The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Paperback)

by Nicholas Tomalin (Author), Ron Hall (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Makes fascinating sense of Crowhurst's madness." -- Sailing

"One of the most extraordinary stories about the sea ever to be published." -- The Washington Post

"The authors... have endeavored here to tell the whole story of Donald Crowhurst, and they have written a masterpiece." -- The New Yorker

"The sea drama of the century." -- Sir Francis Chichester

Product Description
In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set out from England in his untested trimaran, a competitor in the first singlehanded nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, the boat was found in mid-Atlantic with no one on board. Crowhurst's logs and diaries revealed that, although he had radioed messages from his supposed round-the-world course, he had in fact never left the Atlantic. This journalistic masterpiece reconstructs what happened: Crowhurst's growing distrust of his boat; his first decision to attempt one of the great hoaxes of our time; the lying radio transmissions; the ``triumphal'' return up the Atlantic as the elapsed-time race leader; and the fantastic ending. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is both a suspenseful narrative and a psychological casebook of human zeal and anguish.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: International Marine Publishing (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070650845
• ISBN-13: 978-0070650848
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #831,438 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sea-Tinged Madness, March 15, 2004

By	J. H. Minde "Can you keep up?" (Boca Raton, Florida and Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Paperback)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GET IT WHILE YOU CAN, March 19, 1999

By A Customer

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Man and His Ship, October 4, 2000

By	"kingsransom" (Como, Italy) - See all my reviews

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.