Teignmouth Electron ended its days as a dive boat in the Caribbean and its decaying remains can still be found in the dunes above a beach in the Cayman Islands.

Because of family financial problems, Crowhurst was forced to leave school early that year[6] and started a five-year apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough Airfield.

[9][10] After leaving the Army the same year[11] owing to a disciplinary incident,[citation needed] Crowhurst eventually moved to Bridgwater, where he started a business called Electron Utilisation in 1962.

The considerable publicity his achievement garnered led a number of sailors to plan the next logical step – a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world sail.

[16] The other contestants were Robin Knox-Johnston, Nigel Tetley, Bernard Moitessier, Chay Blyth, John Ridgway, William King, Alex Carozzo and Loïck Fougeron.

Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability, but if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, though crews have lived for months with a boat in the inverted position and ultimately survived.

This innovation would hold the mast horizontal on the surface of the water, and a clever arrangement of pumps would allow him to flood the uppermost outer hull, which would (in conjunction with wave action) pull the boat upright.

On 13 October an experienced sailor, Lieutenant Commander Peter Eden, volunteered to accompany Crowhurst on his last leg from Cowes to Teignmouth.

He shut down his radio with a plan to loiter in the South Atlantic for several months while the other boats sailed the Southern Ocean, falsify his navigation logs, then slip back in for the return leg to England.

A great deal of the voyage was spent in radio silence, while his supposed position was inferred by extrapolation based on his earlier reports.

By early December, based on his false reports, he was being cheered worldwide as the likely winner of the fastest circumnavigation prize, though Francis Chichester privately expressed doubts about the plausibility of Crowhurst's progress.

[21] After rounding the tip of South America in early February, Moitessier had made a dramatic decision in March to drop out of the race and to sail on towards Tahiti.

His biographers, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, believe that faced with a choice between two impossible situations—either admit his fraud and then face public shame and likely financial ruin including the loss of the family home, or return home to a fraudulent hero's reception, and then have to live with the guilt and possible subsequent unmasking—Crowhurst descended into a "classical paranoia", a "psychotic disorder in which deluded ideas are built into a complex, intricate structure.

"[22][a] Others, including practising clinical psychologist Geoff Powter, who included a chapter devoted to Crowhurst in his book Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness, have postulated that Crowhurst may have suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which, accentuated by his eventual psychologically fraught situation, could account for his apparent alternation between manic and depressed episodes as evident from the later entries in his logbooks.

"[24] Although rambling and incoherent at times, he was attempting to set down, for the benefit of mankind, a "revelation" or new understanding that he believed he had discovered regarding the relationship between man and the universe.

[26] At 10 a.m. on 1 July (by his own reckoning, since in his meditations he had omitted to wind his chronometer and had to subsequently restart it), Crowhurst commenced what Tomalin and Hall believed to be his "final confession," also incorporating (in their view) a count of hours, minutes and seconds towards the time at which he had decided that he would end "the game" by committing suicide.

[27][28] Tomalin and Hall conjecture that included in his last writings (not all reproduced above) were sentences that cover Crowhurst's internal debate over whether or not to leave the evidence of his actual, rather than faked, journey for posterity to see, and that he decided that the former was the better course; in the event, it was the "true" logbook that was left behind, and the "fake" one (if it ever existed) disappeared, along with the vessel's chronometer (its case was found empty), and Crowhurst himself.

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.

From his apparent state of mind as indicated by his most recent logbook entries and philosophical statements, it seems likely that he deliberately decided to take his own life, possibly in an effort to become a "second generation cosmic being" according to his belief (and thereupon have no further need for his earthly body), although the possibility that he met with some sort of accident, intending to return to continue writing in his logbook, cannot be completely dismissed.

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.

Clare Crowhurst, Donald's widow, strongly disputed the theory put forward by Tomalin and Hall regarding the circumstances of her husband's deception and demise, accusing them of mixing fiction with fact.

In a letter to The Times published on 10 July 1970, she contended that there was no evidence that her husband had intended to write a fake logbook (none was in fact found), that his death could equally have been as the result of misadventure (such as an accident while climbing the mast, which a logbook entry showed that he intended to do before 30 June), and also that Tomalin believed that "all heroes are neurotics, and starting off with this theory, he has sought to prove it by the history of Donald from the earliest age until his death".

[29] Nevertheless, later commentators have agreed with Tomalin and Hall's general conclusions, that Crowhurst's long sojourn alone at sea, coupled with his being placed in an impossible dilemma, led to his eventual psychological breakdown and resulting probable suicide.

[27][30][31] Interviewed by journalist Chris Eakin for his 2009 book A Race Too Far, Crowhurst's now adult son Simon, when asked whether he believed that his father deliberately stepped off the boat to kill himself, said that on the balance of probabilities (and having studied the logbooks, now in his possession, many times), "it is hard to come to any other conclusion.

[38] If Crowhurst had finished the race, his fake coordinates would undoubtedly have been exposed and he would have been treated as a fraud, in addition to being in probable financial ruin.

From his surviving logbooks, while it is possible that his eventual presumed suicide was a rational choice to avoid having to confront such a situation and/or to seek an "honourable" exit without disrespecting his family, it seems more likely that his final metaphysical ramblings, which subsequent analysts have interpreted as clear evidence of a classic psychotic state, led to his abandoning both his body and the world while under the conviction that he had no further need of them.

[39] However, over time the public narrative has changed somewhat, more recent commentators viewing Crowhurst as a well-intentioned but tragic figure who became caught up in a situation that was initially of his own making but that he could not ultimately control.

In 1970, Crowhurst was seen as a hoaxer who came to a pathetic end... Now he's more likely to be viewed (as Tacita Dean sees him) as a tragic hero, a tortured soul, in involuntary exile from the stable world... Teignmouth Electron has become like a ship in an allegory – a vessel to transport the reader beyond the known world, into a strange and lonely realm where the reader, too, will lose his bearings and face the ultimate disintegration of the self in the cruel laboratory of the sea.

With growing predictability, nearly every sailing blog carries this quote from Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.

He reminded us just how lonesome it is out there and how quickly things can go south – particularly hi-tech electronics that tend to fail at the earliest exposure to salt water.