The strange voyage of Donald Crowhurst

About this book

In the autumn of 1968 Donald Crowhurst set out from England in his untested trimaran a competitor in the first singlehanded nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later the boat was found in mid-Atlantic with no one on board. Crowhursts logs and diaries revealed that although he had radioed messages from his supposed round-the-world course he had in fact never left the Atlantic. This journalistic masterpiece reconstructs what happened: Crowhursts growing distrust of his boat; his first decision to attempt one of the great hoaxes of our time; the lying radio transmissions; the triumphal return up the Atlantic as the elapsed-time race leader; and the fantastic ending. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is both a suspenseful narrative and a psychological casebook of human zeal and anguish.