Donald Crowhurst
Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst was a British inventor/entrepreneur, businessman, and amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968–1969. Crowhurst, a developer of electronic products with a poorly performing small business "Electron Utilisation", believed that pursuing the £5,000 prize money offered by the race organisers would offer a financial lifeline for his business, and that successful completion of the race would also showcase a number of new products that he had in mind as safety devices for yachts. However his customised / modified boat for the race, Teignmouth Electron, was constructed very hurriedly and suffered from a number of defects, resulting in the vessel making poor progress as well as constantly leaking. These factors, together with others arising from his incomplete preparation for the race, led to Crowhurst deciding that the boat would most likely not stand up to the harsh rigours of the Southern Ocean. He therefore secretly abandoned the race some weeks or months after departing, remaining in the Atlantic Ocean for seven months while reporting false positions in an attempt to appear to have completed a circumnavigation without actually doing so. His ship's logbooks, found after his disappearance, suggest that stress and associated psychological deterioration may have led to his apparent suicide. Contemporary reporting focused on his fraudulent reports and emphasised his actions as a hoaxer or "con man", however with the passage of time his story has tended to be reappraised as more of a maritime tragedy that, according to one recent author, "raises essential questions about the ethics of competition, solitude at sea and the psychological limits of sailors". While the circumstances that permitted his participation in the race can of necessity only be viewed in the context of the time, safety lessons have been learned by race organisers in particular that would never allow such a combination of an inexperienced sailor, with an untried boat, to take part in an equivalent race today.
Crowhurst's participation in the race, together with its ultimately tragic end, has exerted a fascination over many commentators and artists. It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films, including a documentary, Deep Water, and two feature films, Crowhurst and The Mercy, in which Crowhurst is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth, respectively. Teignmouth Electron ended its days as a dive boat in the Caribbean and its decaying remains can still be found in the dunes above a beach in the Cayman Islands.
Early life
Donald Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British India. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked in the Indian railways. During her pregnancy, his mother had longed for a daughter, and Crowhurst was dressed as a girl until the age of seven. After India gained independence, his family moved back to England. The family's retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the partition of India.Crowhurst's father died in 1948. Because of family financial problems, Crowhurst was forced to leave school early that year and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield. In 1953 he received a Royal Air Force commission as a pilot, but was asked to leave in 1954 for reasons that remain unclear, and was subsequently commissioned into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1956. After leaving the Army the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962. He was a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council.
Business ventures
Crowhurst, a weekend sailor, designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator, a handheld device that allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons. While he did have some success selling his navigational equipment, his business began to fail. In an effort to gain publicity, he started trying to gain sponsors to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in Crowhurst's failing business. Once committed to the race, Crowhurst mortgaged both his business and home against Best's continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation.The Golden Globe Race
The Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney. The considerable publicity his achievement garnered led a number of sailors to plan the next logical step – a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world sail.The Sunday Times had sponsored Chichester, with highly profitable results, and was interested in being involved with the first non-stop circumnavigation, but it had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor. The solution was to promote the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. That was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability before entry.
Entrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in the summer. The prizes offered were the Golden Globe trophy for the first single-handed circumnavigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest. This was then a considerable sum, equivalent to almost £73,000 in 2023.
The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron. "Tahiti" Bill Howell, a noted multihull sailor and competitor in the 1964 and 1968 OSTAR races, originally signed up as an entrant but did not actually race.
Crowhurst hired Rodney Hallworth, a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, as his public relations officer.
Crowhurst's boat and preparations
The boat Crowhurst built for the voyage, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver. At the time, this was an unproven type of boat for a voyage of such length. Trimarans have the potential to sail much more quickly than monohulled sailboats, but early designs in particular could be very slow if overloaded, and had considerable difficulty sailing close to the wind. Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability, but if capsized, they are virtually impossible to right, though crews have lived for months with a boat in the inverted position and ultimately survived.To improve the safety of the boat, Crowhurst had planned to add an inflatable buoyancy bag on the top of the mast to prevent capsizing, the bag would be activated by water sensors on the hull designed to detect an impending capsize. This innovation would hold the mast horizontal on the surface of the water, and a clever arrangement of pumps would allow him to flood the uppermost outer hull, which would pull the boat upright. His scheme was to prove these devices by sailing round the world with them, then go into business manufacturing the system.
However, Crowhurst had a very short time in which to build and equip his boat while securing financing and sponsors for the race. In the end, all of his safety devices were left uncompleted, he planned to complete them while under way. Also, many of his spares and supplies were left behind in the confusion of the final preparations. To top all this, Crowhurst had never sailed on a trimaran before taking delivery of his boat several weeks before the beginning of the race.
On 13 October an experienced sailor, Lieutenant Commander Peter Eden, volunteered to accompany Crowhurst on his last leg from Cowes to Teignmouth. Crowhurst had fallen into the water several times while in Cowes, and as he and Eden climbed aboard Teignmouth Electron, he once again ended up in the water after slipping on the outboard bracket on the stern of the rubber dinghy. Eden's description of his two days with Crowhurst provides the most expert independent assessment available for both boat and sailor before the start of the race. He recalls that the trimaran sailed immensely swiftly, but could get no closer to the wind than 60 degrees. The speed often reached 12 knots, but the vibrations encountered caused the screws on the Hasler self-steering gear to come loose. Eden said, "We had to keep leaning over the counter to do up the screws. It was a tricky and time consuming business. I told Crowhurst he should get the fixings welded if he wanted it to survive a longer trip!" Eden also commented that the Hasler worked superbly and the boat was "certainly nippy."
Eden reported that Crowhurst's sailing techniques were good, "But I felt his navigation was a mite slapdash. I prefer, even in the Channel, to know exactly where I am. He didn't take too much bother with it, merely jotting down figures on a few sheets of paper from time to time." After struggling against westerlies and having to tack out into the Channel twice, they arrived at 2.30 pm on 15 October, where an enthusiastic BBC film crew started filming Eden in the belief he was Crowhurst. There were 16 days to get ready before the race's deadline on 31 October.
Departure and deception
Crowhurst left from Teignmouth, Devon, on the last day permitted by the rules: 31 October 1968. He encountered immediate problems with his boat, his equipment, and his lack of open-ocean sailing skills and experience. In the first few weeks he was making less than half of his planned speed. Among the principal issues with his boat was constant ingress of seawater via additional deck hatches that he had specified. When the flexible rubber that he had requested to seal them had turned out to be unavailable, a non-flexing version had been used instead, with the result that the hatches never sealed properly. A compounding issue was that a crucial hose, which would have eased the problem of pumping out the flooded sections, had been left behind on the shore and never made it to the boat before its departure. A secondary problem was that the fibreglass coating applied to the hulls had not been continued over the deck area, leading to a split forming in that section of one of the floats, eventually requiring an illegal stop in South America for repair.According to his logs, Crowhurst's biggest fear was surviving the rough conditions in the Southern Ocean, since his innovative and self-designed anti-capsize modifications had never been completed; accordingly, he gave himself only 50/50 odds of surviving that ocean, and decided not to enter it.
Crowhurst was thus faced with the choice of either quitting the race and facing financial ruin and humiliation or continuing to an almost certain death in his unseaworthy, disappointing boat.
Over the course of November and December 1968, the hopelessness of his situation pushed him into an elaborate deception. He shut down his radio with a plan to loiter in the South Atlantic for several months while the other boats sailed the Southern Ocean, falsify his navigation logs, then slip back in for the return leg to England. As last-place finisher, he assumed his false logs would not receive the same scrutiny as those of the winner.
Since leaving, Crowhurst had been deliberately ambiguous in his radio reports of his location. Starting on 6 December 1968, he continued reporting vague but false positions; rather than continuing to the Southern Ocean, he sailed erratically in the southern Atlantic Ocean and stopped once in South America to make repairs to his boat, in violation of the rules. A great deal of the voyage was spent in radio silence, while his supposed position was inferred by extrapolation based on his earlier reports. By early December, based on his false reports, he was being cheered worldwide as the likely winner of the fastest circumnavigation prize, though Francis Chichester privately expressed doubts about the plausibility of Crowhurst's progress.
After rounding the tip of South America in early February, Moitessier had made a dramatic decision in March to drop out of the race and sail on towards Tahiti. On 22 April 1969, Robin Knox-Johnston was the first to complete the race, leaving Crowhurst supposedly in the running against Tetley for second to finish, and still able to beat Knox-Johnston's time because of his later starting date. In reality, Tetley was far in the lead, having long ago passed within of Crowhurst's hiding place; but believing himself to be running neck-and-neck with Crowhurst, Tetley pushed his failing boat, also a Piver trimaran, to breaking point and had to abandon ship on 30 May.
The pressure on Crowhurst had therefore increased, since he now looked certain to win the "elapsed time" race. If he appeared to have completed the fastest circumnavigation, his logbooks would be closely examined by experienced sailors, including the experienced and sceptical Chichester, and the deception would probably be exposed. It is also likely that he felt guilty about undermining Tetley's genuine circumnavigation so near its completion. He had by this time begun to make his way back as if he had rounded Cape Horn.
Crowhurst made his last radio transmissions on 29 June. His last logbook entry is dated 1 July. Teignmouth Electron was found adrift, unoccupied, on 10 July.