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.
The book, as its title suggests, is a profile as much of their marriage as of their ordeal — will either pull through? — and while it’s clear what Maralyn had to offer, it’s less obvious what she was getting from the relationship. Perhaps Maurice’s negativity tethered her optimism, gave it something to pull against. “She had to give him something to believe in,” Elmhirst writes — and, as Maralyn begins to convince Maurice that they can make it, get a new boat and set sail all over again, we understand that she may also be convincing herself.
Survival stories are rarely about women, and even less often do they recognize traditionally female tasks as the actual work of survival — not decorations of life, but the fight for life at its most essential. Between stints at fishing, bailing out the raft, smothering seabirds with a towel and cleaning Maurice’s seeping wounds, Maralyn plans dinner-party menus, doodles cats, designs dresses she wants to sew (“brown and pink paisley” with “straight long sleeves”) and crafts playing cards out of thin paper. She kills and skins a shark with pearly skin, planning to make a purse. She serves, in short, as indisputable captain of the lifeboat. To his credit (sort of), Maurice recognized her skill, though in his writings, he still paints himself as the active decision maker, conferring the favor of responsibility. “I saw that she was stronger and more capable than I was,” he wrote, “and I sat back and was prepared to let her take over. And she did.”
Beauty — finding it, making it — has always been an act of defiance against despair. In Elmhirst’s delicate, humane depiction of the couple, her choice of narrative framing, her pacing and her compassion, she renders “A Marriage at Sea” an act of beauty in its own right. I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth. “Dying is still a process,” Elmhirst writes; “you’re still alive while you’re dying.” And, “Boats, like humans, are in a state of permanent decline.”
The implicit question asked by all survival stories — well, at least for me — is self-reflective. Who would I be in this scenario? Would I make it? If I could get through that, can I persevere through whatever feels impossible in my own life? In Elmhirst’s decision to frame the book around Maurice and Maralyn’s whole lives, rather than just the sensational details from the lifeboat, lies her implicit answer: It’s not that the rest of us might survive, but that we are already doing so.
A MARRIAGE AT SEA: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck | By Sophie Elmhirst | Riverhead | 246 pp. | $28
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