took his camera film, logbooks and emergency radio transmitter with him into the inflatable life raft, and then spent the best part of a day drifting anxiously in the Atlantic before an American rescue plane appeared in the late afternoon to pick him up. For Tetley, the race was over and his dream was shattered.
But for Crowhurst, too, this was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. It meant that he would be the clear winner of the prize for fastest voyage, and would come under intense media scrutiny. Already Rodney Hallworth was telegraphing him with news of the hero’s welcome that awaited him: the circling helicopters, the TV camera crews, the boatloads of newspaper reporters. His logbooks would soon be examined in the minutest detail – and he must have known, in his heart, that they would not pass muster. Unmasked as a fraud, how would he survive? Stanley Best would want his money back. Hallworth himself would be a laughing stock. His own marriage might even crumble under the strain …
Faced with the impossibility of his position – realizing that his audacious ‘Third Way’ had turned out to be just another cul-de-sac – Crowhurst simply gave up. Instead of racing, he began to coast. He drifted into the Doldrums and allowed the yacht to plod its way through those stagnant, seaweed-infested waters untended while he sat below deck, naked in the steaming heat, methodically trying to repair his broken radio transmitter – a task which involved rebuilding it from scratch, at some risk of severe electrical shocks and injuries from his soldering iron, and which took almost two weeks to complete. But at least this project kept him, for a while, from too much introspection. When it was finished, in the hot, lonely days that followed, Crowhurst blocked off all thoughts of the reception waiting for him at home, and retreated into a fantasy world of pseudo-philosophical speculation. Inspired by the only book he had thought to bring on the voyage with him (Einstein’s
I introduce this idea v-1 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 2,000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extra physical’ existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.
Continuing this theme, but descending further into fantasy, he started to believe that the human race was on the verge of an enormous change – that a chosen few, like him, would soon be mutating into ‘second generation cosmic beings’, who would exist outside the material world altogether, thinking and communicating in a way that was entirely abstract and ethereal, breaking through the boundaries of space, so that there would no longer be any need to exist in a physical, bodily relationship with other people at all. As the bearer of this momentous news he began to see himself as a personality of huge importance, a kind of Messiah, while remaining aware that, to the rest of the world, he would always appear much less than that: he was resigned to being viewed as a ‘Misfit’ – ‘the Misfit excluded from the system – the freedom to leave the system’. Finally, on the last day of his life, his scrawls became even more incoherent and abstract (‘there can only be one perfect beauty/that is the great beauty of truth’), and his sense of having sinned, having lied, having let everybody down, became overwhelming:
In his last writings, Crowhurst had also become obsessed with time – months of notating his real and fake positions on the earth’s surface having made him weary, perhaps, of thinking in terms of the space dimension any more. He had begun to preface every sentence with an exact note of the time at which he was writing it. And so we know that it was at some moment between 10:29 and 11:15 on 1 July 1969 that he wrote what were almost his final words:
– and then, after scribbling a few more tortured phrases, he took his chronometer, and the logbook containing his false record, climbed on to the stern of
We were not short of real heroes, in the summer of 1969. The news that Crowhurst’s yacht had been discovered in mid-ocean, and that he was missing believed dead, appeared in the Sunday newspapers on 13 July. Two weeks later, on the 27th, the front pages were dominated by him again, but this time, his logbooks had been read, his fraud unmasked, and all the stories were of his attempt to perpetrate a remarkable hoax on the
It was a summer of wonders, in other words. But strangely, the wonder of my erstwhile hero, Donald Crowhurst, and his tragic downfall, is the one which has stayed with me and haunted me most insistently over the years. Which is why I am fascinated, now, to see that other people – including Tacita Dean – have been haunted by it, too. Where does its resonance lie, I wonder? Crowhurst is hardly an admirable figure, after all. The men who emerge with the greatest stature from the Golden Globe saga are Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. The most heartbreaking story, in a way, is the story of Nigel Tetley – the ‘forgotten man’ of the race, who so nearly bagged that ?5,000 prize, and who quietly – without leaving any messages or any trail of newspaper headlines – committed suicide in a wood near Dover two years later.
So … why Donald Crowhurst? Or, to put it another way, what does it say about our own time, the time we are now living in, that we find it easier to identify, not with Robin Knox-Johnston – an almost comically stubborn, courageous, patriotic sportsman – but with a lesser figure entirely: a man who lied to himself and those around him, a little man in the throes of a desperate existential crisis, a tormented cheat?
Well, Poppy, I have no doubt that we will not find the answer to these questions during our visit to the show on Saturday. And I’m sorry to have written to you at such length on a subject which, although it has always been very important to me, can hardly strike the same chord with you, or perhaps with anyone of your generation. But I think we will have an interesting morning anyway, and I hope a good lunch afterwards. Temperatures are due to go down at the end of the week, though, so we’ll not be dining
Looking forward to seeing you again.
Your always loving Uncle,
Clive.
5
When I finished reading this letter for the first time, my left shoulder was numb from the weight of Poppy’s head leaning against it. I gently eased her off, and instinctively she shifted her weight, leaning over to the other side of her seat, away from me. I took her pillow and, carefully raising the back of her head, slid the pillow behind it, until she was ready to settle down upon it. Her mouth was half-open and there was a little bubble of saliva at one corner. I rearranged her blanket, making sure that both of her shoulders were covered, and tucked it in around the edges of her body. She gave a little sigh and slipped even deeper into untroubled sleep.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes and listened for a while to the steady drone of the aircraft engines. Most of the
