The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

Bol Partner

In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set out from England in his untested trimaran, a competitor in the first singlehanded nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, the boat was found in a calm mid-Atlantic, structurally intact with no one on board. Through Crowhurst's logs and diaries the world learned that, although he had radioed messages from his supposed round-the-world course, he had in fact never left the Atlantic. In this journalistic masterpiece, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall reconstruct what happened: Crowhurst's growing distrust of his boat; his decision to attempt one of the greatest hoaxes of our time; his eleven-week radio silence; the secret visit to Argentina for repairs; the lying radio transmissions; the triumphal return up the Atlantic as the elapsed-time race leader; the increasing isolation wrought by his deception; and the fantastic ending. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is both a suspenseful narrative and a psychological casebook of human zeal and anguish. Finally, it takes us to the heart of darkness. This book was originally published in 1970. Heavily publicized in major media (including The New York Times and two U.S. television networks), it was a bestseller, and it left a lasting impression. International Marine issued a trade paperback edition in 1995. The Sailor's Classics would be incomplete without it. Raban's introduction to our Sailor's Classics edition offers an alternative interpretation of Crowhurst's demise. Tomalin and Hall thought that Crowhurst's madness was one of despair. Raban suggests that it might have been the dizzy elation of the manic. Drifting around in the South Atlantic, Crowhurst, a failed businessman, saw himself as Einstein's equal - a man who'd found the Truth at sea. When he stepped off his boat, carrying the ship's clock and his faked logbooks, he may actually have expected to walk on water. The Crowhurst story has a haunting life of its own, and Crowhurst lives on, perversely, as a mythic hero, inspiring the Robert Stone bestseller Outerbridge Reach, a one-man opera called Ravenshead, a string of radio and TV programs, a rumored film in the making, and a new nonfiction account of that long-ago race, A Voyage for Madmen, written by Peter Nichols (author of Sea Change).

Bol

In early 1968, desperate entrepreneur Donald Crowhurst was trying to sell a nautical navigation device he had developed when he saw that the Sunday Times would be sponsoring the Golden Globe Race, the first ever solo, round-the-world sailing competition. An avid amateur sailor, Crowhurst sensed a marketing opportunity and shocked the world by entering the competition using an untested trimaran of his own design. Shock soon turned to amazement when he quickly took the lead, checking in by radio message from locations far ahead of his seasoned competitors.But on July 10, 1969, roughly eight months after he had sailed from England--and less than two weeks from his expected triumphant return--his wife was informed that his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, had been discovered drifting quietly, abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Crowhurst was missing, assumed drowned. How did he come to such an end when his race had begun with such incredible promise?In this masterpiece of investigative journalism, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall reconstruct one of the greatest modern stories of one man's descent into self-delusion, public deception, and madness. Based on in-depth interviews with Crowhurst's family and friends, combined with gripping excerpts from his logbooks that revealed (among other things) he had been falsifying his locations all along, Tomalin and Hall paint an unforgettable, haunting portrait of a complex, deeply troubled man and his final fateful journey.