When Maurice met Maralyn, the auguries were not good. He was a loner, uptight, estranged by his own choice from his family; she was vivacious, competent and outgoing.
Filling in for a colleague, Maurice found himself navigating for Maralyn, a stranger, in a car rally. He was instantly smitten. Unsurprisingly, for anyone who knew the man, Maurice turned out to be a disaster as a navigator. He would afterwards say that he never quite understood where the impulse came from, but he stepped outside himself and told Maralyn he’d fallen in love with her.
To the astonishment of many they met again, and married. This was in landlocked Derby at the start of the 1970s, and Britain was a grim place for ordinary people, which was how the couple saw themselves. Quite what it was that moved in their spirits we will never know, but Maurice and Maralyn shared a terror of living a predictable suburban life. They sold their house, built a boat, and set off to sail around the world.
She was a good small boat, 9m, wood, a Golden Hind, a respected design. Maurice, who had done some coastal sailing, made sure she was a strong boat, well-fitted out. Maralyn, who could neither swim nor sail, placed all her trust in Maurice – and took care of the provisioning. We know she did this meticulously because she recorded it all in her diary.
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Well, they set sail on a dreary morning, crossed the Atlantic – weathering some heavy weather but coping well with it – transited the Panama Canal and made out into the Pacific. I am being no more terse here than Maurice would be in his subsequent account of their adventure.
Nearly 400km off the Galápagos, their sturdy Auralyn hit a sperm whale and sank.
Maralyn gathered what food, clothing, water and other equipment she could, Maurice faffed about trying to stem the leak but 40 minutes after hitting (and grievously wounding) that whale, Maurice and Maralyn stepped into their life raft, to which, fortuitously they had tethered their dinghy, and watched their boat sink.
They were, who could blame them, terrified nearly out of their minds. Little food, water sufficient for four days, out of the shipping lanes, 400km from land – the hardiest sailor would have had occasion for serious thought. On all the evidence, they seem to have given little thought to the possibility that their boat would fail them. They might justifiably have panicked, but Maralyn rallied them both.
They didn’t know then that they would spend 117 days in that life raft, ravaged by thirst and hunger, subsisting on the livers of sharks and seabirds, the raw flesh and blood of turtles, small fish and the absolute minimum of captured rainwater. They didn’t know they would become so emaciated that all their bones showed through their flesh; they didn’t know then the agony of watching ship after ship pass by without seeing them or their malfunctioning flares; they didn’t know that Maurice would succumb to fatalistic indifference, that he would almost immediately cede all authority to Maralyn, that it would be her ingenuity, her refusal to surrender, her faith that they would come through the ordeal, that would save them.
Sophie Elmhirst tells the tale well, all credit to her. Using the diary Maralyn kept every day, amplified by Maurice’s post-rescue book, she does a very good job of holding us there on that life raft through storm, starvation, grim endurance, the occasional, quite reasonable, consideration given to suicide by drowning. In that regard, Maurice and Maralyn is a more than decent contribution to the subgenre of castaway literature.
Elmhirst, a non-sailor herself, is in fact excellent at evoking the surreal horror of the entire ordeal, the meticulously recorded and painstakingly endured terror of living literally from moment to moment in the face of death for almost four months. Four months ...
They are eventually, almost accidentally, rescued by a Korean fishing boat that has been at sea for two years. Maurice, unable to stand unsupported, riddled with saltwater sores so deep that one can see through to his spine, expresses an extraordinary regret, there at the bulwark of the fishing boat – he feels that he has become one with the sea, that in allowing himself to be rescued he is somehow betraying the sea. Few if any of us will understand this – Maralyn for one doesn’t seem to have understood it.
Nor does she judge Maurice for it, nor will she ever judge him for his abdication of responsibility, for his minimal contribution to their daily survival, for his perpetual air of resignation. What Elmhirst understands, and convincingly shows, is that Maurice loved Maralyn, and Maralyn loved Maurice – nothing else seems to have really mattered to them.
