A Voyage For Madmen (3 page)

Part of the attraction of these loners is that they invariably look and sound normal: they look like us. They're usually modest when asked how they survived their terrible ordeals, they readily admit their fear, and in so doing they fool the rest of us into thinking that they are like us – or more accurately, that we could be like them. They become our idealised selves, and so they take us with them, in a way, when they climb Mount Everest or sail around Cape Horn.

But they can't answer the question why. They can't make people who couldn't do what they do understand. When asked, before he disappeared on Everest, why he wanted to climb the mountain, George Mallory gave what is still perhaps the best answer, as simple as the solution to a Zen koan: ‘Because it's there,' he said.

The mass adulation provoked by Chichester's voyage, the inspiration he provided the men who sailed in the Golden Globe race, and the fervent efforts of those who readily aided them in risking their lives are clearly responses to this Ulysses factor. Sailors and would-be hero-adventurers everywhere saw what Chichester had reaped in spades – fame and money – and they were aware of what still remained to be accomplished.

In March 1967, while Chichester was still two months from home, Robin Knox-Johnston, a 28-year-old English merchant marine officer, was on leave at his parents' home in Downe, Kent, before joining the merchant ship
Kenya
as its first officer. One morning, his father read of OSTAR victor Eric Tabarly's new trimaran in a newspaper. Over breakfast they speculated about the Frenchman's plans. Knox-Johnston didn't think the boat would be a good choice for the transatlantic. His father suggested Tabarly might be thinking of another circumnavigation.

‘I wonder if he is going to try and beat Chichester's time, or perhaps even go round nonstop,' said Knox-Johnston senior. ‘That's about all there's left to do now, isn't it?'

After his father left for work, Robin Knox-Johnston sat at the kitchen table, stirring his coffee and pondering what had just been said. Sooner or later, someone was bound to do exactly that: sail around the world alone, nonstop. Tabarly could pull it off, but the idea of his winning another big sailing prize rankled. ‘Frenchman Supreme on the Anglo-Saxon Ocean' the French papers had proclaimed when Tabarly had won the OSTAR, and it had infuriated the young Englishman. ‘By rights,' he thought, ‘a Briton should do it first.'

By rights?
In England at that moment, young people were marching against the bomb; in the United States, they were protesting against the Vietnam War. It was the sixties, a time when young people were turning, virulently and often violently, against the establishment. Not Robin Knox-Johnston. He was the same age as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but he was an unfashionable, almost eccentrically square young man from another era. His heroes were Drake and Frobisher, Elizabethan England's famous sea-dog privateers, whose exploits form venerated chunks of the history syllabus absorbed by English schoolchildren, whose land-grabbing, pillaging, and slaughter were characterised by an imperious and peculiarly English sense of God-given superiority. This tradition, this assumption of the English moral right to trail-blaze
and conquer, characterised Captain Robert Scott's sense of rightful claim to the South Pole. He and all England were affronted by the sudden arrival in the Antarctic of Roald Amundsen and his crack polar crew who, in 1912, beat Scott to the Pole by a month, dogsledding there and back like extreme excursionists, without a man lost. Amundsen, to England's horror and revulsion, had eaten his dogs one by one en route back – he had been pulled to the Pole by his rations; brilliant perhaps, but he was a cold, ruthless, foreign rotter. Scott and his team, burdened by their romantic notions of man-hauling their sleds, all died on the return from the Pole. An epic bungler, Scott was afterwards portrayed to generations of schoolchildren in England as the apotheosis of the hero. In England, he won by dying nobly, beaten by the unscrupulous, dog-eating, trespassing Norwegian.
Dieu et mon droit
– ‘God and my right' – is the motto on the royal arms of England.
By rights
.

At 17 Knox-Johnston flunked the exams for the Royal Navy, so he apprenticed himself to the British India Steam Navigation Company and joined the merchant service instead. He learned knots and splices and marlinspike seamanship unchanged from the time of Nelson. He learned to navigate by sextant, as had Captains Cook and Bligh. He acquired his sailorly arts aboard ships running between London and ports in East Africa, India, and the Persian Gulf – ports that were still outposts of the British Empire, in spirit if no longer in fact. This was the classic POSH route taken by the Empire builders of the British raj, so called because the favoured, more expensive cabins were on the shaded side of the ship:
port
side going
out, starboard
coming
home
. But probably no place the young seaman sailed to preserved this vanishing world as authentically as aboard the insular, tradition-steeped ships of the British Merchant Marine, which produced sailors and officers as hidebound in their ways as Old Etonians. It was a tough, exacting, nineteenth-century British seaman's training.

While stationed in Bombay, Knox-Johnston and a fellow officer decided to commission a local Indian boatyard to build them a yacht. They sent away to a design office in England for
the plans of a sleek ketch they had seen in a yachting magazine, but what came back in the mail was a much older, slower design, a tubby, bluff-bowed double-ender, drawn by American yacht designer William Atkin in 1924 for
Motor Boat
magazine. Based on a type of Norwegian lifeboat known as a
red-ningskoite
, it was an indisputably seaworthy shape of hull, but a long way from a slick design in a modern yachting magazine. However, time being short, and the plans in hand appearing sturdy and seaworthy, Knox-Johnston and his partner went ahead with the older design.

The Indian carpenters used adzes, axes, and hand-powered bow drills, the same tools and techniques used to build a dhow. The boat was entirely and massively built (overbuilt, modern yacht designers and builders would say) of Indian teak. Her construction and finish were more like a tugboat's than a yacht's. She was christened
Suhaili
, the name given to a southeasterly wind in the Arabian Gulf, and at her launch a coconut was cracked open on her bow while the men who built her chanted ancient blessings.

A third officer had bought a share in the boat a-building, but life interrupted their sailing plans, as always seems to happen around boats. Knox-Johnston's two partners left the project, and his marriage fell apart, perhaps a casualty of the long absences from home that are a fact of the professional seaman's life. Yet through these upheavals he managed to hold on to his new boat. He bought out his ex-partners, and in 1966 he sailed
Suhaili
from India to South Africa in stages with his brother and another merchant officer, all three working at jobs ashore during stops. Then, in November of that year, they set sail for England. Their final passage was a nonstop, 8,000-mile, seventy-four-day voyage from Cape Town to London.

Suhaili
had proved herself seaworthy, but as a boat in which to race alone, nonstop, around the world – possibly against Tabarly's 67-foot trimaran – Knox-Johnston thought she was all wrong. Anybody would have agreed with him.

Could he possibly do it? He began imagining what sort of
boat he would need for a voyage of seven to ten months at sea. He wondered too if he could stand being alone all that time without anyone to talk to. A sociable man from a happy middle-class family, with brothers and a sister, the longest he had ever been on his own was twenty-four hours. Maybe he'd go mad. Such a voyage, he knew, would resemble the most brutal prison sentence: solitary confinement with the hardest of labour and the constant possibility of death by drowning. But he soon realised he didn't care. He wanted to go.

The decision was almost instantaneous. He saw the shape of the voyage, and he wanted to do it. For him, and for the others who would come to the same decision, there was no deliberation, no deeper rationale or reason. The process was identical in each case: once the idea was grasped, the decision was made. Let others reason why.

In early April 1967, while Francis Chichester was still far down in the South Atlantic, seven weeks from home, Robin Knox-Johnston put
Suhaili
up for sale and went to see Colin Mudie, a preeminent English yacht designer, to talk about a boat for a round-the-world voyage. Mudie was enthusiatic and began sketching a boat as they talked.

Chichester's voyage, with its single stop, provoked the same musings in others. A gauntlet had been thrown down to adventurous dreamers everywhere, and a zeitgeist fantasy of a nonstop solo circumnavigation spread through the sailing world. Many people talked about it throughout 1967 – at home, in yacht clubs, on weekend cruises, at work – much as Knox-Johnston and his father had done that morning at breakfast. ‘Someone's bound to do it,' they said, and many imagined doing it themselves. For most it remained a pipe dream, but by the time Chichester arrived home in May 1967, at least three other men were making serious plans for nonstop circumnavigations. All of them seemed better prospects for a successful voyage than Knox-Johnston.

The oldest, at 57, was Bill King, a former submarine commander who had joined the Royal Navy in 1924 at the age of 14. He had been the first man to be catapulted in an aeroplane off the deck of a ship, and he had seen hard service, mostly beneath the sea, through the whole of the Second World War. Since then he had lived on his farm in County Galway, Ireland, where he raised black cattle and rode to hounds in top hat and knee boots with the Galway Blazers hunt. He had once raced aboard yachts with friends and sailed his own boat,
Galway Blazer
, across the Atlantic and through the West Indies, yet for the previous eighteen years family life had kept him largely anchored to his farm. But a man who has once been catapulted off the deck of a ship will not slide somnolently into retirement, and Francis Chichester's voyage had fired his imagination.

‘It struck me that I could sail alone around the world
without
stopping to refit in Australia.' Gripped by his idea, King approached his friend ‘Blondie' Hasler for help in designing and preparing the ideal boat for such a voyage. Hasler was a former Royal Marine, a Second World War hero, and one of the participants of the first OSTAR. He had sailed alone across the Atlantic four times in his own small boat. He agreed to help King and brought in yacht designer Angus Primrose, codesigner of Chichester's
Gypsy Moth IV
, whose design office, Illingworth and Primrose, had turned out a number of famous English racing yachts.

What they came up with was something strikingly unusual: a 42-foot-long schooner with a rounded, turtle-backed deck. The idea behind such construction – the same as for an egg, a bottle, or a submarine – is that there are no potentially weak right-angle joints bolted into the boat, no deck-to-hull or cabin side-to-deck joints, which seas can smash against and weaken or possibly break. It might look odd and humpbacked, but sailors and designers could appreciate and generally agree with the thinking that produced such an appearance. It also offered maximum protection for its captain: The cockpit was below deck, sealed off by two small round hatches, port and starboard, each about the size of the hole in the middle of a kayak;
King could do all sail-handling from the waist up from here without actually climbing out on deck. The whole boat was to be built of thin layers of wood laminated together with glue and wrapped around sectional frames and bulkheads, a sound (and today very popular) wooden boatbuilding technique known as cold-moulded construction. The rounded deck and hull would form one integral structure, rather like a plywood tube. This would make for an immensely strong boat.

But this was strength through engineering. Textbook strength. At 4½ tons, King's lightweight, easily driven 42-footer would weigh almost exactly half the weight of Robin Knox-Johnston's slow, fat, 32-foot-long
Suhaili
.