They wanted to spice up a humdrum life with an adventure, and got more than they asked for

Boston Globe

4 days ago

Oh yes, the crack! It is moments like these, when Elmhirst comes close to breaking the fourth wall, that contribute to the pleasure of this exciting book. You know as a reader that you are in very capable hands.
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The Baileys escape in a small rubber raft and a dinghy, which they lash together, although 'escape' might not be the right word.
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They got off the sinking yacht, yes, but they had no radio, no radar, no communication device. Certainly no motor. It was just some tinned food and water, a book or two, and each other, for the next 118 days, until they were rescued, nearly dead, by a Korean fishing vessel.
The story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey is true, one that has been well documented but is not well known, and Elmhirst has fashioned it into a fascinating narrative. She divides the book roughly into thirds — their lives before the journey, their four months on the water, and their lives afterward.
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Maurice was an oddball with a terrible childhood — 'he had a stutter, and a hunched back,' and then he came down with tuberculosis as a teenager and spent months alone, in bed. 'It can stay with you, time like that,' Elmhirst writes. 'Conditioning loneliness, baking it in.'
He grew up exacting and persnickety, antisocial to the extreme.
That he met and married anyone was almost a miracle, even in his own eyes, but that his wife was someone as lovely and adventurous and strong-minded as Maralyn was almost incredible.
They met when he was 30. She was nearly a decade younger and wanted nothing more than to get out of her parents' house and experience adventure. The yacht trip was her idea. England in those years was depressed, cold, confining. One gloomy November evening, she suggested they leave — buy a boat and sail to New Zealand.
Maurice was dubious; by then they had a house and security. But 'In the grip of an idea,' Elmhirst writes, 'Maralyn could drill through rock.'
That tenacity is likely what saved both their lives.
Elmhirst, who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere, had a wealth of material to draw from — journals, newspaper accounts, filmed interviews, and books that both Maralyn and Maurice wrote. She sifted through it all and chose her details wisely.
She doles out the adventures, such as they were, and tells them vividly: the flares that didn't work; the turtles that attacked the flimsy plastic bottom of the boat; the many ships that passed them by without noticing their frantic waving; another whale.
And she focuses on the relationship between the two castaways. Before the shipwreck, Maurice had been fully in charge. He was the captain, she ran the galley. But after the shipwreck, it was all Maralyn. She was resourceful and optimistic, unswaying in her belief that they would be rescued. She understood that they needed a schedule and intellectual stimulation to get through each day, and she made it happen. On a raft. In the ocean. While slowly starving.
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She made a deck of cards out of pages ripped from the logbook, and they played whist. She read aloud from the books they had salvaged and they analyzed every sentence.
She dreamed of what they would do when they were rescued. (Top on her list: build another boat.) She planned menus for dinner parties — pages and pages of menus. 'When you're dying of starvation,' Elmhirst notes, 'all you can think about is food.'
That March night, from the rubber raft, Maralyn had the presence of mind to take a picture of the yacht as it sank, and then one of her husband, 'wearing an expression not of fear, not yet, but of a kind of taut blankness, as if he had not quite grasped what was taking place.'
That moment — intrepid photographer and demoralized subject — is symbolic of their ordeal. 'A Marriage at Sea' is so much more than a shipwreck tale. It's a story of love and strength, a portrait of a marriage that — for all its oddities — is a true partnership. Maurice and Maralyn were not equals, but they fit together in a way that made them invincible.
Elmhirst skates delicately over the metaphor. 'Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must all know, we
do
know, that we'll all have our time adrift,' she writes. 'For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?'
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A MARRIAGE AT SEA: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
By Sophie Elmhirst
Riverhead, 256 pages, $28
Laurie Hertzel's second memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street,' will be published in 2026 by the University of Minnesota Press. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia.