“‘I’m sure they’re going to collide,’ I said as we began making tight circles around them,” Grosvenor recalled. “They were too close together, and too difficult to maneuver to do anything about the situation they were in, so I told the pilot to circle the two ships so we could take pictures of the collision.”īeneath them, the Juan Sebastian de Elcano, a Spanish naval training vessel and, at 370 feet in length, the second largest of the ships in the competition, was being approached by the Libertad, a full-rigged Argentinian vessel, that was only slightly smaller at 345 feet.

“What had happened was, I looked out and realized that two of these tall ships were obviously going to collide,” Grosvenor said, sitting up in his chair as he described the scene. Within minutes, off the east end of Bermuda, those details became all too vivid. The plan from the start had been to fly just 200 or 300 feet above the racers, an altitude that would allow the team to broadly take in the scene below while still enabling them to take in the details. Meanwhile, from the seat right behind him, a photographer clicked away, capturing the kinds of images - thrilling, beautiful and richly colorful - that made Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic’s reputation. Climbing aboard a small, single-engine plane the magazine had hired, Grosvenor began to take notes almost as soon as it was airborne.

Gilbert melville grosvenor