Maybe you’ve dreamed of quitting your job, selling your house, buying a boat and sailing away from modern society. One too many Jimmy Buffet tunes on the summer playlist, perhaps? Before you pull up anchor, you might want to read Sophie Elmhirst’s new biography of a young couple who followed that dream to nightmarish results.
A Marriage at Sea is the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple who sets a course in 1972 from Southampton to New Zealand on a ship with no radio transmitter aboard. They wanted to “preserve their freedom from outside interference,” Elmhirst writes. And all goes well for nearly a year, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocks a hole in their boat and it sinks beneath the waves.
Maurice and Maralyn escape with some key belongings into an inflatable raft and attached dinghy, where they drift and barely cling to life for more than 100 days. Elmhirst’s book focuses not only on the couple’s fight to survive, but their relationship with each other and how two people with vastly different personalities can get along in the worst of circumstances.
“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive,” Elmhirst writes, “as the absence of surrender.”
While they snag fish with makeshift safety-pin hooks and kill sea birds with their bare hands, husband and wife both journal extensively through their ordeal. Those journals were the basis of a self-authored account by the Baileys, 117 Days Adrift, which was published in 1974. Elmhirst draws from that book and other research to give us this updated tale, which has all the nail-biting intrigue of a summer blockbuster film.
A Marriage at Sea combines high-sea adventure with a quirky love story and a fascinating look at how humans can survive the most extreme conditions.
