The Couple That Survived Four Months Floating in the Ocean Together

The Atlantic

3 days ago

In the late 1960s, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey sold their house in Derby, in Central England, and commissioned a 31-foot-long sailboat, the Auralyn. Seeking an escape from their boring lives and the dreary English weather, they planned to sail around the world. To 'preserve their freedom from outside interference,' as Maurice put it, they did not bring a radio transmitter aboard. Nine months after departing from the south of England in 1972, they made it through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific when a whale struck their boat, sinking it.
A new book, A Marriage at Sea, tells the tale of what happened next: The Baileys transferred themselves, 33 tins of food, and some cookies and Coffee-Mate into an inflatable life raft and dinghy, each barely the size of a stretched-out adult. They hoped for a ship to sail by and spot them. For nearly four months, they floated around, filling their time by catching rainwater and turtles—first as pets, then as food. Together, they clung to life as starvation and illness set in. Somehow, they survived. And they stayed married. And they went on another months-long sailing trip together.
The Baileys' experience was, as the book's author, Sophie Elmhirst, put it to me, 'hopefully completely unrelatable for most people.' It is not, of course, a marriage-advice book. But perhaps its story can offer lessons about marriage. The Baileys' seafaring appeared to be a type of 'shared meaning' that relationship experts say can glue couples together. Their mission almost killed them, corporeally, but it also seems to have helped their marriage survive. And although most couples would not want to re-create the Baileys' experience, they can experiment with shared-meaning making in other—perhaps drier—ways.
The two Baileys were strikingly different. Maurice, who had a troubled childhood marked by illness and emotional neglect, was negative and socially ill at ease. Maralyn, meanwhile, was 'as socially able as he wasn't,' Elmhirst told me, as well as confident and enterprising. They met at a car rally where Maralyn was driving a Vauxhall Cresta with a particular level of 'chutzpah,' as Elmhirst writes. Maralyn suggested living aboard the sailboat even though she didn't know how to swim. 'She just had that gung-ho quality,' Elmhirst said.
As I read the book, I could not understand what Maurice offered Maralyn. Why had she married someone so difficult, with so many cockamamie schemes? I asked Elmhirst for her theory, and she speculated that in an era of deep social conformity, Maralyn found liberation in Maurice's atheism, his desire not to have children, and, well, the whole boat thing. They both loved adventure, and both had a sort of British chin-up mentality that can be useful when soldiering on through something horrible.
What Maralyn offered Maurice, though, was clear. Adrift at sea, Maurice started to give up hope quickly, and Maralyn seemed to view spurring him on as a kind of second project, alongside engineering their survival. She made dominoes from strips of paper; when four gallons of drinkable water drifted away, she tried to raise his spirits by opening their last tin of rice pudding in honor of her birthday. She would assure him that they were meant to survive. They did argue, Elmhirst writes, but after a fight ended, they would 'unpick it, see why they had snapped or become intolerant, and apologise.' Later, Maralyn would claim to reporters that they hadn't argued at all.
On the raft, the Baileys discussed the next boat trip they would take as soon as they were rescued. During long days without food or water, they'd fantasize about the provisions for the new boat, the design of the new boat, and where they'd sail it—Patagonia, they figured.
This second boat trip was, in some ways, crucial to getting them through that first, ill-fated one. Maralyn's strategy for keeping Maurice going was to fixate on a future, one that contained a second, successful sailing mission.
The Baileys' near-death experience became their shared meaning—a way of defining 'this is who we are; this is what we do,' says Carrie Cole, the research director of the Gottman Institute, which focuses on couples' counseling. It solidified the relationship and, in all likelihood, made it last. 'A lot of times when people go through some ordeal like that and they survive it together, it really can connect to them,' Cole told me. 'Nobody else has experienced what they have. It's like they have this deep sense of feeling known and understood.' She notes, though, that most people cultivate this shared meaning in less dangerous ways, such as through volunteering or hiking.
Another possible takeaway from this unusual duo, Elmhirst speculated, is that perhaps the Baileys show that, on some level, we all need someone to love. Maurice needed Maralyn to prop him up, and Maralyn needed someone to prop up. In the interviews the pair gave in the years after their rescue, 'he'd make this point again and again that, if it hadn't been for her, he'd never have lived,' Elmhirst said. Perhaps he wouldn't have survived without her even on dry land: Maralyn, Elmhirst said, 'translated him for the world.' Maybe, she added, 'there is something in us that is designed or works well in tandem with someone else.'
In the book, Elmhirst asks, 'For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?' Throughout all the dramas of daily life—the fender bender, the sleep regression, the surprise layoff—partners can start to feel trapped with each other. Maybe that's not the worst thing.