At the bottom of the world’s oceans and seas, reckons U.K. journalist Sophie Elmhirst, are 3 million broken boats and ships, some thousands of years underwater, some more recently sunk. One of those boats, a 30-foot vessel called Auralyn, went to the Pacific seafloor in 1973, its hull smashed after a collision with a whale.

That incident lies at the heart of Elmhirst’s first book, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead, July 8), which recounts what brought 40-year-old Maurice Bailey and his 32-year-old wife, Maralyn—their names combining in that of their boat—from a quiet home in northwestern England to the middle of the ocean.

Elmhirst, a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Economist, tells Kirkus in a conversation from her home in North London that her book had its origin, like so many others, in the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. “I’d come across a little story about the uptick in the sale of private islands during the pandemic,” she says. “That took me down one of those amazing tunnels that I find myself going down when I’m researching ideas to write about. My idea started off being about people who were just trying to live offshore—I was clearly in an escapist frame of mind, which maybe we all were at that time, and I found myself on all sorts of funny journeys [with] people who were living on cruise ships or had managed to create artificial communities out at sea.”

Elmhirst discovered a website run by a Spanish filmmaker named Alvaro Cerezo, who had a fascination with shipwrecks and true tales of survival at sea. Cerezo’s own research had led him to the Baileys and a memoir of their misadventure, 117 Days Adrift, that had long been out of print. There Elmhirst found the true subject of her story.

“Alvaro’s website had a lot of photographs, mostly of wild-looking lone men who had stranded themselves on desert islands or been shipwrecked,” says Elmhirst. “But among them was a picture of a tidy, smiling man and woman, and I was immediately intrigued.”

The title of the Baileys’ book gets at the gist of their story, but Elmhirst digs deep into the background. Married in 1963, the Baileys had long nursed the idea of getting away from England for sunnier climes—and especially New Zealand, which they held as a talisman of the paradise that awaited them. Maralyn and Maurice, a printer by trade, scrimped and saved for years to buy Auralyn. During that time, they studied seafaring manuals and reference books, learned navigational and sailing skills, and prepared themselves for a life at sea. Maurice applied for a job in New Zealand, and, when it came through, they set sail.

The fatal flaw at the very start of their journey, Elmhirst reveals, was Maurice’s stubborn insistence that they were going to be absolutely self-sufficient. He refused to equip the boat with a radio transmitter to “preserve their freedom from outside interference.” Couple that with Maurice’s complicated nature—a mix of insecurity and foolhardiness—and it was no small wonder that the little challenges they encountered as they crossed the Atlantic—storms and becalmed winds and such—turned into larger ones that tested them daily.

Maralyn, though, was eminently practical and even-tempered. In their memoir, both were circumspect about the stress that these challenges must have placed on them in such close quarters. This was true even of Maralyn’s private diary, which, Elmhirst says, “is a wonderful document in that you get slices of her and her reactions. But it’s not a confessional diary, with insights into her internal world.”

There Elmhirst undertook an empathetic exercise in reading between the lines, testing the boundaries, as she puts it, of “what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do” in a nonfiction book. She had her work cut out for her there, for, after crossing into the Pacific and setting a course for the Galápagos Islands, the Baileys encountered that whale—and within a few hours had transferred themselves and a few essentials to a dinghy towing a rubber raft. They rowed for a time, hoping to find land while knowing that land lay hundreds of miles away in any direction. For 117 days they drifted, subsisting on sea turtles, fish, and a rapidly diminishing store of canned goods. Finally, the crew of a South Korean fishing boat spotted them—a propitious rescue that, Elmhirst notes, is still remembered in that country, even as the Baileys’ ordeal was overshadowed and forgotten at home.

Elmhirst’s work became a little easier, she recounts, when she “found a book that Maurice wrote much later in life, after Maralyn died, when he told the whole story again in a series of letters to a friend. I felt like he gave me huge access to the inside of his mind and his assessment of himself—a damning assessment, quite a lot of the time. So I felt like I did have a lot to go on, as well as the memories of people who knew them and traveled with them.”

On their perilous voyage, Maralyn, realizing that Maurice wasn’t quite capable of continuing as captain after Auralyn sunk, took charge of their journey—and this is a key element of Elmhirst’s story, showing, as Maralyn put it, that “men may be physically the stronger of the sexes but mentally women are tops.” However, Elmhirst writes, once the skeletal Baileys were restored to health after their rescue and returned to England, they immediately made plans for other sailing trips, and Maurice made it a point to be in charge when the sails unfurled.

“I guess what I was trying to do was construct a story from the evidence, but also to construct character from the evidence,” says Elmhirst. Indeed, one surprise in the Baileys’ astonishing adventure was that the two stayed married after enduring nearly four months together with little hope of rescue. “My husband told me he would have slipped overboard after a couple of days,” Elmhirst says with a laugh, adding that Maurice might have, too, were it not for Maralyn’s “pragmatism and her optimism.” “Her leadership kept them going,” says Elmhirst, “and kept Maurice going specifically. He was full of despair and self-blame, and he always said that if he’d been on his own, he wouldn’t have survived half as long.”

A Marriage at Sea, with its double-edged title, is a remarkable story of teamwork, survival, and love. And although Elmhirst says that she doesn’t aim to offer any lessons as such, a strong lesson emerges all the same. “What prompted their journey, at least for Maurice in large part, was a kind of isolationism, of wanting to be separate and away from people,” Elmhirst observes. “But then, ironically, what saved them were people coming to their aid—being connected to other people and to each other. There is a deep and intrinsic value to those human relationships, those connections and dependencies. You leave those or loosen those at your peril.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.