Donald Crowhurst

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Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (born August 19, 1932 in Ghaziabad , British India , † probably July 1, 1969 in the North Atlantic ) was a British businessman and amateur sailor, who became known for the unusual circumstances of his participation in a sailing regatta from which he did not return.

Life

Donald Crowhurst was born in British India to a senior English railroad worker and teacher. After India's independence, the family moved to England in 1947 and lived there in poor economic circumstances. After the death of his father, Crowhurst was unable to continue his electrical engineering studies due to lack of money. He embarked on a military career and was trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force . He was advised by the British Army as well as by the British Army , which he subsequently joined, to take his leave due to various official and off-duty escapades.

From 1957 Crowhurst, who had also completed an electrical engineering training with the British Army, worked for the electronics company Mullard and in 1962 set up in Bridgwater with a small electronics company called Electron Utilization Ltd. self-employed. The company's only product was a radio direction finder called the Navicator , a handheld device for finding radio beacons for navigation in private shipping . Economically, however, the company soon went downhill (initially it had six employees, but in 1967 only Crowhurst himself and a technician employed by the hour), so that Crowhurst began to fear for the existence of his family - he and his wife Clare had four children.

In 1962, Crowhurst bought a small sailing boat called the Golden Pot , but only used it for weekend trips near his home.

The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race

The route of the Golden Globe Race

After Sir Francis Chichester's successful one-handed circumnavigation of the world by Sir Francis Chichester from August 1966 to May 1967 with the ketch Gipsy Moth IV , the London Sunday Times , which had reported extensively on Chichester's trip, tried to use the enthusiasm for seafaring that had arisen in Great Britain for journalistic purposes. Since Chichester had made a stop in Australia during its journey, the first non-stop one-handed circumnavigation of the world remained as a destination still to be achieved. On March 17, 1968, the newspaper donated a trophy, the Golden Globe , to the single-handed sailor who would set off from any port in the British Isles for a non-stop circumnavigation between June 1 and October 31, 1968 and be the first to return . Another prize of 5,000 pounds (around 95,000 euros based on today's purchasing power ) was offered for the fastest circumnavigation of the world. The race was open to everyone, proof of seafaring knowledge was not required.

Despite his little sailing experience, Crowhurst was convinced that he could win the race and then sell his company's products better and use the prize money and the expected income from book and advertising contracts to pay off his debts. But he had neither a seaworthy boat nor the necessary financial resources. After an attempt was unsuccessful to get the Cutty Sark Society in Greenwich to provide him with the Gipsy Moth IV on display for the regatta, Crowhurst found a financier in the entrepreneur Stanley Best who, however, took a mortgage on Crowhursts as security House registered and contractually agreed that Electron Utilization Ltd. had to buy the boat from him if the race was not started or stopped prematurely.

The participants in the order of their start with their starting locations were John Ridgway (June 1, 1968, Inishmore ), Chay Blyth (June 8, 1968, Hamble-le-Rice ), Robin Knox-Johnston (June 14, 1968, Falmouth ), Bernard Moitessier (August 21, 1968, Plymouth ), Loïck Fougeron (August 21, 1968, Plymouth), Bill King (August 24, 1968, Plymouth) and Nigel Tetley (September 16, 1968, Plymouth), who like Crowhurst with a trimaran was on the way. On the last possible day, October 31, 1968, Alex Carozzo (of Cowes ) and Crowhurst set off themselves, whose journey began in Teignmouth .

Course of the race

Teignmouth Harbor (2007)

Since funding was not secured until the end of May 1968, Crowhurst could not begin to find a boatyard until five months before the latest possible launch date. He had a trimaran with ketch rigging decided and finally found shipyards in Brightlingsea and Brundall who accomplished the boat in a record time of four months. He also hired the journalist Rodney Hallworth as a PR consultant , who organized the port town of Teignmouth on the southwestern English Channel coast as a sponsor and launch site for Crowhurst. Crowhurst's efforts to get industry sponsorship had been almost unsuccessful. Only from Tupperware did he get plastic containers for stowing small pieces of equipment.

Already on the maiden voyage to Teignmouth from October 2nd to 15th, 1968 (the duration of which was originally estimated by Crowhurst at three days) it became clear that the twelve-meter-long boat baptized the Teignmouth Electron before the wind was right sailed fast, but its maneuverability was limited by the fact that it could be steered a maximum of 60 ° against the wind . Due to the late arrival in Teignmouth, there was hardly any time for Crowhurst to familiarize himself with the trimaran or to complete the capsize protection he had developed - an automatically inflatable float at the top of the mast. After hastily clearing up the boat, during which important spare parts and equipment did not even get on board or were stowed in such a way that Crowhurst could no longer find them at sea, he started in Teignmouth as the last participant in the race on October 31, 1968 at 4 p.m. 52 o'clock.

It soon became clear to Crowhurst that the Teignmouth Electron was much slower than he thought and had limited seaworthiness (he had to deal with leaks in the boat hulls and damage to the autopilot from the start) and that he would have no chance of making the long haul, let alone because to circumnavigate the dangerous Cape Horn . Nevertheless, he sent optimistic radio messages home, in which he stated far exaggerated etmales , including one at the record height of 243 nautical miles (450 km). These reports, which were also embellished by Hallworth, gave the public the impression that Crowhurst was becoming the secret favorite of the race.

When, in early December 1968, Crowhurst's pretended position and overly optimistic schedule began to deviate so significantly from the distance actually covered that it would have been impossible to catch up and arrive at Cape Horn before the particularly stormy winter in the southern hemisphere, he decided not to continue in the direction of the Cape of Good Hope , but to stay in the Atlantic and after a few months of waiting to go home to simulate a completed circumnavigation. The leaks from the boat hulls had also reached such an extent that under these conditions it would have been life-threatening to venture into the storm zone of the Roaring Forties . Since there was no suitable hose on board, the bilge pump was unusable, so that Crowhurst could only bilge with a Pütz . This would have been impossible in a storm. Giving up was out of the question for Crowhurst, however, as he was of the opinion that this - in addition to the embarrassment because of the fake cheering reports about his alleged records - would also result in the bankruptcy of his company and the financial ruin of his family.

Crowhurst's feigned and actual position on April 10, 1969

Under the pretext of having to permanently close the leaking generator hatch to prevent further water ingress, he broke off radio contact in order to avoid increasing inquiries about his exact position. He also began to keep a falsified logbook that he hoped to use to prove the alleged circumnavigation of the world on his return. Crowhurst did not call Hallworth again until April 7, 1969, and the news reached Hallworth three days later. He pretended to be approaching the Diego Ramírez Islands and thus shortly before the circumnavigation of Cape Horn . In the meantime (March 6-8) he had been forced to commit another breach of the rules of the race, calling at a small fishing port on the Río de la Plata in Argentina, because he urgently needed to repair leaks on his boat.

Ridgway, Blyth, Fougeron, King and Carozzo had gradually been forced to give up due to storm damage or illness, and Moitessier, who was clearly in the lead, had decided, after he had already passed Cape Horn, not to be commercially taken, the race to break off and sail on to Tahiti . Robin Knox-Johnston was the first participant to return to Great Britain on April 22, 1969. He was given a triumphant reception.

The end

After Knox-Johnston's victory, which had taken a long time to circumnavigate the world with 312 days, Crowhurst and Tetley were still in the running for the award for the fastest non-stop single-handed circumnavigator. However, since Crowhurst feared that his forged logbook would not withstand a close scrutiny by experts, which was to be expected in the event of a victory, he planned to leave for home only when he could no longer dispute Tetley's title. He hoped this would avoid exposure, since he was sure that no one would check the logbooks of a competitor who had not won either of the two prizes.

However, this was thwarted by the fact that Tetley, who assumed that Crowhurst was close on his heels, sailed too risky and was shipwrecked on May 21, 1969 near the Azores with his trimaran.

When Crowhurst realized that "victory" was now inevitable (Hallworth radioed his plans for the lavish reception in Teignmouth, the BBC wanted to send him a helicopter to receive tapes and films), he desperately broke the radio contact again and sank into mental derangement . His notes from the last few weeks consist of confused philosophical and physical treatises, with a total of over 25,000 words, based on Einstein's On Special and General Theories of Relativity , one of the few books he had on board. On July 1, 1969, the 243rd day of the trip and the day on which he had originally planned to be back in England, he kept an exact record of the last minutes of his life and probably left at exactly 12:00 noon Into the water with the ship's chronometer and the fake logbook in hand. These were the only items that were missing from the cabin. Crowhurst's boat was discovered on July 10, 1969 by the British mail ship Picardy in the North Atlantic ( Lage ) undamaged but empty. His body was not found. The Teignmouth Electron was taken from the mail ship to Santo Domingo and later sold to Jamaica. Today it can be found - as a wreck - on Cayman Brac .

Robin Knox-Johnston donated the £ 5,000 prize for the fastest non-stop, single-handed circumnavigation of the world, which he has now also been awarded, to Crowhurst's widow and children.

literature

  • Nicholas Tomalin, Ron Hall: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1970 (German: The strange journey of Donald Crowhurst . Malik, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3890294742 ).
  • John Harris: Teignmouth Electron († 1969). A tragedy of loneliness . In: Ders .: Without a Trace . Atheneum, New York 1984, ISBN 0-689-11120-7 , pp. 214-236.
  • Peter Nichols : A Voyage for Madmen . HarperCollins, New York 2002. ISBN 0-060-95703-4 (German: Alone on the high seas. Adventure circumnavigating the world . Europa-Verlag, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-203-80525-1 ).
  • Chris Eakin: A Race Too Far . Ebury Press, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-09-193259-6 .
  • Peb Jackson, James Lund: Danger Calling: True Adventures of Risk and Faith . Revell, Grand Rapids 2010. ISBN 978-0-8007-3404-6 , including Chapter 6: Sailing for Glory .
  • Edward Renehan: Desperate Voyage: Donald Crowhurst, The London Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and the Tragedy of Teignmouth Electron . New Street Communications, Wickford 2016. ISBN 978-0-692-75761-1 .

Movies

Fiction

  • The sailor Isabelle Autissier wrote the novel Seule la mer s'en souviendra ( Only the Sea Will Remember , Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009. ISBN 978-2246720911 ) about Crowhurst's voyage.
  • The protagonist of the book The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe (German: Die uneuerliche Einsamkeit des Maxwell Sim , Stuttgart: DVA, 2010. ISBN 978-3-421-04484-6 ) is obsessed with Crowhurst's story.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Crowhurst, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crowhurst, Donald Charles Alfred (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British businessman and amateur sailor
DATE OF BIRTH August 19, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Ghaziabad
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: July 1, 1969
Place of death North Atlantic