The Strange Last Voyage Of Donald Crowhurst (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
Insanity in Lonely Places - The Dark Side of a Sailor's MindThe Teignmouth Electron now lies abandoned, rotting on the beach near the Kidco Dock on the southwest shore of Cayman Brac. It was found ghosting alone in the North Atlantic near the end of the 1968 Golden Globe nonstop singlehanded sailboat race around the world. Its sole inhabitant for 243 days, captain Donald Crowhurst, was never found.In the era before GPS and global satellite tracking, sailors' logbooks were relied upon for verification of routes travelled. Crowhurst, the dark horse darling of Teignmouth England, had two sets of logs - one for race officials carefully calculating his route around the world, and another showing his actual route, sailing in circles for months in remote areas of the Atlantic ocean. Thousands upon thousands of words in Crowhurst's personal journals were also found, documenting his slow spiral into insanity during the race.To most of the public Donald Crowhurst was a successful businessman, loud and brash, highly intelligent and outwardly confident in all of his ventures. He had a wife and family in England and big plans. Privately, however, his business was failing. He was very familiar with Sir Francis Chichester and his world famous singlehanded trip around the world on Gypsy Moth IV (making one stop in Australia), and when the 1968 Golden Globe race was proposed, Crowhurst saw an opportunity. The singlehanded nonstop race around the world offered two prizes - one for the first to finish, and one for the fastest elapsed time. Since the beginning of the race was open for several months, two winners were possible. If Crowhurst could take one of the two prizes, probably the one for fastest elapsed time, the prize money could go towards propping up his business financially and the publicity, he was convinced, would make it a success. The only problem was that Crowhurst was just a marginal weekend sailor with no boat and no backing.Through sheer force of will Crowhurst raced against the start deadline of the Golden Globe and somehow landed a sponsor. He helped design - in 1968 - a futuristic trimaran with an electronic "computer" that he was sure would break all records. The boat, christened the Teignmouth Electron, was built on a crash schedule and launched literally at the last minute without being fully tested and without Crowhurst's newly designed electronics in place. With his trademark confidence he said that he would finish it at sea.Once the boat was in the water Crowhurst, sailing alone, discovered that the promised speed of the trimaran, a revolutionary design in the late 1960's, did not materialize. The hastily designed vessel performed poorly under Crowhurst's inexperienced hand, but he would not - or could not - admit defeat. If he quit the race he faced humiliation and financial ruin. Halfway down the Atlantic heading towards the tip of Africa he began plotting two courses. One course was his actual position, and the other was where he should be if he stayed on schedule. He radioed in cryptic reports, even claiming a new 24 hour sailing speed record. As he neared the southern ocean he claimed that he was having generator problems and would have to maintain radio silence to conserve his batteries. He then went silent for several months. His planned hoax seemed to be to sneak back into the rear of the field as it rounded the tip of South America and headed home to England. Crowhurst gave up hope of finishing in one of the two first place positions, but he believed that if he at least finished his race log books would not receive the scrutiny of the winners and he would gain the credibility to keep his creditors at bay and allow him to build a better boat for the next race. Meanwhile he made an illicit stop in a small town on the coast of Argentina for much needed supplies.Robin Knox-Johnston was the first to finish the race in April 1969. Then problems for Crowhurst began mounting as other competitors began dropping out. Bernard Moitessier was having such a good time in the Roaring Forties that he decided to drop out and circle the globe again. He eventually did 45,000 miles solo and ended up in Tahiti. Crowhurst slipped in behind Nigel Tetley as he headed north from Cape Horn, the only other boat still in the race at this point, and re-established radio contact. Tetley's boat was failing but he pushed it to the breaking point as he neared the finish believing that Crowhurst was tight on his heels. Tetley drove his boat too hard and ended up having to abandon ship on May 30, leaving Crowhurst as the only sailor left in the race and the guaranteed winner of the prize for time elapsed. All he had to do now was finish.Crowhurst was greatly conflicted about causing the end of Tetley's boat and the enormity of his hoax finally hit him. If he finished now, in first place for the elapsed time portion of the race, his logbooks would be heavily scrutinized. Although he had taken great pains to "reverse engineer" his celestial navigation fixes around the world, an extremely difficult process in itself, he realized that he would probably be found out and completely ruined. His sanity finally left him and he spent untold hours writing a religious and philosophical treatise of over 25,000 words that spiraled into incoherence and detailed his ultimate mental breakdown. He ceased radio communications again on June 29, 1969, made his last log entry on July 1, and the Teignmouth Electron was found abandoned on July 10th. It is believed Crowhurst jumped off the boat and drowned, taking with him a last log book and the ship's clock. Later as his death became apparent, sole finisher Robin Knox-Johnston donated his default winnings for the elapsed time portion of the race to Crowhurst's now destitute widow and family."The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" is fascinating reading. A true sailor's classic, it reveals the dark side of the mind of Crowhurst and the psychology of a mind disintegrating into madness. It reprints and analyzes Crowhurst's last writings in great detail, and even reprints his "Last Letter" to his widow Clare, with her permission, written before the voyage and to be opened only in the event of his being lost at sea. Several sections of photographs and charts are welcome additions to the text. This excellent, gripping book can be read as an intriguing companion piece to Sir Francis Chichester's "Gypsy Moth Circles the World," which I reviewed last year. Authors Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall handle a difficult subject with restraint, respect, and dignity. Highly recommended.INTERESTING NOTE: The Teignmouth Electron can be located on Google Earth to this day at the coordinates 19°41'10.40"N 79°52'37.83"W.
I picked this book up at Goodwill in town. I am a huge fan of circumnavigations in small sailing vessels. This is one book in a series called "Sailor's Classics."As I paged through the book that night, I became fascinated with it. Then, I read it cover to cover over the next week. The authors did a superb job of relating the facts, history, and drama of this important segment of small boat sailing.The account records Donald Crowhurst's attempt to circumnavigate in a sailing boat he designed. The setting takes place in the first solo non-stop, circumnavigation race of 1967 . His story is gripping, not for the sailing, but for the moral dilemma he faced on his journey. The authors do a great job creating an emotional and compelling account.From a Judeo-Christian worldview, life stories of moral dilemmas challenge our faith system. This man left behind all the evidence convicting him of his moral crime. We have insights into his own moral network left to us in his own writing. The authors' tell the story as accurately as possible, not in a judgmental way, but to bring closure to a disturbing event in sailing history.From my perspective, Donald Crowhurst may serve as an example of a man possessed by a demon in his final days. The writings he left behind gives plenty of evidence to suggest such a conclusion, thought the authors never hint at this. But, if a person were to read the gospels of demon activity and then read this account of Donald Crowhurst, then one might not be very far off from such a point. (NOTE: I am not accusing or slandering a dead man. I am not judging his soul. I am making an observation.)I have a dream to sail. I live in Iowa with nar a body of water near me. The romance of sailing draws on my heart strings. Living histories, such as this book, makes me want to sail and to stay home at the same time. The loneliness and isolation faced by sailors would appear nearly as hazardous as the storms or floating debri.
What do You think about The Strange Last Voyage Of Donald Crowhurst (2003)?
As the author of this book is a newspaper writer, I was a bit surprised at how difficult I found it to concentrate on it. British journalists are known for their vivid, not to say lurid, style (unless you're delving into the Financial Times or similar) and yet I found myself skim-reading large passages. Another reviewer discribes the text as "turgid", and I'll go along with that! The first section, describing Crowhurst's "Mr Toad" type personality as a child laid the groundwork for the coming disaster; the similarities between the young Crowhurst and Kenneth Grahame's young son (the original Toad, who firmly believed he could do anything, until he came a cropper) were striking. However, it takes almost 80 pages to get to the race itself, and even then there are pages and pages and pages of technical detail on boats, their building and maintenance, and the electronic bits and pieces. If you're a seasoned sailor, you'll probably find this fascinating. If you're into engineering, also. But if like me you don't even know how to swim, it's a bit confusing and I wondered why they felt constrained to include it all. Then I realised that they really didn't have much to work with, beyond what others said about Crowhurst and the very sparse records of his logbooks, private papers and correspondence. The author had to pad the book out with something, and by providing all those technical details the reader may feel they have some superior knowledge that the hapless Crowhurst either lacked or ignored. I could have done without quite so much detail, however, or perhaps it could have been placed in an appendix for those interested.There is, as others have mentioned, a great deal of conjecture regarding Crowhurst's actions and motivations, which goes to feed the mystery angle. The author describes Clare Crowhurst as "heroic" in the very beginning of the book, but over a hundred pages in, I failed to see much heroism aside from allowing her husband to make a venture she knew he was ill-prepared for and from which he might not (and in the end did not) return. If that's heroism, well then she was heroic; however, after many years of marriage and several failed business ventures on Crowhurst's dossier, I feel certain (being a wife myself) that she probably knew his weaknesses and tendency to evade the reality of his own limitations. She describes the last night they spent together, when she hinted that maybe he should give up. Only she didn't--she asked him if he thought he could give up having reached that point. Hardly a way to make a man back out after involving so much time, money and publicity. Not much heroism there, to my mind. Having known various "adventurers" personally, of the type who seek funding to raise seventeenth-century Spanish wrecks etc, I found that aspect of the story interesting and realistic--not so much a "descent" into madness as the natural course when a self-hypnotised spellbinder finds the trap of real life inevitably closing on him. The madness was already there, waiting to manifest itself. It's unfortunate that no one intervened before Mr Crowhurst, in the words of the old saying, acquired enough rope to hang himself.
—Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)
I loved this book! I worked on a one-man opera years ago based on this story--the opera was awesome, BTW. But I've never read this book. I was reminded of it after reading _The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim_, which was a book I also enjoyed. What a feat of investigation the authors undertook, and they really hit it out of the park with the writing. Page-turner.I was really struck by their compassion for Crowhurst. They say it themselves, but it's true--this stoery could very easily been "Man overcomes all odd" if Crowhurst had succeeded. I highly recommend this book.I'm going to watch _Deep Water_ tomorrow.
—Christine
Strange and so inevitably sad. It's hard to decide whether Crowhurst was at least a little mad from the beginning or descended into madness once his situation became clear to him. Broadly sympathetic; you feel like you get to know the man as well as one could, and his backers don't exactly come out of it covered in glory. In the end one feels for his family; the recollection of one of his sons about dreaming he saw his father in his room, while in reality his father was thousands of miles away losing his mind, is terrible. Recommend the film 'Deep Water' as a companion to this.
—Jwalth
