Stress: Mutiny of the Mind

Within two weeks after set sail the London Sunday Times's round-the-world yacht race last October, Donald Crowhurst's 41 -foot trimaran, the Teign-mouth Electron, had started falling apart. The lacing on the boom snapped, the port forward hatch sprang a leak, and then his generator went out, leaving him without electricity for three days. While his boat disintegrated with the pounding of heavy seas, the sailor's sanity, strained as it was by the loneliness of the solo odyssey and haunted by the specter of fail ure, also began to fall apart.

Crowhurst's damaged...