A Voyage For Madmen (2 page)

At the time of the Golden Globe race, I was a schoolboy in England. I knew nothing of sailboats and sailing. But a few years later I took a brief (disastrous, frightening, and wildly exciting) trip aboard an old wooden schooner and my life derailed and spun away seaward. I spent a decade and a half seriously afloat. I worked my way up from paint-scraping grunt to licensed professional yacht captain, delivering sailboats for owners in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic. Eventually my wife and I bought our own small wooden sailboat and moved aboard it full-time.

During those years I collected and read every book I could find about the sea and small-boat voyaging. The literature of the sea, I found, interested me as much as the sea itself. In time I came across a few books about the Golden Globe race and became fascinated – obsessed – by this story. I scoured newspaper libraries for articles about the race. I wondered what it was
like to be alone at sea for long stretches of time, and I wondered about those men. I decided I wanted to try single-handed sailing, to get a little taste of what they had experienced, alone and far out at sea.

I got it – more than I bargained for. After the breakup of my marriage, I started across the Atlantic, bound from England to the United States, alone in my 27-foot-long, 44-year-old wooden sailboat,
Toad
. It was an eventful, bittersweet voyage that ended with
Toad
sinking a week short of reaching the American shore.

Reading of the Golden Globe race as I learned to sail, the story became a core ingredient of my fascination with small boats and the sea. Crossing most of an ocean alone and having my boat founder beneath me only intensified my obsession. This book is the result of a deep investigation into that race, and my efforts to put myself aboard each of those boats and into the minds of those nine very different men.

A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN

I
N 1966-7, A 65-YEAR-OLD
E
NGLISHMAN
, Francis Chichester, sailed alone around the world. He stopped only once, in Australia.

A tall, thin, balding man with thick-lensed glasses, Chichester looked more like a prep school headmaster than an adventurer. He owned a small book and map shop in London. He was a vegetarian. But the urge to subject himself to extreme tests characterised his life. In his youth he made a pioneering flight in a small aircraft from England to Australia. In 1960, at the age of 59, he and four friends made a wager to race each other single-handedly in their four very different boats across the Atlantic. The course began at Plymouth's Eddystone Lighthouse and finished at the Ambrose light vessel off New York Harbour; the route between these two points was up to the racers. There were no other rules. The winner would receive half a crown.

Francis Chichester won the bet and the race. Sailing his 39-foot sloop
Gypsy Moth III
, the largest boat of the five, he made Ambrose in forty days. But winning was not enough; he thought he could do it faster. Two years later, racing nobody but himself, he crossed the Atlantic again, cutting more than six
days off his earlier voyage. Still he was not happy with his time; he believed a crossing of less than thirty days was possible.

The
Observer
had covered the 1960 race and found that it owned a story with major and growing public interest. Four years later, in 1964, the
Observer
sponsored a second single-handed transatlantic race (now famously known by its acronym, OSTAR). Ten additional competitors joined the original group. One of the newcomers, the Frenchman Eric Tabarly, trounced the fleet and took the honours in 27 days, 3 hours, 56 minutes. Chichester came second, 20 hours and 1 minute later. He beat his personal target time handily, but second was a new place for him, an ignominious position for a lone adventurer.

Tabarly was awarded the Legion of Honour and became a national hero in France: ‘Thanks to him it is the French flag that triumphs in the longest and most spectacular race on that ocean which the Anglo-Saxons consider as their special domain,' proclaimed the
Paris Jour
.

Single-handed racing hit the big time. National pride on both sides of the English Channel, from two nations famous for their sense of superiority, xenophobia, and rivalry, now focused on the third OSTAR, due to be held in 1968. At least forty sailors announced plans to compete. Many had new, experimental craft designed and built solely for the purpose of winning that one race. Eric Tabarly was building a new 67-foot trimaran, capable of tremendous speeds; at the time this was a radical reappraisal of the size of boat one person could handle. These boats, with their size and gear and engineering, became so expensive that they were beyond the reach of ordinary sailors. Yacht racing began to resemble motor racing, and the long, increasingly ugly hulls were plastered with commercial logos.

A few sailors felt this was veering too far from the notion of ‘sport'. They wrote disapproving letters to yachting magazines, dropped away, and left the field to younger sailors who were learning to navigate the tide rips and currents of commercial sponsorship.

Chichester decided not to compete with the pack in 1968. He would be up against younger men sailing larger boats, and the outcome must have been clear to him: he would be the game old campaigner who would manage a respectable placing halfway through the fleet. He quietly set off to do something else.

Sailing alone around the world was nothing new. The Nova Scotian-born American Joshua Slocum, a sailing ship master beached in his middle years by the steam age, was the first to do it, in 1895–8. He sailed from Gloucester, Massachusetts, west-about around the globe, against ferocious prevailing winds through the Strait of Magellan, north of Cape Horn, in a seemingly unhandy, fat-hulled, engineless old oystering sloop that he had rebuilt himself and christened
Spray
. The
Spray
's seagoing abilities, and what Slocum managed to do with her, have been wondered at and argued over by sailors ever since. Slocum (who couldn't swim and nearly drowned trying to set an anchor off the Uruguayan coast) stopped in many places and wrote a drily humorous yet thrilling book of his adventure,
Sailing Alone Around the World
. One hundred years later it is still the standard by which all other sailing narratives are gauged.

Eighteen other men had circumnavigated alone by the time Chichester set out in 1967, but his voyage caught the public imagination as perhaps none other since Slocum's. It was no pleasure cruise. His route was down the Atlantic, east-about around the bottom of the world, back up the Atlantic. Virtually all the east-to-west part of his circumnavigation took place in a sea not found on most atlases but infamously known to all sailors as the Southern Ocean: the windswept southerly wastes of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans between latitudes 40 and 60 degrees south, between the habitable world and the Antarctic, where storm-force westerly winds develop and drive huge seas around the globe, unimpeded by land except at one fearsome place, Cape Horn, the southernmost rock of the Andes, the scorpion-tail tip of South America.

Sailors have respectfully and fearfully labelled the latitudes of this global band of turbulent water the Roaring Forties, the
Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. The tea clippers from India and China and the square-rigged grain ships from Australia took this route back to Europe because, blown by the westerlies through the desolate seas of the Forties and Fifties, circling the planet at a short, high latitude, it was the fastest way around the world.

But it took sailors through the most isolated area of the globe, the emptiest expanse of ocean, the remotest place from land. To take this lonely shortcut, ships and sailors made a Faustian bargain on every trip. They exchanged sea miles for an almost certain hammering by the largest seas on Earth, the stormiest weather. Giant waves, sometimes over 100 feet high; sleet, hail, and snow; icebergs and fog were the conditions that could be expected in any season. Many ships disappeared in the Southern Ocean; many sailors were washed overboard, almost always unrecoverably.

In one place all these terrors were magnified and concentrated into a ship's single greatest trial. At 57 degrees south, Cape Horn forced ships to their farthest, coldest, stormiest south in order to pass into the Atlantic Ocean. Here, Southern Ocean winds and waters are funnelled through a relatively narrow gap, Drake Strait, the 600-mile-wide sea passage between Cape Horn and the Antarctic peninsula. The sea bottom shoals off the Horn, raising the already enormous waves, and williwaws of hurricane-force winds scream down off the Andean glaciers; wind, towering waves, and ferocious currents collide, turning Cape Horn waters into a maelstrom. For 400 years, until the construction of the Panama Canal, Cape Horn was a ship's most convenient exit from the Pacific, and many never made it out. It became known as the ‘graveyard of the sea'.

Once around the Horn, square-rig sailors proudly called themselves ‘Cape Horners'; and those whose fancy permitted it could then wear with pride a single gold ring through the left, portside, ear – the ear that had passed closest to the Horn while bound east out of the Pacific.

This was Chichester's route around the world. His voyage
was a savage intensification of the trials faced by a transatlantic single-hander. His stated purpose was to beat the times of the old sailing ships; alone he would race them in a small modern yacht. It was a simple concept, dangerous and daring, and Chichester significantly upped the ante by stopping only once, in Australia. Not only sailors, but the greater mass of the non-sailing public understood perfectly what was really going on here: it was an ordeal of the first magnitude. It was like climbing Everest alone.

For the British in particular, whose stature on the world stage had been severely reduced since the Churchillian glory of the Second World War, who had no plucky astronauts, whose government had recently been scandalised by an association between politicians and two prostitutes who had also been sharing their favours with the KGB, Chichester represented a longed-for but not forgotten ideal of heroic endeavour. British newspapers carried front-page photos of the deeply reefed
Gypsy Moth IV
battling gales off Cape Horn (taken by British warships and aircraft standing by, to Chichester's annoyance, to keep an eye on what had suddenly become a national interest). A quarter of a million people filled Plymouth Harbour on the May evening he sailed home. National television schedules were abandoned to cover the event live, and an entire nation watched hour after hour of
Gypsy Moth IV
sailing the last miles through a great fleet of ships and local boats that stretched from shore far out to sea, waiting through the long English twilight to see the lone sailor step ashore. (Television commentators, speculating on his first rocky steps ashore after months at sea, raised the unseemly possibility that the 65-year-old hero might fall flat on his face with the nation looking on. They mused on air about the probability that the welcoming dignitaries would grab him at the earliest moment and prop him up at all costs. In the end, Chichester acquitted himself well, stepping ashore as if getting out of a golf cart.)

Later, in a ceremony consciously echoing the knighting of Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I at Plymouth Hoe 400 years
earlier, Chichester stepped ashore at Greenwich, London, and knelt before Queen Elizabeth II, who dubbed him with a sword and granted him a knighthood. It was a masterstroke in a jaded era: every Briton knew the scene from school history books; here was myth made real on television, and an intense frisson of national pride swept across the land.

Chichester did not beat the clipper ships' record sailing times, but nobody cared. He was a national hero even before he was knighted by the queen. His book of his voyage,
Gypsy Moth Circles the World
, published that same year, was an instant and lasting best-seller. What he had done had thrilled the public and resurrected glory for the diminished island race.

Why had he done it? Chichester didn't give a hoot about beating the clipper ships – it was just an excuse to go. It was the glib answer he needed when people asked why. The comparison of passage times between a yacht and a clipper ship is the sort of dry, dull detail that might interest a naval architect, historian, maybe even a few sailors, but this wasn't what whipped millions to a national frenzy and drove a middle-aged man to risk his life. Chichester didn't care
why
. He only knew that he had to go.

In his book
The Ulysses Factor
(published just before the Golden Globe race), British author J. R. L. Anderson writes about the lone hero figure in society, the rare character who by his or her exploits stimulates powerful mass excitement. Homer's Ulysses is the classic archetype. Anderson believes this ‘Ulysses factor' – a powerful drive made up of imagination, self-discipline, selfishness, endurance, fear, courage, and perhaps most of all, social instability – is a genetic instinct in all of us, but dormant in most. Yet we respond strongly and vicariously to the evidence of it in the few whom this instinct drives to unusual endeavours.

‘The Devil drives,' was Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton's inadequate answer to why he persisted in going off to Africa and Asia, enduring great hardship, disfiguring pain (a spear through his face), and a constant threat of violent death when he could have stayed home in England and risen to prominence in any number of ways. He felt the urge to be off, to test himself to the
brink of tolerance, and he was unable to resist. Brave, indomitable, elusive and unrestrainable; women found him irresistible, men admired him, the public hungrily consumed every account of his exploits. The lone hero of myth and stories from all ages and cultures, described by Joseph Campbell in his book
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
, is a character driven by the Ulysses factor. So is the movie cowboy: a romantic, socially unstable character who appears at the fringes of town, throwing men and women into turmoil before satisfying an underlying social need and then disappearing. His motives are entirely personal; he acts selfishly in his own interest, but his actions have a profound effect on the society around him. Polar explorers Peary, Scott, and Amundsen; Charles Lindbergh, who made the first transatlantic solo flights, mountain climbers and single-handed sailors – they are all archetypes of the lone hero.