A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols Read Free Book Online

King and his bigger, faster boat, which wouldn’t be completed until July or August, Ridgway determined to depart on 1 June. This date would mean reaching the Southern Ocean sometime in September, rather too early for comfort, at the beginning of the southern spring, but would put him off Cape Horn in January – midsummer – the safest time for a passage south of the stormy cape.
    The
Sunday Times
, which had sponsored Francis Chichester and reaped a bonanza with that story, was very keen to get itself linked with one of the nonstop circumnavigators. The paper dispatched Murray Sayle, the reporter who had covered the Chichester story, to assess the growing pool of possible contenders for this last great sailing ‘first’.
    He liked ‘Tahiti Bill’ Howell, a 42-year-old Australian who had spent years sailing through the South Pacific supporting himself as a cruising dentist. Howell came with an admirable CV: he had sailed the 24-foot
Wanderer II
, a famous yacht once belonging to the venerable English sailor Eric Hiscock, from England to Tahiti with one crew, and from there single-handed to British Columbia by way of Hawaii. He had sailed a 30-footer to sixth place in the 1964 OSTAR. Now he had a 40-foot catamaran,
Golden Cockerel
, capable of sailing much faster than any monohull. He was planning on racing his cat across the Atlantic in that summer’s third OSTAR, then immediately turning left once he was across the finish line and heading south for his nonstop circumnavigation.
    If it was to sponsor anyone at all, the
Sunday Times
had to actfast. King had received sponsorship from the
Sunday Express
, Ridgway had
The People
. Both men, sailing new boats, seemed like possible winners. If the
Sunday Times
didn’t jump on ‘Tahiti Bill,’ it could find itself rooting among the dreamers with inferior boats and untested fortitude.
    But who were the others – the unknowns, the undeclared, the dark horses that would appear and steal the show? Who would sponsor them?
    Murray Sayle and Ron Hall, Sayle’s department head at the
Sunday Times
, hit upon the idea of sponsoring a race that would include everybody. It occurred to them simultaneously but independently of each other, and initially each had different ideas for such a race. Murray Sayle correctly believed that what would matter most, to the competitors and to the public, was who would circumnavigate alone and nonstop first. That was the sailor the history books would remember.
    Ron Hall thought that if there was to be a race, the sailors would have to compete in some way that would give them all an equal chance. But an official start, with everyone setting off at the boom of a gun, was out of the question. The men now anxiously preparing their boats, all of them increasingly aware of the efforts of a growing number of rivals, would certainly leave the moment they were ready, if not before. Some of them had already made arrangements with publishers and other newspapers. If the
Sunday Times
proposed a race, the sailors might refuse to enter. A race was in fact the last thing any of them wanted. These were not yachtsmen or sportsmen. They were hardcase egomaniacs driven by complex desires and vainglory to attempt an extreme, life-threatening endeavour. Each had powerfully visualised what must be done, and was consumed with the need to do it first. They were loners. No one would be waiting for anybody else.
    Yet the race to be first had already begun.
    One afternoon in March, Murray Sayle and Ron Hall sat down together and came up with an ingenious way to scoop all their newspaper rivals and put the inevitable race firmly in thehands of the
Sunday Times
. The newspaper would offer a trophy, which the two journalists decided then and there to call the Golden Globe, for the first sailor home. An additional award, answering Ron Hall’s wish for some sporting measure, would be a cash prize of £5,000 – a princely sum in