The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (6 page)

Well, the great day came at last. 31 October 1968. A drizzly, overcast and altogether dismal Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t a great throng at the quayside – nothing to compare with the crowds who had come to Plymouth to welcome Chichester the year before, that’s for sure – maybe about sixty or seventy of us. Our teacher had given the whole class permission to leave early if we wanted to go and watch, and of course most of the children had taken advantage of this, but wherever the others went, it wasn’t to wave goodbye to Donald Crowhurst on his round-the-world voyage. I was the only child of school age who made the effort, of that I’m fairly certain. My mother was with me, my father must still have been at work, and as for your mother – I don’t know where she was. You would have to ask her. I remember the mood among the crowd as being sceptical as much as it was celebratory. Crowhurst had acquired a fair number of detractors in Teignmouth over the past few weeks, and he didn’t do much to assuage them when he turned up for his grand departure in a beige V-neck sweater, complete with collar and tie. Hardly the outfit Moitessier would have chosen for his send-off, I couldn’t help thinking. And things got worse after that: Crowhurst set off at three o’clock exactly, but almost immediately got into difficulties, was unable to raise his sails and had to be towed back to shore. The crowd became even more derisive at this point, and many of them went home. My mother and I stayed to watch. The problem took nearly two hours to put right, by which time dusk was falling. Finally, he set sail again just before five: and this time it was for real. Three launches went with him – one of them containing his wife and four children, wrapped up tightly in the duffel coats that were considered essential fashion items for youngsters at the time. Despite the fact that Crowhurst was cutting such an unimpressive figure, I can remember envying them for having him as their father: being at the centre of attention, being made to feel so special. Their launch followed his yacht for about a mile, after which they waved goodbye to him and turned back. Crowhurst sailed on, into the distance and over the horizon, heading for months of solitude and danger. My mother took me by the hand and together we walked home, looking forward to warmth, tea and Thursday-night television.

What were the forces operating upon Donald Crowhurst during the next few months? What was it that made him act as he did?

Most of what I know about the Crowhurst story – apart from my early memory of seeing him off from the harbour, that is – comes from the excellent book written by two
Sunday Times
journalists, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, who had access to his logbooks and tape recordings in the months after he died at sea. They called their book
The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst
, and in it they quote something that he said into his portable tape recorder not long after leaving home: ‘The thing about single-handing is it puts a great deal of pressure on the man, it explores his weaknesses with a penetration that very few other occupations can manage.’

In Crowhurst’s case, there were the obvious pressures of living alone at sea – the cramped conditions, the constant noise, motion and dampness, the terrible privacy of his tiny cabin – but there was also pressure coming from other sources. Two other sources, to be precise. One was his press agent, Rodney Hallworth; the other was his sponsor, a local businessman called Stanley Best, who had financed the building of the trimaran and was now its owner, but in return had insisted upon a contract stipulating that, if anything went wrong with the voyage, Crowhurst would have to buy the boat back off him. This meant, in effect, that he had no option but to complete the circumnavigation: anything else would reduce him to bankruptcy.

The pressure coming from Hallworth was slightly more subtle, but no less insistent. Hallworth had spent the last few months building Crowhurst up into a hero. A man who was essentially little more than a ‘weekend sailor’ had now been chosen to take on, in the eyes of the newspaper-reading public, the role of the lone, audacious challenger – the embodiment of Middle English backbone and resilience, a plucky David battling it out with the yachting Goliaths. Hallworth had done (and continued to do) a brilliant if totally unscrupulous job. It’s hard not to see him as a prototype ‘spin doctor’, before that term came to be so prevalent. In any case, Crowhurst had certainly been made to feel that he could not let this public down, and he could not let his press agent down after all the work he had put in. There could be no turning back.

He was not long into his voyage, however, before something became all too painfully obvious: there could be no going forward either. It took little more than two weeks for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation to be revealed as a complete fantasy.

‘Racked by the growing awareness,’ he wrote on Friday, 15 November, ‘that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decision!’
Teignmouth Electron
’s electrics had failed, her hatches were leaking (the port forward float hatch had let in 120 gallons in five days), Crowhurst had left vital lengths of pipe behind in Teignmouth – making pumping out water almost impossible –his sails were chafing, there were screws constantly coming loose from his steering system, and as for the ‘computer’ which was supposed to self-steer the yacht and respond to its every motion with exquisite sensitivity – well, he had never even got around to designing or installing it. The cat’s cradles of multi-coloured wires running so visibly all over the cabin were connected to nothing at all. In other words,
Teignmouth Electron
was barely seaworthy – and yet this was the vessel in which he proposed to sail across the Southern Ocean, the most dangerous sea passage on earth! ‘With the boat in its present state,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘my chances of survival would not, I think, be better than 50-50.’ Most people would have said that even this assessment was optimistic.

So, there was no going forward, and no turning back. Deadlock. What, in these circumstances, could Donald Crowhurst possibly do?

Well, this is what he did: he hit upon a solution worthy, you might say, of our very own Prime Minister. For – just like Mr Blair, faced with the twin undesirables of free-market capitalism and state-heavy socialism – Donald Crowhurst decided that there was another possibility: a ‘Third Way’, no less. And it was, even his critics would have to admit, an extremely daring and ingenious one. He decided, in fact, that if he could not
make
a voyage around the world, single-handed and non-stop, he would do the next best thing – and
fake
one.

Remember, Poppy, that these were the 1960s. All the technologies which are now becoming available to us – the email, the mobile phones, the Global Positioning Systems – were yet to be invented. Once Donald Crowhurst set sail from Teignmouth harbour and drifted into the high seas he was about as alone as it’s possible to imagine a human being could be. His only means of communication with the wider world was a hopelessly unreliable radio system. For weeks, even months at a time, it was quite likely that he would not have the slightest contact with the rest of humanity. And during that time, it was equally likely that the rest of humanity would not have the slightest idea where he was to be found. The only record of his route would be the one that he himself made in his logbooks, in his own handwriting, taking positions using his own equipment. So, what was to stop him giving a completely false account of his voyage? He didn’t need to go round the three Capes at all. He could wander down the coast of Africa, then tack over to the west, hang about in the mid-Atlantic for a few months, and tuck in quietly behind the genuine racers after they had rounded Cape Horn and were heading back towards Great Britain. He would come in a decent fourth or fifth – in which case, no one would be interested in scrutinizing his logbooks too carefully – and honour would have been saved.

Keeping two entirely different sets of logbooks – one recording his real journey, one containing the fake records – would require considerable skill and ingenuity, but Crowhurst was capable of it. At any rate, he obviously found this idea preferable to the prospect of humiliation and bankruptcy. So he made up his mind, and the great deception began.

Back in Shaldon, I had not been giving Donald Crowhurst an enormous amount of thought. The ramshackle, undignified nature of his departure had somewhat shaken my faith in my hero. What’s more, he had barely been mentioned in any of the newspaper reports covering the first few weeks of the race. Several of the competitors had already dropped out and, of those that remained, it seemed to be Robin Knox-Johnston, Bernard Moitessier and Nigel Tetley who were capturing the journalists’ imaginations. I can remember getting very excited, though, one day in December when Crowhurst was suddenly back in the news – and, indeed, dominating that weekend’s sporting headlines – with a
Sunday Times
story reporting that he had claimed a world record for the furthest distance travelled by a single-handed yachtsman in one day – something in the region of 240 miles, I think. This, of course, would have been just after he had made his decision to start keeping false records of his progress.

After that, I kept following the race as best I could, cutting out the latest reports from the newspaper every Sunday and pasting them into the new scrapbook which my mother had bought me for this purpose from Teignmouth post office; but again, things began to go pretty quiet on the Crowhurst front. That spring was when I was selected as goalkeeper for the school football team, and an obsession with football began to supplant my obsession with yachts. Also, my mother and father bought their first caravan, and we took it on a trip to the New Forest during the Easter holidays. I remember being upset because
your
mother (who would have been almost ten) spent the whole week reading Mallory Towers stories and wouldn’t play with me. I remember The Move playing ‘Blackberry Way’ on
Top of the Pops
, and Peter Sarstedt with his interminable ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’. These are the things that survive, in my mind, from the early months of 1969. Family life, ordinary life. A life spent surrounded by other people.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, Donald Crowhurst was going slowly mad.

Chillingly, the encroaching madness was chronicled in his logbooks. I suppose with no human company whatsoever, and no opportunity to communicate with his wife and children by radio in case it gave his position away, it’s not surprising that he attempted to find solace during those long, lonely months in the silent communion between pen and paper. At first, alongside the details of his position – real and fake – he would just write rambling assessments of his current situation, reflections on the nautical life, or even the occasional poem. This one, for instance, was written after a bedraggled, shivering owl had perched for a while on Crowhurst’s rigging, prompting him to think that this might perhaps be the weakling of a migrating flight, ‘a misfit, in all probability destined like the spirit of many of his human counterparts to die alone and anonymously, unseen by any of his species’:

Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart;

Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight.

Save, save him some pity. But save the greater part

For him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit’s guiding light.

But later, as the horror of his predicament began to bear down on him more heavily, Crowhurst’s logbook entries became still more peculiar. Quite apart from the intense isolation to which he was subjecting himself – months of absolute solitude, with nothing but the rolling immensity of the ocean on every side to distract his eye – there would also be the dawning awareness that, if he carried this hoax off, he was going to have to live an enormous lie for the rest of his life. It would be one thing to tell lies to journalists, or even to saloon-bar yachting friends – thrilling tales of bravado on the high seas – the horrors of the Southern Ocean – the exhilaration of rounding Cape Horn – Crowhurst could spin these by the dozen – but what was he going to tell his wife, for instance? Could he lie next to her, night after night, knowing that her love and admiration for him were based, in part, on acts of heroism which he had shown himself far from capable of performing? Could he keep that truth hidden from her for the next forty or fifty years? I have written of the ‘terrible privacy’ of his cabin. Could Crowhurst’s lies survive the even more terrible privacy of family life?

And then, a few months later, towards the very end of the race, his situation grew even more desperate. He found himself destroyed, in effect, by the very success of his own fabrications and exaggerations. For when he had rejoined the race, and telegraphed his position to an astonished Rodney Hallworth (who had assumed – not having heard from Crowhurst for months – that he must probably be dead), the news of his supposed progress was radioed on to Nigel Tetley – now the only other yachtsman, apart from Robin Knox-Johnston, who was still in the running. (Moitessier, remarkably, had rounded Cape Horn in good time but had then turned his back on the race altogether, protesting that the cash prize and attendant publicity were an affront to his spiritual values.) Knox-Johnston, then, was a certainty to win the prize for first man home; but the problem was that he had set out months before the others, so he was not going to win the
£
5,000 prize for
fastest
circumnavigation. That now seemed to be a toss-up between Tetley and Crowhurst. Tetley was in the lead but Crowhurst – apparently – was gaining on him fast. Tetley decided that he could take no chances. He began to push his own trimaran (the ironically named
Victress
) harder and harder on the home stretch. But it had already suffered badly in the Southern Ocean, and it was coming apart. Late one night – while he was sleeping – the port bow came away and smashed a hole in the bow of the main hull. Water was pouring into the boat. He could immediately see that there was nothing for it but to send a Mayday message and abandon ship. He 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.