Douglas Mercer
August 4 2024
It might have started out as a game, they say he had a very playful nature, so game playing would have come naturally to him, so he started playing games. In the aftermath this was one of the ways they sought to explain what happened, after the fact people always need to explain, more for their own comfort than to arrive at any real answer. They also said that he began to deteriorate mentally and began to write in his logbook philosophical speculations of a delusional nature. Naturally several psychological conditions were put forth, and in this way the story was able to meet a neat if certainly sad end.
What happened was that in 1968 an English business man (electronics) decided to enter into a race around the world, a race that would be in a single-handed yacht. A man had previously made the trip but he had stopped in Australia for refitting. This was to be one man against the elements with no landfall, a test of endurance and mental balance. All England became obsessed with this quest; as one commenter put it this was “real Boy’s Own” stuff, and so it was in fact.
It was generally agreed that he had no business doing this. The other sailors were seasoned and hardened and experienced and in top physical condition. He on the other hand was little more than a weekend enthusiast. 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 he was not averse to taking risks, but in this instance he might have thought twice. For when you are alone, just you and the ocean, it’s the whole of your universe, it’s totally indifferent. It’s there waiting for you, if you make a slip, then imagination is the danger, it is no longer about heroes and adventures at sea, it’s about isolation, and the delicate mechanism of the mind. But as everyone agrees once you are on your own you can really discover who you are.
A boat needed to be constructed and money was a problem but he finally found a backer, though soon he learned that the terms of the contract were steeper than he might have imagined. The agreement was that should he not set sail or drop out of the race in the first half he would have to buy the boat back; and given the ever-increasing precariousness of his finances this would prove his ruin. Certainly he dearly loved his wife and his three children but in them he had offered up hostages for fortune.
The rules of the race were that it did not matter when you left England but only how long it took you, the only proviso was that you had to leave by October 31 1968. This date was picked so the sailors would not meet the worst of winter in the perilous Southern Seas. The sailors would go down into the Atlantic and then after circumnavigating the world would sail back through it to home.
In the end the business man left on October 31 itself. Video of him at dock that day shows him being ludicrously unprepared and his ship unprepared as well. Though he kept up a brave face for the cameras those who knew him said once the cameras were off his face dropped. He considered dropping out but when he discussed this possibility with his backer the backer reminded him of the contract. Faced with total ruin he resolved to set sail; he is last seen in the reels floating on a small dinghy with two other men, wearing a white shirt and thin black tie, and looking rather sheepish.
It would not take long for reality to set in and when reality becomes not as perfect as the idea it shows why ideas are dangerous. He had not been gone for days when his boat began to leak; he could bail out the water for now but once he got into heavy seas that would prove impossible. As he headed southward he gave himself a chance of survival as fifty percent.
Meanwhile back at home there was a Press Man who was writing up this story with zest and gusto; he was pitching it as the common man up against the odds, the little fellow with a giant heart going out like the Knight Errants of old; this was the kind of stuff the English public ate up and the Press Man gave it to them in heaping servings. His motto was that he never would let the facts get in the way of a good story, and to his mind there was no better story than this.
Of course this was one story that was proved too good to be true. And sure enough the further the business man sailed the more problems and complications he had on his boat. In his private log he soon resigned himself to the fact that he could not complete the journey. At that point he had two options: go forward to certain death, or go backwards to certain ruin.
Was there a third option?
There most certainly was. There always is.
The business man decided to invent a false narrative, a fake story as it were, and to sell it to the world as true. He would stay in the mid-Atlantic but give radio messages of his location that were incorrect. He would then forge his logs to give his positions on different days, and to this end he began to keep two logs, a real one for himself, and fake one for the world. He knew that should he win the race, or possibly if he even did well, that race officials would want to scrutinize his records, so he had to give the fake log as much plausibility as possible. And then when the other sailors came back up the Atlantic he would simply unobtrusively slip back into the race, and come in as an also ran, but one that meant he made a good show of it. This third option was certainly preferable to the other two and so he made plane for his contingences.
That is as was later said of him he had decided to carry on a bit, to play a game. But as always with games the game soon develops. As time wore on the discrepancy between where he actually was and where he said he was began to grow, and the difference soon began to hit home to him, the enormity of what he was doing. He could not pull into a port for then the game was up, at least possibly. Once in the game he had to continue playing the game, that was one of the rules of his game. He had to go through with it.
With much time on his hands in his private logbook he began to speculate. He wrote of the ocean that there was spirituality about this place. The horizons seem infinite and that relative to that he seemed rather small. Back home they sat on pins and needles of course. The wife was part of a glossy magazine profile with two other wives of sailors in the race, complete with a glamorous looking photo shoot. Given the press’s’ eternal penchant for dramatic renderings the three got a name: The Sea Widows. In a small film about the adventure she said she was keeping a stiff upper lip but that one of her children was having nightmares, and was sleepwalking. She said this child reports that he would see his father as an apparition, but was unable to communicate with him, as the presence of his personality was missing. The mother said the other two children were rather blasé about the whole affair.
Given his need to dissimulate at this point those back home who got messages from the business man by transmitter said that they began to be cryptic beyond belief. They could not figure out what he was talking about, there was no way to decipher them, even if they stretched their imaginations.
Equal footing
Mermaids stop
And then the messages stopped altogether. The Press Man back home began to panic. With no news from his subject the public would invariably become distracted and uninterested and his project would suffer.
Later one of the other sailors reported of the Southern Seas that it was a “bastard of a place.” He said that in such conditions (waves as high as a twelve-story building) one had to leave aside all that was not essential to the game. And that one had to be careful not to go further than is necessary into the depths of the game. But that was the hard part: not going too far. And compared to what the business man was now facing that “bastard of a place” was a piece of cake.
The business man began taking film of his journey that could plausibly be seen to be accurate. He continued his enigmatic messaging or observed outright radio silence and continued to keep his two parallel if very different logs. He knew in his heart that as time wore on the time bomb was ticking. His logbooks found later showed that he began to muse on the nature of things, alone in your boat he wrote, the isolation is complete, it is just you and the ocean, this is your whole universe, and it is completely indifferent to you. He no longer had one enemy, the ocean, but now another: himself, and the delicate and precarious mechanism of his mind. For there was always the problem of the imagination.
Keeping watch on the sails by night alone.
The rigging cries a cosmic sorrow
Weeping Doves may never return
Waves, sweep away my melancholy
But his poetic wanderings could not distract him from the fact that he had entered into a trap, one which it would take all of his patience and ingenuity to emerge from. For as it always sank into him: he was not where he was supposed to be. Back home his now complete radio silence began to take its natural toll. People began to fear the worst; his wife began to berate herself for not having stopped him. But she consoled herself by thinking that it’s like with children: if you squeeze them too tight they will do the opposite. And anyway no one can ever know if the road they are on is the right one.
But straightaway the business man had immediate problems. His float has split and he needed materials or he would sink. With his heart in his hands he decided to put into port in Brazil, though he knew that should the Coast Guard see him his charade would be uncovered, or if the people he met should talk the imperfect illusion he had created would be broken. But he decided to take the risk given his present dangers all things considered. He met people on shore who were foreign to him, and barely they were able to communicate with signs. Later it was said of him that in the real world he would have picked up the phone and called his wife, but he had left the real world a while back. It was said of him that he was half in and half out of the real world, though that estimation can never be fully verified.
Another sailor in the race reported that as he came within a week or so of England he realized he could not return. He knew that the great crowds and rush of people would alarm them, and he would be asked things which no longer mattered to him. He said as he made his way back home the rules of the game had changed, the rules within himself had changed. Being alone for so long had given him a totally new and strange mindset, one that was very simple but that he knew could never be put into words. As it passed instead of returning he went back the way he had come and sailed once more around the world, ending up in Tahiti many months later. It was said of him that he was a loner and a very poetic man.
The business man knew that the sailors would be heading his way soon and his one and only chance was coming up. As he waited he took advantage of the fact that the Press Man had given him a camera and a recording device for his voice. One can still hear his voice saying all that tape, got to deliver a load of gibberish to fill up all that space, do you see?
In his musings one can tell that the prospect of returning was troubling him as he prepared to rejoin the race. He had to prepare written and visual evidence that he had been where he actually had not been. For they might want to scrutinize his logbooks, and a plausible record might need to be produced. First and foremost they would want to see proof that he had actually been around the world. His only hope in this regard is that if he came in second or third they might not be as demanding about this, and the swell of good feeling for him having completed the journey at least would deter them from probing.
So at this point he realized that winning the race was not part of the plot. He was at the maximum point of risk in his game. But he wanted to go back, he had been at sea too long, and he was coming home. So he broke his radio silence and charted a present position that would put him at respectable third or second. Naturally back home this message of safety thrilled everyone. He’s back went out the message to the world: he’s back. His wife can be seen beaming and saying that she felt like going off her head and buying some champagne and doing mad things. But she said she would quell these feelings so she could slowly absorb this new reality, she said she wanted to let it sink in. She said that later she would completely lose her head over it; and when asked about the last leg of the journey she said she did not think he would sink. It was said later that this by then great news when all had looked bleak electrified those who were paying attention, that a switch had been thrown.
The man who eventually won the race said it was a bit of a dream. But it was not about the winning for him—it was inside.
As for the business man the time for game playing might soon be over. It was back to real life now. But for a while he had to continue playing his character, he had a role to play, and he mustn’t drop a line. The Press Man knew that his subject would not win, but that did not bother him too much. It would be seen that he had put on a good show, and there was fair play in it. In fact the Press Man went so far as to say that it was all bloody marvelous.
Then suddenly out of the blue everything changed. The leader sunk. The business man could tarry and end up behind the time that the one already home had made; but that would strain credulity given the positions he had been charting recently. If he went forward to home he knew he would win which spelled total loss of him. For he knew that for all of his Boy’s Own charm they would still want to pore over the details of his film and charts and books, and they would inevitably wither under the attention. Then he would be humiliated and ruined. And what about his family then? As much as he wanted to he knew that now he could not simply glide into port and fade away. He would be a folk hero and all questions as to his trip would need to be verified, so though it had seemed that he had pulled off the miraculous by concocting his false itinerary he now once again was facing the music. He was once again running out of options. And how many more miracles could there be?
On his tapes you can hear him saying that when he was five he knew all about God. That God was an old man who would punish him if he did wrong. But that by the time he was twenty he knew he should expect no assistance from God, if He even existed at all. He said that man was evading his responsibility by constantly looking to God for help. The Cosmic Integral, he wrote, the sum of man adds up to nothing.
Meanwhile his transmitter was failing, and he became obsessed with fixing it. In his log at this time he repeated the phrase: I have heard nothing, I have heard nothing. Later as they tried to make sense of what happened one commenter said in elegy that sailing and living were similar. That one starts out on a long journey that one thinks will never end, and that you start off on this journey unprepared. That you have triumphs and disasters, but what you learn most of all is that the mistakes that you make stand forever. There is no evading that but suddenly you learn that what is done is done, and this realization bring its own kind of peace.
Faced with his dilemma the businessman knew if he returned to his home there would be 100,000 people there to meet him, that an entire nation and the Queen would be expecting him, and there would be fanfare and triumphal parades for their boy’s own hero. At this point the wife said it was turning out really lovely, that everything was suddenly all right. If it has been a dream, the dream was coming true, was coming true despite all expectations, and such an unlikely surprise made the reality of the dream all that much sweeter, as it always does. It was everything that a hero could want.
Of course what happened next is open to interpretation but the lineaments of it are clear enough for those who can read without evasions. The thought of returning home to such an explosion of love and gratitude to be followed by his unmasking and mortification was more than he could bear.
Was there another option?
Apparently there was indeed. There always is.
The Sargasso Sea is a body of water in the mid Atlantic known in legend and in truth for its windless days and eerily calm waters. A boat on this water can be stranded motionless on it placid surface which is ringed by seaweed everywhere. They say that the water there is of an exceptional blue clarity and transparency and one can see two hundred feet down. It is to this silently uncanny spot on our lovely blue earth that the business man decided to take his final rest, and as he did so he began to write, write what later would be called metaphysical speculation and delusions. That is he took out his log book and began to write what he himself (in his own right) called simply Philosophy.
The explanation of our troubles, he wrote, is that cosmic beings are playing games with us. During his lifetime each man plays cosmic chess with God and the Devil. The problem is that God is playing with one set of rules and the devil is playing with another set (like a Knight and a Knave), and these two sets of rules are diametrically opposed to one another.
The shameful secret of God, the trick he used, because it would hurt too much, was to conceal the fact that there is no good and evil, but only truth.
In the face of this do we do on clinging to the idea that God made us? Or do we realize that it lies within us to make God? By learning to manipulate the space-time continuum man will become God and disappear from the physical universe as we know it. I am conceived in the womb of nature and in the womb of my own mind, in the womb of the universe. I have become a second generation cosmic being.
To reporters his wife said she expected that upon his return her husband would be a different person. But reflecting on reading these statements from her husband she said that he had just turned his brain off, that he said in effect: no more. That is she thought that her husband had been overwhelmed by his new reality and could no longer cope, that his defense mechanisms broke down (decompensation) and this explained the nonsense of his final days.
The business man also wrote that he was forced to admit that nature forces on cosmic beings such as himself the idea that there is only one sin that such beings can commit: the sin of concealment, of being untrue. He wrote that untruth is a small sin for a man to commit but is a terrible sin for a cosmic being to commit.
A commenter later speculated that the business man was by now living in a totally internal world. That he was speaking gibberish, was undergoing a psychological disorder, had become a paranoiac, and that this succumbing was due to the privations and hardship of his quest. He had invented a relationship between himself and the universe and had found a necessary refuge there, so to speak.
In the log book they found the words I am what I am and I see the nature of my offense. I will only resign this game if you will agree with me that the next time we play the game it will be played strictly according the rules devised by my great god. It is finished. It is the mercy.
This was the end of the game, the truth had been revealed. It was different from the homecoming everyone had expected. This was not what was supposed to have happened. It can’t be. Such was the feeling of those who read his words later, once they had been absorbed and had sunk in.
The thought about what happened is that he was seven hundred miles from land, was slowly drifting in an unnervingly calm sea, could not move forwards, and he was deserted and that reason had deserted him. His tragedy is that he had been left only with his own resources and listened only to himself and never was able to come back, had become hopelessly lost in his own thoughts, had been unable to exit from his self-created labyrinth. The mind has a delicate and precarious balance, some said.
At the official inquest the verdict was that he had met his end by suicide or misadventure, the latter being defined as death met by the folly of one’s own voluntary decision to venture into dangers that one cannot stand up to. For the layman it was decided that the mystery of his disappearance was inexplicable.
When the Press Man thought to himself he said that for now the lonely yacht and the lonely captain were not going to give up their secrets, that he supposed that we will never know the end of this sea saga and this sea riddle. When he finally came upon the boat in dry dock in the Caribbean he said the same to the men who met him. But they swiftly disabused him of that notion and directed him to the logbooks. The men there agreed amongst themselves never to tell anyone about the content of the logs for the rest of their lives. In this way what had happened from the start and at the end and what had happened in the last hours of his life would remain forever unknown. But of course even as he lied about this the Press Man knew he had already sold the rights to whatever material was found on the boat to a London newspaper. And so slowly piece by piece the truth of the voyage, the deception and what were called delusions were uncovered.
No one likes to be conned of course and when the truth was known universal obloquy was heaped on the head of the business man. The wife said that the Press Man blurted out to her that her husband did not sail around the world and had committed suicide. The wife said she found this way of disclosure appalling and would never forget it. The wife did not have the courage to tell her children of the facts so someone else had to do that.
One newspaperman ruefully said of the whole sordid and sad affair that no one likes to prove the fool, that they were sharp newspapermen and they were kippered, hung out to kipper.
The wife afterward criticized herself, said she should have put her foot down and told her husband not to go. But in the end she consoled herself with the thought that everyone after all had a right to dream, and her husband certainly had that right, just like everyone else.
He had made the wrong decision it was decided, he made the wrong moves in the game, as it were. The crowd mocked him of course, he was no longer the Knight Errant nobly if Quixotically sallying forth, but the fool; but one friend of his said that when someone had risked everything and failed and was received with scorn; when someone had fallen from the tightrope he had been walking it was incumbent that someone pick him up and bury him, and that at least in his mind he gave him the burial of a hero. After all he said that the business man had only wanted to make a success of his life and have a bright future, and there was nothing wrong with that.
The boat of the business man was found listing unoccupied on July 10 1969 in the calm waters of the Sargasso sea. The boat now lies abandoned on the island of Cayman Brac. Nine days after the boat was found a space craft landed on the moon. The businessman’s body has never been found and presumably he drowned at sea.
But we can all agree that like walking on the moon the story told here is real Boy’s Own stuff. It was just that for the business man eventually reality had set in and that’s the problem with ideas—they can be dangerous. At some point the game playing is over and this is real life, how do you match the two? The rules of life are the rules of life after all and when imagination gets the best of you one slip and that's it.
Or at least that is what everyone said.
***
Notes
Boys' Own is the title of a varying series of similarly titled magazines, story papers, and newsletters published at various times and by various publishers, in the United Kingdom and the United States, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, for preteen and teenage boys. In 1828 in London and in 1829 in Boston an encyclopedia for boys by William Clarke was published, titled The Boy's Own Book: A Complete Encyclopedia of all the Diversions, Athletic, Scientific, and Recreative, of Boyhood and Youth. According to historian Robert William Henderson: It was a tremendous contrast to the juvenile books of the period, which emphasized piety, morals and instruction of mind and soul; it must have been received with whoops of delight by the youngsters of both countries.
The 36-card Kipper deck came into being in Germany in the 1890s. Some place the appearance of the first Kipper deck circa 1890, and others say 1900, but whichever date is closer to the truth, it’s inspired by an 1890s sensibility.
On 24 June 1969, he began to document these thoughts in a new set of writings in his second logbook, entitled Philosophy. Although rambling and incoherent at times, he was attempting to set down, for the benefit of mankind, a revelation or new understanding that he believed he had discovered regarding the relationship between man and the universe. Life, as experienced by man, was a game, overseen by cosmic beings, apparently God (or several gods) and the Devil, who set the rules by which the game was played. However, man could, by an effort of will, become one such second generation cosmic being himself, and thereby withdraw from the game on his own terms if he so wished. He would then enter a world of abstract intelligence (the realm of gods) in which he would have no need for his body, or any of the other trappings of daily life. At one point he wrote that this revelation made him happy. That is how I solved the problem. And to let you inside my soul, which is now at peace I give you my book. I am lucky. I have done something interesting at last. At last my system has noticed me! The quick are quick, and the dead are dead. He continued his writings for a week, eventually amounting to more than 25,000 words. At 10 a.m. on 1 July (by his own reckoning, since in his meditations he had omitted to wind his chronometer and had to subsequently restart it), Crowhurst commenced his final confession, also incorporating a count of hours, minutes and seconds towards the time at which he had decided that he would end the game by committing suicide. His observations over the next 80 minutes are generally cryptic and/or incomplete, but include hints such as: Cannot see any purpose in the game. Must resign position in a sense in that if I set myself impossible tasks then nothing achieved by game. Now is revealed the true nature and purpose and power of the game offence. I am what I am and I see the nature of my offence. It is the time for your move to begin, I have no need to prolong the game. It has been a good game that must be ended at the right time, I will play this game when I choose I will resign the game. The disappearance of the vessel's chronometer (clock), apparently following Crowhurst's final diary entry, remains unexplained.
The song A Space Oddity is about an astronaut who elects not to return home but keeps flying off deeper into space. The song was released on July 11 1969, one day after the boat was found.
A kipper is a fish, especially a herring.
