Ron Hall (3) (1934–2014)

In 1968, lone sailor Donald Crowhurst on his trimaran Teignmouth Electron was supposed to be sailing home to a heroes welcome in England having won a highly publicized around the world race. Instead, his boat was founding drifting abandoned, Crowhurst assumed tragically lost at sea. It slowly emerged as his logs were examined that in fact Crowhurst had been living a massive lie. Instead of circumnavigating the world, Crowhurst had realised his ill-prepared vessel was not up to the voyage. show more Unable to deal with the consequences of pulling out, he had had spent months idling in the South Atlantic sending out fake reports on his progress while he tried to deal with the inevitable consequences of his fraud. In the end, he literally went mad, writing sprawling and sometimes incoherent treatises on the nature of existence. Eventually, unable to live with his lies anymore, Crowhurst, literally describing his decision to end himself as THE MERCY, calmly stepped overboard and watched the yacht sail away without him. This fascinating book was actually written in 1970, after painstaking examination of his logs and messages. Incredibly detailed, written with obvious in depth knowledge of sailing and navigation, it is both a technically precise account of the voyage and a movingly haunting story of a brave if flawed man who made a massive miscalculation and in the end decided only his life would serve as atonement. A very sad story that merits a new audience. Great stuff. show less

A chilling story of madness at sea. Crowhurst scraped together a shattered and failed life in one last bid for redemption, entering an early around-the-world sailing race. His boat, and his life were a wreck even before he started, and it all went downhill from there. The extraordinary aspect to his story of deception is not that he faked his journey, but that in part he was responsible for the disaster's that overtook the rest of that fleet as they tried to keep up with his false reports of show more remarkable progress. In the end his plan of coming in somewhere in the 'middle of the pack' fell apart when as everyone else dropped out he was left the race leader. Knowing that he would be subject to intense investigation if he won (he was already under suspicion) he made a final attempt to falsify his log books in a final descent into madness, pieced together from the evidence he left aboard his abandoned boat in the middle of the Atlantic. show less

A good read about the infamous Crowhurst mystery and an interesting insight into his character. His lack of preparation and readiness for the challenge ahead in all areas are obvious in the book. However, his belief and want for something greater propelled him over the starting line towards his own demise. My only criticism of the book was the authors' preference to be relatively absolute at the end, rather than present a range of possible scenarios.

I was a bit surprised by how completely arresting a read this turned out to be. I first heard of Donald Crowhurst and this account of his tragic voyage when reading about the conceptual artist, Bas Jan Ader. In attempting a trans-Atlantic voyage for the completion of his project In Search of the Miraculous, Ader also tragically lost his life at sea. Among his possessions left behind at home was a copy of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst.

This account of Crowhurst's trip is both show more fascinating and haunting. It is heart wrenching to read about his passage from ambition to deception, and finally to uncertainty and madness. The authors do an exceptional job of supporting the passages from Crowhurst's detailed log books with thoughtful exposition. A sad but engrossing read. show less