| Donald Crowhurst | |
| Image Size: | 270px |
| Birth Name: | Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst |
| Birth Date: | 1932 |
| Birth Place: | Ghaziabad, British India |
| Known For: | The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race |
| Children: | 4[1] [2] |
Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932 – July 1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968–69. Soon after starting the race his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, began taking on water. Crowhurst secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so. His ship's logbooks, found after his disappearance, suggest that stress and associated psychological deterioration may have led to his suicide.
Crowhurst's participation in the race has exerted a fascination over many commentators and artists. It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films, including a documentary, Deep Water (2006), and two feature films, Crowhurst and The Mercy (both 2017), in which Crowhurst is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth, respectively. Teignmouth Electron ended its days as a dive boat in the Caribbean and its decaying remains can still be found in the dunes above a beach in the Cayman Islands.
Donald Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British India.[3] His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked in the Indian railways. During her pregnancy, his mother had longed for a daughter, and Crowhurst was dressed as a girl until the age of seven. After India gained independence, his family moved back to England. The family's retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the partition of India.
Crowhurst's father died in 1948. Because of family financial problems, Crowhurst was forced to leave school early that year[4] and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield. In 1953 he received a Royal Air Force commission as a pilot,[5] but was asked to leave in 1954 for reasons that remain unclear,[6] and was subsequently commissioned into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1956.[7] After leaving the Army the same year[8] owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962.[4] He was a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council.
Crowhurst, a weekend sailor, designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator, a handheld device that allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons.[9] While he did have some success selling his navigational equipment, his business began to fail. In an effort to gain publicity, he started trying to gain sponsors to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in Crowhurst's failing business. Once committed to the race, Crowhurst mortgaged both his business and home against Best's continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation.[4]
See main article: Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. The Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney. The considerable publicity his achievement garnered led a number of sailors to plan the next logical step – a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world sail.
The Sunday Times had sponsored Chichester, with highly profitable results, and was interested in being involved with the first non-stop circumnavigation, but it had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor. The solution was to promote the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. That was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability before entry.[10]
Entrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in the summer.[11] The prizes offered were the Golden Globe trophy for the first single-handed circumnavigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest. This was then a considerable sum, equivalent to almost £73,000 in 2023.[12]
The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron. "Tahiti" Bill Howell, a noted multihull sailor and competitor in the 1964 and 1968 OSTAR races, originally signed up as an entrant but did not actually race.
Crowhurst hired Rodney Hallworth, a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, as his public relations officer.[13]
See main article: Teignmouth Electron.
The boat Crowhurst built for the voyage, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified 400NaN0 trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver.[14] At the time, this was an unproven type of boat for a voyage of such length. Trimarans have the potential to sail much more quickly than monohulled sailboats, but early designs in particular could be very slow if overloaded, and had considerable difficulty sailing close to the wind. Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability, but if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, though crews have lived for months with a boat in the inverted position and ultimately survived.
To improve the safety of the boat, Crowhurst had planned to add an inflatable buoyancy bag on the top of the mast to prevent capsizing; the bag would be activated by water sensors on the hull designed to detect an impending capsize. This innovation would hold the mast horizontal on the surface of the water, and a clever arrangement of pumps would allow him to flood the uppermost outer hull, which would (in conjunction with wave action) pull the boat upright. His scheme was to prove these devices by sailing round the world with them, then go into business manufacturing the system.
However, Crowhurst had a very short time in which to build and equip his boat while securing financing and sponsors for the race. In the end, all of his safety devices were left uncompleted;[4] he planned to complete them while under way.[15] Also, many of his spares and supplies were left behind in the confusion of the final preparations. To top all this, Crowhurst had never sailed on a trimaran before taking delivery of his boat several weeks before the beginning of the race.
On 13 October an experienced sailor, Lieutenant Commander Peter Eden, volunteered to accompany Crowhurst on his last leg from Cowes to Teignmouth. Crowhurst had fallen into the water several times while in Cowes, and as he and Eden climbed aboard Teignmouth Electron, he once again ended up in the water after slipping on the outboard bracket on the stern of the rubber dinghy. Eden's description of his two days with Crowhurst provides the most expert independent assessment available for both boat and sailor before the start of the race. He recalls that the trimaran sailed immensely swiftly, but could get no closer to the wind than 60 degrees. The speed often reached 12 knots, but the vibrations encountered caused the screws on the Hasler self-steering gear to come loose. Eden said, "We had to keep leaning over the counter to do up the screws. It was a tricky and time consuming business. I told Crowhurst he should get the fixings welded if he wanted it to survive a longer trip!" Eden also commented that the Hasler worked superbly and the boat was "certainly nippy."
Eden reported that Crowhurst's sailing techniques were good, "But I felt his navigation was a mite slapdash. I prefer, even in the Channel, to know exactly where I am. He didn't take too much bother with it, merely jotting down figures on a few sheets of paper from time to time." After struggling against westerlies and having to tack out into the Channel twice, they arrived at 2.30 pm on 15 October, where an enthusiastic BBC film crew started filming Eden in the belief he was Crowhurst. There were 16 days to get ready before the race's deadline on 31 October.[16]
Crowhurst left from Teignmouth, Devon, on the last day permitted by the rules: 31 October 1968.[14] He encountered immediate problems with his boat, his equipment, and his lack of open-ocean sailing skills and experience. In the first few weeks he was making less than half of his planned speed.
According to his logs, he gave himself only 50/50 odds of surviving the ocean, assuming that he was able to complete some of the boat's safety features before reaching the dangerous Southern Ocean. Crowhurst was thus faced with the choice of either quitting the race and facing financial ruin and humiliation or continuing to an almost certain death in his unseaworthy, disappointing boat.
Over the course of November and December 1968, the hopelessness of his situation pushed him into an elaborate deception. He shut down his radio with a plan to loiter in the South Atlantic for several months while the other boats sailed the Southern Ocean, falsify his navigation logs, then slip back in for the return leg to England. As last-place finisher, he assumed his false logs would not receive the same scrutiny as those of the winner.
Since leaving, Crowhurst had been deliberately ambiguous in his radio reports of his location. Starting on 6 December 1968, he continued reporting vague but false positions; rather than continuing to the Southern Ocean, he sailed erratically in the southern Atlantic Ocean and stopped once in South America to make repairs to his boat, in violation of the rules. A great deal of the voyage was spent in radio silence, while his supposed position was inferred by extrapolation based on his earlier reports. By early December, based on his false reports, he was being cheered worldwide as the likely winner of the fastest circumnavigation prize, though Francis Chichester privately expressed doubts about the plausibility of Crowhurst's progress.[17]
After rounding the tip of South America in early February, Moitessier had made a dramatic decision in March to drop out of the race and to sail on towards Tahiti. On 22 April 1969, Robin Knox-Johnston was the first to complete the race, leaving Crowhurst supposedly in the running against Tetley for second to finish, and still able to beat Knox-Johnston's time, because of his later starting date. In reality, Tetley was far in the lead, having long ago passed within 150nmi of Crowhurst's hiding place; but believing himself to be running neck-and neck with Crowhurst, Tetley pushed his failing boat, also a 400NaN0 Piver trimaran, to breaking point, and had to abandon ship on 30 May.
The pressure on Crowhurst had therefore increased, since he now looked certain to win the "elapsed time" race. If he appeared to have completed the fastest circumnavigation, his logbooks would be closely examined by experienced sailors,[15] including the experienced and sceptical Chichester, and the deception would probably be exposed. It is also likely that he felt guilty about undermining Tetley's genuine circumnavigation so near its completion. He had by this time begun to make his way back as if he had rounded Cape Horn.
Crowhurst made his last radio transmissions on 29 June. His last logbook entry is dated 1 July. Teignmouth Electron was found adrift, unoccupied, on 10 July.[4]
Crowhurst's behaviour as recorded in his logs indicates a complex and troubled psychological state. His commitment to fabricating the voyage reports seems incomplete and self-defeating, as he reported unrealistically fast progress that was sure to arouse suspicion. By contrast, he spent many hours painstakingly constructing false log entries, often more difficult to complete than real entries because of the celestial navigation research required.
The last several weeks of his log entries, once he was facing the real possibility of winning the prize, showed increasing irrationality. His biographers, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, believe that faced with a choice between two impossible situations—either admit his fraud and then face public shame and likely financial ruin including the loss of the family home, or return home to a fraudulent hero's reception, and then have to live with the guilt and possible subsequent unmasking—Crowhurst descended into a "classical paranoia", a "psychotic disorder in which deluded ideas are built into a complex, intricate structure."[18] Others, including practising clinical psychologist Geoff Powter, who included a chapter devoted to Crowhurst in his book Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness, have postulated that Crowhurst may have suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which, accentuated by his eventual psychologically fraught situation, could account for his apparent alternation between manic and depressed episodes as evident from the later entries in his logbooks.[19] On 24 June, he began to document these thoughts in a new set of writings in his second logbook, entitled "Philosophy."[20] Although rambling and incoherent at times, he was attempting to set down, for the benefit of mankind, a "revelation" or new understanding that he believed he had discovered regarding the relationship between man and the universe. Life, as experienced by man, was a "game", overseen by "cosmic beings," apparently God (or several gods) and the Devil, who set the rules by which "the game" was played. However, man could, by an effort of will, become one such "second generation cosmic being" himself, and thereby withdraw from "the game" on his own terms if he so wished. He would then enter a world of "abstract intelligence" (the realm of gods) in which he would have no need for his body, or any of the other trappings of daily life. At one point he wrote that this "revelation" made him happy:whereas at other points his writings documenting mental arguments—with himself, with Albert Einstein, or with God—reveal a tortured soul on the brink of self destruction. While suicide is not explicitly mentioned as an escape route, Tomalin and Hall believe that Crowhurst (whether or not he was admitting it to himself) was groping towards this eventuality with phrases such as "The quick are quick, and the dead are dead. That is the judgement of God. I could not have endured the terrible anguish and meaningless waiting, in fact," as well as "Man is forced to certain conclusions by virtue of his mistakes."
He continued his writings for a week, eventually amounting to more than 25,000 words.[21] At 10 a.m. on 1 July (by his own reckoning, since in his meditations he had omitted to wind his chronometer and had to subsequently restart it), Crowhurst commenced what Tomalin and Hall believed to be his "final confession," also incorporating (in their view) a count of hours, minutes and seconds towards the time at which he had decided that he would end "the game" by committing suicide. His observations over the next 80 minutes are generally cryptic and/or incomplete, but include hints such as:
It is unclear from the spacing whether "11 20 40" was the time of his last entry, or whether it runs on from the preceding wording as his intended time for his ultimate action. Likewise, while the phrase "IT IS THE MERCY" is obscure, most commentators have accepted that it signifies his relief that, at last, he is leaving an unbearable situation.[22] [23]
Tomalin and Hall conjecture that included in his last writings (not all reproduced above) were sentences that cover Crowhurst's internal debate over whether or not to leave the evidence of his actual, rather than faked, journey for posterity to see, and that he decided that the former was the better course; in the event, it was the "true" logbook that was left behind, and the "fake" one (if it ever existed) disappeared, along with the vessel's chronometer (its case was found empty), and Crowhurst himself. The disappearance of the vessel's chronometer (clock), apparently following Crowhurst's final diary entry, remains unexplained.
Crowhurst's last log entry was on 1 July 1969; it is assumed that he then either fell or stepped overboard and drowned. The state of the boat gave no indication that it had been overrun by a rogue wave, or that any accident had occurred which might have caused Crowhurst to fall overboard. From his apparent state of mind as indicated by his most recent logbook entries and philosophical statements, it seems likely that he deliberately decided to take his own life, possibly in an effort to become a "second generation cosmic being" according to his belief (and thereupon have no further need for his earthly body), although the possibility that he met with some sort of accident, intending to return to continue writing in his logbook, cannot be completely dismissed. Three logbooks (two navigational logs and a radio log) and a large mass of other papers were left on his boat to communicate his philosophical ideas and to reveal his actual navigational course during the voyage. The boat was found with the mizzen sail up. Although his biographers, Tomalin and Hall, discounted the possibility that some sort of food poisoning contributed to his mental deterioration, they acknowledged that there is insufficient evidence to rule it, or several other hypotheses, out. They also acknowledged that other hypotheses could be constructed, involving further deception—such as that Crowhurst had perhaps faked his own death, and somehow survived—but that these were extremely unlikely.
Clare Crowhurst, Donald's widow, strongly disputed the theory put forward by Tomalin and Hall regarding the circumstances of her husband's deception and demise, accusing them of mixing fiction with fact. In a letter to The Times published on 10 July 1970, she contended that there was no evidence that her husband had intended to write a fake logbook (none was in fact found), that his death could equally have been as the result of misadventure (such as an accident while climbing the mast, which a logbook entry showed that he intended to do before 30 June), and also that Tomalin believed that "all heroes are neurotics, and starting off with this theory, he has sought to prove it by the history of Donald from the earliest age until his death".[24] Nevertheless, later commentators have agreed with Tomalin and Hall's general conclusions, that Crowhurst's long sojourn alone at sea, coupled with his being placed in an impossible dilemma, led to his eventual psychological breakdown and resulting probable suicide.[25] [26]
Interviewed by journalist Chris Eakin for his 2009 book A Race Too Far, Crowhurst's now adult son Simon, when asked whether he believed that his father deliberately stepped off the boat to kill himself, said that on the balance of probabilities (and having studied the logbooks, now in his possession, many times), "it is hard to come to any other conclusion. ... [however] I don't think he did see it as killing himself. He saw it as a kind of transformation into another state of being. In that sense I don't see it as suicide either. He was thinking in a totally different realm by that stage."[27] And in his chapter dealing with Crowhurst, psychiatrist Edward M. Podvoll in his 1990 book "Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Psychosis" writes: "In an empty, drifting boat he [Crowhurst] left moment-to-moment journals and logs of his mental content and of the inexpressible states of mind through which he had passed. They describe almost a caricature of the psychotic predicament and the stage: leading to self-transformation. As well as logging his states of mind, often every few minutes, his notations also catch lightning flashes of his momentary awakenings from delusion. Naked between the sky and sea, hopelessly beyond his means, caught in a web of deception that had fooled the yachting world and the international press, and in fear of disgrace and dishonor, Crowhurst declared radio silence and "switched" from the natural world into a cosmic theater of his mind."[28]
Teignmouth Electron was found adrift and abandoned on 10 July 1969 by the RMV Picardy, at . News of Crowhurst's disappearance led to an air and sea search in the vicinity of the boat and its last estimated course. Examination of his recovered logbooks and papers revealed the attempt at deception, his mental breakdown and eventual presumed suicide. This was reported in the press at the end of July, creating a media sensation.
Before the deception was revealed, Robin Knox-Johnston donated his £5,000 winnings for fastest circumnavigation to Donald Crowhurst's widow and children. Nigel Tetley was awarded a consolation prize and built a new trimaran.[29]
Teignmouth council considered a proposal to exhibit the boat, charging visitors 2/6d per head, with profits to go to Crowhurst's wife and four children.[30]
Teignmouth Electron was later taken to Jamaica and was sold several times, being repurposed and refitted, first as a cruise boat in Montego Bay and later as a dive boat in the Cayman Islands, before being hauled out following a minor incident in 1983, but later damaged by a hurricane and never repaired. The boat still lies decaying on the southwest shore of Cayman Brac.[31]
If Crowhurst had finished the race, his fake coordinates would undoubtedly have been exposed and he would have been treated as a fraud, in addition to being in probable financial ruin. From his surviving logbooks, while it is possible that his eventual presumed suicide was a rational choice to avoid having to confront such a situation and/or to seek an "honourable" exit without disrespecting his family, it seems more likely that his final metaphysical ramblings, which subsequent analysts have interpreted as clear evidence of a classic psychotic state, led to his abandoning both his body and the world while under the conviction that he had no further need of them. Either way, near-contemporary accounts of his actions were not particularly sympathetic. Once his disappearance and deception were revealed, contemporary news accounts were far from flattering: in the 2006 documentary Deep Water a 1969 newspaper headline is shown which reads: "LONE SAILOR FAKED WORLD VOYAGE", while in the same documentary, a journalist of the day, Ted Hynds states: "No one likes to be conned... we were sharp newspapermen, and he conned us." The 1970 book The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by two Sunday Times journalists has been described as "largely unflattering".[32] However, over time the public narrative has changed somewhat, more recent commentators viewing Crowhurst as a well-intentioned but tragic figure who became caught up in a situation that was initially of his own making but that he could not ultimately control. James Marsh, the director of the film The Mercy, has said: "He made a pretty good go at sailing round the world. He stayed out in the ocean for the best part of seven months so all in all, he achieved much more than people ever thought he could, he just didn't achieve what his objective was. It was a case of over-reach, it was hubris and that is what caused the tragedy of his demise."
Jonathan Raban has written that
Tomalin and Hall wrote in 1970:
Others have commented that in the intervening time, lessons are there to be learned from Crowhurst's tragedy. Writing on his site "Sailing Calypso", Rick Page, author of "Get Real, Get Gone: How to Become a Modern Sea Gypsy and Sail Away Forever", says:
Crowhurst's participation in the race and apparent eventual fate have given rise to a number of works. As Jonathan Coe wrote in the New Statesman, "one of the explanations for its [Crowhurst's stories] resonance and longevity must be that it can be interpreted in so many different ways".[33]