In the annals of survival at sea, 118 days ranks among the longest anyone has spent on a life raft. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple from the East Midlands, accomplished this feat in 1973 after their thirty-one-foot wooden sailboat, built by a firm that once made coffins, was struck by a sperm whale east of the Galápagos Islands and sank in the space of an hour. Drifting west and then northwest with the current for nine hundred miles, they caught fish, bludgeoned turtles, throttled boobies, slaughtered sharks, and drank rainwater befouled by the materials they used to collect and store it. They kept a small turtle, Rastus, as a pet; when he died, they ate him too. They experimented with harnessing two large turtles like a team of oxen to pull their raft toward the Galápagos, but the turtles went in opposite directions. When they were finally rescued by the eighth ship they saw, they were stick thin, anemic, covered in sores, and they could barely walk. They later became vegetarians.
Record holders for sea survival vary depending on your metrics. Different claims could be made—for living the longest alone or with others, on an inflatable raft or a rigid one. Then there is the somewhat less precarious category of disabled vessels, such as the twenty-five-foot fiberglass fishing skiff in which José Salvador Alvarenga is believed to have drifted for a record 438 days from Mexico to the Marshall Islands, where he swam ashore in 2014. Surviving in a standard blow-up inflatable, the kind most offshore cruising boats carry on deck, comes with a set of challenges different from those posed by something rigid, like the eight-by-eight-foot wooden raft of another record setter, Poon Lim, a Chinese messman who drifted alone for 133 days in the South Atlantic after the British cargo ship he was on got torpedoed by a German submarine in 1942.
On an inflatable, you’re enclosed in a tentlike structure that offers some protection from the elements, especially the sun, but the floor is not firm: standing on it is like trying to walk across a tarp covering a pool. The blow-up tubes are always deflating, making the floor even droopier, and they can easily be punctured, especially when you’re using sharp objects to try to spear, hook, and butcher fish; if you can’t fix the punctures, you’ll exhaust yourself working the hand pump to keep the raft afloat.
Wherever you sit or lie (curled up, since it’s unlikely that you can fully stretch out), you’ll be “poked sharply in the sit-upon,” as the British life raft survivor Dougal Robertson complained in his harrowing memoir Survive the Savage Sea (1973). Drawn to the raft’s underwater ecosystem, fish and turtles will jostle you through the floor in their attempts to eat barnacles or one another. If you’ve been on the raft for a while, every knock will be an excruciating torture for your abscessed skin, which will be covered in saltwater ulcers because it’s impossible to keep yourself dry in an inflatable. “Hundreds of boils…have erupted,” the American sailor Steven Callahan wrote in Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (1986). “My body is rotting before my eyes.”
The Baileys experienced all of this. “Pumping every 20 mins all thro night,” scribbled Maralyn in a datebook she used as a diary on the raft. Whenever the raft deflated, their bodies made “large protrusions” in the floor, as she later elaborated in the memoir she and Maurice wrote together, 117 Days Adrift (1974), a series of alternating entries whose misleading title (the length of time was actually “118 and one-third days”) was retained for marketing purposes, since headlines had ingrained the number 117 in readers’ minds.
The sharks would approach at high speed…. Often they hit our bodies and jarred our spines until our bones were bruised and tender. Maurice suffered more in these attacks as they hit his open sores and would start them bleeding again…. An attack would last up to half an hour before they went away.
“The existential dream of childhood,” writes Roland Barthes in an essay on Jules Verne, is “to enclose oneself and to settle,” hence a child’s passion for tents and cubbyholes and small cabins, such as those on boats, where everything necessary for survival is comfortably near at hand while outside the infinite “rages in vain.” A life raft is a kind of tent where the infinite has come inside: with few supplies and little protection from the surrounding sea and weather, there’s almost no division between the two.
In the more famous castaway fiction—the distant relative of modern life raft memoirs—survival generally depends on re-erecting that barrier, figuratively as much as literally. A character adapts to a desert island either by going domestic or by going wild, but since chaos and moral decay threaten to accompany wildness, in a Lord of the Flies manner, the domestic types tend to fare better. No one is a finer homemaker than the most successful castaway, Robinson Crusoe.
Boundlessly resourceful, he builds multiple shelters (“my country-house, and my sea-coast-house”) and makes or procures food, clothing, tools, and furniture. The trial-and-error verisimilitude of Crusoe’s efforts—with all the painstaking details of his planning and manufacturing included in the story—is why Defoe’s book has been called the first realist novel.* Reports of shipwreck, wandering, and captivity were common enough in the early eighteenth century, given that so many people voyaged by sea, but Defoe made his island fiction feel truer than fact.
Robinson Crusoe is, of course, interpretively rich in a way that takes it far beyond a simple tale of resourcefulness, but as a nuts-and-bolts account of a marooned character who uses ingenuity and improvisation to persevere, it spawned a genre of its own—the Robinsonade—of which there are now countless examples, from Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1875) to Gilligan’s Island. Fiction set on lifeboats or the equivalent—such as Stephen Crane’s story “The Open Boat” (1897), in which four survivors of a sunken steamer battle the waves in a ten-foot dinghy off the coast of Florida—could be considered an extreme end point of this genre. And starkest of all varieties is the true story—the most horrific, if not always the most profound.
What makes one mid-ocean Robinsonade survival memoir more interesting than another? Having read a small stack of them, I can say they have much in common—there is always the meticulously chronicled struggle to patch the vessel or fashion a tool or catch freshwater or cure fish. But the details are uniquely riveting, since failure means death and solving each problem depends on the raft’s limited array of materials and the ingenuity of its occupants. Leaving aside differences of literary style, what adds further substance is psychological or philosophical observation, and that’s where results can vary.
On the Baileys’ raft, Maralyn was the industrious Crusoe of their duo, busy keeping them alive; Maurice was primarily focused on the annihilating infinite. Eight years younger than Maurice, Maralyn celebrated her thirty-second birthday on the raft, and that she celebrated it at all while Maurice dispassionately evaluated double suicide options was typical of their contrasting temperaments.
He was a gloomy, awkward loner whose insecurity made him prickly; she was a charismatic optimist. In Sophie Elmhirst’s expansive retelling of the Baileys’ story, A Marriage at Sea, their courtship in the early 1960s was spent camping, mountain climbing, and sailing rented boats. Maurice admired Maralyn for the social confidence he lacked; she was drawn to his untamed nature and an inclination for adventure that matched her own. Neither of them wanted to live a conventional life or have children, but she was the one who pushed them to sell their newly purchased bungalow and go off sailing, undeterred by their lack of money or her inability to swim.
Their boat’s name, Auralyn, blended their names. They set off from the River Hamble near Southampton with the intention of reaching New Zealand, where Maurice, who worked as a compositor for a book printer, had a tentative job offer. When, nine months later, a forty-foot injured whale surfaced beside them and tore a hole in their hull “with a report like a small explosion,” they were forced to abandon ship after their attempt to plug the leak failed. Later they conjectured that a nearby whaler had harpooned and lost the whale, which was out for revenge. They didn’t have a radio, so they couldn’t let anyone know they were sinking. (Maurice, always chafing against the bonds of society, had wanted to “preserve their freedom from outside interference.”)
After both felt some “utter despair,” Maralyn rallied. Maurice, the confirmed Eeyore, did not. He found Maralyn’s hopeful attitude delusional but tried to keep his exasperation to himself. It’s the refrain of their memoir, the one-note dynamic of their marriage even before they bought a boat, an undertaking Maurice had considered “impossible” until Maralyn criticized him for “not even trying.” On their second day lost at sea, Maurice “could say nothing to Maralyn; she was very optimistic.” Two months later, it was the same story: “I could say nothing, her enthusiasm for life showed in everything she did”—a confidence in their survival that “surprised and also depressed” him.
In 117 Days Adrift, written soon after their rescue, Maurice gives her credit for having kept them going. Yes, Maralyn occasionally felt dejected, and Maurice certainly helped them survive, but she was the one calculating their rations, MacGyvering a fishhook from a safety pin, devising a fish trap from a one-gallon container, making her own smoke flares, continuing to look for freighters despite multiple disappointments when the ships churned past, and inventing games to keep their minds occupied, including—most vitally—the game of imagining a future in which they were not starving to death, tortured by thirst, cramped, aching, and exhausted. At her urging, they sketched designs for a new yacht, made a list of provisions, and planned the route of their next voyage (to Patagonia, a trip they did eventually undertake).
Their joint memoir, on which Elmhirst bases a large chunk of her book, is a strangely thin read. Despite Maurice’s dogged doubt and Maralyn’s dogged certainty, their alternating entries, in tone and style, are blandly interchangeable, and it’s hard to know who is talking unless one of them mentions the other or the reader happens to remember which of them was listed at the start of a multipage entry. The similarity of their names adds to the feeling of fusion. “Auralyn had finally disappeared and we felt very much alone in that wide ocean,” Maurice writes of their first day. In an echoing line two months later, Maralyn bemoans the lack of freighters: “We felt alone and realized to its full extent the incredible vastness of the ocean.” They may have been polar opposites in their dispositions, but what emerges on the page is an almost caricatured British reserve—they are, above all else, doggedly reticent.
“We talked without the encumbrances of modern living; we explored the hidden depths of each other’s character, we threw away the trappings of so called civilization and reverted to a simple prehistoric way of life,” writes Maralyn, but she offers absolutely no detail as to what those “hidden depths” are or what conversation “without the encumbrances of modern living” might mean for them. You start to suspect it’s little more than the intimacy of directing one’s diarrhea into a biscuit tin in front of one’s spouse. Maurice caps a grumble about this with a line that echoes Maralyn’s: “We were now existing at a primeval level where the layers of civilization had been stripped away from us.”
What did they fight about? “When our morale was low…we would say hurtful things to each other,” writes Maralyn, and says no more. How did they resolve these arguments? What new things did they learn? One wonders how well they even knew each other. Although they seem to speak with one voice on the page, Maurice’s understanding of Maralyn’s views isn’t quite the same as her own. He says she believes in predestination and that her “faith in some supernatural power governing our affairs never weakened.” For Maralyn, however, perhaps influenced by Sixties spirituality, “destiny” means something less coherent and absolute, more self-directed than imposed:
I have never followed any religion and the isolation and insecurity did not bring any form of conversion. I have a strong belief in destiny, fate, kismet, call it what you will…. I also think we have the ability to write our own future. If we want something badly enough, through sheer determination often that goal is achieved.
Elmhirst does her best to flesh out these skeletal self-portraits without distortion. To her credit, she manages to make the Baileys a little more known without inventing new thoughts for them, bulking out their memoir by adding a prequel and sequel to their raft life, gleaned from archival interviews, the pair’s published and unpublished writings, and discussions with former friends.
The book is particularly effective when it switches to the perspective of Suh Chong-il, captain of the Wolmi 306, the South Korean fishing vessel that finally spotted and rescued the pair. Though the Baileys knew they were in rough shape, Suh’s horrified incredulity—which Elmhirst repurposes from a thirteen-part account he wrote for The Korea Times—makes the picture clearer, his emotions more accessible than those of the Baileys, and instantly affecting. He also provides the one moment of palpable tenderness between them: after Maurice’s stinking body is hosed down on deck, Maralyn is seen crawling over to him to comb his hair and stroke his cheek.
One expects A Marriage at Sea to contain a relationship that is tumultuously stimulating either before it was dropped onto the hellish raft or while it was there, but this is an account of two people surviving in extreme conditions, one of them dependent on the other, who at the end of their ordeal remain as wedded as before to their formulaic roles: she the self-effacing but strong-minded and efficient wife who mothers her husband, he the needy husband who careens between despondency and despotism. In other words, willing partners in a certain kind of traditional marriage, unremarkable for 1973.
In a rare moment of soul-searching while gazing at the stars, Maurice decides that if he returned to civilization he would stop being selfish and impatient and reduce his ego “to equable proportions.” Unsurprisingly, when that future materializes, his ego comes trotting along. After their rescue and celebrity victory tour, they sailed away on Auralyn II with some friends aboard. The friends, finding Maurice insufferable, daydreamed about throwing him overboard. Lack of money brought the couple back to land again: of their forty years together, only four were spent at sea. After Maralyn died of cancer at the age of sixty-one, Maurice spent his remaining fifteen years threatening suicide, annoying his few friends, writing long letters about her, and lamenting how little he had done for her as she was dying.
As the subtitle has it, this is a story of “love, obsession and shipwreck,” but the real passion in the book is reserved for food. The Baileys, like many starving castaways, find it hard to think or talk of anything other than eating, indulging in mutual fantasies about splendid meals. Maralyn writes out multicourse menus for dinner parties and Sunday teas, and invents bespoke cakes: “A Mars special choc sponge sandwich with choc butter icing and layer of Mars bars, top with choc buttons and buttercream sides with squares of Mars bar pushed in.” They even get into a spat over what to drink—water or wine—with a meal of curry on their imaginary future boat. (Maralyn feels, reasonably enough, that the spice would kill the taste of the wine.)
They also become connoisseurs of any nutritious delicacy on hand, such as congealed turtle blood (“sweet and tasted very much like liver”), fish eyeballs (“full of thirst satisfying liquid”), turtle eggs (“moist, bright golden spheres”), raw sea turtle of all types (“a cross between veal and chicken with a dash of crab”), and raw booby flesh (“sweet…we thoroughly enjoyed it”). They seem not to have sampled what other castaways have found best of all: the semidigested fish found inside larger fish, which taste almost cooked after being pickled in stomach juices (like “meat baked in a casserole,” according to Dougal Robertson).
Perhaps feeling the need to counterbalance all this bare subsistence and reach for a relationship drama that isn’t really there, Elmhirst spins out a thought about marriage and seafaring that ends with a proclamation: “For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?” It’s a bewildering analogy when you’ve just spent many pages witnessing a couple on a raft in the throes of starvation, bashing turtles to death with paddles. The lobbing of needless declarations is a habit that Elmhirst might have suppressed, sparing the reader statements such as this, about the ocean: “It will not always be as it is, just as it is no longer what it once was.”
Weirder and more surprising than anything that went on between the Baileys is the relationship that Steven Callahan developed with the dorados that followed his raft in the Atlantic in 1981. In a recent documentary directed by Joe Wein, 76 Days Adrift, which closely follows Callahan’s memoir yet does not produce the same grueling and introspective experience as the slower clock of the page, he confesses that he is, over forty years later, “still touched by the spirit of the fish.” Like Poon Lim, Callahan comes to recognize individual fish by their scars, color variations, sizes, “identifiable styles of bumping,” and personalities. Alone on his raft, he strokes the bolder ones and gets in the habit of talking to them, hoping that one will, as he later writes, “rise and speak to me like the flounder in the fairy tale.”
Though at first they are only lunchable pets (“little doggies”), the hierarchy between fish and human breaks down, and his connection to them grows almost mystical, in the manner of indigenous hunters, through the close and violent physicality of the relationship. “I look upon them as equals—in many ways as my superiors,” he writes. “Fearful of their power” when they fight back or spontaneously attack him, he is also overwhelmed with compassion, soothed by their companionship, and even titillated (calling one a “little flirt”) amid moments of envy or rage. He can’t help but feel that they are keeping him alive on purpose, giving themselves to him by gradually coming closer as his strength and the reach of his spear dwindle.
He longs to become a dorado but consoles himself by imagining that he will be eaten by one, an event that will result in consummation not only with the dorado but with his ex-wife and the earth: “One day, perhaps, long after I am drowned and consumed by fish, a fisherman may haul aboard a catch that will find its way to her table,” where she will eat his fish-consumed self, while the parts she doesn’t eat (head, tail, and bones) will be composted (as will, he neglects to mention, the parts she does eat) and “green life will sprout”—a fully material vision of cosmic connection.
His emotional involvement with the dorados makes his final encounter with them shocking yet somehow understandable: an intense relationship will have a dramatic end. Near the dangerous reef-strewn coast of Guadeloupe, a lone fishing skiff is drawn to the distant frigate birds that hover over his imperceptible raft; the dorados inadvertently become his means of rescue. Surprised to catch a human, the fishermen are even more confused when this one insists they not take him aboard right away: “I can wait. You fish. Fish!” They’ve come a long way to a side of the island they don’t normally frequent, so they do as they are bid. Callahan watches tranquilly as his friends are massacred: “A doggie comes by every so often as if to say farewell before shooting off after the hook.” When he is finally aboard the fishing boat, he recognizes specific dorados among the dozens of dead ones lying around him. (He had managed to kill only twelve dorados, twelve triggerfish, four flying fish, and three birds during his seventy-six days of drifting.)
Callahan is aware of his perfidy, even bringing it up again in the documentary, where he admits to feeling like “a bit of a Judas for sacrificing all these amazing creatures.” The betrayal could be understood as an unconscious moment of triumph or revenge—I survived; you didn’t. And because those are sentiments he might not want to acknowledge, in his written account he imagines that the fish are leaping into the arms of the fishermen: “Perhaps you do not mind enriching these poor men.”
But jealousy is not the only thing he has felt for the dorados. His sense of ownership (“my fish”) combined with his mystical feelings of identification and love turn the gesture into a kind of gift to the needy fishermen—almost a self-sacrifice. In the weeks after his ordeal, he remains fishlike: while rowing in a harbor, he snatches a little fish out of the water with lightning reflexes and gulps it down to looks of horror from his passengers. The impression one gets from Callahan’s book, as well as Robertson’s, about the thirty-eight days he was adrift with his family in the Pacific, is that the way to endure the pitilessness of a life raft is not to insist on a mental barrier between oneself and the harsh environment but to dissolve into those surroundings—to become, in a way, an honorary fish, accepting one’s insignificant yet integral connection to the whole.
After a ship blindly passes his family’s raft on their seventh day of drifting, Robertson feels a defiant change come over him: “We would survive without them, yes, and that was the word from now on, ‘survival,’ not ‘rescue.’” On the seventeenth day their inflatable raft sinks, and all six of them cram into a nine-foot fiberglass dinghy they’d been towing, whose gunwale is only a few inches above the waterline, putting it in constant danger of being swamped. They have no protection from the elements, but by the twenty-fifth day, they have adapted to their terrible conditions so fully that “I felt that we had already gone beyond thinking in terms of survival” and had become actual “inhabitants” of the sea. Theirs is no longer a story of survival but one of feral belonging.
Robertson’s and Callahan’s ability, in their memoirs, to make you feel this sense of brutal yet palliative merging—with the sea and sky and weather and creatures—is what’s needed to unlock Maralyn’s fleeting observation in the Baileys’ less probing account: “Our present survival was all consuming and I felt we had always lived like this…. In some weird and detached way we found peace in our complete and compulsory isolation.”
English (US) · 