A Voyage for Madmen - Softcover

Peter Nichols

4.33

5,545 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861974655 ISBN 13: 9781861974655

Publisher: Profile Books, 2002

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It lay like a gauntlet thrown down; to sail around the world alone and non-stop. No one had ever done it, no one knew if it could be done. In 1968, nine men - six Englishmen, two Frenchmen and an Italian - set out to try, a race born of coincidence of their timing. One didn't even know how to sail. They had more in common with Captain Cook or Ferdinand Magellan than with the high-tech, cyber-fed sailors of today, a mere thirty years later. It was not the sea or the weather that determined the nature of their voyages but the men they were, and they were as different from one another as Scott from Amundsen. Only one of the nine crossed the finishing line after ten months at sea. The rest encountered despair, sublimity, madness and death.

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About the Author:

Peter Nichols has been a professional sailor, a yachtie, and a Hollywood scriptwriter.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the psychedelic summer of 1968, as Apollo 8 soared toward the moon and the Democratic Convention crashed in Chicago, nine men tried finally to accomplish the sailor's age-old ultimate goal: a solo, nonstop circumnavigation of the world. Nichols (Sea Change) deftly introduces myriad aspects of a voyage that promised "dubious, unquantifiable" rewards. He insightfully contextualizes the endeavor as an offshoot of Sir Francis Chichester's famous 1967 solo circumnavigation (with one stop), which represented to England a "longed-for" heroism. Detailing the British media's successful exploitation of the so-called race, he approaches the voyage as the remarkable result of nine men wishing to outdo Chichester. Nichols painstakingly describes the enormous difficulty of solo navigation in the pre-global positioning system of the 1960s. These "hardcase egomaniacs driven by complex desires and vainglory to attempt an extreme, life-threatening endeavor" used only rudimentary equipment and their wits. Nichols is at his liveliest when describing the only two participants who "were really happy aboard their boats": the French-Asian Bernard Moitessier, the most skilled sailor, whose mystical seamanship brings surprises, and the British Robin Knox-Johnson, who was energized during his journey by the memory of "the Elizabethan sea heroes of his youth." Nichols also delivers a compelling portrait of English Donald Crowhurst, an electronics engineer whose "supercharged personality" wreaked havoc on the entire race. While Nichols's pace is neither breakneck nor suspenseful, his careful details and psychological insight make for a riveting account of the triumphant human spirit. 16-page photo insert, 8 maps.

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