The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron. This was then a considerable sum, equivalent to almost £80,000 in 2019. The prizes offered were the Golden Globe trophy for the first single-handed circumnavigation, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest. Įntrants were required to start between 1 June and 31 October 1968, to pass through the Southern Ocean in summer. That was in contrast to other races of the time, for which entrants were required to demonstrate their single-handed sailing ability prior to entry.
The solution was to promote the Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world race, open to all comers, with automatic entry. 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 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 Golden Globe Race was inspired by Francis Chichester's successful single-handed round-the-world voyage, stopping in Sydney. 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. His main sponsor was English entrepreneur Stanley Best, who had invested heavily in Crowhurst's failing business. In an effort to gain publicity, he started trying to gain sponsors to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. While he did have some success selling his navigational equipment, his business began to fail. Business ventures Ĭrowhurst, 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. He was a member of the Liberal Party and was elected to Bridgwater Borough Council. After leaving the Army in the same year owing to a disciplinary incident, Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962.
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. Due to 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. The family's retirement savings were invested in an Indian sporting goods factory, which later burned down during rioting after the Partition of India. After India gained its independence, his family moved back to England. During her pregnancy, his mother had longed for a daughter, and Crowhurst was dressed as a girl until the age of seven. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked in the Indian railways. 2.3 Mental condition and final philosophical writingsĬrowhurst was born in 1932 in Ghaziabad, British India.His innovative but ill-prepared boat, the 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. It has inspired a number of books, stage plays and films, including a documentary, Deep Water (2006), and two feature films, Crowhurst (2017) and The Mercy (also 2017), in which Crowhurst is played by the actors Justin Salinger and Colin Firth, respectively. His ship's logbooks, found after his disappearance, suggest that the stress he was under and associated psychological deterioration may have led to his suicide.Ĭrowhurst's participation in the race has exerted a fascination over many commentators and artists. He secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually doing so. Soon after he started the race his ship began taking on water and he wrote that it would probably sink in heavy seas. Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932 – July 1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who disappeared while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race.