The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

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A true "Sailor's Classic." Reading this book it is impossible not to feel compassion for Donald Crowhurst who set out to win the Golden Globe challenge as the first man to nonstop circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat.

Crowhurst's early years are well-documented and give us a picture of a driven and compulsive man with some serious character flaws and an aversion to failure. Yet failure was a condition which dogged him throughout his life.

Crowhurst's decision to undertake the circumnavigation was both dramatic and ill-considered. With relatively little sailing experience and a lot of bluff he convinced his sponsors to fund the building of a revolutionary trimaran, the "Teignmouth Electron" equipped with all manner of electronic wizardry (Crowhurst had invented a sort of early GPS, the Navicator, in the mid-60's).

Unfortunately, the "Teignmouth Electron" was never properly completed, the race deadline having intervened, and Crowhurst sailed in a boat that was unfinished, poorly provisioned, and untested, having done miserably in what passed for sea trials.

Setting out on the latest possible day, Crowhurst found himself limping along at a ridiculously slow pace three weeks later. Plagued by equipment failures, the "Teignmouth Electron" was taking water due to design flaws, and had no real chance of completing the race. Having staked all on a successful outcome, the tension and isolation of his predicament attacked Crowhurst's mind.

In a fit of brilliant madness, Donald Crowhurst spent hours working out and logging false positions, sun sights, weather reports, and sailing notations to make it seem he was circling the earth while in fact he meandered pointlessly through the South Atlantic for months. He even secretly put in to port for repairs, a fact which was not discovered until after the race, when his "real" logs were reviewed by investigators.

Crowhurst's position reports and daily runs were diligently reported onshore; he was (falsely) credited with a record run of 243 miles in one day, a record he actually matched in reality once he decided to begin sailing in earnest again.

In the meantime, for all the world knew, Crowhurst was going to be the winner of the Golden Globe. As he turned toward home, the media hoopla grew wilder, and so did his delusions. His log entries degenerated into irrational philosophic and religious ramblings in which he began to believe himself God. In the end, tortured by his demons and consumed by guilt, Donald Crowhurst jumped into the sea, leaving his boat to sail on without him.

Brilliantly and sensitively written, without tendering excuses the authors Tomalin and Hall never lose sight of the essential humanity and frailty of their subject, as well as his consuming but undirected brilliance. Relying heavily on Crowhurst's logs, it is devastating to watch the man's mind unravel in the face of his aloneness.

Crowhurst's singlemindedness got him far, but it ultimately proved his undoing as he was unable to see any but the options he had limited himself to, the ultimate one being his own destruction. As Camus wrote, "In the end there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide." Crowhurst's answer is his legacy.

If you're interested in the complexities of the human heart and mind, this book is for you. It's superbly written, well paced and detailed without ever being tedious, and it gets extraordinarily close to Donald Crowhurst the man--an unusual and intelligent person who took a few wrong turns and kept going. There was so much at stake in his journey, and thinking it all through sensibly and accepting the consequences of poor preparation proved to be too difficult for him. In the end he became so distressed and confused that he lost sight of himself... He was never able to see that the truth about human life can't be computed or worked out like an equation--it is not susceptible to logical proofs, because the variables are manifold and not easily understood, and people are both more and less than logical... His need, clearly, was to go home and start again, but the penalty for doing so seemed too high to him. So, in refusing to accept a lesser defeat he suffered a far greater one. You can't help rooting for Donald, and you can't help feeling sorry for him.

Donald Crowhurst left England on October 31, 1968 to participate in a around-the-world, non-stop, solo sailing race. He was the next to last competitor to leave, just before the deadline. His boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was a trimaran.

He sailed at a disappointingly slow speed for a while and then reported a few amazingly fast days. Radio communications halted as he approached the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and nothing was heard from him for 111 days.

Then radio communications resumed as he re-entered the South Atlantic, around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. He was leading the race, and seemed assured of the trophy and the cash prize of £5,000. Then, on July 10, 1969, his boat was found drifting in the Atlantic, with no sign of Crowhurst on board.

This book is the sad detective story of this voyage. Crowhurst never left the Atlantic Ocean, let alone sail around the world. He left massive documentation which showed that he had cheated. Presumably, rather than complete his fraudulent voyage, he stepped into the ocean and left the evidence for people to examine.

Although these facts are known prior to even picking up the book, the author still comes to a very surprising conclusion. This is a book about what was going on in the mind of this sad man who seems to have gone mad. It is a fascinating and worthwhile read.

Towards the end, reading Crowhurst's last log entries, I worried that I myself might come unhinged.

This is not a sailing book -- it is a detective story about what pressure and isolation can do to the human mind. The authors do a wonderful job of assembling and presenting the evidence.

It doesn't matter at all that you know the complete story before you start: A guy's marriage and business ventures are in shambles; he hoodwinks a town into building him a bad plywood trimaran for an around-the-world race; he gets scared and fakes everything by staying in the Atlantic and sailing in circles; he goes nuts and walks overboard.
An amazing study of the human mind under pressure -- I commend the authors.

This book will shake you up. The necessary antidote is "The Long Way" by Bernard Moitessier, a lyrical story about the same race by the man who was winning it, but was so raptured by the Deep that he forfeited the prize and just kept on sailing...

To echo an earlier reviewer, this is also my favourite book of all time. I tracked down a dog-eared and stained copy from the early 1970's, read it in just over a day then started back at the beginning.

The fascination of the book lies with Crowhurst. Here is a man who made a couple of wrong turns in life and just kept on going. A man who may, like many of us, have lived a long life had he not taken to the sea in a white elephant on a goose chase.

Tomalin and Hall had access to Crowhurst's logs and, through them, his thinking - however fuzzy that may be. From this, they constructed a well-written and gripping true-life novel.

FYI, The Teignmouth Electron now lies on a beach near a liquor store on the island of Cayman Brac.

This race and Donald's actions are the reason that solo nonstop sailing around the world has been changed to point to point racing. Isolation from one's human companions can lead to maddness. If only Donald's racing competators had been able to hold their boats together we might never have heard of Donald himself and pieced together what he did.

This book while horrible in its result is a great read. Its an interesting change from Sir Francis Chichester's "Gypy Moth Circles the world" and J. Solcums book, where men are tough and survive the ocean through forsight and careful sailing.

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.

In 1968, a London newspaper, inspired by recent feats of daring in the world of sailing, sponsored a contest that offered a trophy and large cash prize to the first person to successfully complete a solo, non-stop and unaided circumnavigation of the globe in a sailboat. This book is the morbidly fascinating story of one of the participants, Donald Crowhurst, a talented amateur sailor and electronics entrepreneur, who announced that he would build the world's most technologically advanced boat, including a first-of-its-kind on-board computer of his own design, and take the prize.

While sailing buffs will like this book, the real meat of it is in the look at human nature that it provides. Like many entrepeneurs, Crowhurst was a bit of a blowhard who ended up departing just hours before the deadline in a boat that had never been tested and with which he was totally unfamiliar. Busy with race preparations, he never built, much less installed, the much-publicized computer. Feeling certain he could make up time as he became more familar with the craft, Crowhurst began to tell "little white lies" in his sporadic radio communications (remember, there was no GPS back then -- the yachtsmen were truly on their own).

As his problems with the boat mounted, Crowhurst conceived an elaborate hoax to make the world believe he was on track to complete the race, maybe even win it all. For months he sailed around the South Atlantic, alone and increasingly desperate, monitoring radio communications about weather and constructing a fake ship's log and fake documentation that showed his supposed progress day-by-day. In the spring of 1969, when Crowhurst reestablished radio contact with his agent and family back in Britain, he learned a shocking truth. He was the only yachtsman still in the race. With all the others out of it, he had become a national celebrity, and a huge welcome was planned.

At this point, the audacious hoax turned tragic. It appears from his journals that Crowhurst suffered a complete mental breakdown in the week that followed. It was too late to confess or backtrack on his claims without complete humiliation; yet as the winner and only man still in the race, he was sure to be exposed as a cheat. A few days after his last journal entry, Crowhurst's boat was found abandoned and drifting in the Atlantic by another ship. He had left all the evidence of his hoax neatly arranged for the world to find.

Crowhurst is an unsympathetic character to read about, but by the end it was hard not to feel compassion in spite of everything he did. This book is much more than a reconstruction of his mysterious death. The authors invite the reader to think about the deficiencies in the heart and soul that lead human beings to lie and scheme, in spite of the inevitable disastrous results. Why is it so hard for people to be honest? And why is it these very people who lie and scheme who often attempt great things, while the honest people sit on the sidelines?

Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-author of the historical novel "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis and Clark"

This is my all-time favorite sailing book. The story is gripping, the writing is extraordinary and the reader really comes to care about the characters. Although we know how the story ends, we feel the tension as Crowhurst is swept away by the forces he himself set into motion, a prisoner of pride and publicity. I am thrilled to see this book re-issued.

With the stubbornness of Ahab and reckless disregard for family and friends Donald Crowhurst signs his death warrant the moment he sets sail around the world. This well researched and superbly presented true story serves as a lesson for all of us: Only in the company of others can there be comfort, solace and truth. This is an unforgettable tale of how one man's failure to accomplish his dream led to insanity and self destruction. Yes, there is a hero , Mrs. Crowhurst. This is a very thoughtful, insightful book that leaves the reader wondering how he himself would have behaved under similar circumstances. Deserves highest rating.

I made it half way through this book, hoping it was an exciting or at least intriguing mystery. Unfortunately, the first half of the book was mostly about the building of the boat. Although for sailors this may be interesting and definitely needed to be told as it led up to events, I would have preferred to jump right into the mystery/disappearance and then worked back though events that led to the ending.

It did not keep my interest enough to finish the book, so I gave the copy to my brother who IS a sailor.

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

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.

This book pieces together one of the most fascinating hoaxes in modern history. The authors not only use their own knowledge of sailing and that of Donald Crowhurst. But they delve into his past and deduce the turn of events that led to the ultimate conclusion of the hoax. The inciteful writing and use of original log books are instrumental in weaving this fast and engrossing story.

what a story, this is. I became aware of the story after watching the DVD
documentary. The funny thing is how all those psychologist rush and categorize Crowhurst as insane,
ha, what a laugh as if they understood what they were talking about, i found that amusing.
such close minded little worms, trying to understand the Mind Of God.
They would put god in a bottle and label it if they could. Such short sight the
so called men of science of this world have. Oh well what can they do.
Jesus was a genius, he chose the right time to come to Earth, had he come
a this time, he would have been categorized by these great men of science
as they think of themselves as a nut case.

I still think Donald could have found forgiveness in the eyes of the public
and in the eyes of his sponsor Mr Best. On the other hand I think during his last days and hours
he did connect to life beyond the flesh, like many others, in his own hoaxy way
he became immortal. But I think he could have enjoyed his family still.

I give lots of credit to Knox Johnston, what a quality of a man he is
after winning, he gave the 5000 pounds to Donald's family.

The golden globe was really an excuse for Donald to find who he was in
relation to everyting else, he was not a nut case. He had always played games
he just played a game bigger than he could chew so, he thought there is no way
out for me. He knew very well what he was doing, it was not the decision of
an insane mind at all. The only insane are those so called scientists, who spent
most of their lives hiding from themselves behind big Names and Titles,
only to find their naked selves at the end of their lives crying like
little puppies. In this I give credit to Einstein, he was a true scientist.

Hope you found what you wanted Donald.

A superb read! I couldn't put it down. A tragic and fascinating examination of Donald Crowhurst's downward spiral into madness. It may be helpful to read A Voyage for Madmen first as it documents the complete race and details the other sailors competing as well. This has become one of my favorite books.

This is a classic study of a psychologically broken man drawn into fraud by his emotional needs. It's also a sea story and a detective story in one. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates yachting, human weakness, and mysterious happenings.

Through the authors Donald Crowhurst has left a tragic legacy for his family and a powerful gift for us the readers. Through his logs Donald documented his fallibilities and revealed his decision path. We are able to armchair quarterback, speculate how we might have done things differently and learn.

The illusion of our own grandeur is revealed through this book. We can be smug about our own approaches and look at the trials and misadventures of others with superiority. However, lurking in the corner is the bit of Donald that seeks our moment of glory. Donald identified and removed the constraints to his validation and too late he realized it was a one way ticket.

This was/is tragic for his family and their bubble was burst very early on. They had no illusions left.

Kudos for Sir Robin Knox for donating his prize to the family.

Deep Water, the video is a must see companion to this book.

I've read the reviews of "Strange Last Voyage," and while I concur with many of the thoughtful, accurate reviews, I can only give the book four stars. My beef? The persistently unsympathetic tone in the book.

Crowhurst's fate was a tragic one and deserving of sympathy. While it was the culmination of many poor decisions (an understatement, indeed!), that he ended up in a position of such desperation merits at least a bit more compassion than the authors are willing to grant. I understand their disdain for the foolhardiness of many of Crowhurst's choices--as well as his choice of a solution for "winning the race"--I found that the portrayal was a nearly sniggering, dismissive evaluation of the man. Fellow race competitor Robin Knox-Johnson's sensitive entreaty that Crowhurst not be judged too harshly in the afterword appears to have been ignored by Crowhurst's biographers.
As for the story itself, the recounting of it is perfectly paced. Their work unwickering his confusing logs is convincing, and the investigation of his final days is masterfully recounted.

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.

This is a fascinating true story. Stories about a lone man fighting against the odds...man against man, man against nature...or, in this case, against his own failures, can make one think about one's own weak grasp on reality. This story ranks right up there with "The Old Man and the Sea." I seriously think the story of Donald Crowhurst should be made into a movie.

A page turner. Well written story about a rather unusual fellow who created a fantastic ruse.

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.

After Sir. Frances Chickister's one stop around the world solo voyage the next logical step was to go around the world solo without stoping.Donald Crowhust was one man who risked everything is a poorly designed boat to be the first to acomplish this goal. The choices he makes once he realizes he is not going to be able to make it are though provoking. First, you wonder why he has made the choices he has, then you wonder what you would do in the same situation.

It is the effects of these desisions and the effect they have on Donald as well as his fellow competitors that keep the reader tied up in the story. It also makes you ask "Could he have pulled it off?"