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The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

Now filmed as The Mercy

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The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

By: Nicholas Tomalin, Ron Hall
Narrated by: Philip Bird
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About this listen

Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, directed by James Marsh (The Theory of Everything).

In 1968 Donald Crowhurst was trying to market a nautical navigation device he had developed and saw the Sunday Times Golden Globe 'round the world sailing race as the perfect opportunity to showcase his product.

Few people knew that he wasn't an experienced deep-water sailor. His progress was so slow that he decided to shortcut the journey, falsifying his location through radio messages from his supposed course. Everyone following the race thought that he was winning, and a hero's welcome awaited him at home in Britain.

But on 10 July 1968, eight months after he set off, his wife was told that his boat had been discovered drifting in the mid-Atlantic. Crowhurst was missing, assumed drowned, and there was much speculation that this was one of the great mysteries of the sea.

In this masterpiece of investigative journalism, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall reconstruct one of the greatest hoaxes of our time. From in-depth interviews with Crowhurst's family and friends and telling excerpts from his logbooks, Tomalin and Hall develop a tale of tragic self-delusion and public deception, a haunting portrait of a complex, deeply troubled man and his journey into the heart of darkness.

©1970 Times Newspapers Ltd. (P)2016 Hodder & Stoughton Adventurers, Explorers & Survival Sailing Sailing & Boating Water Sports Sports Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Thought-Provoking

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This book is a fascinating look into the 'mind' of an intelligent and articulate man, who was brought to the very edge of sanity. The narrative is carefully constructed so that you can understand how Crowhurst got from A-B. B being the final scenario we are left with. Well written (although slightly meandering at times) and well read by the narrator. A perfect voice and pace for this subject matter. Crowhurst very much appears to be a jack-the-lad with a conscience. A victim of his own internal moral code.

A man taken to the brink

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I was totally enthralled by this account of the characters and certain of the events involved in the first Golden Globe Race, though I've never had any interest in yacht racing before, and particularly by Donald Crowhurst, who in spite of the deceipt was also revealed to have admirable qualities. In view of the miles he covered, I'm not sure why he did not feel able to sail to Cape Town and retire from the race there, with his dignity in tact. Even if this was risky, surely it would have been worth a try, bearing in mind the final outcome? The authors appear to have been even handed and fair in their narrative, and this moving tale has greatly sparked my interest to read accounts of the other competitors. I would certainly recommend this book to others.

Amazing account of entrant to original GGR

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an interesting insight into what must have been a terrifying journey knowing that he was tragically unprepared for .

unprepared

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Well done, very gripping. what a sad and amazing tale this is. Not a word too much, the only thing that disturbed me was the interpretation of Donald' s behaviour and writing by the authors. There are definitely some deeper possibilities here, in the why and how, as well as the turn of Donalds'smind in the end. The authors, I feel, were prejudiced and superficial in this, and did not explore some of the very interesting philosophical parts which , to me, were more likely part of Donald' s thinking. After all this was an intelligent man who had many metaphysical thoughts and ideas his whole life.

well written and well narrated

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Any additional comments?

I first came across Donald Crowhurst in Peter Nichols' wonderful "A Voyage For Madmen" which got me hooked on the story of one of the daftest races ever attempted. Not through any fault of Nichols, I came away with a picture of Crowhurst as the type of seedy and tragic con man so often encountered in the pages of a Graham Greene novel. Before I was too far into this book however, suspicions of another kind were emerging. Have you ever had a friend with bipolar disorder? Crowhurst's whole life - his ability to erect promising prospects for himself only to pull them down around his ears at the last moment; his tendency to create extreme and unnecessary chaos; dramatic weight loss, his inability to plan, and (without wishing to give anything away) some of the awful things that were happening towards the end of the book, sadly reminded me of my friend whose own illness ended in premature death. The authors, puzzlingly, don't make this connection but they, like me, aren't doctors. Who can possibly know definitively what was going on with this gifted, but tormented man? The book is a convincing and engrossing exercise in deduction, drawn from the fragmented, confused and deliberately misleading records of an increasingly tormented mind, the torment coming both from a free-fall into extreme mental illness and the conflict created by the realisation that the fat was in the fire as far as being able to cover up an increasingly huge bank of lies. I was reminded of those lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there." Chay Blythe, back in England, adopts the unlikely role of brooding Nemesis, and invisible furies pursue this poor Odysseus so viciously that there was to be no return to Ithaca and patient Penelope. The voices missing (for obvious reasons) from the story, are those of Donald and Clare Crowhurst's children. The mind balks at any attempt to imagine the immense suffering they have endured.

Whom the Gods wish to destroy

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