed, had replied that she considered it ‘totally irresponsible' and on this Christmas Day I began to think she was right. I was sailing round the world simply because I bloody well wanted to – and, I realised, I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

His voyage might have been a small one compared to the
Apollo
flight, but he was driven by the same genetic impulse that powered NASA, and in his own way he was exploring the same boundaries of human endeavour. Furthermore, he was enjoying himself. That was Knox-Johnston's special adaptation and qualification. He was at home at sea.

John Ridgway was not. Nor was Chay Blyth. Both soldiers, brutally tough men, saw a circumnavigation as an ordeal to be endured, and both hated being at sea. Bill King enjoyed his voyage until he saw that others would probably beat him home; he lost heart long before he was capsized. Fougeron lacked the genetic impulse – he didn't want it badly enough. Crowhurst had devised a personal hell. Tetley was plugging away despite boredom and loneliness with a peculiar, dogged determination.

Only Moitessier equalled Knox-Johnston for the sheer pleasure he derived from his epic voyage. Only these two were really happy aboard their boats at sea.

I
N 1842, AN
A
MERICAN NAVAL OFFICER
, Matthew Fontaine Maury, took charge of the US Navy's Depot of Charts and Instruments. There he began collecting and collating weather observations recorded by sea captains in their logbooks. He looked beyond the information gathered by naval ships to search out the logbooks and diaries of merchant ship masters. He found a treasure trove.

By the early nineteenth century, whaling ships – half the world's fleet being American vessels from two towns, Nantucket and New Bedford – were poking their bluff-bowed noses into every corner of the known and unknown world. As whales grew scarcer in the historic grounds long plundered by whalers, these heavy, unhandy ships ventured perilously deep into the Arctic and Antarctic, becoming in every respect vanguard explorers of the furthest reach of the earth's oceans. No less bold than explorers like Cook, they found little or no fame for their voyages, only the product sought by their industry. Assiduously, the whaling masters and their equally intrepid brethren aboard sealing vessels made notes and surveys, maps, drawings, and watercolour paintings of their newfound territories; and
every day
, throughout voyages lasting three and four years at a time away from their home
ports, they wrote up morning, noon, and evening observations of the weather they were experiencing. ‘Heavy snow all morning with gales from W. snow and wind fell off in the pm. seas down with short fetch now in lee of Pt. Barrow. Fog in the evening, a warm breeze from direction of land to the S. So end these twenty-four hours.'

Maury and his team gathered thousands of such observations and made of them wind and current charts covering the known world, with accompanying explanations and sailing directions. For the first time mariners had available to them reams of written and diagrammatic information about the seas they intended sailing to, rather than the useful but limited oral lore handed down from old salt to young.

Maury's work was the basis for the pilot charts and sailing directions now carried aboard all ships at sea. Today, instant weather faxes tell sailors what's coming their way, but at the time of the Golden Globe race, pilot charts were the main predictor of the weather and sea conditions a ship, or a yacht, would encounter.

Pilot charts are the visual opposite of land maps: the land masses at their perimeters are blank, but the sea spaces are crammed with information. Oceans are divided into a grid of near-squares, 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude (at the equator, this square is 300 by 300 miles; the longitude distances progressively diminish going further north and south), and in each square is a ‘wind rose' giving the average wind strength and direction that will be found there, and the percentage of time when gales and calms can be experienced. They also show where icebergs may be encountered, the path of tropical and extratropical cyclones, atmospheric pressure, the direction of ocean currents, air and sea temperatures, magnetic variation, and the routes across the ocean taken by full- and low-powered ships. There are charts containing all this information for all the world's seas and oceans for each month of the year. They are the essential tool used by navigators, shipping companies, and lone yachtsmen to determine the optimum route across an ocean.

Thus a pilot chart can tell a sailor in the middle of the Pacific stretch of the Southern Ocean in January, heading for Cape Horn, what to expect in every 5-degree square along the way.

They will also guarantee his disappointment and frustration. All the information is statistically
averaged
from millions of observations, and on any given day the weather at sea, as ashore, can confound all predictions.

All through December 1968, Robin Knox-Johnston experienced winds in the Southern Ocean contrary to everything he had been expecting, and despite a break for Christmas cheer, this proved the most frustrating and anxious period of his whole voyage. In an area where the pilot charts, and every written account of passages made there, practically guaranteed the famous westerlies of the Roaring Forties, he was met with days and weeks of easterly winds blowing in his face, slowing him down, at times stopping him. Beating his way east against infuriating head winds, he was convinced that not far behind, and getting closer every day, ‘the Frenchman' was surfing downwind towards him, getting the favourable conditions touted by the pilot charts. It drove him mad. It made his British blood boil. It brought out his best English schoolboy xenophobia:

December 9th, 1968 … Of all the lousy things to happen; easterlies in an area which is renowned for westerlies … If the Frogs are meant to win – OK, but there is no need to torture me as well as allowing me to lose, and the Chinese could hardly have thought up a slower, more destructive method of torturing a person than this …

December 10th, 1968. No change still. I cannot make it out at all … Perhaps if I decided to turn round and head back to New Zealand I'd get westerlies! …

December 29th, 1968 … I just give up! Someone is going to have to rewrite the books! …

December 30th, 1968 … Tacking north and south and making no progress at all, whilst somewhere to the west and probably not far away now, I'll bet the Frenchman is having beautiful westerlies.

For Knox-Johnston, who could not accept that anyone but an Englishman should be the first to make a solo nonstop circumnavigation, the spectre of ‘the Frenchman' having all the luck with the weather and sailing hard up his backside was probably a great boon. From New Zealand onwards, after Bruce Maxwell had told him of Moitessier's pace and position, Knox-Johnston's logbook makes frequent reference to this hard-pressing threat to his lead. It's unlikely that he would have driven himself and
Suhaili
quite so hard without it.