2013. Donald Crowhurst, the tragedy of a sailor.

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

Donald Crowhurst, the dreamer

Taken from the 2013 Journal of Sailing, Year 39, No. 09, Oct., pp. 84/89.

Donald Crowhurst to save his family from bankruptcy sets off in a small trimaran for the first Golden Globe Race in 1968, the first solo round-the-world race in history. The dramatic life of a man who gave the sea everything.

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Year 1968, British newspaper Sunday Times launches the first non-stop solo round-the-world race. At the start an unknown Englishman shows up in a tie. He is unprepared, but ready for anything to satisfy his spirit of adventure and save his family from bankruptcy. We retrace the dramatic life of a man who gave everything to the sea.

“There are many similarities between carrying a small boat and living. You set out completely unprepared, you have a long journey ahead of you that you think will never end. You know a series of triumphs and defeats. And suddenly you realize that what is done is done. The mistakes you have made are indelible.” And mistakes, in Donald Crowhurst‘s life, many are made. It is 1968, the previous year Francis Chichester circumnavigated the world solo, and ocean fever breaks out in England. The Sunday Times newspaper launches the challenge: the fastest man to circle the globe nonstop and unassisted will win a £5,000 prize. Any interested sailor must depart in his or her own vehicle from any English port by October 31, 1968. Nine men accept the challenge. Among them was an unknown electronic technician, Donald Crowhurst, in fact.

An inexperienced dreamer

Born in the British Indies in 1932, Crowhurst spent a lonely childhood in Asia. When he and his family moved to England, he soon lost his father and began working as an electronics technician, founding his own company, but always juggling various financial problems. An amateur sailor, he also tries to patent numerous electronic boating instruments, without success. The Chichester feat strikes his imagination, and the prize money proposed by the Sunday Times does the rest: Crowhurst wants to participate in the Golden Globe Race. The first problem, which is not insignificant, is finding a boat, and for two months he stubbornly attempts to obtain the use of the Gypsy Moth IV, the sixteen-foot Chichester, which the English baronet himself had referred to as “the worst boat with which to sail alone.” That attempt having failed, incredibly Crowhurst finds a real sponsor to build his own boat. He is Stanley Best, an RV builder, completely unfamiliar with boating. “My wife says I must have gone crazy. I did, I guess, because of the appeal of that idea, the publicity and the excitement and Donald’s persuasive skills. On balance, round and round, you really have to say he was an extraordinary man, and as persuasive as any man ever was,” Best says years later.

A “revolutionary” boat

Crowhurst, however, is far behind the other competitors, who are already ready to set sail, and is betting big on one idea: to build a trimaran to harness its speed and make up for lost time. He is not interested in being first overall, but the fastest, which would guarantee him winning the prize money. Thus begins, in haste, the construction of
Teignmouth Electron
which goes into the water in late September. His maiden voyage, from the shipyard to the small town of Teignmouth, from which Crowhurst intends to set sail on the venture, makes it clear just how botched the project was: the planned sailing of three days, is instead two weeks. Moreover, Crowhurst proves that he does not have a great sea foot, falling overboard twice.

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The unheard cry

Crowhurst, at this point, has only two weeks to fine-tune the boat, the Oct. 31 deadline inexorably approaching. On the deck of the trimaran, supplies are piled up almost in bulk, while a BBC crew follows the preparations uninterruptedly. The story of an unknown and inexperienced sailor, pushed by newspapers and television, is igniting the imagination of the British. Crowhurst, in his heart, knows the boat is not ready, and neither is he. “Honey, I’m very disappointed with the boat, It’s not good. I’m not prepared.” , he confides to his wife on the night of October 30-31. “If you give up now, will you be unhappy for the rest of your days?” asks Claire. Donald does not respond, but bursts into tears. She cries until morning, sleeping less than five minutes. “What a fool I was,” Claire later confided. “I didn’t realize he was asking me to stop him. He had always been so amazing at putting things right in times of crisis that I had no idea he couldn’t do it again. And so I did not heed his call. What a fool I was!”

In a tie at the start

In Teignmouth Harbor a small crowd gathered the next day to greet that man who, wearing a yellow oilskin and still wearing a tie, was about to brave the oceans. Problems were not long in coming: the boat is proceeding at an exasperatingly slow pace, traveling about 60 miles a day, less than half of what was planned. Above all, along the descent of the Atlantic, it begins to take on water. Facing the Southern Oceans appears suicidal. Despondency seized Crowhurst: going back, he would be ruined; going forward, he would die. Even back home in England, enthusiasm wanes, until–until a telegram arrives: “Darted south, 243 miles traveled in one day.” Suddenly the wind seems to change, Crowhurst smashes one record after another, every achievement seems possible again, newspapers relaunch the great adventure. The run-up to the top of the rankings proceeds apace, the Indian Ocean is crossed in a flash. But it is all false.

The great fiction

Crowhurst actually never leaves the Atlantic. What he really had in mind, starting to send false coordinates, we do not know. What begins as an attempt to stall in the face of failure turns as the months pass into a dramatic struggle with himself. Slowly approaching the coast of South America, where the idea of waiting for competitors to arrive, to queue up with them and pretend to complete the race begins to take hold. But even this plan fails. Crowhurst is forced to land in Argentina to repair the hull plating. When he resumed the sea, ahead of him Robin Knox-Johnston arrived first in England, but Crowhurst appeared, to all eyes, still competing with Bernard Moitessier and Nigel Tetley for the fastest circumnavigation. Crowhurst only needs to arrive, not as a winner, to avoid having his logbooks checked by the judges. It would still be, in the eyes of the world and especially the sponsor, a positive result. Instead, Bernard Moitessier, in a gesture that will make him immortal in the eyes of dreamy sailors the world over, when he now has victory in his grasp, turns the prow southward and makes another nonstop halfway around the world to Tahiti. Nigel Tetley, for his part, wrecks with 1,000 miles to go. The unthinkable has happened, Donald Crowhurst is expected back home as a hero, over 100,000 people are ready to welcome him. But aboard
Teignmouth Electron
, by now madness devours the Englishman’s mind. In the last two weeks of sailing, he fills the ship’s logs with 25,000 delirious words. His last notes were dated July 1. On July 10, the trimaran is found abandoned adrift off the coast of the Bermuda Islands, and the deception of the dramatic voyage discovered and revealed to the world. Donald Crowhurst ‘s body was never found.

by Alessandro de Angelis

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