Survival storiesCould your marriage survive a shipwreck?“Maurice and Maralyn”, a new book about a couple stranded almost four months at sea, makes you wonderMaurice and Maralyn. By Sophie Elmhirst. Chatto & Windus; 272 pages; £18.99When the captain of a Korean tuna-fishing ship first caught sight of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey bobbing in the Pacific Ocean in June 1973, he could not work out what they were. About four months earlier, while they were trying to sail from England to New Zealand, their boat had crashed into a sperm whale. The couple was stranded in a tiny inflatable life-raft tied to a flimsy dinghy, subsisting on rainwater, turtles whose throats they had slit, birds they strangled and sharks they suffocated. Unable to stand and wearing clothes that had disintegrated, their skeletons looked ready to burst through their skin.Miraculously, they were alive. In “Maurice and Maralyn”, Sophie Elmhirst (an occasional contributor to 1843, The Economist’s sister magazine)
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