Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

Donald Crowhurst

Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from the Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.

Early life

Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British Raj India. His mother was a school teacher and his father worked on the India railway. After India gained independence, his family moved back to England; however, money saved working in India was worth considerably less in England, and the family found life in their new home very difficult.

Due to family financial problems, Donald was forced to leave school early and start a 5-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield; he later received a commission as a pilot. Later he was asked to leave the Royal Air Force; later still, he joined the British Army. After leaving the Army due to a disciplinary incident, he eventually moved to Bridgwater and started a business called Electron Utilisation Ltd. He was active in his local community as a member of the Liberal Party and in 1967 was elected to represent the Central Ward of Bridgwater Town Council.

Business ventures

Crowhurst, a weekend sailor, designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator. This device allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons with a handheld device. 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 leveraged both his business and home against Best's continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation.

The Golden Globe

The Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney. The considerable publicity to which his achievement gave rise 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 they had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor. They solved this by declaring the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. This was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability prior to entry. Entrants were required to start between June 1 and October 31, in order to pass through the Southern Ocean in summer. 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 a considerable sum then, equivalent to £58,100 in 2005.

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 Daily Express, as his public relations officer.

Crowhurst's boat and preparations

The boat Crowhurst built for the trip, Teignmouth Electron, was a trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver. At the time, this was an unproven type of sailing 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; however, if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, in contrast to monohulls, and this would typically be a fatal disaster for the boat's crew.

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 boat horizontal, 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; he planned to complete them while underway. Also, many of his spares and supplies were left behind in the confusion of the final preparations. On top of it all, Crowhurst had never sailed on a trimaran before taking delivery of his boat several weeks before the beginning of the race.

Departure and deception

Crowhurst left from Teignmouth, Devon, on the last day permitted by the rules: 31 October 1968. He encountered immediate problems with his boat and equipment, and in the first few weeks was making less than half of his planned speed. According to his logs, he gave himself only 50/50 odds of surviving the trip, assuming that he was able to complete some of the safety equipment before reaching the dangerous Southern Ocean. Crowhurst was thusly faced with the choice of either quitting the race and facing financial ruin and humiliation, or continuing to an almost certain death in his unsafe boat. Over the course of November and December 1968, the hopelessness of his situation pushed him into an elaborate deception. He planned 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 scrutiny of the winner.

Since leaving, Crowhurst had been deliberately ambiguous in his radio report of his location. Starting on 6 December 1968, he continued reporting further vague but false positions and possibly fabricating a log book; rather than continuing to the Southern Ocean, he sailed erratically in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and stopped once in South America (in violation of the rules) to make repairs to his boat. 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 race, though Francis Chichester publicly expressed doubts about the plausibility of Crowhurst's progress.

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 recircle the globe. 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 possibly still able to beat Knox-Johnston's time (due to his later starting date). In reality, Tetley was far in the lead, having long ago passed within of Crowhurst's hiding place; but believing himself to be running neck-and neck with Crowhurst, Tetley pushed his failing boat (also a Piver trimaran) to the 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 log books would be closely examined by experienced sailors, including Chichester, and the deception in all probability would be exposed. It is also likely that he felt guilty about wrecking 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 ended radio transmissions on 29 June. The last log book entry is dated July 1. Teignmouth Electron was found adrift, unoccupied, on 10 July.

Mental breakdown and death

Crowhurst's behavior as recorded in his logs indicates a complex and conflicted psychological state. His commitment to faking the trip seemed incomplete and self-defeating, as he reported unrealistically fast progress that was sure to arouse suspicion. By contrast, he spent many hours meticulously constructing false log entries, often more difficult to complete than real entries, due to the celestial navigation research required.

The last several weeks of his log entries, once he was facing a real possibility of winning the prize, showed increasing irrationality. In the end, his writings during the voyage - poems, quotations, real and fake log entries, and random thoughts - amounted to more than 25,000 words. The log books include an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from his impossible situation. The number 243 shows up several times in these writings: he originally planned to finish the trip in 243 days, recorded a false distance of in one day's sailing (which if valid would have been a record day's run at the time), and may have ended his life on the 243rd day (1 July) of his voyage.

His last log entry was on 1 July 1969; it is assumed that he then jumped 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. He may have taken with him a single deceptive log book and the ship's clock. Three log books (two navigational logs and a radio log) and a large mass of other papers were left on his boat in order to communicate his philosophical ideas and to reveal his actual navigational course during the voyage.

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 out.

Aftermath

Teignmouth Electron was found adrift and abandoned on July 10, 1969. 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 suicide. This was reported in the press at the end of July, creating a media sensation.

Robin Knox-Johnston donated his winnings to Donald Crowhurst's widow and children. Nigel Tetley was awarded a consolation prize and built a new trimaran, but committed suicide (for unknown reasons) in 1972.

Teignmouth Electron was later taken to Jamaica and was sold multiple times, most recently in 2007, to American artist Michael Jones McKean. The boat still lies in the dunes on the southwest shore of Cayman Brac.

Literary and dramatic treatment

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (The Sailor's Classics) (Hardcover) by Nicholas Tomalin (Author), Ron Hall (Author). This 1970 book (updated in 1995) is widely considered to be the definitive account of the Crowhurst tragedy.

One episode of the 1979-80 BBC drama Shoestring had the title character involved in a plot that bore a striking resemblance to the Crowhurst story. "The Link-up" first aired in November 1979 features Jimmie Colefax who is trying to sail around the world in a home-made boat. An amateur radio ham discovers that all his broadcasts actually come from a shed in Bristol.

In 1986, the film Race of the Century (Russian: Гонка века, "Gonka veka"), based on the Crowhurst affair, was released in the Soviet Union.

In 1982, the French film Les quarantièmes rugissants (productor Jacques Perrin) was based on Crowhurst's story

American author Robert Stone based his critically acclaimed 1992 novel Outerbridge Reach on the Crowhurst tragedy.

British artist Tacita Dean created two video works entitled Disappearance at Sea, partly inspired by the story of Donald Crowhurst. She has also written about Teignmouth Electron, journeying to Cayman Brac to visit the wreck of the boat.

Crowhurst's story was the inspiration for the 1999 2-person play "Daniel Pelican" written by and starring Chris Van Strander. In the piece, the British Crowhurst becomes Daniel Pelican, from Maine, in the USA, and enters a round-the-world yacht race on the heels of "Lindy Fever" following Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. The site-specific play ran Off-Off-Broadway at the historic Frying Pan Lightship, docked in New York harbor.

An opera based on Crowhurst, Ravenshead, was written and performed by operatic tenor Rinde Eckert in 1998. Eckert transforms Crowhurst into "Richard Ravenshead" and his ship from the Electron to the Photon. The solo performance follows Ravenshead from the launch of the ship in England to his insanity and suicide in the Atlantic.

Crowhurst's story features in "Jet Lag", a 2000 play written by Jessica Chalmers and produced by Builders Association. The story of the doomed sea voyage is interwoven with the alleged story of Sarah Krassnoff, who in 1971 flew 167 times between New York City and Amsterdam, trying to keep her grandson from being returned to his father's custody, before collapsing and dying of "jetlag".

UK based independent Darlow Smithson Productions produced a 2006 documentary film for Film Four based on the affair, called Deep Water. The film reconstructs Crowhurst's voyage from his own audio tapes and cine film, interwoven with archive footage and interviews with his widow, one of his sons, and others who knew him and were connected with his adventure. It was given a limited cinema release in the UK in 2006, and is now available on DVD. The DVD extras include an "interactive" reconstruction of the cabin of the Teignmouth Electron, and some scanned pages from Crowhurst's log books. In 2007, the documentary was released theatrically in the United States. The film was broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 5th November 2007 and in the USA as part of the Public Broadcasting Service's "Independent Lens" series on 15th June 2008.

The rock band Stiltskin performed a song called "Horse" on their album The Mind's Eye, which examined the affair from Crowhurst's perspective.

The band "Super U" have put a demo of a song "Places I've been to are known" online. The song reflects on the Donald Crowhurst story, in the context of the songwriter's experience of the sea.

Matt Elliott, under the "band" name Third Eye Foundation, included an instrumental song named "Donald Crowhurst" on the album Ghost.

A 1976 Canadian production named "Horse Latitudes", starring Gordon Pinsent is based on Crowhurst's story.

British Band iLiKETRAiNS wrote a song called "The Deception", which appears on their album Elegies to Lessons Learnt, based upon Donald Crowhurst's story.

The 1987 book The Wake of the Electron: A Narrative Poem by Donald Finkel reconstructs Crowhurst's descent into madness during the race. Finkel incorporates many lines from Crowhurst's journal into his poetry.

The San Francisco band Rube Waddell performed a song called "The Cosmic Integral" on their 2001 album Bound for the Gates of Hell which describes Crowhurst's journey.

References

Tomalin, Nicholas, and Ron Hall (2003). The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. ISBN 0-07-141429-0
Harris, John (1981). "Teignmouth Electron: A tragedy of loneliness" in Without a Trace. Atheneum. ISBN 0-689-11120-7