Customer Reviews

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (The Sailor's Classics #4)

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A true "Sailor's Classic." Reading this book it is impossible not to feel compassion for Donald Crowhurst who set out to win the Golden Globe challenge as the first man to nonstop circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat.

Crowhurst's early years are well-documented and give us a picture of a driven and compulsive man with some serious character flaws and an aversion to failure. Yet failure was a condition which dogged him throughout his life.

Crowhurst's decision to undertake the circumnavigation was both dramatic and ill-considered. With relatively little sailing experience and a lot of bluff he convinced his sponsors to fund the building of a revolutionary trimaran, the "Teignmouth Electron" equipped with all manner of electronic wizardry (Crowhurst had invented a sort of early GPS, the Navicator, in the mid-60's).

Unfortunately, the "Teignmouth Electron" was never properly completed, the race deadline having intervened, and Crowhurst sailed in a boat that was unfinished, poorly provisioned, and untested, having done miserably in what passed for sea trials.

Setting out on the latest possible day, Crowhurst found himself limping along at a ridiculously slow pace three weeks later. Plagued by equipment failures, the "Teignmouth Electron" was taking water due to design flaws, and had no real chance of completing the race. Having staked all on a successful outcome, the tension and isolation of his predicament attacked Crowhurst's mind.

In a fit of brilliant madness, Donald Crowhurst spent hours working out and logging false positions, sun sights, weather reports, and sailing notations to make it seem he was circling the earth while in fact he meandered pointlessly through the South Atlantic for months. He even secretly put in to port for repairs, a fact which was not discovered until after the race, when his "real" logs were reviewed by investigators.

Crowhurst's position reports and daily runs were diligently reported onshore; he was (falsely) credited with a record run of 243 miles in one day, a record he actually matched in reality once he decided to begin sailing in earnest again.

In the meantime, for all the world knew, Crowhurst was going to be the winner of the Golden Globe. As he turned toward home, the media hoopla grew wilder, and so did his delusions. His log entries degenerated into irrational philosophic and religious ramblings in which he began to believe himself God. In the end, tortured by his demons and consumed by guilt, Donald Crowhurst jumped into the sea, leaving his boat to sail on without him.

Brilliantly and sensitively written, without tendering excuses the authors Tomalin and Hall never lose sight of the essential humanity and frailty of their subject, as well as his consuming but undirected brilliance. Relying heavily on Crowhurst's logs, it is devastating to watch the man's mind unravel in the face of his aloneness.

Crowhurst's singlemindedness got him far, but it ultimately proved his undoing as he was unable to see any but the options he had limited himself to, the ultimate one being his own destruction. As Camus wrote, "In the end there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide." Crowhurst's answer is his legacy.

If you're interested in the complexities of the human heart and mind, this book is for you. It's superbly written, well paced and detailed without ever being tedious, and it gets extraordinarily close to Donald Crowhurst the man--an unusual and intelligent person who took a few wrong turns and kept going. There was so much at stake in his journey, and thinking it all through sensibly and accepting the consequences of poor preparation proved to be too difficult for him. In the end he became so distressed and confused that he lost sight of himself... He was never able to see that the truth about human life can't be computed or worked out like an equation--it is not susceptible to logical proofs, because the variables are manifold and not easily understood, and people are both more and less than logical... His need, clearly, was to go home and start again, but the penalty for doing so seemed too high to him. So, in refusing to accept a lesser defeat he suffered a far greater one. You can't help rooting for Donald, and you can't help feeling sorry for him.

Donald Crowhurst left England on October 31, 1968 to participate in a around-the-world, non-stop, solo sailing race. He was the next to last competitor to leave, just before the deadline. His boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was a trimaran.

He sailed at a disappointingly slow speed for a while and then reported a few amazingly fast days. Radio communications halted as he approached the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and nothing was heard from him for 111 days.

Then radio communications resumed as he re-entered the South Atlantic, around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. He was leading the race, and seemed assured of the trophy and the cash prize of £5,000. Then, on July 10, 1969, his boat was found drifting in the Atlantic, with no sign of Crowhurst on board.

This book is the sad detective story of this voyage. Crowhurst never left the Atlantic Ocean, let alone sail around the world. He left massive documentation which showed that he had cheated. Presumably, rather than complete his fraudulent voyage, he stepped into the ocean and left the evidence for people to examine.

Although these facts are known prior to even picking up the book, the author still comes to a very surprising conclusion. This is a book about what was going on in the mind of this sad man who seems to have gone mad. It is a fascinating and worthwhile read.

To echo an earlier reviewer, this is also my favourite book of all time. I tracked down a dog-eared and stained copy from the early 1970's, read it in just over a day then started back at the beginning.

The fascination of the book lies with Crowhurst. Here is a man who made a couple of wrong turns in life and just kept on going. A man who may, like many of us, have lived a long life had he not taken to the sea in a white elephant on a goose chase.

Tomalin and Hall had access to Crowhurst's logs and, through them, his thinking - however fuzzy that may be. From this, they constructed a well-written and gripping true-life novel.

FYI, The Teignmouth Electron now lies on a beach near a liquor store on the island of Cayman Brac.

This is an amazing book, carefully and wonderfully crafted by its authors. Crowhurst was an amazingly complicated man, driven by his intellect and confined by his shortcomings. The sea was the ultimate challenge for him to face his personal demons. Setting out on a voyage inspires a whole range of emotions and feelings for those who choose to embark on such a journey. It is a study in contrasts: hope & fear; order & chaos; skill & luck; triumph & defeat. Crowhurst experienced each of these at such a deep level. He was on the world stage, yet confined by his own machinations. He set out to conquer the last great solo feat and relied on his own abilities. This is the story of how that played out. Along with this text, I would also recommend reading Peter Nichol's "A Voyage For Madmen." It provides an excellent overview of the men involved in the first solo-around-the-world-race and each of their fates. I was unable to put either of these books down.

In 1968, a London newspaper, inspired by recent feats of daring in the world of sailing, sponsored a contest that offered a trophy and large cash prize to the first person to successfully complete a solo, non-stop and unaided circumnavigation of the globe in a sailboat. This book is the morbidly fascinating story of one of the participants, Donald Crowhurst, a talented amateur sailor and electronics entrepreneur, who announced that he would build the world's most technologically advanced boat, including a first-of-its-kind on-board computer of his own design, and take the prize.

While sailing buffs will like this book, the real meat of it is in the look at human nature that it provides. Like many entrepeneurs, Crowhurst was a bit of a blowhard who ended up departing just hours before the deadline in a boat that had never been tested and with which he was totally unfamiliar. Busy with race preparations, he never built, much less installed, the much-publicized computer. Feeling certain he could make up time as he became more familar with the craft, Crowhurst began to tell "little white lies" in his sporadic radio communications (remember, there was no GPS back then -- the yachtsmen were truly on their own).

As his problems with the boat mounted, Crowhurst conceived an elaborate hoax to make the world believe he was on track to complete the race, maybe even win it all. For months he sailed around the South Atlantic, alone and increasingly desperate, monitoring radio communications about weather and constructing a fake ship's log and fake documentation that showed his supposed progress day-by-day. In the spring of 1969, when Crowhurst reestablished radio contact with his agent and family back in Britain, he learned a shocking truth. He was the only yachtsman still in the race. With all the others out of it, he had become a national celebrity, and a huge welcome was planned.

At this point, the audacious hoax turned tragic. It appears from his journals that Crowhurst suffered a complete mental breakdown in the week that followed. It was too late to confess or backtrack on his claims without complete humiliation; yet as the winner and only man still in the race, he was sure to be exposed as a cheat. A few days after his last journal entry, Crowhurst's boat was found abandoned and drifting in the Atlantic by another ship. He had left all the evidence of his hoax neatly arranged for the world to find.

Crowhurst is an unsympathetic character to read about, but by the end it was hard not to feel compassion in spite of everything he did. This book is much more than a reconstruction of his mysterious death. The authors invite the reader to think about the deficiencies in the heart and soul that lead human beings to lie and scheme, in spite of the inevitable disastrous results. Why is it so hard for people to be honest? And why is it these very people who lie and scheme who often attempt great things, while the honest people sit on the sidelines?

Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-author of the historical novel "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis and Clark"

Towards the end, reading Crowhurst's last log entries, I worried that I myself might come unhinged.

This is not a sailing book -- it is a detective story about what pressure and isolation can do to the human mind. The authors do a wonderful job of assembling and presenting the evidence.

It doesn't matter at all that you know the complete story before you start (but if you don't want to know, simply skip the rest of this paragraph): A guy's marriage and business ventures are in shambles; he hoodwinks a town into building him a bad plywood trimaran for an around-the-world race; he gets scared and fakes everything by staying in the Atlantic and sailing in circles; he goes nuts and walks overboard.
An amazing study of the human mind under pressure -- I commend the authors.

This book will shake you up. The necessary antidote is "The Long Way" by Bernard Moitessier, a lyrical story about the same race by the man who was winning it, but was so raptured by the Deep that he forfeited the prize and just kept on sailing...

This is my all-time favorite sailing book. The story is gripping, the writing is extraordinary and the reader really comes to care about the characters. Although we know how the story ends, we feel the tension as Crowhurst is swept away by the forces he himself set into motion, a prisoner of pride and publicity. I am thrilled to see this book re-issued.

With the stubbornness of Ahab and reckless disregard for family and friends Donald Crowhurst signs his death warrant the moment he sets sail around the world. This well researched and superbly presented true story serves as a lesson for all of us: Only in the company of others can there be comfort, solace and truth. This is an unforgettable tale of how one man's failure to accomplish his dream led to insanity and self destruction. Yes, there is a hero , Mrs. Crowhurst. This is a very thoughtful, insightful book that leaves the reader wondering how he himself would have behaved under similar circumstances. Deserves highest rating.

This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving and literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst's story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, Deep Water, and was so captivated by it that I bought this and another account of the race (fellow competitor Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way (which, for the record, doesn't really touch on the Crowhurst story)).

The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business and assuring his family's future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed non-stop round-the-world yacht race.

Yes; quite.

Not only, he rationalises, will his entry publicise his firm's own brand of navigational equipment, but the £5000 prize will satisfy an ever more anxious major creditor. His plan to win, cobbled together from a standing start in six months, is to use an (at the time) almost unheard-of design: the trimaran, substantially of his own specification.

No matter that, a weekend yachtsman, Crowhurst has never been out of the Solent and has no realistic chance of beating the hoary old sea-dogs, renowned explorers and ex-navy officers already signed up for the race. No matter that preparing the boat involves raising further finance from the same major creditor who was already breathing down Crowhurst's neck (you do have to wonder what *he* was thinking, don't you). No matter that there is no time to have the boat properly finished, let alone thoroughly ocean-trialled.

And thereafter a perfect, inevitable, tragedy unfolds. Crowhurst is carried by events, some of his own making, to prosecute a plan it is plain, even to him, is madness. But events and circumstances spur him on. A BBC film crew is following him. A rather over-excited publicist inflates expectations. Before he knows it, Crowhurst is off the coast of Portugal in a slow, leaking, malfunctioning, poorly provisioned boat, fearing for his life if he should go on, and for his solvency and marriage should he not. He realises there his no hope of success, but is compellingly obliged to soldier on, stiff upper lip, and makes the hasty and fatal decision to exaggerate his progress. From that point on, fortune's wheel is set.

The ironies and twists of fate which thereafter play out and force events to their sorry conclusion are so cruel that one can hardly blame Crowhurst for reneging on a lifetime's atheism and laying his plight at the hands of a malicious (and game-playing) God. The saddest irony of all was the last: Crowhurst, never intending to do anything but come in a respectable but uninteresting last, announces (to add some drama!), that he is closing on the last remaining competitor who, in panic, redoubles his efforts to coax his own damaged, worn out and jury-rigged boat faster, causing it to break up entirely and sink - leaving Crowhurst to win (if he arrives home at all) by default - the one thing he simply cannot afford to do.

Tomalin and Hall's book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together and beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, and charts sympathetically and extensively Crowhurst's descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst's final plunge into the abyss, and his final burst of energy in recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful and somehow uplifting: here is a hero going out in true Nietzschean style with the psychology of the tragic poet: "Not so as to get rid of pity and terror ... but beyond pity and terror, to realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses the joy in destruction"

Olly Buxton