Review: A Voyage For Madmen

Ed Gorman is aghast at the courage and foolhardiness recounted in this contemporary look at the notorious '68 Golden Globe Race

Peter Nichols has picked a great story and re-told it well in his gripping account of the path-breaking 1968/69 Golden Globe Race, A Voyage for Madmen.

The title is no accident. Despite the tragic fates of two of the competitors, we have generally been accustomed to regarding those first would-be non-stop round-the-world soloists as heroic figures.

Nichols's view - and it is one that is difficult to argue with - is that, though they may have been heroic, the nine intrepid adventurers who set sail in 1968 were also close to being certifiable. With perhaps only two exceptions, they were setting off in unfound or woefully unsuitably designed yachts, with little actual experience of ocean voyaging.
The advance of technology and the passage of time, as Nichols points out, has made the solo round-the-world race not just a relatively sensible challenge but one in which many of the discomforts and dangers have been dramatically reduced.

Consider the last Vendee Globe, for example, in which competitors spoke at will to their shore teams and families, took part in live satellite interviews from on-board and used a battery of advanced weather and positioning technology. At all times they knew exactly where they and their rivals were and they could predict the weather ahead with the precision of professional meteorologists. The Vendee Globe skippers were also sailing in very fast yet exceptionally strong yachts, were clad in superb all-weather sailing gear and were eating carefully controlled diets.

Just 32 years ago - incredible how far ocean sailing has come in that time - few grasped what sort of boat was required to take on the Southern Ocean, navigation was by sextant and dead-reckoning, food was in vast quantities of heavy tins, oil skins were oil skins and loneliness was a killer, alleviated only by occasional radio contact or VHF links with passing ships.

Nichols conveys this stone age world vividly. It is simply staggering to look back from the era of Geodis, Fila or PRB to the world of the Golden Globe. Both Chay Blyth and John Ridgeway, for example, set sail in 1969 in laughably unsuitable 30ft bilge-keel production cruising yachts. In Blyth's case (he was clearly an absolute maniac at this stage in his amazing life) he did so with virtually no idea of how to sail a boat. "Few people leaving a dock for an afternoon's sail in a dinghy have cast off with less experience than Chay Blyth had when he set off to sail alone around the world," notes Nichols.

Donald Crowhurst and Nigel Tetley, meanwhile, were trying to circumnavigate in weedy and leaky horrible-looking plywood trimarans built like early caravans. While Crowhurst never tested his boat in the Southern Ocean, Tetley did well to hold his together until the closing stages of his largely unsung voyage when his Victress broke up close to the Azores - an event which ultimately led to his suicide.

Only the eccentric Frenchman Bernard Moitessier in his rugged steel-built ketch, Joshua, which had masts made from telephone polls and Robin Knox-Johnston, the unknown merchant seaman in his stumpy and slow little Indian-built ketch, Suhaili, had - roughly speaking - the right tools for the job.

Nichols tells the whole story with pace and with illuminating and imaginative comment based on his own experiences of solo sailing and A Voyage for Madmen is hard to put down. He brings out the Tetley tragedy well and he simply can't lose with Crowhurst whose descent into madness makes compulsive reading. It seems Crowhurst is set to haunt us for ever. There is a great picture in the book of Crowhurst's yacht, Teignmouth Electron, rotting on Cayman Brac, taken just two years ago.

Moitessier is also well-drawn - a philosopher of the sea whose influence still resonates through the modest and brave world of modern French single-handed racing. Nichols's account reminds us that, had it not been for Moitessier's weird decision not to return to Plymouth but to carry on to Tahiti, Knox-Johnston may not have entered the history books as the first man to sail non-stop, alone, around the world, a voyage completed in 313 days at an average speed of 3.39 knots.

Nichols, an American, paints a rather dry picture of Knox-Johnston as a sort of Elizabethan-style loyal servant of his sovereign with a "solid" taste in books and food who plodded round the world and into history - a view which tends to obscure the enormity of what he achieved in that tiny little boat (which Nichols now believes must be released from her dry berth at the National Maritime Museum to save her from disintegration).

He makes much of that fact that both before and after his epic voyage, Knox-Johnston was found to be "distressingly normal" by a psychiatrist who examined him. "His 'normalcy' was no doubt a distress to the psychiatrist, but the diagnosis was fundamentally mistaken," writes Nichols. "Normal people aren't driven to try to sail alone around the world without stopping."

A Voyage for Madmen is published by Profile Books at £17.99.