In July 1969 the trimaran Teignmouth Electron was found drifting in the mid Atlantic, intact and empty, with fake navigation logs and a 25,000 word philosophical essay aboard. Its sailor, Donald Crowhurst, was an electronics engineer and weekend sailor whose radio navigation business was failing when the Sunday Times launched the 1968 Golden Globe race, a solo nonstop circumnavigation with 5,000 pounds for the fastest time. He mortgaged his business and family home, chose a fast but unproven trimaran, and planned a self righting masthead airbag he never built. The shakedown sail from Norfolk to Teignmouth took 13 days, and he left on October 31, 1968, the final legal start date, with supplies unstowed and repair materials left on the dock.

By mid November he calculated the boat would break apart in the Southern Ocean, but quitting meant bankruptcy. On December 6 he began two logbooks: a real one tracking slow progress in the Atlantic and a fake one showing a record run south, built from reverse engineered celestial sightings and weather reports he heard on the radio. At Christmas he implied he was off Cape Town while lingering off Brazil, and in March he made an illegal stop in Argentina for repairs. His claimed speed pushed Nigel Tetley to drive his own trimaran until it sank about a thousand miles from the finish, leaving Crowhurst set to win the prize and face scrutiny from Sir Francis Chichester. He withdrew into writing, made a final log entry on July 1, and vanished.

• Robin Knox-Johnston was the only finisher and donated his 5,000 pound prize to Crowhurst’s family.
• Bernard Moitessier entered the same race as a spiritual quest and loathed its commercialism.
• The prize equates to roughly 76,000 pounds today.
• Crowhurst shot 16 millimeter film to support his invented route through southern waters.
• He carried Albert Einstein’s book on relativity and wrote about a mind transcending the physical world.