Word: crowhurst
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This bloody boat is falling to pieces!" he wrote after eleven days at sea. After two weeks, Crowhurst surmised that he was running dead last in the race, and began debating in his small, neat handwriting whether he should chuck the whole thing and put in for home. But he noted that he needed the $12,000 prize money to solve his financial problems. Depressed and once physically ill, he devoted long passages to his inability to admit failure, even when he realized it was certain. "Superficial assessments of success or failure are worthless," he rationalized...
Double Logs. In the last stages of his despondency, when he began to lapse into nonsense, Crowhurst observed that life is a chess game played against "cosmic beings." But the proper strategy for success eluded him, as his boat suffered new damage almost daily. "It is finished. It is finished. IT IS THE MERCY," he wrote enigmatically on July 1, the date of his final entry. "I will play this game when I choose. There is no reason for harmful . . ." The sentence was never completed...
There are no clues to what became of Crowhurst. It may have been suicide, an imprudent swim in shark-filled waters, or simply a misstep on a slippery deck. A number of friends in Teign-mouth, the town that helped sponsor his trip, hold out hope that he is still alive...
...most intriguing aspect of the voyage was discovered last week by Sir Francis Chichester, the celebrated circumnavigator, who was a judge in the race. Examining Crowhurst's logs, he found that the yachtsman had sailed 14,500 miles but never left the Atlantic. He had invented his positions in countless short-wave radio broadcasts to indicate that he was traveling around the world. Moreover, Crowhurst began a new logbook on Dec. 12, and about that time he began sending false radio messages. It appears that he intended to fill the old log with fake entries and throw...
Ironically, Crowhurst's despondency over his apparent failure was less justified than he thought. Unknown to him, eight of the nine other competitors in the race had dropped out before Crowhurst vanished-all of them because of the same kind of mishaps and small illnesses that he himself suffered...