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 boat was found in the mid-Atlantic 81 months after he set out from the resort town of Teign-mouth on the southern coast of Eng land. His position, 700 miles southwest of the Azores, indicated that he was front runner for the fastest time. Though Crowhurst, 36, was missing, his logbooks, which gradually lapsed into incoherence, provide a revealing case study of the effects of extended solitude.

"This bloody boat is falling to pieces!" he wrote after eleven days at sea. After two weeks, Crowhurst surmised that he was running dead last in the race, and began debating in his small, neat handwriting whether he should chuck the whole thing and put in for home. But he noted that he needed the $12,000 prize money to solve his financial problems. Depressed and once physically ill, he devoted long passages to his inability to admit failure, even when he realized it was certain. "Superficial assessments of success or failure are worthless," he rationalized.

Double Logs. In the last stages of his despondency, when he began to lapse into nonsense, Crowhurst observed that life is a chess game played against "cosmic beings." But the proper strategy for success eluded him, as his boat suffered new damage almost daily. "It is finished. It is finished. IT IS THE MERCY," he wrote enigmatically on July 1, the date of his final entry. "I will play this game when I choose. There is no reason for harmful . . ." The sentence was never completed.

There are no clues to what became of Crowhurst. It may have been suicide, an imprudent swim in shark-filled waters, or simply a misstep on a slippery deck. A number of friends in Teign-mouth, the town that helped sponsor his trip, hold out hope that he is still alive.

The most intriguing aspect of the voyage was discovered last week by Sir Francis Chichester, the celebrated circumnavigator, who was a judge in the race. Examining Crowhurst's logs, he found that the yachtsman had sailed 14,500 miles but never left the Atlantic. He had invented his positions in countless short-wave radio broadcasts to indicate that he was traveling around the world. Moreover, Crowhurst began a new logbook on Dec. 12, and about that time he began sending false radio messages. It appears that he intended to fill the old log with fake entries and throw the new one away when he landed. And while his jottings became more distressed, the tape recordings he did for the BBC became increasingly chipper. "I feel in tremendous shape," he taped a week before his last navigational log entry. "There is nothing like going to sea for getting rid of all the poisons in your body."