The Two Voyages of Donald Crowhurst

I have heard nothing on 875 oh I am now returning to Portishead radio for advice [Music] Donald Crowhurst was an electronics engineer with a small business in Somerset in October 1968 he left home to sail around the world alone nine men embarked on the Sunday Times yacht race in search of fame and adventure Donald Crowhurst never returned [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I can think of very distinct markings in April 1968 the Sunday Times announced the first non-stop single-handed round-the-world yacht race even Sir Francis Chichester had gone ashore during his triumphant voyage the year before Crowhurst was the last to leave on October the 31st the day the deadline expired the spotlight was on Crowhurst from the outset not only was he the last to leave but he'd become a local celebrity BBC Bristol gave him 250 pounds a film camera and a tape recorder to make a record of his voyage I feel a bit of a charley actually sitting here with this BBC tape recorder whirring away taking down everything I have to say faithfully and revealing it for pure absolute nonsense I feel like somebody who's been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message some profound observation that will save the world back home in Bridgewater Crowhurst wife had four young children to bring up and a rambling house to maintain their only income was to have been from sales of Crowhurst navigator a radio receiver that acted as a device for navigation Crowhurst was a radio wizard who loved inventing gadgets the Navigator was the least fanciful of many [Music] I can remember him sitting for hours on end in the shed surrounded by electronic devices an oscilloscope and wearing headphones totally absorbed in making rearranging designing electronic devices and radio devices it was something that completely intrigued him and he would often talk to us as children about radio waves and how they spread out like ripples on a pond Crowhurst had invented not only the navigator but also a computerized safety mechanism for the yacht he undertook the voyage in the hope that the publicity would promote his ailing electronics business the house was remortgaged to finance the trip and he persuaded his backer a successful local caravan dealer to stand by him until the voyage was over this really was an exciting venture and I'm not an adventurous person about Hankinson but it's like with interesting compelling to join in even at a distance I feel I've done a reasonably good day's work today filming recording looking after the bows and navigation cooking and of course by far the most important event establishing my contact reporters header area which is the crowning achievement of today I was a radio officer at the Portishead radio during the the time that Don Ho has was supposed to be going round the world I took a lot of messages from him in Morse code of course because we were what we called a WT station hf w g high-frequency wireless telegraphy we when it passed his signals to the various people to his agent and also to his wife we stuck with earphones on took our signals and typed them out but with him because he was a special case we would perhaps type it down and take it up and thrown it through to his wife it was a local story and we were very much looking forward to getting frequent progress reports from heroic Crowhurst as he went around the world this is what race entrants do their radioing back positions what's happening to them we got virtually nothing but very long intervals Donald would send back a six word telegram to Portishead radio which his agent didn't like because he wanted success stories to push on to us and all the papers so the agent had to do his best with six words turn it into 40 words and hoped that that was it but we never really knew what he was doing we never really knew where he was I was employed by The Sunday Times to follow the ten contestants in the round-the-world yacht race in 1968 and indeed to calculate their relative speed each week in comparison with tipsters famous voyage the previous year now Donald crossed of course was the last to leave on the 31st of October and he did very for speeds for the first week or two what was generally rather poor weather but what worried me about Donald Clovis was the vagueness of the information we got from them and then suddenly in early December we had this claim for a world record for a single-handed yachtsman 243 miles in one day well that made me suspicious bearing in mind is only been averaging at 50 miles a day roughly up until that time Crowhurst claim worried both captain rich and Sir Francis Chichester but the world continued to follow his circumnavigation it was only at the end of the voyage which curiously lasted 243 days that this moment was seen as a turning point [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was at that particular stage that things started to change and indeed when I reconstructed his route some time later once sir the logbooks had been brought back to the United Kingdom in fact it was from that period on that we had two voyages if you like the real voyage which took him down to the Falklands roughly back again and the fraudulent voyage which indeed he pretended to go around the world despite his doubts Craig Rich continued to report Crowhurst apparent progress to the Sunday Times his unease about the boats capabilities was not without precedent Crowhurst irrepressible optimism had obscured a sense of concerns that had existed right from the start I was eight years old at the time but we all I think all of us children felt it as a sense of the tension as well as the excitement there was obviously time we were getting away to the seaside and we were going to see my father set off to sail around the world but at the same time we could feel the tension and the haste that was involved we could see everything in disarray in the boat it was absolute chaos the inside of his trimaran resembled nothing less than a car boot sale warehouse it was piled up with electronic bits with wire with equipment with tins with bags with ropes with everything it really was total chaos it never seemed to get any better the boat wasn't ready and there was the tension and the sense of something approaching doomed that was in the air there was this indefinable feeling that there was something terribly wrong and that my father was involved in something unstoppable and currently enjoying this cruise the boat has been extremely well behaved very exhilarating to sail everything's quite at ease very in fact crow has kept up the nonchalant tone of his tape recordings throughout the journey but his logbook in which he recorded his authentic feelings alongside his navigation told quite another story one of the striking things that the logbook shows the difference that developed from quite an early stage in the voyage between what my fathers were paid to tell other people about what was happening on the boat and what he knew himself the situation was at the 15th of November he recalled that he had no electrics that the hatches were leaking letting water into the float that the sails were incorrectly cousin with the shrouds was chafing and also that he had no method of punting because a crucial bit achieving and being left behind in the Russia Tenma's so with that great list of problems in his mind in November 15th he booked a call to my mother to say that everything was ok nothing at all about the incredible difficulties he was having with the boat what course is rope I do not have Bandhan the nonstop attempt when I go on if I go on I have an equal chance of making the trip or drowning Claire would think the risk was unacceptable and my first duty is to her on the whole it must be regarded as unacceptable for a married man with a moderately large family the strain uncle Claire would be terrible [Music] I've been alone now for very hairy two months not what I'm depressed or feeling sorry for myself by any means but there is a spirituality about this place and about the time Christmas that does tend to make one a little bit melancholy [Music] obviously the boat wasn't a very good condition we know that but nonetheless he continued to flow southwards down the Brazilian coast here while telling everybody was off around the Roaring Forties but that's all we knew at that stage because he stopped sending radio messages when he said their transmissions were impossible he was leading up to the fact that he was going to go out of radio communication because if he kept in radio contact going across the southern ocean the only way he could got his messages back is through the local when I used that inverted commas radio station which would have been Wellington he was operating his Reuben desires because he was close enough and in radial distance but he couldn't send anything through Wellington because in fact he wasn't there he did give this warning that he thought he might have to go into radio silence but the psychological isolation was that much more complete he could hear messages coming in and yes he did it imposed the situation upon himself of non communication of being as it were speechless keeping a sort of watch on sales by night alone the rigging size of sigh of cosmic sorrow for weeping does that die maybe tomorrow on 12.7 by 10 to the 5th irradiated olive trees aside of film and soul with melancholy waves sweep away my melancholy my foot stores a 10 pound case of rice to the northeast 2.5 by 10 cubed miles 250 by 10 cubed babies will slowly die too weak to fuss carbohydrate deficiency they tell us on 15.2 402 megahertz it's clear that he's thinking of himself as a as a component sitting in the middle of the boat which is itself acting as though as a kind of radio receiver and picking up these these messages about the world and about the state of the world which is one of irreparable sorrow and damage and it clearly reflects how he was thinking about his own predicament and the boat itself being unmanageable and unsuitable for around-the-world voyage do you wanna do money where am i who am i doing will I describe the actual help doing time run your circum you silly Oh second you're in the room as a second navigator can be haha he's a terrible thing hiding all determine a little sweet for you ah in theory then he will go all the way across here around the world I'll pass New Zealand and here is coming in towards Cape Horn and this of course means that he's now back in theory close to his actual position his fake journey had now joined up with his real one and he was free to speak again as far as Don Cohoes was concerned he would have used that particular switch 12 Meg's I would have worked him on that time when he told me he came there just come round Cape Horn it would have been about five o'clock one morning he would have used a 12 make frequency I would have arts at him with that key down his callsign with Mike Zulu uniform whiskey I would have got a message for expecting him to send a telegram for a telegram yes I would fight like this good solid very hard-working stand a lot of hardware died but instead of sending a telegram he just told me that he had come round Cape Horn and I would have gone back on the key here Mike and said uniform whiskey his callsign I would have said received thank you and will passed information on there was a tremendous excitement when we heard that when the radio silence when his radio silence was broken we heard that he was returning home and everyone was smiling and we just thought it was wonderful Crowhurst emerged from radio silence to find that he was bound to win the prize for the fastest circumnavigation and that his log books would be scrupulously examined I was determined to solve the problem if it took the rest of my life half an hour later I had set up the basic equations and seen the path three days later I understood everything in nature in myself in all religion in politics in atheism agnosticism communism and systems I knew everything from Julius Caesar to multi-sector I had a complete set of answers to the most difficult problems now facing mankind I had arrived in the cosmos while contemplating the navel he was in a very extreme psychological final about time in the interest of the message of there were thousands of people waiting to cheer him home on his arrival at that two men his homecoming receptions threatened to be as huge as the Frances Chester's the previous year sirens are sounding people are cheering and waving plates of Sekulow crowd who began over him so they would have tremendous excitement and exhilaration out here if I stipulated my own free will that by learning to manipulate the space-time continuum man will become God and disappear from the physical universe as we know it I am providing the system with an impulse if my solution is rooted in the mathematical requirements of a solution it is correct then I am very close to God and should by the methods I claim are available move at last to prophecy let's have a go the choice is simply this do we go on clinging to the idea that God made us all realize that it lies within our power to make God he wanted to convey truth about the way in which and intellect can identify with with what's eternally true with mathematics and that in that situation that individual survival didn't didn't really matter [Music] the system is freaking out this message at the top of its voice why does no one listen I am this may be my uniform Wesley Marzullo uniform whiskey calling our material and l4 walk on a bomber color wall doc might as well a uniform whiskey it must have been a very ironic situation but having pretended for so long that he was unable to a transmissions when he really did desperately need to to make a telephone call to my mother and that's to make a confession that he was unable to because the transmitter began to fail he did try desperately hard to try and make devoted telephone link work but without success apart from the odd gale it'll get downhill run to Union no problems at all I shouldn't think anyway I certainly feel as though the voyage is over I live about 2,000 miles or so to go barring catastrophes and whole thing's so announced the stage I think I realized all those ambitions I noted as a boy like playing cricket for England land free on top of the world tremendously fit I feel in from indice shape I never felt these were the last words he recorded on June the 23rd his tapes ran out really the first news that we had but things were so terrible that other took us all upstairs and we sat on the bed and she said that the boat had been found and that my father wasn't on it and which point she began to cry and we were just stunned we didn't know what it meant we knew that there was a search tool on so we felt quite optimistic that he might be found and when the truth about what had happened when the log books finally began to be studied people began to realize what's happened it was very difficult tomorrow to explain to us natured is not allowed God to seen any sins except one that is this thing of concealment [Music] this is the terrible secret of the torment of the soul needed an actual system to keep trying [Music] he has perpetrated this sin from eternity I think in a way what he did it right at the end of the voyage was to make the boat itself a kind of transmitter a way of transmitting his confession about what happened on the voyage and and his philosophical message the the impulse that he he felt he'd received that he wanted the boats transmitted to the rest of the world even after his death they can only be one perfect beauty that is the great beauty of truth no man may do more than all that he is capable of doing the perfect way is the way of reconciliation I am what I am and I see the nature of my offense right at the end of notebook writing Li reaches a kind of conclusion and she writes the words it is finished this is the mercy and says that he will resign the game and gives the time that he'll do so which this I'm just surely after that the time of the last messages the most likely conclusion from that is that is when he had decided to die it's just possible that there is some other meaning but from this psychological movement of bozlovski pages he clearly regarded his strugglers coming to amount at that point and that's where the liberal guns you

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Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2017