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Time Madness & Seafaring

Naughty_Felid

Naughty_Felid

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As pointed out on the Good reads thread I'm listening to https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Last-Voyage-Donald-Crowhurst/dp/0071414290

Crowhurst apparently become fixated on time. He wrote about time a lot in his log books whilst becalmed just before he disappeared.

Th writers say mariners refer to this as "Time Madness"? I can't find anything about this and was wondering if anyone had heard of it before?

I'm guessing its down to the sensory and physical isolation on the open seas leading to becoming delusional regarding time passing.
 
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That reminds me a bit of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
I normally hate poetry, but that one I found pretty fascinating.
 
Mythopoeika said:
That reminds me a bit of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
I normally hate poetry, but that one I found pretty fascinating.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interview-the-young-woman-and-the-sea-1181925.html

Donald Crowhurst was the amateur sailor who joined the 1968 Golden Globe round-the-world boat race at the last minute. He got as far as the Atlantic Ocean before he realised he would never make it through the Roaring Forties: so he deliberately broke off radio contact and started faking his route around the world. In June 1969 he resumed radio contact, and appeared to be winning. "But by then he was suffering from time-madness", Dean says, "which is what sailors get, because you can't locate yourself any more on the surface of the world ... " Crowhurst jumped overboard, clutching his chronometer, and was never seen again. Crowhurst's story, as told in the book by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall (1995), is the source behind the space-time continuum of Dean's film. And it was Crowhurst's abandoned vessel, the Teignmouth Electron, that Dean travelled to the Cayman Islands to see.
 
At least within the context of the Crowhurst case, the term seems to have arisen with the Tomalin / Hall book and been more widely popularized by artist Tacita Dean:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interview-the-young-woman-and-the-sea-1181925.html

There's another specific mention (again in relation to the above-cited authors) in Carl Thompson's Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity. The Thompson book is searchable at:

https://books.google.com/books?id=z...cQ6AEINTAF#v=onepage&q="time madness"&f=false

Thompson's reference list (2nd of 2 hits within the book) cites a 2009 article or essay by Dean entitled Time Madness. There may be more within that article, if you can track it down.

Beyond that, I'm not yet finding any solid hits (or even leads) on 'time madness' among sailors generally.
 
EnolaGaia said:
At least within the context of the Crowhurst case, the term seems to have arisen with the Tomalin / Hall book and been more widely popularized by artist Tacita Dean:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interview-the-young-woman-and-the-sea-1181925.html

There's another specific mention (again in relation to the above-cited authors) in Carl Thompson's Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity. The Thompson book is searchable at:

https://books.google.com/books?id=zg6LAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA221&lpg=PA221&dq=sailing OR sailor OR sailors "time madness"&source=bl&ots=eOZMWT0_Dy&sig=7GzC6YUCBor0-z8UoWaajO32Vk0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjf4siDtq7RAhVr64MKHaDpBBcQ6AEINTAF#v=onepage&q="time madness"&f=false

Thompson's reference list (2nd of 2 hits within the book) cites a 2009 article or essay by Dean entitled Time Madness. There may be more within that article, if you can track it down.

Beyond that, I'm not yet finding any solid hits (or even leads) on 'time madness' among sailors generally.
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Yeah same, nothing regarding seafaring outside of Tomalin/Hall. I can see why it would be a evocative concept in art though.
 
From what I gather (cursory though it is ... ) Crowhurst's later log entries pretty clearly indicated an obsession with time, which may or may not be evidence of a more general 'madness' in relation to time / temporality. My wild guesswork toward an explanation goes like this ...

Precise timekeeping was the key to determining longitude (as demonstrated by Harrison and his chronometer).

Crowhurst was faking his logs continuously after he gave up on continuing the race as originally planned. This meant he had to create reasonable readings / figures to document the fictional locations he entered into the logs. He could 'fudge' (make do with approximations and / or arbitrary selections for ... ) geographical coordinates to some extent. However, his fictional longitudes had to be supported with a specific reference time for a sighting / reading.

Time was therefore the one parameter he couldn't 'fudge', and it was the one fixed-point parameter around which all his other fictional data had to correlate. As his actual location(s) diverged farther and farther from his fictional locations, time became a progressively trickier element to fake. The one unavoidable, and most presumptively exacting, measurement he had to log was the one that was becoming the farthest removed from his immediate circumstances.

The increasing mass of his deception weighed down upon him with a sharp point - the inescapable time element. As a result, his general descent into madness came to focus upon the one subject he couldn't elude or fake - time.
 
EnolaGaia said:
From what I gather (cursory though it is ... ) Crowhurst's later log entries pretty clearly indicated an obsession with time, which may or may not be evidence of a more general 'madness' in relation to time / temporality. My wild guesswork toward an explanation goes like this ...

Precise timekeeping was the key to determining longitude (as demonstrated by Harrison and his chronometer).

Crowhurst was faking his logs continuously after he gave up on continuing the race as originally planned. This meant he had to create reasonable readings / figures to document the fictional locations he entered into the logs. He could 'fudge' (make do with approximations and / or arbitrary selections for ... ) geographical coordinates to some extent. However, his fictional longitudes had to be supported with a specific reference time for a sighting / reading.

Time was therefore the one parameter he couldn't 'fudge', and it was the one fixed-point parameter around which all his other fictional data had to correlate. As his actual location(s) diverged farther and farther from his fictional locations, time became a progressively trickier element to fake. The one unavoidable, and most presumptively exacting, measurement he had to log was the one that was becoming the farthest removed from his immediate circumstances.

The increasing mass of his deception weighed down upon him with a sharp point - the inescapable time element. As a result, his general descent into madness came to focus upon the one subject he couldn't elude or fake - time.
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Yeah I think he always had a cyclothymic personality with lots of highs and lows. The writers mention his mother trying to kill herself and a father who drank and was prone to violence too.

Agreed his juggling of all the balls including the immense stress of actually sailing the craft which was inadequate sent him into a full-blown manic episode and I really like the idea of weight of "inescapable time element" as the tipping point. Psychosis followed and he finally went ahead to 'free his mind" and he jumped off the boat.


The writers also mentioned that effort it would have taken to fake his position, more so than taking genuine readings to make it plausible.

It's incredible what he must have gone through.
 
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I never heard of Time Madness in connection with seafaring before. Donald Crowhurst was probably a unique example, but his madness was his decision to fake a round the world voyage, and that led to his obsession with trying to fake his times and waypoints.

Another famous solo round the world sailor, Joshua Slocum, apparently went the other way, and claimed he navigated by means of a clock with only an hour hand! (But much of what he said was very much tongue-in-cheek, and makes for an amusing read!)
 
graylien said:
So basically Tacita Dean doesn't know what she's waffling on about?
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IMHO it's a mixed bag. Dean's characterization of Crowhurst's madness as being focused on 'time' is reasonable given the scenario and the few known facts (e.g., that Crowhurst supposedly bailed out clutching his chronometer).

On the other hand, I can't find any evidence for Dean's claim that such 'time madness' was a widely- / well-known phenomenon among solo sailors.

I don't know whether this latter claim originated with the Tomalin / Hall book or Dean herself. It's possible Dean adopted the (over-?) generalization from those earlier authors.
 
I don't recall any mention of "time madness" in the documentary about the Crowhurst case, Deep Water, but it's been a decade since I saw it. It's such a sad film, and will be interesting to see what the new biopic of the man is like (Colin Firth is playing him), and if it mentions this "madness". He seemed to have died from shame more than anything else.
 
GNC said:
I don't recall any mention of "time madness" in the documentary about the Crowhurst case, Deep Water, but it's been a decade since I saw it. It's such a sad film, and will be interesting to see what the new biopic of the man is like (Colin Firth is playing him), and if it mentions this "madness". He seemed to have died from shame more than anything else.
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I think it was a lot more than shame. His last writings showed marked thought disorder that wouldn't be out of place in a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I think he always had an underlying mental illness and I think that what killed him in the end although there are many factors involved.
 
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Naughty_Felid said:
I think it was a lot more than shame. His last writings showed marked thought disorder that wouldn't be out of place in a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I think he always had an underlying mental illness and I think that what killed him.
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I can only go by what I remember in the film, but it seemed to that when he was going to win the race by default without actually having gone around the world, it broke his mind with the shame of it, and he couldn't face returning to land as a fraud. Maybe your book says differently?
 
GNC said:
I can only go by what I remember in the film, but it seemed to that when he was going to win the race by default without actually having gone around the world, it broke his mind with the shame of it, and he couldn't face returning to land as a fraud. Maybe your book says differently?
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He always lived this dichotomy that cheating was wrong and yet cheating was fine if it gave others pleasure or did no harm. He's spent a great deal of his life living this contradiction.

He had the germ of faking the race even before he left England as he knew his boat wouldn't survive the Roaring 40's.

If he could have gotten away with it he would have lived with faking winning, I've no doubt about it.

It was the effort of attempting to fake it, malnutrition, the stress and fear of the voyage itself, knowing he was going to be bankrupt and his underlying mental illness that caused the breakdown. Lastly it was the fact that he couldn't fake it that finally broke him.
 
Yeah, I suppose there were complex reasons behind his self-destruction, but that's often the way.
 
GNC said:
Yeah, I suppose there were complex reasons behind his self-destruction, but that's often the way.
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I just think he was a lot more complicated than is often made out. His fear of failure, (he pretty much had failed at everything in life), was a major driving force and that stemmed from his father's ignominious return to the UK.

He felt also that life was a game, you played it to get rich and he was an actor in this game. His last ravings explore the concept of "playing the game".

I'm pretty sure he would have ended committing a crime to gain money if he'd not taken on the race.

I'll stop babbling on about it. Very interesting guy with many faults but very brave as well.
 
I first became aware of this story through the following book (preview available):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Dangerous-Dreams-Between-Adventure/dp/0898869870/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1491070351&sr=8-4-fkmr2&keywords="strange and dangerous" crowley

Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a Britishbusinessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday TimesGolden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-worldyacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.

[...]

Mental breakdown and death
Crowhurst's behaviour as recorded in his logs indicates a complex and conflicted psychological state. His commitment to fabricating the voyage reports seems incomplete and self-defeating, as he reported unrealistically fast progress that was sure to arouse suspicion. By contrast, he spent many hours meticulously constructing false log entries, often more difficult to complete than real entries due to the celestial navigation research required.

The last several weeks of his log entries, once he was facing the real possibility of winning the prize, showed increasing irrationality. In the end, his writings during the voyage – poems, quotations, real and false log entries, and random thoughts – amounted to more than 25,000 words. The log books include an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from his impossible situation. It appeared the final straw was the impossibility of a noble way out after Tetley sank, meaning he would win the prize and hence his logs would be subject to scrutiny.

His last log entry was on 1 July 1969; it is assumed that he then jumped overboard and drowned. The state of the boat gave no indication that it had been overrun by a rogue wave or that any accident had occurred which might have caused Crowhurst to fall overboard. He may have taken with him a single deceptive log book and the ship's clock. Three log books - two navigational logs and a radio log - and a large mass of other papers were left on his boat; these communicated his philosophical ideas and revealed his actual navigational course during the voyage. Although his biographers, Tomalin and Hall, discounted the possibility that some sort of food poisoning contributed to his mental deterioration, they acknowledged that there is insufficient evidence to rule it, or several other hypotheses, out.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst

The story of the false reporting is well-told there, the details of the course are here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030212190726/http://website.lineone.net/~teignmuseum/crowhurst.htm

Has anybody read this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mercy-Strange-Voyage-Donald-Crowhurst/dp/1681441829/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491070903&sr=8-1&keywords=The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

[Apparently there's a film in the offing]
 
Sample pages:

YoNh2.jpg

OGNDQ.jpg

Y89gq.jpg
 
A bit of nautical madness displayed just now on Tipping Point. The question was which old fashioned navigational instrument derived its name from the Latin 'sextus'? Neither contestant knew the answer, and when told that the answer is 'sextant' the male contestant said he's never heard of it!! :p
 
rynner2 said:
A bit of nautical madness displayed just now on Tipping Point. The question was which old fashioned navigational instrument derived its name from the Latin 'sextus'? Neither contestant knew the answer, and when told that the answer is 'sextant' the male contestant said he's never heard of it!! :p
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On the face of things, it beggars belief that an adult has never heard of a sextant, but then again we have people today that don't know where meat and eggs come from.
 
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