Flight of the Fantasist: The Race Around the World

Pushkin a morning before we start. This episode discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from the nine to eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US or from the Samaritans in the UK. Sixteen year old Simon Crowhurst browses the shelves and the library on his first day at a new school. He's in the history section looking for a book on King John. He's about to see something much more interesting. Years earlier, when he was just eight, Simon and his three siblings had waved off their father, Donald Crowhurst, from the harbor of a British port. He was going to sail round the world on his own non stop. We heard on the

last episode of Cautionary Tales about the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race and the man who won the trophy for being the first to complete the journey. If you haven't heard that episode, you might want to do that now. The race had another prize too, for the sailor who sailed fastest around the world from one British port and back again, leaving between June and October in nineteen sixty eight.

The prize was five thousand pounds, an equivalent sum today might be around a quarter of a million dollars. This was the prize Donald Crowhurst wanted to win. Crowhurst set off on the final day of October, the latest possible moment, and he still wasn't ready. The last few days had been a blizzard of activity, family, friends and well wishers, buzzing around, buying supplies, doing jobs. No sooner had Crowhurst left the harbor than he turned around and came back again.

When he had tried to raise his sails, he discovered that someone had put them on wrong.

I'll be glad that I'm on my own without help from you, bloody lot.

Crowhurst gave his wife a theatrical wink, rearranged his sails, and set off again. Nearly nine months later, Crowhurst's wife, Claire, gathered little Simon and his siblings in a bedroom and told them that their dad's boat had been found and he wasn't on it. Then she began to sob. We didn't know he was dead, Simon later recalled, but we knew something very serious had happened. Years passed. Claire Crowhurst doesn't believe that she consciously withheld the truth from her children.

I think if the children asked me questions, I answered them. But of course they didn't know the questions to.

Ask, And so Simon Crowhurst didn't know why his dad had disappeared when, at the age of sixteen, a book caught his eye on the shelves of his new school's library, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. It was like a little trick shock, Simon recalls. He wasn't allowed to take books out of the library, and Simon was a rule abiding kid, so it didn't occur to him to steal it. Instead, he sat down and read as much as he could before the library closed. Then the next chance he got, he came back and read some more.

He read to the end of the book, then he read it again. Simon later recalled to the writer Chris Eakin, things that people had said dropped into place. So what was so strange about the Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Donald Crowhurst ran a small electronics company that made equipment for sailors.

He invented a product called the Navigator in the days before GPS. One way for sailors to try to figure out where they were was from the relative strength of radio signals. The navigator was a futuristic gun like device. You had pointed towards where you thought the nearest land might be, and it would calculate your rough position. Crowhurst was an absolutely brilliant innovator, said the main investor in his company, but as a businessman he was hopeless. The investor had more less resigned himself to losing his money when Crowhurst approached him with a plan to turn the failing business around. The Sunday Times had announced a race to sail solo round the world, leave before the end of October, and the sailor who made it back in

the shortest time would win a handsome cash prize and also publicity, just what an inventor needs. Crowhurst wanted to make the voyage in a trimaran, a relatively new designer boat. Imagine your classic boat shape and add arms sticking out on either side connected to smaller boat shaped floating compartments.

Trimarans were fast and stable usually, but nobody had yet tried to sail one round the world, and for very good reason. The fierce and waves of the Southern Ocean under Africa, Australia and South America threatened to expose the big vulnerability of the trimaran design. If it capsized, it wouldn't right itself. Simpler votes do flip them over and they'll pop back up again. But if a trimaran tips over, those sideways arms and floating compartments will keep it firmly upside down. Donald Crowhurst had an ingenious solution. He told his investor. An electronic system would detect if the trimeran was upside down and trigger a pressurized gas canister to inflate a buoyancy device. It would flip it the right

way up again.

If the practical utility of the equipment I propose can be demonstrated in such a spectacular way winning the race, the rapid and profitable development of the company cannot be in any down.

The investor's wife told him he'd be mad to risk another penny. Crowhurst was hopeless at business, but he was also the most impressive and convincing of men, the investor later wistfully recalled. He agreed to lend Crowhurst enough to build a boat with the partial security of a mortgage on Crowhurst's house.

I have gone into the problems and risks in detail, and I am very confident of success.

He'd better be. If Crowhurst failed, he stood to lose not only his business but his home. Another sailor also wanted to take a trimaran around the Southern Ocean. Lieutenant Commander Nigel Tetley like trime ran so much he lived on one. He was soon to retire from the Royal Navy at the age of forty five. One Sunday morning, reading the newspapers over breakfast, Tetley handed his wife the Sunday Times an article announcing the race. He waited till she'd read it and asked, may I go? Eve Tetley looked at her husband for a long time.

I would not try to stop you.

Tetley hoped at first to build a new trim ran for the journey. That would need money. He wrote letters to every potential sponsor he could think of.

My sailing experience covers thirty years and includes the Round Britain race in which I achieved fifth place in my family trimaran.

He got lots of good wishes and no offers of cash. Oh well, he'd just have to rent a flat for Eve and take the family trimaran. Like Donald Crowhurst, but in a much more literal way. Nigel Tetley was risking his home. Donald Crowhurst struggled to find someone to build his trimaran. Time was tight. Eventually, a boatyard on the other side of the country agreed to the job. The boatyard boss was most impressed with Crowhurst. His ideas for the boat design were often brilliant, although unfortunately they were also often impossible to test before the end October deadline.

For example, Crowhurst won to the hules divided into various compartments, including one for the heavy generator low down to help keep the boat stable, Every compartment needed a watertight hatch, but the boat builders couldn't find the right kind of rubber. Would the replacement rubber keep out leaks? Only time would tell.

In early October, the boat was ready ish Crowhurst sailed it from the boat yard to a harbor near his home for the final preparations. He expected the journey to take three days. It took thirteen. That left him just two weeks before the deadline for departure. A local remembers everyone was trying to help, but nobody knew what to do.

Crowhurst hadn't an inkling what was happening. Days. The boat would need specially reinforced hose, for example, to pump out water that leaked in. The pump was too powerful for a normal hose. Crowhurst had forgotten to ask the boat builder to supply it. He tracked some down and had it flown to the airport on a private plane. When someone went to collect it, they couldn't find it anywhere.

I can only think someone pinched it for their garden. Then, when Crowhurst opened the specially made hatch to the generator compartment, Robert Seal fell off.

How the hell is that kind to stand up to the Southern Ocean.

Over coffee, an old friend asked Crowhurst if he could really get his boat around the world, his journey from the boatyard had gone so much more slowly than planned. In response, Crowhurst began to doodle a map of occur in South America.

Well, one could always shuttle around in the South Atlantic for a few months. There are places out of the shipping lanes where no one would ever spot a boat like this.

So not go into the Southern Ocean at all. Fake going around the world.

It would be simple. No one would ever find out.

Was he serious? Crowhurst laughed, of course not. He was joking. Of course he was joking. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Soon after Donald Crowhurst departed, his wife Claire got a knock on the door. It was somewhe dropping off a bag that had been found on the Harbor slipway. It contained a long, loving letter that Claire had written to Donald, a present for Christmas, and a ham and salad bun for his dinner. She'd put this bag on board herself. Someone must have taken it off and forgotten to put it back. Also accidentally left on the slipway was a pile of plywood, rigging, nuts and screws, all the spare parts that Donald would need to do running repairs on his boat. We heard in the last

episode how this Round the World boat race was really about maintenance. Robin Knox Johnston, the first to finish, filled his boat with supplies for maintenance. Bernard Mortessier, who quit the race to save his soul, carefully minimized the need for maintenance. Donald Crowhurst had the worst of both worlds, a boat that needed maintaining and no supplies to do it with. He soon noticed the lack of supplies when screws were loose from the steering mechanism.

That's four screw's gone. Now. Can't keep cannibalizing from other spots forever. The thing will soon fall to bits.

The missing hose for the pump was an issue too, because the hatches were leaking badly.

The whole compartment was flooded. I bailed out with a bucket. It was a long, exhausting job that took three hours.

Two weeks in Crowhurst wrote a nine page entry in his log book listing everything wrong with his boat. The leaks, lack of pump, falling out screws, the sails still weren't right. Oh and his ingenious boy and see system to write the boat in case of a capsize didn't exist. He hadn't had time to make it. If he went into the Southern Ocean, Crowhurst estimated his chances of survival were perhaps no better than fifty fifty.

I must soon decide whether or not I can go on. What a bloody awful decision to chuck it in at this stage, What a bloody awful decision.

Nigel Tetley had set off weeks earlier, and things were going rather smoothly.

Two months at sea, the days go by more or less on a framework of routine.

The family Trimeran is holding up remarkably well.

Bits have dropped off her. It's true leaks have developed, but such min of troubles are to be expected.

She is an excellent seaboat.

Tetley's diary of the journey major is on the weather and what he had for lunch.

After a dull start, the day brightened up. The wind stayed light about force two.

I have cooked some.

Crazy dishes recently, for example, spaghetti, peas and curried prawns.

It's frankly a bit boring. As he passes Cape Town, Tetley gets a call from a radio station. They've got a Sunday Times reporter on the phone, hoping for a story. The reporter soon gets exasperated. Haven't you fallen over the side or anything else exciting? No, but Tetley is about to enter the Southern Ocean. Exciting things might happen there.

The book that young Simon Crowhurst finds in his school library, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, was written by journalists from the Sunday times. After Crowhurst's vote was found floating deserted in the Atlantic, the journalists tried to reconstruct what had happened from his log books and tape recordings he had made on equipment had been given by the BBC.

The journalists make the case that Crowhurst wrote and spoke in two distinct voices. There's the private Crowhurst, honest and real.

What a bloody awful decision.

And there's an act that Crowhurst put on with a view to later public consumption. He expected the BBC to broadcast his tapes after his voyage. On the same day he put his odds of surviving at just fifty to fifty. He made an upbeat tape recording, I've been.

Seen our for very nearly fourteen days, and I'm on my way to a rendezvous with Cape Horn. This prime an really is phenomenally stable.

Crowhurst could perform. He was a leading light in his local amateur dramatic society. But performing isn't something we do only on a stage. A decade earlier, the sociologist Irving Goffman published a book that became a classic of sociology, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman invites us to see all of life as a theater. Every social interaction is a stage of sorts. A business meeting, a cocktail party, even a casual a conversation. We play the role, we think the situation demands of us. Only when we're backstage can we drop the act and be ourselves. Crowhurst's two distinct voices are a striking example of Goffman's theory at work. With his BBC tape recorder, he's front stage,

showing the bluff optimism, as the Sunday Times writers put it, of Crowhurst, the hero as he would like to appear. Backstage. Meanwhile, Crowhurst grappled with his bloody awful decision. Risk the Southern Ocean, with its fifty to fifty chance of death, or chuck it in, with its certainty of financial ruin. Crowhurst chose neither.

He'd joke with a friend about faking the voyage by hiding in the Southern Atlantic for a few months, just a joke, But he wasn't joking now. His more's code messages began to be strategically ambiguous about his position towards Madeira that could cover a couple of thousand miles off Brazil. Half the minute Atlantic is off Brazil.

Heading south may have the seal charger compartment sneaky.

Everyone knew Crowhurst's generator was in a compartment with a leaky hatch. It made sense that he might decide to fully seal the hatch for the Southern Ocean, where the waves would be most fierce. And if he couldn't open the hatch, he couldn't recharge batteries for the radio, so he couldn't send messages. Crowhurst, had said, set up the perfect excuse to drop out of radio contact. Then in a few months time he could pop up again and say he'd made it round Cape Horn and was back in the Atlantic heading for home. Nigel Techley, meanwhile, actually is braving the Southern Ocean and it's too exciting for comfort. Trimarans, remember, won't right themselves if they capt size. A monstrous wave clabs his boat, and for an awful moment, Tetley thinks

it's flipping over.

I felt her Tito at an angle of about fifty degrees in a half cartwheel.

Then she's slowly writing.

Another wave floods the cabin.

A solid bram a star war window gave way, and the sea was in.

The night, passed miserably cold and.

Damp, but he makes it to Cape Horn, the emotional peak of the journey, the point where the worst has passed. You're out of the Southern Ocean, you turn north into the Atlantic with its promise of kinder weather. Remember from our last episode how the French philosopher sailor Bernard Wotessier described his rounding of the.

Cape A great cape has his soul, A soul as smooth as a giant's as hard as a criminals.

Here's Nigel Tetley's less than stirring prose.

I cannot claim that the moment held any strong emotive can for me. The Horn was more of a navigational problem than anything else.

Tetler's boat is battered and weakened, but it should just about get him home, and he doesn't need to rush. Bernard Martessier's out of the race. There's no news from Donald Crowhurst. Only Robin Knox Johnston has completed the voyage, and he was so slow that Tetley can afford to take it easy and still win the prize for the fastest journey. Donald Crowhurst hides out in the South Atlantic, listening to weather reports for the parts of the Southern Ocean where he's going to claim he had been. He meticulously reverse engineers his logbook, coming up with plausible positions for each day's sailing. He recalled as a tape for the BBC, putting on a show about how hard he'd tried to send radio messages while passing Australia.

Unfortunately, my signals were very weak and my battery was getting extremely low. Unsealing the hatch could be dangerous in the conditions. It was fairly rough and there was a fair amount of water getting into the cockpit.

At last, he decides enough time has passed for it to be plausible to say that he's rounded Cape Horn, unsealed the hatch to the generator and recharged his batteries. He sends a bullish Morse Code message, pretending to be newly reconnected and wanting to know how his competitors are doing what.

New ocean bashing.

Wise crowhursts back in the race and the date he's chosen to claim that he's rounded Cape Horn puts him on course for a dramatic neck and neck finish with Nigel Tetley to claim the prize for the fastest journey. A few weeks ahead of him, Tetley has been playing it safe, nursing his cracked and creaking trimran gently across the Atlantic. Now he hears that Donald Crowhurst has rounded Cape Horn and is hot on his tail.

I wanted to win, or put it another way, I didn't want anyone to beat me beast of all. In a similar type of.

Boat, Tetley decides he needs to risk pushing harder. When a storm starts to gather, he leaves up his sails for as long as he dares. His Gambol ends in disaster. About one thousand miles from Britain, nearly ninety seven percent of his way around the world. Part of Techler's boat snaps off. Water gushes in through a hole. Tech Lee clambers onto a life raft as his family home quickly sinks beneath the waves.

Very very night.

Cautionary tales will return. In Irving Goffman's metaphor of life as theater, Some social performances come naturally, others are an effort. It's a relief to get backstage and drop the act. But in a theater, you're backstage with other actors. You can talk things over compare notes, prepare for the next show.

In the backstage of his boat in the middle of the ocean, Donald Crowhurst has nobody to talk to, and the role he's committed to playing will be incredibly demanding. So far, his performances are little more than rehearsals on his own with a tape recorder. Will he really be able to maintain a convincing account of sailing around the Southern Ocean in all the interviews he'll have to give.

With news of Nigel Tetli's sinking, this question comes sharply into focus. Crowhurst is now on course to win the prize. He'll easily beat the time set by Robin Knox. Johnston telegrams flood in whole town planning huge Welcome your triumph, bringing one hundred thousand folk the BBC Get In Touch television program for day of return. They want to meet offshore to pick up his tapes before his arrival can arrange helicopter. At this point, Donald Crowhurst's mind starts to fall apart. He stops sailing towards Britain and lets his boat drift with nobody to talk to. He writes in his log book under the heading philosophy, what explains human troubles.

The explanation of our troubles is that cosmic beings are playing games with us.

At times, his ideas sound like a kooky, yet familiar kind of New Age religion.

By learning to manipulate the space time continuum, man will become God and disappear from the physical universe as we know it.

But as Crowhurst writes and writes twenty five thousand words, he becomes more and more unhinged.

I am the only man on earth who realizes what this means. It means I can make myself a cosmic being by my own efforts.

His realization will save the world.

Mathematicians and engineers will skim through my complete work in less than an hour. Problems that have beset humanity for thousands of years will have been solved for them.

By the final page, he's talking directly to the cosmic beings.

It is finished. It is the mercy. It is the end of my game. It is the time for your move to begin. I will resign the game. There is no reason for harmful.

He stops mid sentence, and then we can only imagine. He puts down his pencil, rises from his log book and steps out into the sea. Forty years after the Golden Globe Race, the journalist Chris Eakin spoke to everyone he could to write a book A Race too Far. He interviewed Simon Crowhurst, then forty eight years old and a researcher at Cambridge University. Simon tells Chris Ekin about how, as a teenager, he'd found in his school's library the strange last voyage of Donald Crowhurst and started to understand what had happened to his dad and what happened afterwards.

When Donald Crowhurst's boat was found, the race was over. The first man home, Robin Knox Johnston, would be the only finisher and therefore the fastest. He was due the five thousand pounds, a meaningful sum. Knox Johnston wasn't rich before the race. He'd worked as an officer on trade ships. The prize was two and a half times his annual salary.

Knox Johnston told the Sunday Times to give the money to Crowhurst's family. They told him what they discovered from studying Crowhurst's logbooks. He cheeked, did Knox Johnston still want Crowhurst's family to have the money?

Of course, he said, I wasn't giving money to a cheat. I was giving the money to an unfortunate family who were going to be in an even worse plight. Now those children were going to suffer. I just thought there was no change to the situation.

When Simon Crowhurst was old enough to understand what Robin Knox Johnston had done for his family, he wrote to thank him. They stayed in touch. Simon has a great deal of admiration for him. The journalist Chris Eakin also interviewed Eve Tetley, whose husband Nigel sank so agonizingly close to the finish line.

Had it not been for Crawhurst, Nigel would have plodded horn cheerfully is where he sunk. Ah hit at Crawlhurst so much hit hit hit.

Life was hard for the Tetley's. After Nigel's rescue, they started to build a new Trimran, a new home, but money was tight. Tetley wrote a book, Trimaran Solo, but sales were poor. That's actually not surprising, It's frankly.

A bit boring.

Tetley gave a lecture at a Navy event, but afterwards no one approached him with questions. Robin Knox Johnston was there.

I saw the hurt on his face, so I went up to chat to him. That was how we got to know each other. I wonder how much of that he put up with.

Yes, but you didn't succeed.

It was a very remarkable voyage, and he never really got the credit for it.

If Nigel was disappointed by the lack of credit, he never showed it to Eve. Stiff upper lip. They had to stop talking about Donald Crowhurst. Nigel was uncomfortable at how intensely Eve hated him.

I think he probably felt there but for the grace of God, I could have gone the gorn bonkers, the effect of the solitude. I just think he was so sympathetic to Crawhursts predicament. Perhaps sympathetic is not the right word, but understanding. I had no time for that.

One day, three years after the race, Tetley disappeared. His body was found in a forest. He had died by hanging. The newspapers reported that had been depressed, but when a policeman broke the news to Eve, he had a sensitive question to ask, are any of your clothes missing?

I thought, what a funny question, he said, what about underwear?

I had no idea why he was asking that.

Tetley had been found in stockings, suspenders and a corset. The inquest said this wasn't suicide, it was sexual adventure gone wrong.

Bloody, how there was all so unlike Nigel.

Maybe, just maybe Nigel Techley sympathized with Donald Crowhurst because he understood the mental strain of putting on an act to hide a secret. It's hard to be backstage on your own with no one to drop the act with and be who you really are. In the Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, the authors describe how Crowhurst became obsessed with trying to get a phone call through to his wife Claire. His radio didn't work as it should.

He could send and receive messages in Morse code, but he couldn't talk to radio stations to ask them to connect a call. He spent days trying to fix it, but never could. It's hard not to wonder what might have been different if Crowhurst had been able to share his predicament with someone he loved. Then again, perhaps nothing would really have changed. Claire Crowhurst recalls a conversation the night before Donald left.

Darling. I'm very disappointed in the boat. She's not right. I'm not prepared. If I leave with things in this hopeless state, will you go out of your mind with worry? If you give up now?

Will you be unhappy for the rest of your life?

Donald didn't answer, he started to cry. Only much later did Claire understand what Donald had been trying to say.

I was such a fool, such a stupid fool. I didn't realize Don was telling me he'd failed and wanted me to stop him.

Even with his wife. Donald Crowhurst couldn't let go of the role he was playing, the hero, willing to press on even with everything Again. Tim Claire responded by playing the role she thought the situation demanded, the loyal, loving, supportive wife. All of life's a theater, Irving Goffman says, if we have no friends backstage to share our true selves, the theater is a lonely place to be. A key source for this episode was A Race Too Far, The Tragic Story of Donald Crowhurst and the nineteen sixty eight Round the World Race by Chris Eakin. For a full list of sources, see Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise bend A. Daph Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Massa Munroe, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does make a difference to us and if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only newsletter every month. Why not join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.

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Flight of the Fantasist: The Race Around the World - Part 2

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