A Voyage For Madmen (31 page)

Another spire rose, then another, and branches beamed out, spread, and soon covered half the southern sky, glowing and pulsating in pink and bluish tones like cold fire, and finally Moitessier knew that he was seeing the aurora australis, the southern sister of the northern lights. It lasted for nearly an hour, and he watched, dazzled, riven by its beauty.

Strong winds, but still no great gales pushed him on down towards the Horn. As he grew closer, he spent more and more time on deck, day and night, held by the sea, the heavens, the weather, his boat, taking it all in. He stood on
Joshua
's cabin top, or on her plunging, twisting bow, holding on to the steel pulpit or the inner forestay, wild hair and beard streaming, staring ahead, upwards, and at the sea around him, for hours, until driven below only by cold or hunger or exhaustion. These tended to, he returned to stand and watch again. The Ancient Mariner on a surfboard.

None but the callowest sailor can pass Cape Horn without gratitude and trembling, without being acutely aware of its history, of all the ships, seamen, and civilian passengers, men,
women, and children wrecked, smashed, and drowned there. Deaths that often came at the end of weeks of the vilest discomfort and despair imaginable. For most sailors the Horn is their Everest; for Moitessier, it was Mount Olympus, a holy place, a crucible in which he, his seamanship, and the sea gods he believed in converged. For him it was Ultima Thule, to which he brought the eastern imagination of his childhood. It was going through the wardrobe to Narnia. He had passed it by once before, but after only twenty days at sea, and with his wife Françoise aboard to comfort and worry and distract him. Now after more than five months alone, he realised it was this totemic coordinate in time and place that he had been aiming for all along – not the race's end. As he flew towards it, he stood exposed and raw at the centre of his world, sucking in every strand of sensation available to him.

He sailed through a very different sea than Knox-Johnston. There was not a whit of fancy in the Englishman's prosaic view of things, even when sighting the Horn. By comparison, Moitessier could have been on LSD. The beads of moisture on his sails were ‘living pearls'; phosphorescence in the waves became ‘globes of fire', reminding him that he had once tried harpooning such lights, thinking they were the eyes of giant squids.

Joshua
drives towards the Horn under the light of the stars and the somewhat distant tenderness of the moon … I no longer know how far I have got, except that we long ago left the borders of too much behind.

On 5 February the strong winds finally increased to gale force, yet under a blue sky and a brilliant sun that turned the sea a deep violet. He had covered 171 miles in the previous twenty-four hours, and now drove on faster. Feeling no hunger, he ate nothing all day.

The Diego Ramirez islands appeared, a blue spot on the sunny horizon, in mid-afternoon. By twilight they were a speck far astern. The wind eased off with the coming night. Moitessier set his alarm for 0100 to be woken 20 miles from the Horn and
turned in to sleep. When he woke, he knew from the angle of the risen moon through the portholes that he had slept through the alarm and possibly even passed the Horn. He went on deck and looked away to port, where he knew it lay. The night was clear, full of brilliant stars, and he saw only the moon with a cloud draping its moonshadow over the sea beneath it. The wind was lighter and had backed from the west to southwest, angling
Joshua
's course 15 degrees closer towards the little island, the false cape.

Then the cloud moved, and there was Cape Horn beneath the moon, less than 10 miles away – a small, black, rocky shape against the starry sky at the edge of the dark sea. Moitessier was overcome with chills of euphoria.

The seaman's traditional rounding of Cape Horn was really the whole passage from 50 degrees south to 50 degrees south around the bottom of South America, either from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the harder, meaner passage against the prevailing westerlies. That 1,000-mile passage contained so many attendant terrors – storms, drifting glacial ice, currents, and the screaming katabatic williwaws of Tierra del Fuego, Slocum's white-arched squall – that could stop a ship and shove her backwards along her wake, making her lose in an afternoon sea miles that had taken weeks of desperate struggle to gain, that not until the latitude of 50 degrees south in the destination ocean had been reached could the Horn be safely said to be astern. That was the full meaning of rounding the false cape Moitessier saw across the moonlit sea.

He well knew it. He knew that so far he had been lucky. Not until he neared the Falkland Islands in three or four days' time would he be properly past Cape Horn.

Yet he celebrated the passing of the rock. The high-wire state of mind that had gripped him for two days now eased up. He went below, turned up the cabin light, made coffee and rolled a cigarette, and allowed his thoughts at last to turn towards his destination.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
J
ANUARY
, the
Sunday Times
photographed Françoise Moitessier, Clare Crowhurst, and Eve Tetley together aboard the
Discovery
, the ship that had carried British polar hero–bungler Captain Robert Scott on his first expedition to the Antarctic in 1901. The ship, moored on the Thames near the Tower of London, had tall masts that provided a suitably nautical frame for a photograph of the three sailors' wives. On Sunday 12 January, the newspaper ran an article with the macabre headline, ‘The Sea Widows They Left Behind'.

Françoise Moitessier, who had already sailed around Cape Horn, declared that her own ambition was to be the first woman to sail alone around the world without touching land.

Clare Crowhurst provided a more prosaic, wifely point of view. She didn't have nightmares about her husband, she said, but her 7-year-old son, Roger, did, in which he saw his father standing at the door to his room, staring at him. Her 8-year-old boy, Simon, on the other hand, thought sailing around the world was nothing and planned to swim around when he was ‘old enough'.

Eve Tetley was confident of her husband's chances. The
racers were only just past the halfway point, and since five of the nine starters had ‘gone down', she said, others were likely to drop out and his position would become stronger as the race went on.

The next morning her husband almost went down himself. At 0500 on Monday 13 January, Nigel Tetley was 450 miles south of Cape Leeuwin, western Australia, when a wave struck
Victress
along the whole length of her beam, with a single sledgehammer blow. She was lying ahull in a gale, drifting sideways at the time. Water tore through the wheelhouse curtains, through the cockpit doors, and into the cabin. Tetley, who was below, didn't see the wave coming. He only saw it smash against the cabin windows so hard he was sure they would break. Amazingly, they held. Two hours later the wind had risen to hurricane force, and the seas, Tetley wrote in his logbook, were unlike any he had seen before.

Waves or seas ‘unlike anything I'd ever seen' is an inadequate last-resort description, yet one frequently employed by hardened seamen in extreme conditions. Seasoned sailors come to know that their own impressions of great waves at sea, even when measured by eye against the known height of an object, such as the mast of one's boat, tend to be exaggerated by as much as 100 per cent. More than 100 years of oceanographic studies, and now wave height measurements taken from satellite-sensitive GPS transponders on weather buoys, have shown that waves of 30 feet or higher are the rare product of unusually powerful winter storms in the high North Atlantic or the high latitudes of the Pacific. But even knowing this, what experienced sailors might rationally understand of the reality of waves at sea is driven from their minds and replaced by subjective terror. Fifteen-foot waves beneath a dark sky, driven by a shrieking wind, look terrible enough – great grey-green impersonal mountains with the density of concrete looming high overhead, and always more coming without pause or end. Being tossed about on them like flotsam
removes every last vestige of a physical sense of security, so that the observer easily believes he or she may soon die in this nameless place far out at sea, far from shore and safety and loved ones. It is this dam-bursting of a lifetime of shored-up fears, reducing one to the most fearful childlike state, that makes the awful sea look at least twice as terrible as it really is.

The photographs sailors take of the great waves that impress them so at the height of a storm, are always later disappointing in their inability to convey what such a scene ‘felt like'. Ironically, the impossible and wholly unrealistic computer-generated waves and conditions depicted in a film like
The Perfect Storm
do in fact provide very accurate impressions of what it
looks like
far out at sea in a terrible storm. It is their excessive exaggeration that mirrors the subjective impression of the human observer. Yet the movie feels safe. It comes without the horrifying realisation that
this is real, there's no way out, nothing in all the world will save you now but luck
. This is what turns big waves into the vertiginous forms and shapes found only in nightmares.

Nigel Tetley, an experienced seaman, guessed that the great waves he saw that day in the Southern Ocean south of Australia were 80 feet high. He may have been right – maybe they
looked
160 feet high. His writing is plain and not given to embellishment.

His great Southern Ocean storm continued all day. All day he believed that
Victress
would break up at any moment and he would be drowned. At the same time, the persistently hopeful side of human nature in him vowed that if he didn't die he would sail north to Albany and give up. But he didn't die, and the wind blew the trimaran away over the sea almost as fast as the onrushing waves, few of which hit her with any force after the first smash.

The next day the wind dropped to normal gale force, and when he saw how remarkably little damage had been done – the torn wheelhouse curtain, a soaked battery charger – he decided to carry on, if he could, as far as New Zealand, and see what things looked like then.

This was a starkly courageous decision. When
Suhaili
had finally lost her self-steering rudder a little further east in the Great Australian Bight, Knox-Johnston had wavered and thought about giving up in Melbourne. It was the knowledge that he was in the lead, that he stood a chance of winning the race, that had pushed him on. Nigel Tetley had no such encouragement. Nor, having heard from his radio contacts of Moitessier's much faster progress, could he hope for the cash prize for the fastest voyage. He had only the cold comfort of knowing that these were the conditions he could expect now that he had left the Indian Ocean and sailed at last below the fortieth parallel. This was what the Southern Ocean was all about and he could look forward to three more months of it, with no chance of a prize at the end of it. Still he sailed east.

(Nearing western Australia a week earlier, he had contacted Perth Radio and found he had a call waiting for him. He was patched through to Dr Francis Smith, president of the Western Australian Trimaraners Association. Dr Smith sent him heartfelt greetings on behalf of all Australian trimaran owners. The safety of multihulls was then being seriously questioned in Australia; five such craft had been lost in Australian waters in the last year, fifteen dead from their crews. Authorities had demanded investigations. Nigel Tetley had appeared at a propitious moment, and found himself celebrated as the poster boy for the Aussie trimaran movement. His reluctance to let his brother multihullers down was probably a factor in his decision to keep going, along with his amazement at how well
Victress
had stood up to her first Southern Ocean drubbing.)

Most of the Golden Globe racers exhibited an abundance of Ulysses factor traits, but Tetley did not conform to the profile. He was a man with a steady job who one day simply read about a race and decided instantly to join it. He was often frightened and perhaps less sure of the reasons for his circumnavigation than the others, but once he had decided to go – very late and almost impulsively compared to the long-planned campaigns of his rivals – he stuck to his course. In his deceiving ordinariness,
in the apparent wispiness of his motivation, and in the extraordinary steadiness of his resolve, he was the strangest of the nine.

Rough weather followed him across the Great Australian Bight. Like Moitessier, unlike Knox-Johnston, he passed to the south of Tasmania, a more direct route towards New Zealand. His sponsor, Music for Pleasure, hired an aeroplane to take pictures of
Victress
as she sailed south of Hobart, but the aeroplane couldn't find him. Tetley didn't wait around but headed across the Tasman Sea. Approaching New Zealand, he thought about sailing through Foveaux Strait, like Knox-Johnston, as a shortcut rather than going around Stewart Island, but overcast conditions gave him poor sextant readings and he wound up off the south side of Stewart Island. He cut between North and South Trap reefs and the southern tip of the island, then steered northeast for a day, close to the New Zealand coast, feasting on the green and rugged scenery that reminded him of the Scottish coastline he had seen from
Victress
on the Round Britain race. On 2 February, he rounded Tairoa Head into Otago Harbour, where
Suhaili
had gone aground, and found a small fishing boat to take his package of mail and photographs. The fisherman offered him a crayfish, but the
Sunday Times
race rules, which would have termed such a gift ‘material assistance', forced Tetley to decline. His package was quickly forwarded to England, and the photograph of Tetley eating his lonely Christmas Day lunch appeared in the
Sunday Times
on 9 February.