Stranded at Sea, Would Their Marriage Survive?

New York Times

08-07-2025

A MARRIAGE AT SEA: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck, by Sophie Elmhirst
Wilderness survival is tedious. Its tensions consist, in large part, of gradually lowered standards, as survivors cling as long as possible to the dignities of saying 'not yet': to killing weird animals; then killing cute ones; eating raw or rotten meat; cannibalism. A survivor's strength is twofold, lying both in acceptance of what must be done — and in a resistance to doing it.
In 'A Marriage at Sea,' the journalist Sophie Elmhirst's elegant and propulsive nonfiction debut about a married couple cast adrift for months on a raft, this tension is on full display. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey took to the seas from 1970s England, selling their suburban home to buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Nine months into the trip, a sperm whale breached under their boat — called the Auralyn, a combination of their names — and it sank into the Pacific, leaving them stranded on a crude raft with an assortment of salvaged items, luckily including water, canned food, a camera — and a biography of King Richard III.
Drawing on contemporary news accounts and the couple's 1974 book '117 Days Adrift,' Elmhirst has created something of her own: a piece of lyrical narrative nonfiction that adds depth and detail to a story with imagination and respect, even while hewing to the frankly remarkable facts.
Maralyn, in Elmhirst's telling, was almost unnervingly buoyant. When their raft made it into a shipping lane only for ship after ship to pass them by, she reassured herself that these particular potential rescuers weren't meant to stop.
Maurice, on the other hand, comes across as a downer. One gets the impression that his negativity was always at 11 — whether on a promising first date ('everything he said was wrong') or while passing in and out of consciousness while covered in saltwater sores ('He didn't die. Failed at that, too'). He served as captain on the Auralyn, but, once marooned, promptly proposed a double suicide. Maralyn, meanwhile, made fishhooks from safety pins, harnessed wild sea turtles, and when that failed — because the turtles swam in different directions and didn't seem interested in pulling them to the Galápagos — she conceived of fashioning smoke flares from their shells.
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