A Voyage For Madmen (6 page)

If it was to sponsor anyone at all, the
Sunday Times
had to act
fast. King had received sponsorship from the
Sunday Express
, Ridgway had
The People
. Both men, sailing new boats, seemed like possible winners. If the
Sunday Times
didn't jump on ‘Tahiti Bill,' it could find itself rooting among the dreamers with inferior boats and untested fortitude.

But who were the others – the unknowns, the undeclared, the dark horses that would appear and steal the show? Who would sponsor them?

Murray Sayle and Ron Hall, Sayle's department head at the
Sunday Times
, hit upon the idea of sponsoring a race that would include everybody. It occurred to them simultaneously but independently of each other, and initially each had different ideas for such a race. Murray Sayle correctly believed that what would matter most, to the competitors and to the public, was who would circumnavigate alone and nonstop first. That was the sailor the history books would remember.

Ron Hall thought that if there was to be a race, the sailors would have to compete in some way that would give them all an equal chance. But an official start, with everyone setting off at the boom of a gun, was out of the question. The men now anxiously preparing their boats, all of them increasingly aware of the efforts of a growing number of rivals, would certainly leave the moment they were ready, if not before. Some of them had already made arrangements with publishers and other newspapers. If the
Sunday Times
proposed a race, the sailors might refuse to enter. A race was in fact the last thing any of them wanted. These were not yachtsmen or sportsmen. They were hardcase egomaniacs driven by complex desires and vainglory to attempt an extreme, life-threatening endeavour. Each had powerfully visualised what must be done, and was consumed with the need to do it first. They were loners. No one would be waiting for anybody else.

Yet the race to be first had already begun.

One afternoon in March, Murray Sayle and Ron Hall sat down together and came up with an ingenious way to scoop all their newspaper rivals and put the inevitable race firmly in the
hands of the
Sunday Times
. The newspaper would offer a trophy, which the two journalists decided then and there to call the Golden Globe, for the first sailor home. An additional award, answering Ron Hall's wish for some sporting measure, would be a cash prize of £5,000 – a princely sum in 1968 – for the fastest voyage. Thus, if the first man home won the Golden Globe simply because he had been the first to set out, there would still be an incentive for others to race home for the fastest time and the cash prize. Contestants were not even required to enter the race. Anybody setting out, sponsored or not, whose departure and arrival dates could be verified, would be eligible for the
Sunday Times
prizes. This way, no circumnavigator could
not
take part.

The rules were simple and designed to embrace the various plans already afoot: competitors could leave from any port of their choice in the British Isles, on any date between 1 June and 31 October 1968. (To leave earlier or later could mean reaching the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn during the severer weather of the austral winter, and – in what would turn out to be its only such effort – the
Sunday Times
wanted to avoid encouraging undue risk.)

The route was around the world ‘by way of the three capes', in clipper ship parlance: the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa; Cape Leeuwin, Australia; and South America's notorious Cape Horn. Competitors would sail alone, without stopping or putting in at any port, without assistance or resupply. And they would return to their port of origin.

To give lustre and authority to its self-appointed interest, the
Sunday Times
quickly put together a panel of judges, made up of heavyweights from the world of yachting, with Sir Francis Chichester as its chairman.

With plans for a circumnavigating yacht drawn up for him by Colin Mudie, Robin Knox-Johnston went looking for a quote from a builder. The design, 53 feet long, simple and lightweight, though to be built of steel, was of such unusual construction that most boatyards either refused to quote at all or put him off with outlandishly high figures. He finally found a barge-building yard on the River Thames that quoted £2,800 for the hull, and even appeared interested in the project. This price meant the possibility of a complete boat ready to sail for around £5,000, which was cheap.

Around the World by Way of the Three Capes

But Knox-Johnston had no money at all. By the end of 1967, he had written over fifty letters to firms and businesses seeking sponsorship, and those who replied had all declined.
Suhaili
, his only asset, was still up for sale, but roughly built and old-fashioned, she was few people's idea of a proper yacht, and there had been no takers.

Yet he had made up his mind to go. Increasingly his thoughts turned to
Suhaili
, the boat he had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across 10,000 miles of ocean. Between professional stints at sea, he had lived aboard her for two years. He knew her, she was a proven vessel – and she was available.

She would need a refit, new sails, new rigging, some sort of self-steering gear, and he would have to load her with a year's supply of food – but all this seemed possible. He turned his back firmly on the sleeker pipe dream and decided to go ahead with
Suhaili
. He would find the money for what he needed where he could.

George Greenfield, a London literary agent, thought there might be a book in Knox-Johnston's voyage. Greenfield specialised in adventurers – the newly knighted Sir Francis Chichester was one of his clients, as was British explorer Wally Herbert, who was then putting together the British transarctic expedition, a sledge-hauling crossing of the Arctic icecap by way of the North Pole. Greenfield thought he saw the same stuff in the young merchant seaman. He might be unknown in yachting circles, but he had sailed his boat home from India, and Greenfield was excited about the idea of his nonstop circumnavigation. He told Knox-Johnston to get on with his preparations.

Early in 1968 Greenfield sold the book rights to Knox-Johnston's
voyage to the London publisher Cassell. This brought an advance payment of enough money for
Suhaili
's refit. Then he approached the
Sunday Times
, hoping for the same coverage he had got for Chichester, but the paper was unimpressed – it was the decidedly poor prospect of Knox-Johnston and his archaic Indian-built boat that led the
Sunday Times
to back Tahiti Bill Howell. Finally, Greenfield got the London
Sunday Mirror
newspaper interested in buying the rights to exclusive accounts radioed from Knox-Johnston at sea. Before signing, the
Sunday Mirror
people wanted to meet their sailor, and Greenfield set up a nautically themed lunch on a restaurant boat on the Thames. During the lunch, a tug went by on the river throwing up a wake that rocked the restaurant, and the tough young adventurer who was going to sail alone around the world lost his balance and fell out of his chair. Greenfield still made the deal.

With enough money for a full refit and all his supplies, Knox-Johnston now devoted all his free time – between Royal Navy reserve duty aboard HMS
Duncan
, for which he was already committed – to preparations.

Bernard Moitessier had already signed the contract with his French publisher, Jacques Arthaud, for the book he would write of his epic nonstop, single-handed voyage. He spent the spring of 1968 preparing
Joshua
in the French Mediterranean port of Toulon. When the
Sunday Times
learned of his intentions, Murray Sayle was sent to invite him to take part in its race. He found the Frenchman in a portside bistro.

Moitessier was aghast. He had made a pact with the gods (he later wrote) to make up for selling his earlier book down the river and felt that his motives for the new voyage must remain as pure as driven snow. He told Sayle that the idea of a race made him want to vomit. Such a voyage, he said, belonged to a sacred domain where the spirit of the sea had to be respected. A race for money and a gold-coloured ball would make a circus of all their efforts. He got up in a rage and left the bistro.

Sayle and his newspaper were flummoxed. Moitessier and his boilerplate-steel boat unquestionably represented the strongest effort under way. The mystic Frenchman and his
Joshua
were the only sailor and boat of those now preparing to have already spent any time in the Roaring Forties. Together they had been around the Horn, the great, fearful, spectral bogey of the Southern Ocean. Moitessier could sail around the world from Toulon to Toulon and make a mockery of the Golden Globe race. Unwilling to lose its most formidable competitor and see its race made redundant, the
Sunday Times
revised a rule for the Golden Globe trophy for first man home. It made it eligible to anyone starting from any port north of latitude 40 degrees north – that's just below the French-Spanish border.

A few days later, Sayle cornered Moitessier again. He started by suggesting (according to Moitessier) that his famous Tahiti-Alicante voyage had been the catalyst for Chichester's voyage (unlikely, since Chichester's preparation for his circumnavigation had begun well before
Joshua
reached Alicante), and for all the voyages now being planned. But Moitessier didn't need any sweet-talking; he had already decided to join the race. He had thought of nothing else since Murray Sayle had first spoken to him. He told the reporter that he'd join his race, and would sail
Joshua
to Plymouth, Devon, start from there and return to Plymouth to be eligible for both prizes. And if he came home first and fastest, he'd snatch the cheque without a word of thanks, auction off the Golden Globe, and thereby show his contempt for the
Sunday Times
.

This was pure Moitessier, the yin and yang of his childhood influences battling within him. The pleasure and the unease he would feel all his life about the fame and money that came his way, usually from simply doing what he wanted. His ambivalence about the race certainly had much to do with his feeling that it would sully the purity of his intent and effort. But he realised that it would be a great and historic race, with worthy rivals, and that if he didn't take part, he would be left out. He also knew he stood a very good chance of winning both prizes and seeing his star blaze brighter – and he couldn't resist that.