Upon first meeting Maralyn, Maurice’s prospects looked rather dim. He was a solitary character, fraught with tension, and voluntarily cut off from his family. Maralyn, on the other hand, was animated, adept, and sociable. Maurice crossed paths with Maralyn during a car rally, stepping in for an absent teammate. Despite acting as her navigator, an area in which he was ill-equipped, a sudden affection began to bloom. He confessed his love to Maralyn, taking even himself by surprise.
Despite incredulous whispers, their relationship led them to the matrimonial altar. This was back in Derby, during the dreary beginnings of the 1970s. The British society at the time was hardly a rose-tinted one for the everyday man, and the pair viewed themselves as regular folks. Motivated by an unexplainable stimuli, they were unified in their fear of mundane suburban existence. The couple made the radical decision to sell their home, construct a boat, and embark on a global voyage.
Their constructed vessel was a sturdy one, a 9m, wooden Golden Hind of notable reputation. Maurice, who had some previous boating experience, ensured it was robust and well-equipped. Maralyn, devoid of swimming and sailing skills, placed her full confidence in Maurice and assumed responsibility for stocking up provisions.
Their venture began on a dismal morning and took them through the Atlantic, withstanding significant meteorological challenges. They passed through the Panama Canal and ventured into the expanses of the Pacific, mirroring the brevity of Maurice’s recount of their journey.
However, disaster struck nearly 400km from the Galápagos when their robust Auralyn collided with a sperm whale, eventually sinking. While Maralyn salvaged any possible food, clothing, and supplies, Maurice fruitlessly attempted to control the water ingress. No more than 40 minutes post-collision, the pair found themselves clambering into their life raft, attached handily to their small boat. They watched on as their Auralyn became one with the ocean.
It is difficult to point the finger of blame at them for their palpable fear. They faced an inhospitable situation with limited food, meagre water to last only four days, positioned outside the shipping routes and some 400km away from land. Even the bravest mariner may have been given pause by such circumstances. The thought that their vessel could betray them appeared not to have entered their minds in any significant way. Their panic would have been entirely justified, yet it was Maralyn who posed as their source of strength.
At that point, they were unaware that they would be spending a total of 117 days crammed in a life raft. Their survival would solely rely on scarce food and water supplies, such as the organs of deep sea predators and birds, raw turtle meat and blood, minute fish and occasional bouts of gathered rainfall. It was unknown to them how they would suffer the pain of seeing ship after ship sailing past obliviously, or spotting their faulty distress signals. Unbeknownst to them Maurice, crushed by the weight of the harsh reality, would pass the baton of leadership to Maralyn almost immediately. It was ultimately her resourcefulness, unyielding spirit and confidence in their survival that would be their ticket to safety.
The tale is beautifully narrated by Sophie Elmhirst in a commendable fashion that accurately recounts the horrific ordeal. With the help of Maralyn’s daily diaries and Maurice’s book penned post-rescue, Elmhirst manages to retain the audience’s interest as they picture the way they braved through starvation, cruel long-suffering and the sporadic contemplation of ending their own lives at sea. Elmhirst’s narrative, despite her lack of sailing experience, emerges as a worthy addition to the existing literature on survival stories.
Elmhirst does a spectacular job at portraying the nightmarish details of the entire experience, the terror of living on the very edge of life and death for nearly four months. The difficult moments marked meticulously and faced with stoic endurance over a span of four months.
Ultimately, their rescue comes quite by chance at the hands of a Korean fishing vessel that has been traversing the ocean for two years. Maurice, barely able to uphold his own mass, wounds inflicted by the saltwater so profound that his spine is visible, voices a profound lamentation. As they approach the ship’s edge, he feels an intimate bond with the ocean, believing his rescue to be a kind of treachery to the sea. Such sentiments are unlikely to resonate with many – Maralyn, for instance, does not seem to grasp this.
Despite this, Maralyn refrains from passing judgement on Maurice, neither for his neglect of duty, nor for the lackluster contribution to their continual existence, or even for his prevailing demeanor of surrender. Elmhirst’s comprehension and convincing depiction is that simply, Maralyn and Maurice cherished each other – to them, it appears nothing else of significance compared to this.