Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!

books:


	• The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst Nicholas Tomalin, Ron Hall International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2003 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

BUY THIS BOOK!!!

This is an amazing book, carefully and wonderfully crafted by its authors. Crowhurst was an amazingly complicated man, driven by his intellect and confined by his shortcomings. The sea was the ultimate challenge for him to face his personal demons. Setting out on a voyage inspires a whole range of emotions and feelings for those who choose to embark on such a journey. It is a study in contrasts: hope & fear; order & chaos; skill & luck; triumph & defeat. Crowhurst experienced each of these at such a deep level. He was on the world stage, yet confined by his own machinations. He set out to conquer the last great solo feat and relied on his own abilities. This is the story of how that played out. Along with this text, I would also recommend reading Peter Nichol's "A Voyage For Madmen." It provides an excellent overview of the men involved in the first solo-around-the-world-race and each of their fates. I was unable to put either of these books down.

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The psychology of Round the world races

I was led to this book through "A Voyage for Madmen". This book looks at the same Golden Globe race but focuses practically solely on Donald's trip. It gives you actual pages from his log and takes you all the way up to his last minutes. This book kept me really interested. It shows you Donalds trip from sanity to insanity and all in bewteen. It goes in depth on how he faked his progress and what he actually did. If you like sailing or psychology or you want to read some of the philosophy of a man on the brink on insanity, this is a great read. It kept me up all night and it has changed the way I think of solo circumnavigations.

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A powerful, moving must-read

This is a must-read classic for any armchair sailor or adventurer. It tells the story of one of nine entrants in the first around-the-world sailing race, Donald Crowhurst, who perpetuated one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century before mysteriouly disappearing. Jonathan Raban, Fellow of the Royal Social of Literature (among his many accolades)writes in the introduction, "I've been reading the Strange Last Voyage every year for more than twenty years, and with each further reading, the Crowhurst story deepends and darkens, gaining in power as the world it records slides further into the past." Written by two journalists just a couple of years after the 1968 events, it is meticulously researched and brilliantly written. The result is a singulary moving, amazing, and haunting story. It transcends genre to become a genuine human tragedy. I envy those reading it for the first time.

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Great

The other reviews said it all. Great book. I like the true-life adventure genre, and this one is near the top of the list. Crowhurst really lost it at the end. Wow.

If you liked this book, you might try Adrift, by Steve Calahan.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!

This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving and literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst's story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, Deep Water, and was so captivated by it that I bought this and another account of the race (fellow competitor Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way (which, for the record, doesn't really touch on the Crowhurst story)).

The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business and assuring his family's future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed non-stop round-the-world yacht race.

Yes; quite.

Not only, he rationalises, will his entry publicise his firm's own brand of navigational equipment, but the £5000 prize will satisfy an ever more anxious major creditor. His plan to win, cobbled together from a standing start in six months, is to use an (at the time) almost unheard-of design: the trimaran, substantially of his own specification.

No matter that, a weekend yachtsman, Crowhurst has never been out of the Solent and has no realistic chance of beating the hoary old sea-dogs, renowned explorers and ex-navy officers already signed up for the race. No matter that preparing the boat involves raising further finance from the same major creditor who was already breathing down Crowhurst's neck (you do have to wonder what *he* was thinking, don't you). No matter that there is no time to have the boat properly finished, let alone thoroughly ocean-trialled.

And thereafter a perfect, inevitable, tragedy unfolds. Crowhurst is carried by events, some of his own making, to prosecute a plan it is plain, even to him, is madness. But events and circumstances spur him on. A BBC film crew is following him. A rather over-excited publicist inflates expectations. Before he knows it, Crowhurst is off the coast of Portugal in a slow, leaking, malfunctioning, poorly provisioned boat, fearing for his life if he should go on, and for his solvency and marriage should he not. He realises there his no hope of success, but is compellingly obliged to soldier on, stiff upper lip, and makes the hasty and fatal decision to exaggerate his progress. From that point on, fortune's wheel is set.

The ironies and twists of fate which thereafter play out and force events to their sorry conclusion are so cruel that one can hardly blame Crowhurst for reneging on a lifetime's atheism and laying his plight at the hands of a malicious (and game-playing) God. The saddest irony of all was the last: Crowhurst, never intending to do anything but come in a respectable but uninteresting last, announces (to add some drama!), that he is closing on the last remaining competitor who, in panic, redoubles his efforts to coax his own damaged, worn out and jury-rigged boat faster, causing it to break up entirely and sink - leaving Crowhurst to win (if he arrives home at all) by default - the one thing he simply cannot afford to do.

Tomalin and Hall's book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together and beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, and charts sympathetically and extensively Crowhurst's descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst's final plunge into the abyss, and his final burst of energy in recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful and somehow uplifting: here is a hero going out in true Nietzschean style with the psychology of the tragic poet: "Not so as to get rid of pity and terror ... but beyond pity and terror, to realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses the joy in destruction"

Olly Buxton

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

The Sailor's Classics library introduces a new generation of readers to the best books ever written about small boats under sail

In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set sail from England to participate in the first single-handed nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, his boat was found in the mid-Atlantic, intact but with no one on board. In this gripping reconstruction, journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall tell the story of Crowhurst's ill-fated voyage.

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