Nonfiction How does love survive when you float together on a raft in the Pacific Ocean for 118 days? Or if your loved one is wintering in the Arctic? Two books about unlikely love stories.
Maurice Bailey thinks he’s a nerdy idiot when he meets the flamboyant Maralyn Harrison, almost ten years his junior, in the summer of 1962. After a disastrous first meeting, it is Maralyn who takes the initiative for the sequel. It is logical that Maurice falls in love with her, she is beautiful and gives him the necessary self-confidence that he naturally lacks. And her? Well, love is often a “disturbing coincidence,” says Sophie Elmhirst A wedding at seathe book about their unusual covenant and calvary on the ocean. Elmhirst is a journalist at The Guardian and came across the couple’s story during the Covid lockdown.
The reconstruction she did based on old newspaper clippings, books and the diary that Maralyn kept is breathtaking reading. Right from the first pages, the boat on which the couple wants to sail from England to New Zealand is hit hard by a whale somewhere in the Pacific Ocean at night. “The boat was their baby. The sound of the cracking and splintering wood was like a baby screaming in pain.”
At first they stare orphanedly at the heavily bleeding and restless sperm whale, Maralyn finds it unbearable to think that they and their boat are responsible for the death of the animal. But soon the realization grows that they mainly have to save themselves. The hole in the slowly sinking sailboat is not closed, they try to save everything necessary (food, water, logbooks, writing utensils). They prepare the smaller dinghy and pump air into the inflatable life raft to get themselves and all the necessities for survival to safety. When she succeeds after an hour of hard work, she takes another photo of their sinking boat, and of Maurice in his bare torso, from the raft with the rising sun as a background. “His expression was not yet frightened, but rather covered with a kind of nervous emptiness, as if he did not yet fully understand the situation, as they witnessed their slowly capsizing boat sink in the middle of the ocean.”
Sailing to New Zealand
It then takes another fifty pages before we are back on that raft, because Elmhirst first describes the run-up to the fatal moment. How Maurice and Maralyn decided to shake off dusty England, build a sailboat and sail to New Zealand to start over. They have been working on their plan for almost ten years, they live at the shipyard and their entire lives revolve around the boat. At the end of June 1972 they were ready to leave, and from then on their life consisted of sailing, more sailing, some rest and refueling in ports.
Everything goes according to plan, until that fateful March 4, 1973, on the way to the Galapagos Islands. What follows is an exciting story about all the hardships and setbacks that the couple has to deal with. But above all, it is also a story about real resilience, about love that makes you overcome even the toughest hardships. They physically survive on the flesh of turtles, small sharks that they catch with a fishing hook they make from safety pins, birds that they wring their necks. For lack of water, they squeeze the fluid from the eyes of killed turtles to have something to drink. They survive storms and see a ship pass by six times without being noticed because their flares fail.
In addition to the physical hardships, there is of course the emotional one. Maurice believes that he has failed as a captain, and has therefore failed in life. He wonders what Maralyn is talking about when she comments that it’s a shame she forgot to take a photo of the whale that swam with their raft for half an hour, even allowing itself to be stroked. “No one believes us when they hear this,” she notes, and Maurice doesn’t understand how she can think she will ever be saved. But she is the captain now, taking the lead, deciding to row to get ahead, coming up with things to do, to keep busy. One of those things is writing down recipes for the dinner parties that she wants to organize once back on shore, but also: plans for a new boat, which are carefully noted in the notebooks they carry with them. It seems like madness, floating around on the ocean, but it gives them both a purpose, something to look forward to, something to stay alive for.
Just when a hallucinating, emaciated Maurice threatens to collapse, a South Korean freighter comes to the rescue. That is also masterfully and excitingly described, from the point of view of the ship’s brooding captain, who has turned his first trip into a fiasco, until the rescue also earns him hero status. When he finds their passports, he cannot believe that the two Englishmen are barely 41 and 32 years old, they look decades older.
Maurice and Maralyn are welcomed triumphantly in Hawaii, newspapers worldwide write about the couple who spent 117 days on a raft – in reality it was 118, but to avoid confusion, a book about their journey is given the title 117 Days Adrift. They are celebrated as heroes, but they don’t feel that way. When a reporter suggests that they should thank God that they are still alive, Maurice becomes angry. “Only my wife’s determination kept us alive,” he says. When Maralyn dies a few decades later at the age of 61, Maurice also slowly but surely fades away. The letters to his doctor also testify to the deep love for Maralyn.
Buried with a silver casket
Similar letters are also described and quoted in Arctic love, longing at -40°C, by Norwegians Anders Bache and Sigri Sandberg. They searched for love stories from known and unknown polar explorers in letters and diaries. Gemma Venhuizen, science journalist at this newspaper, has been fascinated by the Arctic for many years, and became friends with archaeologist Bache during a trip to Spitsbergen. She translated the book that Bache wrote with journalist Sandberg, rearranged the chapters and provided introductions that should provide sufficient context for readers less familiar with the glorious stories of heroic polar explorers.
Unlike Maurice and Maralyn, the trappers and polar explorers often live separated from their loved ones for long periods of time. That causes heartache and anxiety, you never know when your loved one will get stuck in the Arctic and never return. But the longing for others also gives meaning and depth to life. “A life full of desire is never empty,” wrote Fridtjog Nansen to his lover Eva Sars, then a well-known singer of love songs. The night he proposed, having just returned from an expedition to the Greenland ice cap, in addition to his love for her, he also confessed his next plan: traveling to the North Pole. And yet she said yes, the authors note.
Sometimes love even transcends death. This is evident from the story of the Swedish Anna Charlier, who waits more than ten years for the return of her husband Nils Strindberg. Only thirteen years after his disappearance she marries another man. But Nils’ photos decorate their house, and the pigeon with which he once sent her a letter is stuffed in her bedroom. 33 years after his disappearance, Nils is found, a photo of Anna on his frozen chest. After her death, Anna was buried next to her husband, but not before Nils’ brothers fulfilled her last wish. At the Strindberg cemetery in Stockholm, the brothers placed a silver casket containing… Anna’s heart.
In addition to these kinds of catchy stories, it is striking again that in this book it is the women who keep love alive. Their husbands must share their passion for travel, while their wives stay behind at home, with or without children. The men often have something egocentric, are maniacally busy with their journey of discovery, while the women are very archetypically there to support their men. But you hardly hear anything about that dark side of love.
Even with men who go out of their way, the book remains very much on the same level. The American Robert Peary was married, his wife financed his travels. But he also had a relationship in Greenland with Aleqasina, a teenage girl who had a child with him. Peary was clearly a narcissist and an old-fashioned racist colonial who looked down on the ‘primitive’ Inuit, but strangely enough the book does not discuss this delicate point at all. It is about his haste to be the first to reach the northernmost point of the globe. Peary still writes letters to his wife, but they now start with ‘MD’. At least his letters used to start with ‘My Darling’, but there was no time for that anymore. Even so-called ‘big men’ can have darn small sides. Both the authors and Venhuizen could have been a little stricter about this.
A little more love for the ice cream
“Love is the strongest power in our existence,” is the motto of the book, a sentence from a letter from Fridtjog Nansen to his Eva. Nansen was certainly a romantic, just like Strindberg, but you still get the impression that they too loved the ice and the polar lights just that little bit more than a life with a wife and children. This certainly applies to Peary and several other macho adventurers in the book. That’s okay Arctic love sometimes something uncomfortable, because you never quite believe the men when they once again pour out their hearts in a longing letter.
No, rather the love of Maurice and Maralyn. He knows she is the mentally strongest, and he admires her for it. She kept him alive with her optimism, and he wanted to stay alive to be there for her, not for himself. Maralyn explained afterwards: “Thanks to him, I had someone else to think about instead of just worrying about myself all the time.” It is not yet a perfectly balanced love, but making the other person your goal in life comes pretty close.
Source: NRC