A Voyage For Madmen (37 page)

He woke at midnight. He heard a scraping, wracking sound in the bow. Knowing his boat and its every piece so well, the sound conveyed a picture to his mind of what had happened: the damaged bow of the port hull had broken away and was caught between the hulls. He had already drilled holes in the bow, so it didn't really matter if it fell off; the watertight bulkhead just aft of the bow would keep water out of the rest of the hull, but the opened hull would certainly slow him down. He had to get up and clear away the wreckage. All this he thought in a moment. Then he reached for the light switch.

Water was pouring into the main hull. This he hadn't pictured. Dashing up on deck, he saw the port bow was gone, as he had thought, but in going it had smashed a hole in the bow of the main hull. When he returned to the cabin it was flooding at a rate that told him instinctively not to bother locating the leak – quantity told him everything. He reached for the radio and broadcast every sailor's most awful message.

There is a form to it. Somehow one already knows it by heart.
Mayday Mayday Mayday. This is the sailing yacht
Victress
at latitude thirty-nine degrees ten minutes north, longitude twenty-four degrees thirty minutes west. I am sinking and I request assistance. Mayday Mayday Mayday …

An immediate, crisp, professional reply from a Dutch vessel
allayed panic. But by the time he had finished speaking with the ship's radio operator, water was swirling around his legs. It was time to get out the life raft. Still in the dark of night, he dragged it on deck, tied off its painter, and heaved it overboard where it began automatically to inflate. Into the raft he threw the film and logbooks that contained the record of his voyage; his sextant, chronometer, camera, binoculars, and a handheld radio transmitter; and some warm clothes. By then water had filled half the main cabin and the boat's movement was sluggish and dead.

As he climbed into the raft, some piece of the trimaran snagged its sea-anchor line and held it close.

‘Give over, Vicky, I have to leave you!' Tetley yelled. He found the line holding him to his sinking boat, cut it, and soon drifted clear.

The waves were still high and the life raft went spinning and dipping away like an amusement park ride. Lights shone aboard
Victress
a moment longer, but then the sea closed over the batteries and they suddenly went out, and Tetley lost sight of her in the moonless dark.

He had no time for feelings just then. His predicament drove thoughts of
Victress
from his mind, and he busied himself trying to get the small emergency transmitter working. He continued sending his Mayday through the dark night but got no response.

When daylight came, he was able to read the transmitter's instructions and saw that he hadn't rigged the set's aerial. Once he'd done that and started transmitting again, he immediately made contact with an American rescue plane alerted by the Dutch ship and already searching for him. By midday, the Hercules aircraft from the US Air Force 57th Rescue Squadron based in the Azores was circling overhead. At 1740 he was picked out of the sea by the nearest available ship, an Italian tanker,
Pampero
, on charter to British Petroleum. They were happy to rescue him.

After eight months on his own, Tetley found that once he
started, he could not stop talking; he chattered compulsively to
Pampero
's captain and crew. It kept him from brooding over the loss of
Victress
, except at night when he was alone in the small cabin they gave him. Then his mind flew back to his voyage, and the agonising closeness of its completion.
Victress
had sunk a bare thousand miles from England.

Eight days later,
Pampero
docked at Trinidad in the West Indies. Eve had flown out to meet her husband and was there when he arrived.

It was over, Tetley thought. But he was to find that the Golden Globe race threw a long shadow.

N
EWS OF
N
IGEL
T
ETLEY'S SINKING
reached Donald Crowhurst two days later, on 23 May, in a cable from Clare. He was now the only remaining competitor in the race.

If no accident or mishap disabled
Teignmouth Electron
before reaching England, Crowhurst would be the winner of the
Sunday Times'
£5,000 cash prize. He would join Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Sir Francis Chichester, and the other
Sunday Times
judges and experts for the Golden Globe celebratory dinner aboard the tall ship
Cutty Sark
, where they would swap stories about their trials in the Southern Ocean and confirm their standing in the small company of men that has been called the Cape Horn breed. Of these, Knox-Johnston, Tetley, and Crowhurst would be placed among the rarest of the elite, the solo Cape Horners.

It was the sort of glory Crowhurst had always yearned for. The notoriety and speed of his voyage would turn his company Electron Utilisation into a solid success. Book and merchandising deals would be forthcoming. The brilliance and superiority of Donald Crowhurst would be acknowledged by the world.

Also, Captain Craig Rich of the London Institute of Navigation, Sir Francis Chichester, and others would examine his logbooks and navigation records.

In fact, Chichester was already drafting a letter to Robert Riddell, the
Sunday Times
race secretary, asking for details of Crowhurst's messages and position statements, particularly his last message before leaving the South Atlantic and entering the Southern Ocean near the Cape of Good Hope and his next message about nearing the Horn (‘Digger Ramrez'). ‘We need to know why the silence from the Cape to the Horn (from an electronics engineer too) … Why did he never give exact positions? It also appeared that he had an extraordinary increase of speed on entering the S. Ocean; I think he claimed 13,000 miles in ten weeks, or something, which seems most peculiar considering his slow speed for the previous long passage to the Cape, and the succeeding 8,000 miles (Horn-home).'
Claimed
. Chichester had put the numbers and his own sea sense together and the conclusion was, to him, inescapable.

Crowhurst already felt the weight of scrutiny that awaited him. It was one thing to make up a story in the lonely, solipsistic space of
Teignmouth Electron
's cramped cabin and feed it to the ecstatically credulous, geographically ignorant Rodney Hallworth, who passed it on to an equally gullible and wanton press. It was quite another to lay the lie before a committee of sea dogs and savants who had really done what he had only guessed at and pretended. Crowhurst knew this; he was a highly intelligent man. But he had chosen not to dwell on it. Now, only a few weeks away from stepping ashore into a klieg light of illumination and surrendering his logbooks, the fullest ramifications of his deception swept over him.

Crowhurst began to coast. He delayed, he zig-zagged, he let the wind blow the boat where it would. In the preceding weeks, since breaking radio silence, he had sailed faster and more steadily than at almost any other period of his voyage, even clocking a genuine 200-mile-plus run in the twenty-four hours between noon of 4 May and 5 May. But from 23 May – the day he learned of Tetley's sinking – onward, his progress up the Atlantic became erratic. He passed out of the steady southeast trade winds and entered the Doldrums, the hot, steamy, thundery band of stagnant
air and light and fluky winds either side of the equator.
Teignmouth Electron
ghosted through the water while Crowhurst, naked and streaming sweat, sat in the messy overheated cabin amid the detritus of his grand plan – wires snaking to nowhere, radios, boxes of spare parts, and a contradictory set of logbooks – trying to see his way home and clear.

Early in June, his Marconi transmitter failed. Suddenly his newfound voice, which he had been exercising since ending his self-imposed radio silence, the precious link to the world outside the claustrophobic cabin, beyond the empty horizon, was taken from him. For Crowhurst, the breakdown of his core electronic device was unhinging. For the next two weeks
Teignmouth Electron
drifted slowly north, largely untended, while he devoted all his efforts to fixing the transmitter. He spent sixteen hours a day sitting in the boiling cabin, surrounded by the cannibalised innards of radios and open tins of food, while he soldered and tinkered with wires and transistors, ate when he remembered to, lost in his work, fascinated, challenged, sustained by the one realm he truly understood.

The sea – the watery blue reality beyond the cabin, the discipline of seamanship, the purpose of his adventure – receded.

In the cooler, dark, early hours of 22 June, Crowhurst fixed his radio and finally made Morse contact with Portishead Radio. He immediately sent cables to his wife Clare and to Rodney Hallworth.

Then, as the sun rose, the cabin temperature increased, and so did the heat coming from the repaired radio. For much of the rest of that day, Crowhurst sat hunched beside it, exchanging cables with Hallworth, who was already working on deals and syndication rights, and with Donald Kerr of the BBC, who wanted to arrange a rendezvous for boats and helicopters to meet Crowhurst offshore. The welcome, the clamour, the end of the voyage, the end of the game, loomed.

On Tuesday 24 June, Donald Crowhurst turned away from it all. He turned away from the world and plunged deep into himself.

At the top of a clean page in his logbook – following weeks
of comment-free mathematical workings of his celestial sights – he wrote a title: ‘Philosophy'.

He began by discussing Einstein, whose book,
Relativity: The Special and General Theory
, was one of the few he had brought along on his voyage to read. Einstein had written the book to explain his theory to a general audience; in its day it was as well-known and as widely unread as Stephen Hawking's later explanation of the universe,
A Brief History of Time
. But for Crowhurst, reading it over and over in the isolation chamber of
Teignmouth Electron
's lonely cabin, Einstein's statements took on the truth and gravity of holy writ.

One paragraph made a profound impact on him:

That light requires the same time to traverse the path A to M as for the path B to M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a
stipulation
which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.

Einstein was only stating, or appropriating, a definition of the word ‘simultaneity' for the purpose of his argument. But to Crowhurst this Einsteinian exercise of free will appeared to be a godlike control of physics, of the universe. ‘You can't do that!' wrote Crowhurst, imagining a dialogue between himself and Einstein. ‘Nevertheless I have just
done
it,' answered Albert. Crowhurst did not doubt Einstein's authority to take such control. He took it as an example of the power of a superior mind. This led him deep into a maze of tortured logic.

He was soon writing this:

I introduce this idea
because [it] leads directly to the dark tunnel of the space-time continuum, and once technology emerges from this tunnel the ‘world' will ‘end' (I believe about the year 2000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extraphysical' existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.

As he wrote, Crowhurst was listening to the radio. Beside his philosophical writing, he now made annotations of what he was hearing: ‘1430 gmt, 24th, Radio Volna Europa. 1435: Hysterical laughter.'

He continued writing. Through the day, into the night, all through the next day.

At 1700 on 25 June, when he had been writing for about thirty hours, a Norwegian cargo ship,
Cuyahoga
, passed close by
Teignmouth Electron
. Crowhurst appeared on deck and waved cheerfully as the ship steamed by. The
Cuyahoga
's captain wrote in his logbook that the man on the trimaran had a beard, wore khaki shorts, and appeared to be in good shape. Crowhurst had spent the day writing a history of the past 2,000 years, with a further look back to the time of cavemen, illustrating the way exceptional men have, through the shock of their genius, changed society through the ages. At some point in this history, he put down his pencil, climbed up on deck, and waved at the
Cuyahoga
.

Over the next week, for eight days from Tuesday 24 June, to midday Tuesday 1 July, Crowhurst wrote 25,000 words in his logbook (equivalent to almost a third of this book), stopping only to eat or nap as need overtook him. His hand flew across the pages, bearing down hard, the urgency of what he had to say outstripping the need to sharpen his pencil. His neat engineer's handwriting now grew large and irregular, the strokes thick with emphasis. The pages became dense with notes crawling around the margins, circled and crammed between distant paragraphs, as insight upon insight struck him and deepened his revelations. He wrote in a white heat of possession.