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The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst | 
 enlarge | Authors: Nicholas Tomalin, Ron Hall
Publisher: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 50023
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0071414290
Dewey Decimal Number: 797
UPC: 639785802594
EAN: 9780071414296
ASIN: 0071414290
Publication Date: April 30, 2003
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
The Sailor's Classics library introduces a new generation of readers to the best books ever written about small boats under sail In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set sail from England to participate in the first single-handed nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, his boat was found in the mid-Atlantic, intact but with no one on board. In this gripping reconstruction, journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall tell the story of Crowhurst's ill-fated voyage.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
A gift and a legacy September 13, 2008
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.
 Deeply thought-provoking and disturbing tale of human nature September 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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"
Extraordinary story with one complaint... June 30, 2008
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.
Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea! January 26, 2008
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
A powerful, moving must-read November 3, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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