Don Crowhurst and the Golden Globe Race

In 1968, the Sunday Times newspaper organised an incredible competition. The “Golden Globe Race”, as it was called, was a round-the-world yacht race. The journey had to be done solo, and with no stops for repairs or supplies whatsoever. Anyone was allowed to enter, and no experience in sailing was necessary. But the most amazing part was this; noone had ever sailed single-handedly, non-stop around the world before. This wasn’t just a race; it was a test of the very possibility of the feat itself.

Nine sailors put their names down for the race. Almost all had completed lengthy voyages before, and knew well how to handle a boat. One man, however, was a much more unlikely candidate. Donald Crowhurst, formerly an RAF pilot and inventor, decided that he would attempt the oceanic circumnavigation. Though he was, at best, little more than a “weekend sailor”, he still managed to find sponsorship for his entry, including the purchase of the requisite yacht. The possibility of having an aspirant, untrained yet hardy Englishman win this international contest was a national romance, and drew huge media interest.

But any notions of romance were dispelled utterly in the face of the unrelenting ocean. The race finished up a veritable disaster; only one of the sailors who set out, Robin Knox-Johnston, actually managed to complete the journey. Five retired at various points on the route, and another’s boat sank (though luckily, he survived). Another, a Frenchman, somehow lost his yearning for human company while on the sea. After rounding the treacherous waters of Cape Horn, he decided not to race back to the finishing line off the English coast, but rather went on to attempt to circle the globe a second time (he eventually tired of sailing and landed the boat in Tahiti).

Crowhurst’s story, however, was utterly incredible – and equally tragic. Bound by financial obligations (his sponsor had made Crowhurst put up his own finances as collateral in the case of dropping out of the race), he set out on a boat that was obviously unready for such a massive trip. He experienced unremitting difficulties and constant solitude, all the time aware that if he returned home or landed anywhere he and his family would be ruined financially. But if he continued the race into the dangerous waters around the Earth’s lower latitudes, he risked almost certain death.

He decided instead on an act of subterfuge. Just off the coast of Brazil, he stopped sailing and let the boat sit. His plan was to wait until the other competitors had passed him on the home stretch, then join in as if nothing had gone wrong. Of course, he would not win the race, but he would avoid entering the most dangerous stretches of water in the world and still return home to a hero’s welcome – and some semblance of financial stability. In the meantime, he would send bogus coordinates to home base, and make up an entirely false log. This wasn’t a major concern, however; what panel of judges would assiduously check the logbook of the guy who came in last?

But the “meantime” was a long time to spend alone. Crowhurst spent a total of four months waiting to re-enter the race in the closing stages. In this time, his only contact with the rest of the world was via his radio, which was used to send tall tales of “record-breaking speeds” (also, at one point he docked briefly to repair damage to his boat).

Eventually, the remaining two competitors entered the final section of the race (Robin Knox-Johnston and Nigel Tetley). When Tetley heard the (untrue) report that Crowhurst had made huge progress and was only three days behind him, he pushed his already-battered boat to its limits, sinking it and almost losing his life.

Crowhurst was now going to come in second place. However, he was inevitably going to win the prize for fastest trip (since the boats had left on different dates) – which would mean his logs being carefully scrutinized by expert sailors. He would be found out. Not only that, but his actions had indirectly resulted in the near-death of one of his competitors. Crowhurst cut off radio contact altogether. His mind, already fragile from months of solitude and subterfuge, was pushed over the edge.

He never returned to England. His boat was found three months later, without him in it. Presumably, he had committed suicide by drowning. His journals and logbooks revealed not only the magnitude of the falsehood, but the places to which his tortured psyche had retreated: “The shameful secret of God… is that there is no good or evil — only truth… I have become a second-generation cosmic being…” His rationale for not returning home abandoned the vicissitudes of fiscal responsibility and became an almost Lovecraftian validation: “It’s a small sin for a man to commit, but it is a terrible sin for a cosmic being.”

It’s difficult to imagine the lonely torture that Crowhurst went through (it’s even more difficult to believe that solitary confinement is deliberately used in modern prisons to elicit such states of terror and paranoia in prisoners). It’s one of those rarely-recounted tales of derring-do that, when executed, goes horribly wrong at every turn.

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Crowhurst’s boat, the Teignmouth Electron, sits rotting on the Caribbean island of Cayman Brac to this day. His story is brilliantly told in the film “Deep Water“.

Be Here Now

In Eckhart Tolle’s famous book “The Power Of Now“, he describes how people have lost the art of simply “being”, of existing purely from one moment to the next, without the neuroses of the past and the worries of the future attacking from all sides.

Our society, and in particular, our educational system, has inculcated us with the belief that happiness is always just around the corner, part and parcel of the next class, promotion or pay raise. We never quite get there, of course. There’s always another corner ahead to round.  It’s a recipe for never-ending incompleteness; how many people are totally happy with how they look or how they think? This is heaven for the advertising industry – they always have the snake oil to cure what ails ya’. Indeed, this basic sense of constant individual inadequecy could very well be the core of virtually all of humanity’s ills.

Tolle suggests that all of this results from our perception of time; or at least, what our current social constructions say how time should be perceived. Ancient cultures such as the Mayans believed that time is purely a cyclic edifice, moving through great periods of destruction and creation, but always evolving. Many indigenous cultures believe that the very idea of time itself is futile. In fact , if you really think about it, the whole idea of the past and the future are purely theoretical. We never, ever experience them. We are only ever “here” and “now”. Even the most immersive memories and hypotheses are little more than projections of a mind that can only ever exist in the present. Indeed, Tolle suggests that these flights of the psyche are distractions from “now”, which is what we should truly appreciate.

If we get into the habit of living “now” (which Tolle says can be aided greatly by regular meditation, which is essentially the practice of grounding oneself in pure, unthinking existence), then we can be free of the jealousies and fears that exist only as elements of the constructs of the “past” and the “future”. This is not a new concept; but Tolle has updated it from Vedic scriptures and the Upanishads to be understandable by the denizens of modern society.

If all of this seems like pedantic semantics, remember that modern science seems to confirm many of these theories. Einstein himself was a pioneer of the idea that time was almost as flexible or as static as one perceived it to be. Once, when asked to explain Relativity Theory, he famously illustrated it with the observation that an hour on a bench with a pretty girl seemed like a moment, while a moment on a hot stove seemed like an hour. As Dr. Roy Mathew says, “Einstein . . . added support to the concept that time and the mundane reality are both non-substantial. Time, Einstein showed, was relative and therefore, the mundane world with time as its basis also had to be ephemeral.”

Time is not a mechanical contruct with cogs and wheels. It is as malleable as each individual’s experience of it. We should then, as Tolle hypothesizes, tweak or even overhaul completely that experience in order to filter out the unnecassary flotsam of jetsam of the ideas of past and future. We should end the perception of ourselves as moving towards an uncertain future, carrying the debris of the past. Only then will we destroy the neuroses that emerge purely from these ideas.