The Lonely Sea and the Sky (2 page)

  Many people felt the rigours of rounding Cape Horn were just too risky for this old man (nowadays we know that sixty-five is not so old) and there was much pressure on him not to continue his circumnavigation. Well, he took the setback in his stride, made necessary repairs and spent days sorting everything out as well as sailing, navigating, cooking, communicating, writing a full journal or log and so on.

  Rounding Cape Horn proved to be exciting but manageable. The real challenge to his navigation skills came on the approach to Drake Strait after several days of poor visibility and no sun observations to fix his position. Instead of being one of the loneliest places in the world it turned out to be quite crowded; HMS
Protector
came down from the Falkland Islands to see him round and a light aircraft with journalists and photographers from
The Times
to record the moment. After that, possibly the most stressful moment came in the North Atlantic when a launch was chartered by the press and BBC to go out, find him and film him in mid-ocean (much against my mother's wishes at the time). Appropriately enough it was called
Sea Huntress
and my father made it pretty clear they were unwelcome. The story of his voyage had been big news for some time, but by comparison with the pressures public figures are put under nowadays from the media it may seem he got off lightly. However, it was a harbinger of the attention he was to receive on his return.

  When he finally reached Plymouth Sound it truly was to a hero's welcome. It was very exciting stuff for me to be involved as a hanger-on, but for my father the shock of arrival after four months at sea alone was considerable. Not long after his return, he collapsed and was diagnosed as suffering from an ulcer caused by 'poor diet at sea', so the medics said. Perhaps they came from the same school as the types who had diagnosed carcinoma of the lung and given him six months to live back in 1958, but it seemed pretty obvious to us that it was the transition to shore life and all the demands made upon him that brought it on. It must have seemed as though everyone wanted something from him, a simple request here, a little thing there, and pretty soon he must have felt completely drained.

  He recovered and we sailed on the last leg up to London where the Queen bestowed upon him the accolade of Knighthood at Greenwich in the first public investiture for many decades. We had only been told the evening before, it all seemed like a fairy tale, a storybook adventure come true. After that he was fêted at Mansion House by the Lord Mayor and greeted by massed crowds outside. It all had the feel of a latter-day Elizabethan maritime adventurer come home in triumph. It was that rare event, a good news story enjoyed by almost everyone.

  There was little or no rest for the wicked, however, because he had to turn his hand to writing the book of the voyage in time to catch the Christmas market that year. Once that was completed, life began to settle back into a more normal pattern, whatever that may be for a man like him. Many things needed attention, including a visit in early 1968 to New Zealand to see the forest and catch up with old friends who had noticed that he had stopped in Australia and sailed past New Zealand. In 1969 my mother organised a family holiday in the Algarve in Portugal. I have a photo I took of the two of them looking fit, healthy and happy: he was already planning the next adventure. The holiday was interrupted for him when he went back to London to commentate on the moon landings that year. I recall he said he preferred his sort of adventure because the astronauts were almost entirely dependent on others whereas he was largely reliant on his own resources at sea. Clearly it was an addictive sort of lifestyle and, having done a fair bit of short-handed long-distance sailing myself (mostly after he died), I can glimpse the appeal. Life at sea can be very fulfilling because you have an objective, your destination; the means to accomplish it, your boat and yourself; and a self-contained life without external distraction other than the natural challenges of the ocean. The navigation aspect is particularly interesting and enjoyable.

  That same year, he published a book on keep fit exercises with a very long title, of the sort fashionable at the time, based on his own regime as followed during the trip by steamer-ship from England to New Zealand in 1968. It was not as successful as he had hoped. He also started work on
Gipsy Moth V
, his final boat. For it, he went back to the same designer, Robert Clark, who had drawn the lines for
Gipsy Moth III
. They also went back to Ireland to build it, in Crosshaven this time, and we had a lot of fun travelling to Cork to watch construction work and fitting out. She was launched in summer 1970 and I shall never forget the party laid on by Dennis and Mary Doyle who owned the yard. There is nothing quite like Irish hospitality!

  
Gipsy Moth V
was the most beautiful and the most fleet of the four boats. The next step was for my father to find a worthy challenge. He became very interested in the 200-mile day (24-hour runs) and cast around for a course where he could have a chance of achieving it over a long distance and where the starting and finishing points were fixed. The old clipper captains used to record some very fast runs in the middle of the ocean which could neither be validated or challenged easily but were important for their claims to be fastest to deliver the cargo and passengers. My father lighted upon a course from West Africa to Central America that was 4,003 miles along the Great Circle route through the trade winds.

  In early 1971 he made the passage in remarkably good time, 22.3 days, but didn't achieve his goal of 200 miles a day over the full distance. Nevertheless, for a man in his seventieth year to average 179 miles a day was pretty remarkable. He had the odd adventure coming back to England, including another serious knockdown when he thought for a while that the boat was sinking and he was done for. He survived to come back to a much quieter reception and set about writing the book of the voyage which he was determined was to be the best he had ever produced. He had difficulty in settling on a title and my contribution was to persuade him to call it
The Romantic Challenge
for it seemed to me he had been on a quixotic quest to get to the other side of the horizon as fast as he could. It was a good book but, unfortunately, all the other adventurers and explorers who were out there doing things and publishing books resulted in it not achieving the success of the round-the-world book or this
The Lonely Sea and the Sky
.

  Sometime in 1971 he was diagnosed with another cancer, this time of the blood, and it was the real thing. He fought it hard and, nothing daunted, entered for the 1972 single-handed transatlantic race. Some thought, when they saw his physical condition at the start, that his intention was to go out and end his days at sea. It was not so, and, when he realised he was no longer up to handling the boat all the way across, he turned back for home. He had another adventure on the way back when a French weather vessel, in seeking to offer assistance, passed too close and caught the rigging, thus breaking off part of the mizzen mast. Due to his return, I too had an adventure; I was enjoying myself at Henley when I was persuaded to fly to Culdrose airfield in Cornwall, be helicoptered out to rendezvous with HMS
Salisbury
in the Western Approaches, and put aboard
Gipsy Moth V
via a rubber launch, with a volunteer crew of Royal Navy chaps, to help the old man sail back. It was only a few weeks later that he finally gave up the struggle and died.

  Having read this book several times and lived through the later part of his life, it seems to me that this is a tremendous story of ups and downs, of setback and achievement. For me, when I read the words on the page, I can hear my father speaking. It is a good yarn, full of encouragement about what can be done against the odds. For him, the answer to the question 'Why did you do it?' was that it 'intensifies life'. What more could one ask?

We know nothing of the boyhood of Ulysses, and it has always seemed to me a great loss that he did not write the story of his early life after he had got back from his travels. Perhaps he could not; perhaps Tennyson was right, and he set off again 'to sail beyond the sunset', leaving himself no time for recollection in tranquillity. But still, it is a pity.

  Autobiography is an intensely difficult task, and whatever satisfaction the writing of his own life may give the man who writes it, his readers will be satisfied seldom. If you are interested in a man, you want to know as much as you can about him, not only what he did, but what made him want to do it, what formed him, moulded him into the kind of man he is. Of what formed Ulysses, we know nothing; at the other extreme, in that lovely chapter of autobiography by W. H. Hudson,
Far
Away and Long Ago
, we read on with excitement to find suddenly that we have got to the last page and that Hudson is still about five years old. In so far as a man can succeed in making a rounded whole of a life that he has not yet finished living, I think Francis Chichester has succeeded in this book. His boyhood, his young manhood, achievement in maturity, all are there, credible, interesting always, and the more moving because the record is unadorned. How Homer would have loved a story Chichester tells of one of his early adventures in his North Devon woods. It is best to hear him tell it, in his quiet, unemphatic voice, rich in quartertones:

Once I fell from a crow's nest in an oak tree. First I was falling through branches, hitting one and then another, and then for the last twenty feet or so, dropping clear. I hit the ground with a terrific whang, and everything went black. I was in great pain and wondered what damage had been done. I didn't move a millimetre from my position when I landed, just stayed dead still for what seemed a long time, although, perhaps, it was only about a quarter of an hour. Gradually, the shock went away, and I tried to move my legs and body. To my astonishment, nothing was broken, and in a few minutes I was moving about without much pain. Since then I have tried this technique time after time with success – relaxing completely after a fall, or a big shock.

  After his remarkable single-handed crossing of the Atlantic in 1962, Chichester began contemplating a book on the record of his life. I rather pressed him to it. I had been a good deal mixed up in the planning of his transatlantic voyage, and I had edited his logs to produce a book. It seems to me that Chichester is one of the really great men of our time – great in a personal way that is rare in this period of mass parties, mass achievement, and competing nationalism. Chichester is in the line of great individualists who have enriched human history, in which, perhaps, our English race is (or was) particularly rich – Martin Frobisher, Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, Waterton, Shackleton and their peers. So I pressed him to write some record of his life, before he became too deeply involved in the next adventure.

  His response to this was both flattering and vexatious. He said 'Yes', he would write the book I wanted him to write, but only if I would take his manuscript as he poured out memories of his life and put it into order for him. Now no man could feel other than proud at such a request, but to me it was vexing, and a severe practical problem too, because my association with Chichester has been solely related to the sea, and while we can talk the same language, as it were, here, his immense achievement in the air would have to be history rather than living experience. However, after some argument, I took it on. This book is the outcome of our partnership.

  I must make it clear that I have been throughout a most junior partner. I am by trade a carpenter in words (a joiner, perhaps, if I am feeling arrogant), and like any good carpenter I respect my material. This book is in no sense 'ghosted' – a horrible term for a horrible form of literary faking. Everything in this book is Chichester's own: all that I have done is to cut and tighten here and there, as a documentary film may be cut and tautened by its editor, and occasionally do the mortise-work for joining things together. I have added nothing, commented on nothing: Chichester speaks for himself. And I think that what he has to say is infinitely worth listening to. In an age when human society is inevitably becoming more and more highly organised, when great projects like the development of nuclear energy require the whole resources of the community, it is good to be reminded that one man's vision can still be the driving-force towards wholly individual achievement. Chichester is a single-hander, content to depend on himself, to get out of difficulties by himself. A superficial judgement would be that this is a selfish, or at least self-centred, attitude to life, but that would be a complete misunderstanding of Chichester's complex character. In the best sense, he is one of the least selfish men I have ever come across: he has undertaken whatever project he has set himself with no particular thought of gain, with no demands on others, and with a deep humility of conviction that in setting out to accomplish some hazardous purpose by himself he is fulfilling what he came into the world to do, and thereby performing a service. And in this, I think, he is quite right. His obvious services to the rest of us – his work on navigation for the RAF, for instance – have been great, but to my mind they are secondary to his demonstration of man's continuing ability to fend for himself –
'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'
.