Douglas Mercer
November 24 2024
Continued from Crow (Part One)
A Voyage Round The World was the title of the report on Cook’s second voyage and to me it always had a ring to it—A Voyage Round The World. In England in the flying 1960s it seemed that everywhere one looked people were setting their minds on fire—new forms of spirituality, odd notions of the Cosmos, and a general impatience with the state of things as they were. But the flaming music and the ever-blossoming styles of Carnaby leave me cold, these are just children playing with fire. The real heroes are the ones who venture into the real, indeed soon pictures will come to us of this beautiful blue white and green earth against stark black backdrop and the world’s collective mouth will drop—but it’s nothing we have not been able to see with our own two eyes all along.
When Chichester was making his voyage the entire nation was riveted—as well it might have been. But for my money his feat was marred by that single stopover in Australia. Nonetheless a quarter million people trekked to Plymouth Hoe to see their hero’s return. They said at the time that the way his voyage captured the public’s imagination was surprising but it was not. One should never underestimate, even in an ironic age, even in an iron age, men being pulled by the lure of the real and by chivalrous and gallant and brave deeds and feats by the heroic—it is a strain that runs deep in the English psyche, and a cheap and tawdry world can bury the feeling but never eradicate it.
As for myself I did not venture forth to be among the receiving party—I had studied all of his books and had charted his progress on a home map as diligently as any naïve fan. Instead I took the time on that great day to putter around in Bristol Channel and then came back to watch the festivities on television and in my best Hullo Folks mood I preened around the living room making mincemeat of and mocking the announcers in their stentorian tones of Hooray Harrys. No, I said again and again only the first man to travel around the world non-stop would be inducted into the halls of the immortals, that most precious of designations. Naturally my companions took my blustering and bluffing with a grain of salt and my merry glint did nothing to dissuade them from that assessment.
I had many irons in my mental fires—I thought about drifting in a raft 8000 miles across the Pacific which the aptly named Thor Heyerdahl had done in order to prove that white skinned red-bearded and sun worshipping people had sailed to Polynesia first; or taking a trip from the Canaries to Barbados subsisting on raw fish—but then the fervor with which the nation was swept up in and The Great Race made all other thoughts subside. The lionization of Sir Francis stuck in my craw—but set my mind on fire.
Such was the sweeping nature of the enthusiasm among the public (and among sailors) that the idea of the voyage around the world was conceived by the Sunday Times: the very appositely named The Great Race. If there is anything quintessentially English, it is the finishing of the job and somehow or other that fatal stopover was bothersome; and a good bit of sporting rivalry surely played its part as well. In March of 1968 the rules were hammered out. There would be two prizes, for the first to finish and the fastest finisher. It was to be something of a free for all, there would be no vetting of the participants; and so it was feared that this might encourage the mentally unstable to take unqualified risks; but such, as is said, is life. In order to avoid the inevitable pitfalls of the dangerous Southern Seas (the notorious Roaring Forties) it was specified that entrants had to leave between June 1 and October 31 of 1968. The start and finish had to be at a port in anywhere in the British Isles; other than that it was simply may the best man win. Every game has its rules.
It was generally agreed that I had no business doing this. The other sailors were seasoned and hardened and experienced and in top physical condition. I on the other hand (despite my protestations) was little more than a weekend enthusiast or a vagrant hobbyist, certainly an amateur. But, as was said at the time, we are all human and we all have dreams, and this voyage was to be an adventure. And I was not averse to taking risks, even though at times we are cautioned to think twice. For when you are alone, just you and the ocean, it’s the whole of your universe, it’s totally indifferent, and in the pit of my soul it was that exhilaration and danger that I hungered for. You see I knew all along that it’s there waiting for you, and I longed for the experience where if you make a slip, then imagination is the danger, when it is no longer about heroes and adventures at sea, but it’s about isolation, and the delicate mechanism of the mind. For as everyone agrees once you are on your own you can really discover who you are which is the thing I had been searching for my whole life.
Such were the feelings I noted down when I determined to make the race. To outward appearances I was bullish on my prospects, as I always believed that the frame of mind that one put oneself in had a lot to do with one’s success. It is true I know now that though I was supremely confident in my obsessions, obsession they still were. I knew above all that this was the moment of my life and that I had to prove myself as if by ordeal. But first I needed a boat: a revolutionary boat; I became fascinated by trimarans; I wrote long and didactic letters to the yachting magazines extolling trimarans as the wave of the future though I had never even been in one; fast before the wind, slower windward, difficult to capsize but once turned over nearly impossible to right; I had never sailed one so people were a bit nonplussed at my sudden and overwhelming enthusiasm for them but I have always believed that in the face of desire experience was overrated. I said in my letters that there are technical hazards in such an endeavor but that special procedures can be worked out in advance to deal with them, reducing the risks to the vanishing point. I indicated that the trimaran was a highly suitable platform for such a voyage and, of course, that I was just the man to do it. It would become a caravan of the sea and that all doubts about safety could easily be dispelled; that I had gone into the danger in detail and so had every confidence in my ultimate success. Despite my misadventure (for so it likely will come to be called at least as a legal matter) I still believe this whole heartedly; that is none of my faith has been dimmed, far from it; I just know now what risk is and why I braved it.
Time was ticking onward to the deadline; in an ideal world more months would have been available but as I’ve always said “in theory” is like “barring the unforeseen” –both meaningless phrases. I had no boat nor had I any sponsor but I remained in my characteristic euphoria. With little to support me and no means of getting there yet I was ready to challenge the Everest Of The Sea. Hullo Folks!
It was by a calculated afterthought that I pulled off one of the most persuasive coups of my life, at least until then. Mr. Best had peremptorily (and to my mind unfairly) cut out of the enterprise of my navigation device; but then in a strange twist I convinced him that the best use of that money was to back me in my quest to sail around the world—that is to put up the money for a boat. It might seem strange that someone who had just pulled out of my business would plunge right back in on what to the world seemed at best a dubious proposition—but I think I convinced others because I was convinced myself. However it was it worked, and that’s the final test of anything.
A boat needed to be constructed and having my backer I learned that the terms of the contract were steeper than I might have imagined. That bit about the caravan of the sea was meant specially to appeal to Mr. Best, that dealer in caravans, but his shared ecstasy with me had not made him soft. I am sure that later on he will say to the ravening press that he has no idea what led him to agree to the pact; as if he was mesmerized by some wan elfin figure who exercised over him some special and uncanny power. To any who are reading this, and if he is claiming this, rest assured that I looked him straight in the eye and he was as swept away by it as I was. I know for sure that at the time many said he was mad, and that it was the glamour of the unpredictable pitch that convinced him; but for a hardheaded businessman there can be no better reason. And at any rate he hedged his bets; it was agreed that should I not set forth or that if I aborted the trek early I would be contractually bound to buy the boat back. Even at the time this could be seen as a trap and so it proved, it was the key clause which weighed heavily on my mind and was the single factor which led me to my present straits, if straits they are. For should anything go wrong I was on the hook for the full boat as the Americans are fond of putting it; which one way or the other would spell my ruin. Which only goes to show I guess that one must be rather careful what one wishes as one is likely to get it; and that a trap can just as easily become a portal as anything else.
The making of the boat took longer than I expected; it was an ordeal in itself, but I was in such a feverish state of excitement that I look at the time of construction as the culmination of my life; and whatever dangers inevitably lurked I shut them out of my mind completely. I was a true believer that I could pull the whole thing off and my attitude was picked up by those helping me; were we in a delusion of several?; perhaps, but then was anything worthwhile done in any other state of mind? They say that Lindbergh sailed with an engine and a cockpit and he flew blind for four hours in fog and darkness, and he ended up a voyaging hero. I had safety devices, control mechanisms, electronic processes at my fingertips; I was at the time at the top of my game and, if I say so myself, the most supremely confident and impressive and persuasive of men; the standard Trimaran had a spacious cabin and a high and enclosed wheelhouse; I would modify this so as not to be vulnerable to the crushing southern seas in which they say there is no law and beyond that no God; so I pared and stripped it all down and left myself with only a flush deck broken only by a low round doghouse, thus being rid of what I deemed to be superfluous superstructure. All in all as I was grappling with these crucial issues of design I was immured in the most intoxicating workshop session of my life.
When you read this you have to put out of your mind the ensuing “disaster.” Everything looks different in the end. Had I succeeded conventionally all of this mish mash and hurry scurry would have been seen or written off as maddening details that we overcame by iron determination and native pluck; surely in the future they will be signs that went unheeded only due to blind madness; only success succeeds they say, a motto I endorse with all my heart on these cloudless days on a ever stiller sea. In the end one can either make it happen or one cannot. It is the yardstick by which every man should be judged.
My home at this time had a grand piano on which in down time I would bang out tunes that I loved, usually comic ones or travesties that spoke of heartfelt love; the place was strewn by maps, diagrams, mathematical calculations, documents, blue prints, specs, and manifests and manifestos, the latter of which were a kind of Hooray Harry exhortations to finish the job. If in retrospect I was seen at this time to be plagued by unhinged over-optimism, Pollyannaish meanderings, and glib promises of success, pushing salesmanship, that cannot be helped; doubt is the worm in the apple and one slip in that regard and that’s it. By my calculations I proved that I would win the race and my remarkable self-possession was what underwrote my supreme confidence. Blind enthusiasm is always best, anything less and one might as well pack it in. I had the technical knowhow and an imaginative mind as I would be the first to tell anyone with a dour face.
The main threat of course was that I would capsize; that my craft, hit by a stray wave, would end up bobbing listlessly on its side, tipped beyond the horizontal stretch, supported only by an immersed float at one end and a rubber buoyancy bag on the other. If my boat began to precipitously heel then electrodes in the immersed float would send an instant signal to the central switching mechanism (what I laconically called my computer) and all would go into action. In this event a electrical circuit would be completed and a carbon monoxide cylinder connected to the horspipe would disappear before the yellow mast. By odd chance an even larger wave might knock the boat back upright but if not my systems would do the trick. As we went into the ins and outs of this contingency I assured all of them that this eventuality was most unlikely given what I took to be the providential nature of the computer. But, as is said, one must explore all the options, however unlikely or implausible, before setting off on such a grand venture. If it all sounded a bit quixotic to the sober minded newspaper writers nothing can be done about that.
I know of course the stories that will come out. That I was too casual, or absent minded, or alternately too manic, or not patient enough, that the whole project was rather fly by night. And of course given the story line’s ending as they know it they will be deemed correct. Victory as they say is always well provided for but catastrophe is ever the beggar at the ball. And I must say that I did give a rather whirlwind impression, driving up to the Technical College to get a crash course in radio telegraphy operations, and this constant toing and froing gave a false picture of my concentration.
I must say there were some irrepressible and ebullient moments in there as well. A fascinating figure named Rodney Hallsworth (think Charles Laughton as Henry 8) came onto the scene; he was a public relations man and crack news gatherer. This redoubtable newsman had written a book about an expedition to Greenland called The Last Flower Of The Earth, but he was at his hard-boiled best in relating scenes of bone chilling crime stories. I could tell he had the aptitude or knack to transform a few odd cables into a melodramatic account of the battle against the elements; this was his genius, to take only a bit of information and to rhetorically elevate it into a story that would capture the imagination of the reading public; no Johnson ever eschewed his Boswell and in Rodney I had found another true convert to the religion of adventure; I knew he would have my wild horses swirling over high wet mountains of foam, and one man alone riding the waves of courage, and dauntless quests for the brass ring of the Empyrean, but this would be one instance where he was not gilding the lily, for the fateful race could not be gilded; I first met this ecstasy possessed man in a hotel bar near Taunton; we hit if off from the first and he became my press agent; he told me he saw in me a real Swashbuckler. With him in tow I knew my status as a public figure and my designs on immortality were in capable hands for he had a pen which could rise with a flourish to any occasion. I can only wish that he knew the real story; for it will take some doing for words, any words, to match the glittering reality.
Continued at Crow (Part Three)
