GREAT BRITAIN 78 Days to Fame

"Your historic voyage has ended," boomed a bullhorn on the harbor master's launch to the sailor in the tiny dinghy. "Welcome to Falmouth!" Over head a four-engine R.A.F. Coastal Command reconnaissance plane dipped its wings in salute. On the pier a crowd of 20,000 cheered wildly, a band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner, and the town's scarlet-robed mayor waited to extend official greetings. Said Robert N. Manry, 47, as he stepped from the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic nonstop: "I'm flabbergasted."

On the Tether. So was the rest of the world. Seventy-eight days earlier, Manry, a copy editor at the Cleveland "Plain Dealer, had quietly set out alone in the 131-ft. Tinker belle from Falmouth, Mass., for the other Falmouth 3,200 miles away, thinking no one would pay any attention. No one did until a fortnight ago, when it suddenly seemed possible that he was actually going to make it all the way to England. Then came the world headlines. Falmouth trawler captains gave up fishing to haul boatloads of journalists in search of the red-sailed dinghy; some reporters even clambered aboard to interview Manry at closer range. Then, heightening the drama, Manry went unsighted for a week before the last 55 miles to safety.

The Atlantic had not been easily conquered. Sudden gales blew the Tinker belle on her side; she bobbed upright because of her special flotation material. Manry napped during the day and sailed at night so that he could signal away ships that might otherwise have run him down in the dark. Even so, he said, "ever so often some great steamer would come bearing down." On several occasions, he was washed overboard in heavy seas; each time he hauled himself back aboard by a lifeline that tethered him to the boat or by grabbing the boat's rigging. Worst of all were his hallucinations, the result probably of taking too many benzedrine pep pills. Once he imagined that a "monster" had invaded the boat's cabin and thrown his eleven-year-old son overboard.

Goodbye Backyards. Manry had dreamed of sailing the Atlantic ever since he first heard about open-ocean sailing as a small boy in India, where his father was a Presbyterian missionary. He bought the 36-year-old Tinker-belle six years ago for $250, completely rebuilt her, taught himself navigation, and practiced long-distance sailing on Lake Erie. "There is a time when one must decide either to risk everything to fulfill one's dreams or sit for the rest of one's life in the backyard," he told his wife.

No more backyards for Manry. The Plain Dealer, which was scooped two weeks ago by the rival Cleveland Press about Manry's progress (TIME, Aug. 20), sent a bevy of reporters to serve as his escort. Autograph seekers stopped him on the street. Offers for books and magazine pieces have begun pouring in. Cleveland plans a hero's welcome when he returns home next week, and Ohio's Republican Congressman William Minshall has proposed that Tinkerbelle be placed in the Smithsonian Institution alongside Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.

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