Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst review – all at sea

When Maurice and Maralyn Bailey decided to build a boat and sail to the other side of the world, it was not on a whim. The couple from Derby had long hankered for adventures that would lift them out of their dreary suburban existence. Over six years, they diligently studied boat designs, routes, timetables and supplies. They gave up their jobs, sold their bungalow and the bulk of their belongings, and oversaw the building of a boat they called “Auralyn”, a composite of their first names. Auralyn would have no radio transmitter as Maurice was keen “to preserve their freedom from outside interference”.

By the time they set off for New Zealand in the summer of 1972, Maurice and Maralyn were confident sailors who had considered every eventuality. But even they couldn’t have anticipated a 40ft sperm whale, injured and in distress, smashing into their boat 250 miles north of Ecuador and ripping a hole the size of a briefcase beneath the waterline. Their attempts to pump water out of the boat proved hopeless, as did their efforts to plug the hole. Realising what needed to be done, they spent 10 wordless minutes wading around gathering essentials, after which they climbed into a tiny motorless dinghy, with an attached inflatable raft, and watched their beloved Auralyn sink into the inky depths.

In Maurice and Maralyn, Sophie Elmhirst documents the before, during and after of the Baileys’ ordeal, which began in March 1973 and ended with their rescue four months later. Elmhirst, who specialises in long-form feature writing, had stumbled on their story while stuck in her own confined space with her family during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Her captivating and fitfully claustrophobic book opens with a ferocious jolt and the sound of splintering wood as whale meets boat. A few pages later, we are marooned with the couple on the raft, assailed by the smell of rubber and fish. Where, just hours before, their lives were shaped by structure and routine, now they were inert and helpless, entirely at the mercy of the wind.

Maurice and Maralyn may be based on real events, but it has the feel of fiction – all the better to convey the thoughts, fears and coping strategies of the pair as they fight for survival. Elmhirst finds rich source material in Maralyn’s diaries, written on the raft, which contain, among other things, inventories of the food she daydreamed about. She also studied interviews conducted with the Baileys after their rescue, along with their series of memoirs published after their return home, written to fund – I kid you not – a second sailing adventure, this time with a small crew and, you would hope, a radio.

The couple spent a total of 118 days adrift, during which they endured sunburn, dysentery, dehydration and near-starvation, not to mention the sores and fungal conditions caused by spending months sitting in a puddle in a tiny floating prison. While they were able to pack food from the boat before it sank, these rations soon ran low, leading Maralyn to fashion a fishing rod using safety pins and a length of cord. For much of their time at sea, they subsisted on raw sea turtle, small sharks, the occasional sea bird and rainwater captured in containers that quickly became smothered in algae.

The bare facts of the couple’s survival are, by themselves, astonishing, though this isn’t just a story of physical endurance. Underscoring it is a spiritual drama in which the couple’s partnership is put to the test. “For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?” Elmhirst asks. While the author is not given to empty theorising or confected melodrama, she nonetheless does a convincing job of filling in the psychological gaps in Maurice and Maralyn’s story.

Crucial to this is understanding who they were before they took to the sea. We learn how, before meeting his wife, Maurice was a shy and anxious man whose unhappy childhood led to estrangement from his family. He and Maralyn met via a mutual acquaintance named Mike. Mike and Maralyn would go to car rallies once a month but, when he couldn’t make it one week, he asked Maurice to go in his place. Maurice was 29 with limited experience of women and cars, but Maralyn, then 21, turned out to be the yin to his yang: talkative, adventurous, at her happiest outdoors. “I needed someone like Maralyn in my life to make up for the confidence I lacked,” Maurice later wrote. Meanwhile, for Marilyn, Maurice represented freedom. She was still living with her parents and had an administrative job at the tax office in Derby. She was, bored and fearful of domesticity, craving a life free of housework and children: “Here was a man, nine years older, who already appeared to be living it, sailing boats and climbing mountains. He flew planes.”

Maurice was nonetheless a glass-half-empty type of man, and on the raft had quietly resigned himself to dying. As Elmhirst tells it, Maurice had found a strange kind of peace on the sea with its vast emptiness “even if it was a peace close to annihilation”. At one point, the pair came nose to nose with another whale, which, after emitting great blasts of air and water through its blowhole, dived, threatening to capsize their raft. After it had disappeared, Maralyn told Maurice she wished she could have taken a photograph since no one would believe how close they came to the animal. He was amazed. “How much she seemed to assume: that they’d be rescued, that they’d live to turn an encounter with a whale into an anecdote, as if this ordeal were a minor interruption to the progress of their lives. No part of Maralyn appeared to question their survival.”

After their rescue – the details of which I won’t spoil here – their recovery took months as their bodies acclimatised to food and movement (to start with, they could only move on all fours, as they had on the raft). Maralyn said their survival had depended on their working as a team. “Where one faltered, the other bolstered their flagging spirits,” she told the radio presenter John Peel. But Maurice was more candid, confessing it was he who did the flagging and Maralyn the bolstering. The saddest section of the book is the final one in which Maurice is a widower (Maralyn died of cancer in 2002, while Maurice lived until 2018). Without his wife’s bolstering presence, he is once again adrift, at sea in his loneliness.

The tale of the Baileys is clearly a gift for an author: high drama followed by slow torture followed by a second chance at life (a film adaptation surely beckons). But all credit to Elmhirst for marshalling these elements into an electrifying narrative full of atmosphere and humanity and with the lightest dusting of romance. Maurice and Maralyn is about a shipwreck, yes, but it’s also a tender portrait of two unconventional souls blithely defying the conventions of their era and making a break for freedom.

• Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

• This article was amended on 14 February 2024. An earlier version said that the couple were adrift for 117 days, when it was actually 118.