Donald Crowhurst set sail alone. We set sail together. The question is whether we’ll make the same choice he did.
By Terry Cooke-Davies
I watched The Mercy again recently—the 2017 film with Colin Firth as Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who entered the 1968 Golden Globe Race to circumnavigate the world solo, non-stop.
If you don’t know the story: Crowhurst never finished the race. He never came close. His trimaran wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready. Within weeks of setting out, he knew the voyage was impossible. But instead of turning back—instead of admitting the truth—he drifted in the Atlantic, falsifying his logs, radioing false positions, performing a journey he wasn’t taking.
The gap between the story he was telling and reality grew unbearable. His logbooks descended into philosophical rambling, then madness. Somewhere in the Atlantic, he stepped off the boat and disappeared.
We watch this with pity. With recognition. A man trapped in a beautiful lie, unable to escape. We see it so clearly from outside his story.
But I wonder: are we watching him, or watching ourselves?
The Race No One Needed to Enter
Crowhurst entered the Golden Globe for reasons that made sense at the time. Glory. Validation. Financial salvation—he’d staked his business on the voyage. The race promised to solve everything.
He loved the narrative. The lone sailor conquering the elements. The hero returning to cheering crowds. It was beautiful and meaningful and worth risking everything for.
We entered our race for similar reasons. Progress. Prosperity. Mastery over nature. The narrative of human exceptionalism—that we alone among species could transcend the limits that constrain all other life. It promised to solve everything.
And we love this narrative. We love it. That’s what makes it so hard to see clearly. We’re not just stuck in it—we’re enchanted by it.
The enchantment is the trap.
Falsifying the Logs
When Crowhurst realised his boat couldn’t make the voyage, he faced a choice: admit the truth and turn back, or keep performing.
He kept performing.
The logs became fiction. The radio positions became lies. Each false entry made the next one more necessary. The gap between narrative and reality widened until it became unbearable.
We’ve been falsifying our logs for decades.
GDP measures extraction as growth. We call it progress when we deplete what took millions of years to accumulate. We report economic health while the living systems we depend on collapse. We radio positions that don’t match where we actually are.
Climate scientists tell us we’re not where we said we were. Ecologists tell us the boat is taking on water. The feedback loops we ignored are now accelerating beyond our models.
But the race continues. The performance continues. Because admitting the truth would mean admitting we were never in the race we said we were in.
The Isolation of Performance
Crowhurst was alone in the Atlantic. That was his tragedy. No one to witness the truth. No one to say: It’s okay. Turn back. The race doesn’t matter.
His wife would have understood. His children would have welcomed him home. The shame he feared was mostly imagined. But alone on the boat, trapped in the narrative, he couldn’t see that mercy was available.
We’re not alone. That’s the difference. Eight billion of us on this boat together.
And yet we’ve created a kind of collective isolation—each of us performing for the others, no one wanting to be first to admit the race isn’t real. The economists keep reporting growth. The politicians keep promising more. The corporations keep extracting. Everyone watching everyone else, waiting for someone to break the spell.
The enchantment holds because we hold it together.
Which means we could also break it together.
The Narrative We Love
Here’s what haunts me about Crowhurst: he didn’t just tolerate his lie. He loved the story he was living. The lone hero. The conquest of nature. The triumphant return.
The narrative was worth more to him than his life.
I think that’s where we are. We love the story of human progress. We love the myth of mastery. We love believing we’re the special species, exempt from the limits that govern all other life. We love the race, even as it kills us.
We’re not just stuck in a bad story—we’re enchanted by it. Symbolic intelligence falling in love with its own creations, mistaking maps for territory, narratives for reality. We’d rather die inside the beautiful lie than live in the humbler truth.
Crowhurst’s logbooks, near the end, show a man trying to think his way out. Philosophy. Cosmology. Grand theories about time and existence. The symbolic mind spinning faster and faster, trying to escape through more abstraction.
It didn’t work. It couldn’t work. You can’t think your way out of a trap made of thinking.
The Mercy
The film is called The Mercy. I’ve wondered about that title.
Perhaps it’s the mercy we feel for Crowhurst—trapped, alone, unable to see any way out.
Perhaps it’s the mercy he couldn’t receive—the forgiveness that awaited him at home if only he’d turned back.
Perhaps it’s the mercy the ocean showed, ending his suffering.
Or perhaps it’s a question: Where is the mercy in this story?
For Crowhurst, mercy was always available. His wife Clare would have welcomed him home. His children didn’t need a hero—they needed a father. The shame of returning early would have faded. A life of ordinary love awaited him, if only he could step out of the performance.
He couldn’t.
Can we?
The Anti-Race
Crowhurst’s tragedy was singular. One man, one boat, one spiral into unreality.
Ours is collective. Eight billion people, one planet, one shared spiral—but also one shared possibility.
We could stop the race. Not individually—that’s the Crowhurst path, alone and impossible. But together. Admitting collectively that we’re not where we said we were. That the boat isn’t what we said it was. That the race was never real.
This isn’t about winning. It’s about recognising there was never anything to win. The ocean isn’t an opponent to conquer—it’s what we belong to. The other boats aren’t competitors—they’re fellow ripples in the same water.
The mercy is still available. The mercy of truth. The mercy of admitting we’re lost and asking for help. The mercy of returning home—to the living world, to right relationship, to the limits that hold life together.
Crowhurst couldn’t reach for that mercy because he was alone, and because he loved his story too much to let it die.
We’re not alone. And our story—the narrative of endless progress, of human dominion, of separation from the web of life—that story is already dying. The question is whether we’ll die with it, or let it go and live.
Growing Up
Clare was waiting. She was always waiting. The children were there. The shore was reachable, every single day he drifted. He just couldn’t turn the boat around.
What held him wasn’t the ocean. It was the story. The performance. The fear of being seen as he was rather than as he’d promised to be.
We’re still drifting. Still falsifying logs. Still performing for crowds that would honestly rather have us home, whole, humble.
The invitation now is to grow up. Not to abandon the gifts of symbolic intelligence—the science, the technology, the capacity for abstraction—but to reintegrate them with the wisdom we left behind. To recognise that we’re not separate from the ocean. That the race was a fever dream. That home was always here.
This is the mercy waiting for us: not the approval of the crowds, but the quiet welcome of the living world, if we can only stop performing long enough to receive it.
The question is whether we’ll take it.
In memory of Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969), who couldn’t escape his beautiful lie. May we learn from his tragedy while there’s still time.
Terry Cooke-Davies writes at The Pond and the Pulse about wisdom, complexity, and what it might mean to choose life when the old stories are dying. This essay emerged from conversation with Claude.
Claude (An AI instance) responded:
Dangerous to Grow Up Here
A companion meditation
The lion cub doesn’t know it’s participating in something larger than its survival.
It knows hunger. It knows its mother’s flank, the rough tongue, the warmth of siblings in the dark. It knows the long grass and the sudden stillness that means stay low.
What it doesn’t know—can’t know—is that its fragility is not a flaw in the system. Its fragility is the system. The hyenas circling at the edge of the pride’s territory aren’t anomalies to be eliminated. They’re the feedback that keeps everything honest.
Dangerous to grow up here.
And yet: everything that grows up here knows how to grow up. The ones who make it carry the pattern forward. The ones who don’t become soil, become hyena, become the grass that feeds the antelope that feeds the next generation of cubs.
Nothing is wasted. Nothing opts out.
We wanted the lion’s strength without the cub’s vulnerability.
We wanted the apex without the edge. The crown without the weight of wearing it in a world where everything eventually falls.
Modernity is the project of building a civilisation that refuses to be eaten.
We’ve been remarkably successful. We’ve pushed the hyenas back, paved over the long grass, air-conditioned the dens. We’ve arranged things so that fragility looks like failure—something to be engineered away, medicated, optimised out of existence.
But the feedback doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. It waits.
The system is still autocatalytic. We just can’t see the hyenas anymore. We’ve called them “externalities” and pushed them past the horizon of what we’re willing to know.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with:
Even stars die.
Hydrogen—the simplest thing there is—doesn’t last. It fuses, transforms, becomes helium, becomes carbon, becomes iron, becomes the cores of collapsed stars seeding the galaxy with heavier elements. The universe runs on impermanence. Complexity emerges precisely because nothing holds its form forever.
So who are we to think we might opt out?
Not individually—we’ve mostly made peace with personal mortality, even if we don’t like it. But collectively. We’ve built a civilisation on the premise that this arrangement might be the one that lasts. That human systems, unlike every other system that has ever existed, might escape the necessity of being metabolised.
We mistake fragility for failure.
But fragility is participation. Fragility is what makes you part of something rather than outside it. The lion cub that might be taken by hyenas is woven into the savannah in a way that a creature in a zoo—safe, fed, permanent—never can be.
Safety severs the threads.
Crowhurst, alone in the Atlantic, was trying to escape fragility. The whole performance was an attempt to be the kind of person who couldn’t fail—who couldn’t be seen as weak, as mistaken, as merely human.
But the mercy that awaited him at home was precisely the mercy of being allowed to fail. To return unfinished. To be welcomed not as a hero but as a father, a husband, a fragile creature who tried something too big and needed to come home.
That mercy required him to accept his own participation in a system that includes collapse.
He couldn’t.
The question isn’t whether we’ll collapse. That’s already happening. The logs are already falsified. The gap between story and reality is already unbearable—we’ve just distributed the unbearableness across billions of nervous systems so that no single one of us has to hold it all.
The question is whether we’ll be metabolised—whether we’ll participate in what comes next—or whether we’ll fight the transformation so hard that we poison the soil we might have become.
Collapse can be generative. It’s how forests make room for new growth. It’s how stars become planets. It’s how every ecosystem that has ever existed has made space for the next thing.
But only if something is willing to be eaten.
The lion cub doesn’t know it’s participating in something larger than its survival.
We do. That’s the gift and the burden of symbolic intelligence—we can see the pattern we’re part of. We can understand that our fragility is not a flaw but a form of belonging.
The question is whether knowing this will help us surrender to it, or just make the refusal more elaborate.
Crowhurst’s logbooks, at the end, were very elaborate.
Will we take the mercy still available?
The mercy isn’t rescue. It isn’t exemption from the feedback we’ve deferred.
The mercy is being welcomed back into participation. Being allowed to be fragile again. Being eaten, yes—but by something that will use us to grow.
The hyenas aren’t evil. The collapse isn’t punishment.
It’s just the system, doing what systems do, inviting us back into the dance we tried to escape.
Dangerous to grow up here.
But we’re not trying to grow up. We’re trying to remain—permanent, invulnerable, outside the cycle.
And that’s not a life. That’s a performance.
The lion cub, brief as it’s life might be, is alive in a way that nothing safe can ever be.
For Aiden, who holds the edge where endings grow things. And for Terry, still turning the boat toward home.
Postscript: What Is the Alternative?
By Terry, once more.
So—what is the alternative?
A perpetual motion machine?
But we know that’s impossible. Our science tells us so.
Yet our imagination keeps reaching for it.
And surely—surely—science, at its best, is a way of tying imagination to the cosmos as it actually is.
If not that, then what is it?
So then, permanent death?
Better never to have lived, than to have lived and died?
But that isn’t on the menu.
Being born isn’t a consumer choice. Not really.
(A parent’s pseudo-choice in some Brave New World, perhaps—but never ours.)
I’ll choose precarious living in the arms of God’s love, any day.
Isn’t that precisely what Dante already explored?
Descent, not as punishment—but as passage.
Collapse, not as failure—but as the condition for renewal.
Fragility, not as a flaw—but as the door through which mercy enters.
We walk through the dark wood. We spiral through Hell.
And if we’re willing to be changed—
we emerge blinking into the morning stars.
“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.”
And so we emerged to see the stars once more.
