Tacita Dean and Donald Crowhurst’s Drifting Boat

2000

Donald Crowhurst's chronicle has inspired several books and films. An amateur sailor with financial problems, he signed up for the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race with a substantial monetary prize. But Crowhurst never left the Atlantic. By sending false data about his true location, he pretended that he was in the Pacific and at other points along the route. Finally overwhelmed by the stress of maintaining an untenable lie, he seems to have thrown himself overboard into the sea. His catamaran, the Teignmouth Electron, was found intact with the logbook inside, which suggests, although without conclusive evidence, how he may have died. The last entries in the diary – the last is dated 1 July 1969 – indicate an extremely disturbed mental state, while also suggesting how the human condition can survive in complex situations. Seen in the media as an impostor, the British artist Tacita Dean recovers his journey and turns him into a defender of truth. Don’t miss the artist herself commenting on the work in the Collection.