MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
A new book, "A Marriage At Sea," is about a married couple who decide to quit their jobs, sell everything they own, buy a boat and sail around the world. This is a true story. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey set off from England in 1972. All went great until in the Pacific Ocean, about 300 miles from the Galapagos, a whale knocked a hole in their boat. It sank. The Baileys managed to scramble onto an inflatable rubber life raft and dinghy - no radio, no motor. They floated, hoping to be rescued for weeks, then months. Author Sophie Elmhirst told me they had managed to grab a few cans of food, and what else?
SOPHIE ELMHIRST: A couple of books, a first aid kit, a few essentials, some remaining water that they had, and that's it. They have nothing else. Maralyn, by the way, doesn't even know how to swim.
KELLY: That detail blew my mind - that with all...
ELMHIRST: (Laughter).
KELLY: ...Of their extensive preparations, she didn't know how to swim before they set out to sail the world.
ELMHIRST: I know. I know. But I think what you then are faced with and what you realize is that there's the kind of immediate physical urgency of survival, right? They had to figure out how to catch the rainwater in order to drink, in order to stay hydrated. Then they had to figure out how they were going to eat once these few tins they had ran out. They were catching fish, turtles, sharks. They were sucking the moisture out of turtle eyeballs. And that's before you get to the kind of mental question of there being nothing, of watching ship after ship go past and not stop and how you sort of persist in the face of that level of despondency and despair.
KELLY: Yeah. One of the details that will stay with me - you reproduce pages from the journal that Maralyn kept in this life raft, and this as they're floating. And she's writing page after page after page about cakes - lemon cake, walnut cake, ginger cake. And your chapter on that closes with the line, when you're dying of starvation, all you can think about is food. I just - it's awe-inspiring and heartbreaking what they lived through and how all she could think about was the ginger cake.
ELMHIRST: Right. I mean, like, I think what struck me about her so much was the force of her imagination, what she had to conjure in order to sort of believe in the possibility of a future beyond floating around the Pacific on this life raft. And, you know, she writes out whole dinner party menus, whole lists of - as you say - of cakes, of tea parties, you know, multicourse picnics. It's a kind of fantasy world that she has to assemble - you know, part torture and part belief that one day she will eat this and make this stuff again.
KELLY: Of the many, many things they are lacking as they float around on this raft, there is no radio transmitter because Maurice had made what turns out to be the extraordinarily bad decision not to bring one. Why?
ELMHIRST: Well, I think this really gets to the heart of Maurice and the kind of man he was. You know, part of that escapist fantasy he'd always had was about getting away from other people. And his vision for that was being alone in the middle of the ocean on his boat, just with his wife, and without any communication with anyone else. And of course, what ends up happening exposes the sort of folly of that fantasy.
KELLY: How'd you learn about this story? How did you decide to write it?
ELMHIRST: So I was researching a piece. I'm a journalist. It was about people trying to escape the land and live on water in different ways. I sort of caught sight of this tiny, black-and-white image of a woman and a man, and this turned out to be the Baileys. And I was immediately intrigued what it would be like to go through an experience like that with your partner - what that would do to your marriage and what effect that would have, I guess, on the rest of your lives.
KELLY: Yeah. Well, stay with that, because the book is about that - how they survived each other, how their marriage survived - as much about that as it is about their physical survival and, you know, eating raw turtles and sucking their eyeballs for the juice. How did their marriage survive this?
ELMHIRST: Well, I think what they discovered in each other was that basic connection, the idea that that fantasy that Maurice had of this sort of supreme isolation was actually a myth, that really what gets us through often is another person. And I think ultimately, what they sort of found in each other was their savior, in a way. And I would say, I guess - and I think Maurice would be the first to say this, too - that without her, he would never have made it.
KELLY: Yeah.
ELMHIRST: And that she really was the one that - just in that sheer belief and in having hope - was the one that kind of got them through it.
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, with all respect to poor Maurice, Maralyn pulled more than her weight in this. At one point, she was caring for him when he fell ill. She's doing all the fishing. She's - half of the life raft tube has deflated and punctured, and she's having to pump it up every 20 minutes or they'll sink. How was he buoying her in the same way? Like, what was she getting out of this?
ELMHIRST: Yeah. I mean, she would say, I think - and did say afterwards - well, you know what? Having him to look after was the thing that kept me going. And I found that so interesting, sort of self-effacing in a way. But I think there's truth to it, too. There was a need that he had and a respect that he had for her, which I think also empowered her in a way and made her life sort of worth living.
KELLY: How did surviving something like this shape the rest of their lives?
ELMHIRST: Well, it became a story that they told themselves for the rest of their lives and one that did shape them, I think, very profoundly as individuals. I think it also bound them together, you know, just irreparably for the rest of their lives. It also crucially made them both vegetarian. I think, once you've eaten raw fish for many weeks and months on end, you never touch an animal again.
KELLY: The pleasure you describe of when they're finally rescued and they get to drink a glass of milk and have a piece of buttered toast, and that's unimaginably, unfathomably delicious. I could feel it.
ELMHIRST: Right, exactly. That kind of basic human urge to sate hunger, to sate thirst. You know, I think it's actually so hard to understand what it would feel like to be deprived of that for so long, and yet, they were. And yeah, those sort of initial sensations of drinking, of eating were, I think, like, something else.
KELLY: So what is your takeaway, Sophie Elmhirst, from all of this? You know, if the question is to bring or not to bring a radio transmitter, the answer is, yes, bring it. What else?
ELMHIRST: I think - well, there's two things. One, I suppose, is going back to that sort of fantasy idea, you know, those idle escapist dreams that we all have. And it's to sort of challenge what it is that we're escaping. I think what Maurice eventually realizes is you can't escape yourself. But I think it's also that actually what you find in these moments of crisis. And, you know, their story is extreme, but there's also something universal about it. We'll all face crises in our lives and with our partners, but that we can find such strength through that connection, through going through crisis with someone else and that whatever we can draw from that is what will help us in the end.
KELLY: Sophie Elmhirst, talking about her book, "A Marriage At Sea." Sophie Elmhirst, thank you.
ELMHIRST: Thank you so much.
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