A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols Read Free Book Online Page B

refit. Then he approached the
Sunday Times
, hoping for the same coverage he had got for Chichester, but the paper was unimpressed – it was the decidedly poor prospect of Knox-Johnston and his archaic Indian-built boat that led the
Sunday Times
to back Tahiti Bill Howell. Finally, Greenfield got the London
Sunday Mirror
newspaper interested in buying the rights to exclusive accounts radioed from Knox-Johnston at sea. Before signing, the
Sunday Mirror
people wanted to meet their sailor, and Greenfield set up a nautically themed lunch on a restaurant boat on the Thames. During the lunch, a tug went by on the river throwing up a wake that rocked the restaurant, and the tough young adventurer who was going to sail alone around the world lost his balance and fell out of his chair. Greenfield still made the deal.
    With enough money for a full refit and all his supplies, Knox-Johnston now devoted all his free time – between Royal Navy reserve duty aboard HMS
Duncan
, for which he was already committed – to preparations.

    Bernard Moitessier had already signed the contract with his French publisher, Jacques Arthaud, for the book he would write of his epic nonstop, single-handed voyage. He spent the spring of 1968 preparing
Joshua
in the French Mediterranean port of Toulon. When the
Sunday Times
learned of his intentions, Murray Sayle was sent to invite him to take part in its race. He found the Frenchman in a portside bistro.
    Moitessier was aghast. He had made a pact with the gods (he later wrote) to make up for selling his earlier book down the river and felt that his motives for the new voyage must remain as pure as driven snow. He told Sayle that the idea of a race made him want to vomit. Such a voyage, he said, belonged to a sacred domain where the spirit of the sea had to be respected. A race for money and a gold-coloured ball would make a circus of all their efforts. He got up in a rage and left the bistro.
    Sayle and his newspaper were flummoxed. Moitessier and his boilerplate-steel boat unquestionably represented the strongest effort under way. The mystic Frenchman and his
Joshua
were the only sailor and boat of those now preparing to have already spent any time in the Roaring Forties. Together they had been around the Horn, the great, fearful, spectral bogey of the Southern Ocean. Moitessier could sail around the world from Toulon to Toulon and make a mockery of the Golden Globe race. Unwilling to lose its most formidable competitor and see its race made redundant, the
Sunday Times
revised a rule for the Golden Globe trophy for first man home. It made it eligible to anyone starting from any port north of latitude 40 degrees north – that’s just below the French-Spanish border.
    A few days later, Sayle cornered Moitessier again. He started by suggesting (according to Moitessier) that his famous Tahiti-Alicante voyage had been the catalyst for Chichester’s voyage (unlikely, since Chichester’s preparation for his circumnavigation had begun well before
Joshua
reached Alicante), and for all the voyages now being planned. But Moitessier didn’t need any sweet-talking; he had already decided to join the race. He had thought of nothing else since Murray Sayle had first spoken to him. He told the reporter that he’d join his race, and would sail
Joshua
to Plymouth, Devon, start from there and return to Plymouth to be eligible for both prizes. And if he came home first and fastest, he’d snatch the cheque without a word of thanks, auction off the Golden Globe, and thereby show his contempt for the
Sunday Times
.
    This was pure Moitessier, the yin and yang of his childhood influences battling within him. The pleasure and the unease he would feel all his life about the fame and money that came his way, usually from simply doing what he wanted. His ambivalence about the race certainly had much to do with his feeling that it would sully the purity of his intent and effort. But he realised that