Unit 4, Part 2

When Ellen MacArthur recently sailed round the world, alone in her boat Kingfisher , she always knew exactly where she was. An electronic device hooked her up to eight satellites and constantly updated her position, telling her to within a few metres which point on the earth's watery surface she had reached. Not only did she knowwhere she was, but everyone else did too - the organisers of the race, her family, newspaper readers, visitors to her Web site. You could even watch her on the Internet. MacArthur, too, could browse the Internet, check where her competitors had got to, phone home, receive weather forecasts by fax. If she'd got into trouble, help would have been only a few hours in coming. She didn't get into trouble, of course, but sailed home and into the nation's hearts: a courageous captain indeed, but far from mad.

Just 33 years ago, to sail solo round the world was a very different kind of deal. In 1968 nine men set out to be the first to sail single-handed non-stop round the world in what was dubbed the Golden Globe race. A Voyage for Madmen , Peter Nichols calls his book, and he's not wrong.

Most were woefully ill-prepared. One competitor, Chay Blyth, had never sailed before; the moment he lost sight of land, he was lost. There were no Web cameras then, or satellite navigation. Radios generally broke down, and though some of these sailors knew more or less where they were, there were long periods when no one else did. There wasn't much in the way of sponsorship in those days either, though Nigel Tetley got some money from Music for Pleasure, a company that marketed cassettes, plus a whole lot of tapes. So Tetley could advertise music to the waves and fish and ease the pain of loneliness. He had the best-stocked kitchen, too: prawns, lobster, asparagus, oysters, pheasant and cases of fine wine.

The race was won by Robin Knox-Johnston, a "distressingly normal" man, according to the psychiatrist sent to check him out before the race. In fact, of the nine, he was the only man to finish. Others had faster boats, but those broke up or their skippers broke down, and they limped into ports while Knox-Johnston ploughed doggedly on, fuelled by the classics of English literature. Ellen MacArthur took 94 days to sail round the world. Robin Knox-Johnston got back home in a little over 10 months.

But the story belongs to the other, more eccentric men. Mad, even. Those such as Frenchman Bernard Moitessier: "You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all. "Moitessier had spent his life sailing the oceans of the world, usually running away from something. He was one of the few who knew his boat and how to deal with really extreme conditions. He could have won, but after rounding Cape Horn he decided he wasn't ready to face real life yet, so instead of turning north for Plymouth he just kept on going, sailing round the world again, searching for his soul.

Most of all, though, the story belongs to Donald Crowhurst, a brilliant electronics engineer who had been dismissed from his job for bad behaviour. Charming and enthusiastic, Crowhurst had never been successful at anything; his life up to the voyage had been all crushed aspirations. The signs were there from the beginning that this wasn't to be his race: the champagne bottle failed to smash at the launch of his boat, then a burn to the hand erased the lifeline on his palm (sailors are a superstitious lot). After he had finally set off, just hours before the deadline, a box was found on the quay, full of vital repair equipment.

Crowhust soon realised that he was not equipped to sail round the world, but instead of abandoning the race and limping home in shame he hatched a bizarre plan to hang around in the Atlantic, hidden from the rest of the world, before rejoining the race and sailing home to fame and victory.

So for months he zigzagged aimlessly about the Atlantic, lost in self-doubt and his obsession with electronics. He kept two log books, one which was to do the trick and make him a hero; and another one, which told the truth. Both were found when a mail ship discovered his boat, abandoned. The cabin was a terrible mess of dirty dishes and electric wires.

As the time to turn back for home approached, Crowhurst's writing had become the mad scribbling of a man who could no longer live with his deception. In the end he lowered himself over the side and slipped silently into the Atlantic, while his boat drifted on without him.

Peter Nichols hadn't taken much interest in the Golden Globe race when it happened; he was a schoolboy at the time. But when he later found he had saltwater in his blood, he became obsessed by the story of those nine men and the silly risks they took, risks that don't seem to be taken any more, and he was inspired to set off alone across the Atlantic in a little wooden boat. I suspect he has much more in common with those early pioneers than with the Ellen MacArthurs of this world. He failed, of course

A Voyage for Madmen is a book about boats and the sea, about wind and waves and frightening, lonely places. But more than that, it is about sad, heroic characters, and Nichols does characters like a novelist does. There have been other books about this race, but those were written by sailors for sailors. But this one is different: an outsider's view, but that of an outsider with a healthy obsession with his subject. It is a wonderful yarn, told with passion.