A MARRIAGE AT SEA

A tale of an adventure gone definitively wrong.

A maritime bookend of sorts to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, British journalist Elmhirst’s narrative turns on two 1960s-era British dreamers who decided to pitch it all in and sail from grim, gray Britain around the globe to New Zealand, “discovering new lands on the other side of the world.” In the course of researching a quite different magazine piece, the author discovered the story of Maurice Bailey, a printer by trade, who took a studious approach to the voyage, learning navigation and reading and rereading reference books. His wife, Maralyn, was eminently practical—certainly more so than Maurice, who insisted on having no radio transmitter aboard to “preserve their freedom from outside interference.” That would prove a consequential decision when a whale collided with their boat and sank it—though, Elmhirst notes provocatively, there is a lingering question of whether the Baileys might have abandoned the craft prematurely. In any case, they floated, adrift and without a clue as to their location in the vast Pacific, for 117 days until finally being spotted, quite by chance, by a passing South Korean fishing boat, whose crew prove to be heroes in Elmhirst’s telling. Skeletal, having nearly starved to death, the Baileys were slowly nursed back to health. Astoundingly, Elmhirst writes, no sooner did the couple return to England than they began planning another maritime adventure. Maralyn emerges as the real hero of the story; for those fraught months at sea, having gauged Maurice’s inability to see the job through, she took command of the expedition and kept the two alive. Countering “his despair” with “her resolution,” she later recalled, “I discover that men may be physically the stronger of the sexes but mentally women are tops.”

A nimbly told story that should serve as a caution—but oddly, too, as inspiration—to would-be escapists.