Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932 – July 1969) was a British electronics engineer, businessman, and amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968–1969. He secretly abandoned the race some weeks or months after departing, remaining in the Atlantic Ocean for seven months while reporting false positions. Contemporary reporting focused on his fraudulent reports and emphasised his actions as a hoaxer or "con man". However, with the passage of time, his story has tended to be reappraised as more of a maritime tragedy that, according to one recent author, "raises essential questions about the ethics of competition, solitude at sea and the psychological limits of sailors".
Crowhurst's participation in the race, together with its ultimately tragic end, has exerted a fascination over many commentators and artists. It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films, including a documentary, Deep Water (2006), and two feature films, Crowhurst and The Mercy (both 2017), in which Crowhurst is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth, respectively. Teignmouth Electron ended its days as a dive boat in the Caribbean and its decaying remains can still be found in the dunes above a beach in the Cayman Islands.
Early life Donald Crowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British India. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked in the Indian railways. During her pregnancy, his mother had longed for a daughter, and Crowhurst was dressed as a girl until the age of seven. After India gained independence, his family moved back to England. The family's retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the partition of India.
Crowhurst's father died in 1948. Because of family financial problems, Crowhurst was forced to leave school early that year and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield. In 1953 he received a Royal Air Force commission as a pilot, but was asked to leave in 1954 for reasons that remain unclear, and was subsequently commissioned into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1956. After leaving the Army the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962. He was a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council.
Business ventures Crowhurst, a weekend sailor, designed and built a radio direction finder called the Navicator, a handheld device that allowed the user to take bearings on marine and aviation radio beacons. While he did have some success selling his navigational equipment, his business began to fail. In an effort to gain publicity, he started trying to gain sponsors to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in Crowhurst's failing business. Once committed to the race, Crowhurst mortgaged both his business and home against Best's continued financial support, placing himself in a grave financial situation.
The Golden Globe Race
The Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney. The considerable publicity his achievement garnered led a number of sailors to plan the next logical step – a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world sail.
The Sunday Times had sponsored Chichester, with highly profitable results, and was interested in being involved with the first non-stop circumnavigation, but it had the problem of not knowing which sailor to sponsor. The solution was to promote the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. That was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability before entry.A Voyage for Madmen, by Peter Nichols; page 17. Harper Collins, 2001.
Entrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in the summer.A Voyage for Madmen, page 30. The prizes offered were the Golden Globe trophy for the first single-handed circumnavigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest. This was then a considerable sum, equivalent to almost £73,000 in 2023.
The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron. "Tahiti" Bill Howell, a noted multihull sailor and competitor in the 1964 and 1968 OSTAR races, originally signed up as an entrant but did not actually race.
Crowhurst hired Rodney Hallworth, a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, as his public relations officer.
Crowhurst's boat and preparations
The boat Crowhurst built for the voyage, Teignmouth Electron, was a modified trimaran designed by Californian Arthur Piver.Tomalin and Hall, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" At the time, this was an unproven type of boat for a voyage of such length. Trimarans have the potential to sail much more quickly than monohulled sailboats, but early designs in particular could be very slow if overloaded, and had considerable difficulty sailing close to the wind. Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability, but if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, though crews have lived for months with a boat in the inverted position and ultimately survived.
To improve the safety of the boat, Crowhurst had planned to add an inflatable buoyancy bag on the top of the mast to prevent capsizing, the bag would be activated by water sensors on the hull designed to detect an impending capsize. This innovation would hold the mast horizontal on the surface of the water, and a clever arrangement of pumps would allow him to flood the uppermost outer hull, which would (in conjunction with wave action) pull the boat upright. His scheme was to prove these devices by sailing round the world with them, then go into business manufacturing the system.
However, Crowhurst had a very short time in which to build and equip his boat while securing financing and sponsors for the race. In the end, all of his safety devices were left uncompleted, he planned to complete them while under way. Also, many of his spares and supplies were left behind in the confusion of the final preparations. To top all this, Crowhurst had never sailed on a trimaran before taking delivery of his boat several weeks before the beginning of the race.
On 13 October an experienced sailor, Lieutenant Commander Peter Eden, volunteered to accompany Crowhurst on his last leg from Cowes to Teignmouth. Crowhurst had fallen into the water several times while in Cowes, and as he and Eden climbed aboard Teignmouth Electron, he once again ended up in the water after slipping on the outboard bracket on the stern of the rubber dinghy. Eden's description of his two days with Crowhurst provides the most expert independent assessment available for both boat and sailor before the start of the race. He recalls that the trimaran sailed immensely swiftly, but could get no closer to the wind than 60 degrees. The speed often reached 12 knots, but the vibrations encountered caused the screws on the Hasler self-steering gear to come loose. Eden said, "We had to keep leaning over the counter to do up the screws. It was a tricky and time consuming business. I told Crowhurst he should get the fixings welded if he wanted it to survive a longer trip!" Eden also commented that the Hasler worked superbly and the boat was "certainly nippy."
Eden reported that Crowhurst's sailing techniques were good, "But I felt his navigation was a mite slapdash. I prefer, even in the Channel, to know exactly where I am. He didn't take too much bother with it, merely jotting down figures on a few sheets of paper from time to time." After struggling against westerlies and having to tack out into the Channel twice, they arrived at 2.30 pm on 15 October, where an enthusiastic BBC film crew started filming Eden in the belief he was Crowhurst. There were 16 days to get ready before the race's deadline on 31 October.
Departure and deception Crowhurst left from Teignmouth, Devon, on the last day permitted by the rules: 31 October 1968. He encountered immediate problems with his boat, his equipment, and his lack of open-ocean sailing skills and experience. In the first few weeks he was making less than half of his planned speed. Among the principal issues with his boat was constant ingress of seawater via additional deck hatches that he had specified. When the flexible rubber that he had requested to seal them had turned out to be unavailable, a non-flexing version had been used instead, with the result that the hatches never sealed properly. A compounding issue was that a crucial hose, which would have eased the problem of pumping out the flooded sections, had been left behind on the shore and never made it to the boat before its departure.
Crowhurst was thus faced with the choice of either quitting the race and facing financial ruin and humiliation or continuing to possible death in his unseaworthy, disappointing boat.Nichols, pp. 158-161. According to his logs, Crowhurst's biggest fear was surviving the rough conditions in the Southern Ocean, since his innovative and self-designed anti-capsize modifications had never been completed; accordingly, he gave himself only 50/50 odds of surviving that ocean. (Whether or not the vessel itself would indeed have stood up to Southern Ocean conditions was never tested; fellow competitor Nigel Tetley, in his own Piver-designed trimaran, did successfully traverse that leg but his by then-failing boat broke up in the Atlantic Ocean on his final return leg.) He considered discussing his situation with Stanley Best (presumably to see whether the latter would countenance his withdrawal from the race without calling in the loan funds) but his generator was broken at the timeNichols, p. 160. and it seems that, either for that reason or other, such a conversation never occurred.
Over the course of November and December 1968, the hopelessness of his situation pushed Crowhurst into an elaborate deception. He shut down his radio with a plan to loiter in the South Atlantic for several months while the other boats sailed the Southern Ocean, falsify his navigation logs, then slip back in behind the other contestants for the return leg to England. As last-place finisher, he assumed his false logs would not receive the same scrutiny as those of the winner, however he would retain some acclaim for supposed successful completion of the race and not risk forfeiture of his business (and home) under the terms of his financial obligation to Best.