Everything about Sunday Times Golden Globe Race totally explained
The
Sunday Times Golden Globe Race was a non-stop,
single-handed,
round-the-world yacht race, held in 1968–1969, and was the first round-the-world yacht race. The race was controversial due to the failure by most competitors to finish the race and because of the
suicide of one entrant; however, it ultimately led to the founding of the
BOC Challenge and
Vendée Globe round-the-world races, both of which continue to be successful and popular.
The race was sponsored by the
British Sunday Times newspaper and was designed to capitalise on a number of individual round-the-world voyages which were already being planned by various sailors; for this reason, there were no qualification requirements, and competitors were permitted to start at any time between
1 June and
31 October 1968. The
Golden Globe trophy was offered to the first person to complete an unassisted, non-stop single-handed circumnavigation of the world via the
great capes, and a separate
£5,000 prize was offered for the fastest single-handed circumnavigation.
Nine sailors started the race; four retired before leaving the
Atlantic Ocean. Of the five remaining,
Chay Blyth, who had set off with absolutely no sailing experience, sailed past the
Cape of Good Hope before retiring;
Nigel Tetley sank with 1,100 sea miles to go while leading;
Donald Crowhurst, who attempted to fake a round-the-world voyage, began to show signs of mental illness, and then committed suicide; and
Bernard Moitessier, who rejected the philosophy behind a commercialised competition, abandoned the race while in a strong position to win and kept sailing non-stop until he reached
Tahiti after circling the globe one and a half times.
Robin Knox-Johnston was the only entrant to complete the race, becoming the first person to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world. He was awarded both prizes, and later donated the £5,000 to a fund supporting Crowhurst's family.
Genesis of the race
Long-distance
single-handed sailing has its beginnings in the nineteenth century, when a number of sailors made notable single-handed crossings of the Atlantic. The first single-handed
circumnavigation of the world was made by
Joshua Slocum, between 1895 and 1898, and many sailors have since followed in his wake, completing leisurely circumnavigations with numerous stopovers. However, the first person to tackle a single-handed circumnavigation as a speed challenge was Sir
Francis Chichester, who, in 1960, had co-founded the
Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (
OSTAR).
In 1966, Chichester set out to sail around the world by the
clipper route, starting and finishing in
England with a stop in
Sydney, in an attempt to beat the speed records of the
clipper ships in a small boat. His voyage was a great success, as he set an impressive round-the-world time of nine months and one day — with 226 days of sailing time — and, soon after his return to England on
May 28,
1967, was
knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II. Even before his return, however, a number of other sailors had turned their attention to the next logical challenge — a
non-stop single-handed circumnavigation of the world.
Plans laid
In March 1967, a 28-year-old British
merchant marine officer,
Robin Knox-Johnston, realised that a non-stop solo circumnavigation was "about all there's left to do now". Knox-Johnston had a 32-
foot (9.7
m) wooden
ketch,
Suhaili, which he and some friends had built in
India to the William Atkin
Eric design; two of the friends had then sailed the boat to
South Africa, and in 1966 Knox-Johnston had single-handly sailed her the remaining 10,000 nautical miles (18,500 km) to
London.
Knox-Johnston was determined that the first person to make a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation should be British, and he decided that he'd attempt to achieve this feat. To fund his preparations he went looking for sponsorship from Chichester's
sponsor, the British
Sunday Times. The
Sunday Times was by this time interested in being associated with a successful non-stop voyage but decided that, of all the people rumoured to be preparing for a voyage, Knox-Johnston and his old wooden ketch were the least likely to succeed. Knox-Johnston finally arranged sponsorship from the
Sunday Mirror.
Several other sailors were interested.
Bill King, a former
Royal Navy submarine commander, built a 42-foot (12.8 m)
junk-rigged
schooner,
Galway Blazer II, designed for heavy conditions. He was able to secure sponsorship from the
Express newspapers.
John Ridgway and
Chay Blyth, a
British Army captain and sergeant, had
rowed a 20-foot (6.1 m) boat across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1966. They independently decided to attempt the non-stop sail, but despite their rowing achievement were hampered by a lack of sailing experience. They both made arrangements to get boats, but ended up with entirely unsuitable vessels, 30-foot (9.1 m) boats designed for cruising protected waters and too lightly-built for
Southern Ocean conditions. Ridgway managed to secure sponsorship from
The People newspaper.
One of the most serious sailors considering a non-stop circumnavigation in late 1967 was the French sailor and author
Bernard Moitessier. Moitessier had a custom-built 39-foot (11.9 m) steel ketch,
Joshua, named after Slocum, in which he and his wife Françoise had sailed from France to Tahiti. They had then sailed her home again by way of
Cape Horn, simply because they wanted to go home quickly to see their children. He had already achieved some recognition based on two successful books which he'd written on his sailing experiences. However, he was disenchanted with the material aspect of his fame — he believed that by writing his books for quick commercial success he'd sold out what was for him an almost spiritual experience. He hit upon the idea of a non-stop circumnavigation as a new challenge, which would be the basis for a new and better book.
The birth of the race
By January 1968, word of all these competing plans was spreading. The
Sunday Times, which had profited to an unexpected extent from its
sponsorship of Chichester, wanted to get involved with the first non-stop circumnavigation, but had the problem of selecting the sailor most likely to succeed. King and Ridgway, two likely candidates, already had sponsorship, and there were several other strong candidates preparing. "Tahiti" Bill Howell, an Australian cruising sailor, had made a good performance in the 1964
OSTAR, Moitessier was also considered a strong contender, and there may have been other potential circumnavigators already making preparations.
The
Sunday Times didn't want to sponsor someone for the first non-stop solo circumnavigation only to have them beaten by another sailor, so the paper hit upon the idea of a sponsored race, which would cover all the sailors setting off that year. To circumvent the possibility of a non-entrant completing his voyage first and scooping the story, they made entry automatic: anyone sailing single-handed around the world that year would be considered in the race.
This still left them with a dilemma in terms of the prize. A race for the fastest time around the world was a logical subject for a prize, but there would obviously be considerable interest in the
first person to complete a non-stop circumnavigation, and there was no possibility of persuading the possible candidates to wait for a combined start. The
Sunday Times therefore decided to award two prizes: the
Golden Globe trophy for the first person to sail single-handed, non-stop around the world; and a £5,000 prize (a considerable sum then, equivalent to £58,100 in 2005) for the fastest time.
This automatic entry provision had the drawback that the race organisers couldn't vet entrants for their ability to take on this challenge safely. This was in contrast to the
OSTAR, for example, which in the same year required entrants to complete a solo 500-nautical mile (930 km) qualifying passage. The one concession to safety was the requirement that all competitors must start between
June 1 and
October 31, in order to pass through the
Southern Ocean in summer.
To make the speed record meaningful, competitors had to start from England. However Moitessier, the most likely person to make a successful circumnavigation, was preparing to leave from
Toulon, in
France. When the
Sunday Times went to invite him to join the race, he was horrified, seeing the commercialisation of his voyage as a violation of the spiritual ideal which had inspired it. A few days later, Moitessier relented, thinking that he'd join the race and that if he won, he'd take the prizes and leave again without a word of thanks. In typical style, he refused the offer of a free radio to make progress reports, saying that this intrusion of the outside world would taint his voyage; he did, however, take a camera, agreeing to drop off packages of film if he got the chance.
The race declared
The race was announced on
March 17,
1968, by which time King, Ridgway, Howell (who later dropped out), Knox-Johnston and Moitessier were declared competitors. Chichester, despite expressing strong misgivings about the preparedness of some of the interested parties, was to chair the panel of judges.
Four days later, British
electronics engineer
Donald Crowhurst announced his intention to take part. Crowhurst was the manufacturer of a modestly successful
radio navigation aid for sailors, who impressed many people with his apparent knowledge of sailing. With his electronics business failing, he saw a successful adventure, and the attendant publicity, as the solution to his financial troubles — essentially the mirror opposite of Moitessier, who saw publicity and financial rewards as inimical to
his adventure.
Crowhurst planned to sail in a
trimaran. These boats were starting to gain a reputation, still very much unproven, for speed, along with a darker reputation for unseaworthiness; they were known to be very stable under normal conditions, but extremely difficult to right if knocked over, for example by a
rogue wave. Crowhurst planned to tackle the deficiencies of the trimaran with a revolutionary self-righting system, based on an automatically inflated air bag at the masthead. He would prove the system on his voyage, then go into business manufacturing it, thus making trimarans into safe boats for
cruisers.
By June, Crowhurst had secured some financial backing, essentially by
mortgaging the boat, and later his family home. Crowhurst's boat, however, hadn't yet been built; despite the lateness of his entry, he pressed ahead with the idea of a custom boat, which started construction in late June. Crowhurst's belief was that a trimaran would give him a good chance of the prize for the fastest circumnavigation, and with the help of a wildly optimistic table of probable performances, he even predicted that he'd be first to finish — despite a planned departure on
October 1.
The race
Given the design of the race, there was no organised start; the competitors set off whenever they were ready, over a period of several months. On
1 June 1968, the first allowable day, John Ridgway sailed from
Inishmore, Ireland, in his weekend cruiser
English Rose IV. Just a week later, on
8 June, Chay Blyth followed suit — despite having absolutely no sailing experience. On the day he sailed, he'd friends rig the boat
Dytiscus for him and then sail in front of him in another boat to show him the correct manoeuvres.
Knox-Johnston got underway from
Falmouth soon after, on
14 June. He wasn't disturbed by the fact that it was a Friday, contrary to the common sailors' superstition that it's bad luck to begin a voyage on a
Friday.
Suhaili, crammed with tinned food, was low in the water and sluggish, but the much more seaworthy boat soon started gaining on Ridgway and Blyth.
It soon became clear to Ridgway that his boat wasn't up to a serious voyage, and he was also becoming affected by loneliness. On
17 June, at
Madeira, he made an arranged rendezvous with a friend to drop off his photos and logs, and received some mail in exchange. While reading a recent issue of the
Sunday Times that he'd just received, he discovered that the rules against assistance prohibited receiving mail — including the newspaper in which he was reading this — and so he was technically disqualified. While he dismissed this as overly petty, he continued the voyage in bad spirits. The boat continued to deteriorate, and he finally decided that it wouldn't be able to handle the heavy conditions of the Southern Ocean. On
21 July he put into
Recife,
Brazil, and retired from the race.
Even with the race underway, other competitors continued to declare their intention to join. On
30 June, Royal Navy officer Nigel Tetley announced that he'd race in the
trimaran he and his wife lived aboard. He obtained sponsorship from
Music for Pleasure, a British budget record label, and started preparing his boat,
Victress, in
Plymouth, where Moitessier, King, and Frenchman Loïck Fougeron were also getting ready. Fougeron was a friend of Moitessier, who managed a motorcycle company in
Casablanca, and planned to race on
Captain Browne, a 30-foot (9.1 m) steel
gaff cutter. Crowhurst, meanwhile, was far from ready — assembly of the three hulls of his trimaran only began on
July 28 at a boatyard in
Norfolk.
Blyth and Knox-Johnston were well down the Atlantic by this time. Knox-Johnston, the experienced seaman, was enjoying himself, but
Suhaili had problems with leaking seams near the
keel. However, he'd managed a good repair by
diving and
caulking the seams underwater.
Blyth wasn't far ahead, and although leading the race, he was having far greater problems with his boat, which was suffering in the hard conditions. He had also discovered that the fuel for his
generator had been contaminated, which effectively put his radio out of action. On
15 August, Blyth went in to
Tristan da Cunha to pass a message to his wife, and spoke to crew from an anchored cargo ship,
Gillian Gaggins. On being invited aboard by her captain, a fellow
Scot, Blyth found the offer impossible to refuse and went aboard, while the ship's engineers fixed his generator and replenished his fuel supply.
By this time he'd already shifted his focus from the race to a more personal quest to discover his own limits; and so, despite his technical disqualification for receiving assistance, he continued sailing towards
Cape Town. His boat continued to deteriorate, however, and on
13 September he put into
East London. Having successfully sailed the length of the Atlantic and rounded
Cape Agulhas in an unsuitable boat, he decided that he'd take on the challenge of the sea again, but in a better boat and on his own terms.
Despite the retirements, other racers were still getting started. On Thursday,
22 August, Moitessier and Fougeron set off, with King following on Saturday (none of them wanted to leave on a Friday). With
Joshua lightened for a race, Moitessier set a fast pace — more than twice as fast as Knox-Johnston over the same part of the course. Tetley sailed on
16 September, and on
23 September, Crowhurst's boat,
Teignmouth Electron, was finally launched in Norfolk. Under severe time pressure, Crowhurst planned to sail to
Teignmouth, his planned departure point, in 3 days; but although the boat performed well downwind, the struggle against headwinds in the
English Channel showed severe deficiencies in the boat's upwind performance, and the trip to Teignmouth took 13 days.
Meanwhile, Moitessier was making excellent progress. On
29 September he passed
Trindade in the south Atlantic, and on
20 October he reached Cape Town, where he managed to leave word of his progress. He sailed on east into the
Southern Ocean, where he continued to make good speed, covering 188 nautical miles (348 km) on
28 October.
Others were not so comfortable with the ocean conditions. On
30 October, Fougeron passed Tristan da Cunha, with King a few hundred nautical miles ahead. The next day —
Halloween — they both found themselves in a severe storm. Fougeron
hove-to but still suffered a severe knockdown; King, who allowed his boat to tend to herself (a recognised procedure known as
lying ahull), had a much worse experience, as his boat was rolled, and he lost his foremast. Both men decided to retire from the race.
Four of the starters had decided to retire at this point, at which time Moitessier was 1,100 nautical miles (2000 km) east of Cape Town, Knox-Johnston was 4,000 nautical miles (7400 km) ahead in the middle of the
Great Australian Bight, and Tetley was just nearing Trindade. However,
31 October was also the last allowable day for racers to start, and was the day that the last two competitors, Donald Crowhurst and Alex Carozzo, got under way. Carozzo, a highly-regarded Italian sailor, had competed in (but not finished) that year's
OSTAR. Considering himself unready for sea, he "sailed" on
31 October, to comply with the race's mandatory start date, but went straight to a
mooring to continue preparing his boat without outside assistance. Crowhurst was also far from ready — his boat, barely finished, was a chaos of unstowed supplies, and his self-righting system was unbuilt. He left anyway, and started slowly making his way against the prevailing winds of the English Channel.
By mid-November Crowhurst was already having problems with his boat. Hastily built, the boat was already showing signs of being unprepared, and in the rush to depart, Crowhurst had left behind crucial repair materials. On
15 November, he made a careful appraisal of his outstanding problems and of the risks he'd face in the
Southern Ocean; he was also acutely aware of the financial problems awaiting him at home. Despite his analysis that
Teignmouth Electron wasn't up to the severe conditions which she'd face in the
Roaring Forties, he pressed on.
Carozzo retired on
14 November, as he'd started vomiting blood due to an
ulcer, and put into
Porto,
Portugal for medical attention. Two more retirements were reported in rapid succession, as King made Cape Town on
22 November, and Fougeron stopped in
Saint Helena on
27 November. This left four boats in the race in December: Knox-Johnston's
Suhaili, battling frustrating and unexpected headwinds in the south
Pacific Ocean, Moitessier's
Joshua, closing on
Tasmania, Tetley's
Victress, just passing the
Cape of Good Hope, and Crowhurst's
Teignmouth Electron, still in the north Atlantic.
Tetley was just entering the Roaring Forties, and encountering strong winds. He experimented with self-steering systems based on various combinations of headsails, but had to deal with some frustrating headwinds. On December 21 he encountered a calm and took the opportunity to clean the hull somewhat; while doing so, he saw a 7-foot shark prowling around the boat. He later caught it, using a shark hook baited with a tin of
bully beef (corned beef), and hoisted it on board for a photo. His log is full of sail changes and other such sailing technicalities and gives little impression of how he was coping with the voyage emotionally; still, describing a heavy low on December 15 he hints at his feelings, wondering "why the hell I was on this voyage anyway".
Knox-Johnston was having problems, as
Suhaili was showing the strains of the long and hard voyage. On
3 November, his self-steering gear had failed for the last time, as he'd used up all his spares. He was also still having leak problems, and his rudder was loose. Still, he felt that the boat was fundamentally sound, so he braced the rudder as well as he could, and started learning to balance the boat in order to sail a constant course on her own. On
7 November, he dropped some mail off in
Melbourne, and on
19 November he made an arranged meeting with a
Sunday Mirror journalist in
Otago,
New Zealand.
On
10 December, Crowhurst reported that he'd had some fast sailing at last, including a day's run on
8 December of 243 nautical miles (450 km), a new 24-hour record.
Francis Chichester was sceptical of Crowhurst's sudden change in performance, and with good reason — on
6 December, Crowhurst had started creating a faked record of his voyage, showing his position advancing much faster than it actually was. The creation of this fake log was an incredibly intricate process, involving working celestial navigation in reverse.
The motivation for this initial deception was most likely to allow him to claim an attention-getting record prior to entering the
doldrums. However, from that point on, he started to keep two logs — his actual navigation log, and a second log in which he could enter a faked description of a round-the-world voyage. This would have been an immensely difficult task, involving the need to make up convincing descriptions of weather and sailing conditions in a different part of the world, as well as complex reverse navigation. He tried to keep his options open as long as possible, mainly by giving only extremely vague position reports; but on
17 December he sent a deliberately false message indicating that he was over the
Equator, which he was not. From this point his radio reports — while remaining ambiguous — indicated steadily more impressive progress around the world; but he never left the Atlantic, and it seems that after December the mounting problems with his boat had caused him to give up on ever doing so.
Christmas Day, 1968 was a strange day for the four racers, who were very far from friends and family. Crowhurst made a radio call to his wife on
Christmas Eve, during which he was pressed for a precise position, but refused to give one. Instead, he told her he was "off Cape Town", a position far in advance of his plotted fake position, and even farther from his actual position, off the easternmost point in
Brazil, just 7 degrees (480 nautical miles, 890 km) south of the equator.
Like Crowhurst, Tetley was depressed. He had a lavish Christmas dinner of roast pheasant, but was suffering badly from loneliness. Knox-Johnston, thoroughly at home on the sea, treated himself to a generous dose of
whisky and held a rousing solo
carol service, then drank a
toast to the Queen at 3 p.m. He managed to pick up some radio stations from the USA, and heard for the first time about the
Apollo 8 astronauts, who had just made the first orbit of the Moon. Moitessier, meanwhile, was sunbathing in a flat calm, deep in the roaring forties south-west of New Zealand.
By January, concern was growing for Knox-Johnston, from whom nothing had been heard since New Zealand, as he was having problems with his transmitter. He was actually making good progress, however, and rounded
Cape Horn on
17 January. Elated by this successful climax to his voyage, he briefly considered continuing east, to sail around the Southern Ocean a second time, but soon gave up the idea and turned north for home.
Crowhurst's deliberately vague position reporting was also causing consternation for the press, who were desperate for hard facts. On
19 January, he finally yielded to the pressure and stated himself to be 100 nautical miles (190 km) south-east of
Gough Island in the south Atlantic. He also reported that due to generator problems he was shutting off his radio for some time. His position was mis-understood on the receiving end to be 100 nautical miles (190 km) south-east of the Cape of Good Hope; this mistake, and the high speed it implied, fuelled newspaper speculation in the following radio silence, and his position was optimistically reported as rapidly advancing around the globe. Crowhurst's actual position, meanwhile, was off Brazil, where he was making slow progress south, and carefully monitoring weather reports from around the world to include in his fake log. He was also becoming increasingly concerned about
Teignmouth Electron, which was starting to come apart, mainly due to slapdash construction.
Moitessier had also not been heard from since New Zealand, but he was still making good progress, and coping easily with the conditions of the "furious fifties". He was carrying letters from old Cape Horn sailors describing conditions in the Southern Ocean, and he frequently consulted these to get a feel for chances of encountering ice. He reached the Horn on
6 February, but when he started to contemplate the voyage back to Plymouth he realised that he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the race concept.
As he sailed past the
Falkland Islands he was sighted, and this first news of him since
Tasmania caused considerable excitement. It was predicted that he'd arrive home on
24 April as the winner (in fact, Knox-Johnston finished on
22 April). A huge reception was planned in Britain, from where he'd be escorted to France by a fleet of French warships for an even more grand reception. There was even said to be a
Légion d'honneur waiting for him there.
Moitessier had a very good idea of this, but throughout his voyage he'd been developing an increasing disgust with the excesses of the modern world; the planned celebrations seemed to him to be yet another example of brash materialism. After much debate with himself, and many thoughts of those waiting for him in England, he decided to continue sailing — past the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean for a second time, into the Pacific. Unaware of this, the newspapers continued to publish "assumed" positions progressing steadily up the Atlantic, until, on
18 March, Moitessier slingshotted a message in a can onto a ship near the shore of Cape Town, announcing his new plans to a stunned world:
On the same day, Tetley rounded Cape Horn; badly battered by his Southern Ocean voyage in an unsuitable boat, he turned north with considerable relief.
Teignmouth Electron was also battered and Crowhurst badly wanted to make repairs, but without the spares that had been left behind he needed new supplies. After some planning, on
8 March he put in to the tiny settlement of Río Salado, in
Argentina, just south of the
Río de la Plata. Although the village turned out to be the home of a small
coastguard station, and his presence was logged, he got away with his supplies and without publicity. He started heading south again, intending to get some film and experience of Southern Ocean conditions to bolster his false log.
The concern for Knox-Johnston turned to alarm in March, with no news of him since New Zealand; aircraft taking part in a
NATO exercise in the North Atlantic mounted a search operation in the region of the
Azores. However, on
6 April he finally managed to make contact with a British
tanker using his
signal lamp, which reported the news of his position, 1,200 miles from home. This created a sensation in Britain, with Knox-Johnston now clearly set to win the Golden Globe trophy, and Tetley predicted to win the £5,000 prize for the fastest time.
Crowhurst re-opened radio contact on
10 April, reporting himself to be "heading" towards the
Diego Ramirez Islands, near Cape Horn. This news caused another sensation, as with his projected arrival in the UK at the start of July he now seemed to be a contender for the fastest time, and (very optimistically) even for a close finish with Tetley. Once his projected false position approached his actual position, he started heading north at speed.
Tetley was informed of the fact that he might be robbed of the fastest-time prize, and started pushing harder, despite the fact that his boat was having significant problems — he made major repairs at sea in an attempt to stop the port hull of his trimaran falling off, and kept racing. On
22 April, he crossed his outbound track, one definition of a
circumnavigation.
On the same day,
22 April, Knox-Johnston completed his voyage where it had started, in
Falmouth. This made him the winner of the Golden Globe trophy, and the first person to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world, which he'd done in 313 days. This left Tetley and Crowhurst apparently fighting for the £5,000 prize for fastest time.
However, Tetley knew that he was pushing his boat too hard. On
20 May, he ran into a storm near the Azores and began to worry about the boat's severely weakened state. Hoping that the storm would soon blow over, he lowered all sail and went to sleep with the boat lying ahull. In the early hours of the 21st, he was awoken by the sounds of tearing wood. Fearing that the bow of the port hull might have broken off, he went on deck to cut it loose, only to discover that in breaking away it had made a large hole in the main hull, from which
Victress was now taking on water too rapidly to stop. He sent a
Mayday, and luckily got an almost immediate reply. He abandoned ship just before
Victress finally sank and was rescued from his
liferaft that evening, having come to within 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km) of finishing what would have been the most significant voyage ever made in a multi-hulled boat.
Crowhurst was left as the only person in the race, and — given his high reported speeds — virtually guaranteed the £5,000 prize. This would, however, also guarantee intense scrutiny of himself, his stories, and his logs by genuine Cape Horn veterans such as the sceptical Chichester. Although he'd put great effort into his fabricated log, such a deception would in practice be extremely difficult to carry off, particularly for someone who didn't have actual experience of the Southern Ocean; something of which he must have been aware at heart. Although he'd been sailing fast — at one point making over 200 nautical miles (370 km) in a day — as soon as he learned of Tetley's sinking, he slowed down to a wandering crawl.
Crowhurst's main radio failed at the beginning of June, shortly after he'd learned that he was the sole remaining competitor. Plunged into unwilling solitude, he spent the following weeks attempting to repair the radio, and on
22 June was finally able to transmit and receive in
morse. The following days were spent exchanging
cables with his agent and the press, during which he was bombarded with news of syndication rights, a welcoming fleet of boats and helicopters, and a rapturous welcome by the British people. It became clear that he couldn't now avoid the spotlight.
Unable to see a way out of his predicament, he plunged into abstract philosophy, attempting to find an escape in
metaphysics, and on
24 June he started writing a long essay to express his ideas. Inspired (in a misguided way) by the work of
Einstein, whose book he'd aboard, the theme of Crowhurst's writing was that a sufficiently intelligent mind can overcome the constraints of the real world. Over the following 8 days, he wrote 25,000 words of increasingly tortured prose, drifting farther and farther from reality, as
Teignmouth Electron continued sailing slowly north, largely untended. Finally, on
1 July, he concluded his writing with a garbled suicide note, and jumped overboard.
Moitessier, meanwhile, had concluded his own personal voyage more happily. He had circumnavigated the world and sailed almost two-thirds of the way round a second time, all non-stop and mostly in the roaring forties. Despite heavy weather and a couple of severe knockdowns, he contemplated rounding the Horn again. However, he decided that he and
Joshua had had enough and sailed to Tahiti, where he and his wife had set out for Alicante. He thus completed his second personal circumnavigation of the world (including the previous voyage with his wife) on
21 June 1969. He started work on his book.
Aftermath of the race
Knox-Johnston, as the only finisher, was awarded both the Golden Globe trophy and the £5,000 prize for fastest time. He continued to sail and circumnavigated three more times. He was awarded a
CBE in 1969 and was knighted in 1995. His book,
A World of My Own,
Joshua was beached, along with many other yachts, by a famous
hurricane at
Cabo San Lucas in 1982; with a new boat,
Tamata, Moitessier sailed back to Tahiti from the
San Francisco Bay. He died in 1994.
When
Teignmouth Electron was discovered drifting in the Atlantic on
10 July, a fund was started for Crowhurst's wife and children; Knox-Johnston donated his £5,000 prize to the fund, and more money was added by press and sponsors. Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, two of the journalists connected with the race, wrote a book on Crowhurst's voyage,
The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,
Tetley found it impossible to adapt to his old way of life after his adventure. He was awarded a consolation prize of £1,000, with which he decided to build a new trimaran for a round-the-world speed record attempt. His 60-foot (18 m) boat
Miss Vicky was built in 1971, but his search for sponsorship to pay for fitting-out met with consistent rejection. His book,
Trimaran Solo,
Blyth devoted his life to the sea and to introducing others to its challenge. In 1970–1971 he sailed a sponsored boat,
British Steel, single-handedly around the world "the wrong way", against the prevailing winds. He subsequently took part in the
Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race and founded the
Global Challenge race, which allows amateurs to race around the world. His old rowing partner, John Ridgway, followed a similar course; he started an adventure school in Scotland, and circumnavigated the world twice under sail: once in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, and once with his wife. King finally completed a circumnavigation in
Galway Blazer II in 1973.
Suhaili was sailed for some years more, including a trip to
Greenland, and spent some years on display at the
National Maritime Museum at
Greenwich. She has since been returned to the water and is now based at the
National Maritime Museum Cornwall; she's expected to take part in the 2006
Round the Island Race.
Teignmouth Electron was sold to a tour operator in
Jamaica and eventually ended up damaged and abandoned on
Cayman Brac, where she lies to this day.
There was considerable controversy over the race and its organisation, given the failure of most starters and the tragic outcome of Crowhurst's voyage; no follow-up race was held for some time. However, in 1982 the
BOC Challenge race was organised; this single-handed round-the-world race with stops was inspired by the Golden Globe and has been held every four years since. In 1989,
Philippe Jeantot founded the
Vendée Globe race, a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world race. Essentially the successor to the Golden Globe, this race is also held every four years and has attracted an enormous public following for the sport.
Competitors
Nine competitors participated in the race. Most of these had at least some prior sailing experience, although only Carozzo had competed in a major ocean race prior to the Golden Globe Race. The following table lists the entrants in order of starting, together with their prior sailing experience, and achievements in the race:
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sunday Times Golden Globe Race'.
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