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Who was Morris Bailey?
So Morris Bailey was a young man who grew up in the town of Derby, which is a town right in the middle of England, about as far from the sea as you can get.
He was a fairly lonely child, I think.
He was unwell as a child, had to spend a lot of time on his own in his bedroom.
And he grew up to be quite a kind of awkward, quite a lonely young man.
Sophie Elmerist is a writer and journalist.
In 1962, when Morris was in his late 20s, he lived alone in an apartment in the middle of the town where he'd grown up and worked at a printing press.
And he would spend his weekends trying to escape the city.
He would go hiking, he would fly these small planes and he would sail when he could.
But he didn't have a lot of money, so sailing as an expensive hobby, so he couldn't do that very much.
But he did a lot of these pursuits alone, essentially.
He wasn't a man of many friends.
You know you go to the gym where he knew a couple of people, but it was a fairly limited straight in life, I guess.
One day in the gym, Morris met one of his acquaintances.
He said, oh, you know what?
I can't go to this car rally that I'm supposed to be doing on the weekend.
And I was just going with someone, a young woman called Marilyn.
I'm supposed to be driving accompanying her in her car.
Could you take my place?
And Morris said, yes.
So Saturday rolls around and he goes to the marketplace in Derby, right in the middle of the city, and he waits for Marilyn to arrive.
And as he's standing there he's thinking maybe she won't calm, and that would kind of be a relief.
But, sure enough, up drives this large car and in it is a young, very pretty woman with brown hair and she leans over and opens the front passenger door and in he gets.
And how did the day go?
Well, the day when, almost as badly as it could, Morris is not a car man, you know, he knows about planes and he knows about boats.
And there's lots of things he does know about and he likes to tell people about them.
But he is suddenly not a man comfortable in cars doesn't know really much about navigating either.
And he manages to steer them in all the wrong direction.
She's doing the driving.
She's very confident, very upbeat.
It gets to one point where they have to refill and he wants to sort of make his contribution and doesn't actually have enough money for the petrol.
So all in all, he feels like it's been a disaster.
He's realized that she's this sort of attractive and lively and wonderful kind of person to spend a day with, but he feels like he's made a terrible impression.
I mean, had he dated a lot of women before?
No, I mean, Morris has really kind of accepted the idea that he's going to be a bachelor for life.
He doesn't really have any hope or expectation of being in a relationship.
So meeting Marilyn and being immediately drawn to her and to her character is as much a surprise to him as anyone else.
She had a way of sort of being in the world that he could tell immediately was a revelation to him.
She had a kind of natural, instinctive optimism, I guess, about how things would turn out, which was almost the opposite of the way he saw life.
Morris was convinced he'd never see Marilyn again after the day they'd had together.
He sent her an apology and the biggest bouquet of flowers he could afford.
A few days later, she wrote back to thank him.
So he decided to write her again to ask her out on a date.
And so they spent their first evening together.
He took her out to a Chinese restaurant and then to the theatre, and Marilyn was eight years younger than him.
In her early twenties She was still living with her parents.
She had quite a protected, sheltered upbringing.
And though she had this adventure of spirit in her, she really had never done any of these kinds of things before.
This was her first time going out to dinner to a restaurant like this.
So in a way, it was a kind of new departure for both of them.
At the end of the night, they stayed up talking for hours.
When the sun started to come up, they drove to a field and Marilyn showed moors where to find mushrooms.
After that, they started going on trips together.
They went to the lake district and went camping, one time it was so cold that it snowed.
They went hiking together and got caught in a storm.
And Morris taught her how to sail.
The first time Marilyn steered the boat by herself.
She ran it into a riverbank and they had to dig themselves out with knives and forks.
She was game for it all.
Morris knew, I think, probably the first time he met her, but certainly very quickly, that he wanted to marry Marilyn.
But his great fear was, of course, for someone like Morris who was not socially confident was asking her to marry him.
He needed to know that she felt the same way about certain things.
And one of those very importantly was that he didn't want to have children.
Morris's upbringing had been almost affectionless.
In his description he felt strongly, given the kind of person he felt he'd become, that he didn't want to sort of perpetuate himself in a way.
He didn't want to have children.
He'd always known this very clearly and he wanted to be sure that Marilyn didn't want children either, and to his great surprise and happiness she said she didn't.
So eventually he summons up the courage to ask her to marry him and she says yes.
I mean, were they a good match together?
Well, I think it depends who you ask.
I think there's a magic to their match.
I think, on first impression, you might question this match.
Certainly.
I know that her sister was skeptical, couldn't see why.
That you know.
It was very obvious as to why Morris was attracted to Marilyn, but less obviously the other way round.
But I think there was something that he brought to her that actually was liberating, that She was growing up in this conventional household.
Her parents expected her to stay at home until she was married.
And then there was an expectation that she would follow in her mother's footsteps, that life as a woman in the early 70s was probably going to be domestic, that she would get married, have children, stay at home.
And that would be her existence.
And Marilyn was cut from different cloths.
She had these energies and these instincts to have adventures.
And Morris actually opened the door to the possibility of those actually being real, about them being able to travel and if they didn't have children, they were free.
After they married they moved into a bungalow they'd bought in the suburbs and saved money each month to go on as many trips as they could and maybe even buy a boat one day.
Morris kept working for the printing press and Marilyn worked for the tax office and they're living a respectable day-to-day suburban existence, which is kind of driving them both crazy.
And one rainy evening Marilyn is looking at the window and just says you know what, why don't we sell this house and build a boat and go?
I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love.
Her idea was they would go on this epic journey.
They would sail around the world and end up in New Zealand, which was a place they knew was far wilder than a city like Derby in the middle of England.
And they would start a new life there away, far from their families and from the sort of world that they knew so well.
And what did he say to this whole player?
Morris, I think first was skeptical.
He was absolutely on board with the idea of wanting to escape their life.
But this, he thought, was a sort of lifelong project of gradually, steadily saving money and going on these little excursions and camping trips and sailing trips when they could.
But Marilyn was dogged and persistent and she insisted that they would make it happen.
And as he put it, her arguments finally won me over.
So she persuaded him.
They sold the house and almost everything else and moved into an unfurnished apartment in the south of England.
They slept on the floor, but they were close to the water and closer to the port where their boat was being built.
Tell me about the boat.
So the boat was a relatively small 31 foot boat.
It was based on a model called the Golden Hind and they knew that she was sort of study as a boat as a model.
But they had various specifications they wanted wanted a moderate draft, full headroom, ample beam and maybe most specifically of all, and perhaps shockingly, Morris particularly was very keen that they had no radio transmitter.
His vision for this journey was that they would be really out of contact with land, with civilization, in any way.
And he was a very experienced sailor.
He knew not to navigate by the stars, and they would have various devices on board to help navigation.
But it was this kind of almost point of principle for him that they would be out of communication, especially when they were crossing oceans, and that he would be sailing like the old sailors Columbus and Kirk, who was just sailed by the stars and their wits.
They named the boat the Orlin, a combination of Morris and Maryland.
It was in a way.
And they sometimes would talk about it like this as their child.
This was as close as they would get to having a child.
They, you know, cherished and looked after and worked on this boat with all the sort of love and care that you might a child.
And that was sort of what she became in a way.
Morris would be the captain and navigator and Maryland would be in charge of the supplies.
So There are tins upon tins docked up.
She removes their labels.
She writes on each one what they are.
There are fresh water containers, everything from first aid to emergency packs.
She will have it all mapped out exactly what they need for the whole voyage.
But she didn't know how to swim.
It feels like the one skill you really want to make sure you have when you're about to have all the skills.
Right.
I agree.
I think swimming feels fairly important if you're planning to set around the world voyage on a small boat.
But Marilyn was Marilyn, and she wasn't going to learn to do something that she didn't want to do.
It took them six years to get everything ready to sail all the way to New Zealand.
And in the summer of 1972, they finally left.
There is the sense of elation.
They're free.
And At first, it goes well.
They are competent sailors.
They survive storms.
They make it to Tener Reef, to Madeira.
And then they have their first great challenge, which is crossing the Atlantic.
And this is their first ocean crossing they've ever done.
It stays upon days of time completely alone in the middle of the ocean, which was Morris's fantasy, in a way, to have that level of isolation, but is also, you know, a feat of sailing to do, just to review.
They settled into a routine, getting things done in the morning and then playing chess or reading during the hottest part of the day.
They stopped wearing clothes and stood outside in the rain to wash themselves.
And eventually Morris can tell from his records that they must be approaching land.
And he sees a blinking light in the distance, which is the lighthouse on the eastern Cape of Barbados.
And you know, after days and days of just the plain blue, grey of the ocean, seeing this kind of green of land is thrilling.
Morris goes down to wake up Marilyn.
She jumps out of her bunk, she's naked, runs straight up on deck and exclaims looks just like England.
And they sit up on deck holding each other, seeing the lights of the shore sort of twinkling in the distance, and have this immense sense of satisfaction of what they've achieved and what they've managed to do.
And surely if they've done that, they can do anything.
They spent Christmas in New Years in the Caribbean and in February.
They crossed the Panama Canal and then, you know, that's the big moment.
They eventually arrived at Balboa and they take their boat apart practically and put it back together again, because this is when they're on the brink of the Pacific Ocean.
And they have the greatest challenge ahead of them, the longest part of their journey, where they'll be completely alone in the ocean, where they are going to cross the Pacific, first of all, stopping at the Galapagos Islands.
What's the difference between crossing the Pacific and the Atlantic?
The Pacific Ocean is obviously the largest body of water on Earth.
You have a degree of remoteness on the Pacific On the Atlantic, it's a busier ocean.
You're more likely to have passing ships to see other people on your way.
And you're essentially never going to be as quite as isolated, I guess, on the Atlantic as you are in the Pacific.
And the potential sort of storms and threats and doldrums as periods of real flatness on the Pacific are all there sort of facing them on a sort of different order of magnitude, I guess, to the Atlantic.
On February 26, almost eight months after leaving England, they started across the Pacific.
The conditions are calm.
There's a breeze.
They can't believe their luck.
They're making very good progress.
They think it'll only take them about 10 days to get to the Galapagos.
And there's very little activity on the ocean.
They don't see any other ships.
It's just free sailing.
And they estimate by the 3rd of March, there's only about 325 miles to go.
They're going at around 100 miles a day.
And so they were probably only by that point, about three days out from the Galapagos.
So the night of the 3rd of March, they're just taking their alternate watches as usual.
And Marilyn is up on deck.
And there's suddenly a light in the ocean they see. a fishing boat, which is rare.
We've hardly seen any ships until this point, but there it is blazing on the ocean.
They see a light, a sort of spotlight, pooling light on the water, but past they go.
And the night passes at 7 a.m.
Marilyn comes down below deck to wake Morris.
It's his turn to go up and she starts making breakfast.
And it's a quiet moment.
It's ordinary.
She's putting on the pot to make coffee.
It's what she always does.
And then there is this almighty crash.
It sounds almost like a gun going off.
And it's so violent that cut the restarts flying across the cabin.
Books come off the shelves and immediately they run up the ladder onto deck to see what has happened.
They can't understand what it could be.
And right there is their answer.
In the water, thrashing, blood pouring from its body is an enormous whale, a sperm whale.
And they can see it's injured.
They can see it's hurt.
It's thrashing in pain.
It's what Morris imagined.
Probably it's death throes, that the whale is struggling for life.
And they watch it transfixed.
They can't believe it.
I mean, it's probably a 40 foot long this whale.
It's longer than their boat.
It's tail, which is smashing into the water at any point hits their boat.
That will be the end of their boat.
They know it.
And they watch it until eventually the whale does this huge dive down.
It disappears beneath the ocean.
And they're frozen for a minute until they realize and remember that crash that first alerted them to the whale's presence.
And they run back down below deck and find water already rising in the cabin.
We'll be right back.
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I've had durian in Asia.
It's a fruit with a smell so strong and offensive, airlines prohibit bringing it on the plane.
Duryan is legendary.
In some parts of the world, it's considered the king of fruits.
When Duryan is in season, people pay a fortune for the best ripe fruit.
But it's also got such an intense aroma that you can't bring it on public transport in those same parts of the world.
Julia Child described it as, quote, dead babies mixed with strawberries and camembert.
This episode of Gastropod, why is Durian so beloved and also so hated?
Where does that pungent smell come from and can and should scientists get rid of it?
Find Gastropod wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe.
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When Morrison Maryland, went down into the cabin, they realized they had to find the hole in the boat and stop the water from coming in.
Fast.
Maryland started trying to pump water out.
Morris found the hole.
It was the size of a briefcase.
They tried to cover it from the outside with a spare sail.
And when that didn't work, they tried to fill it with anything they could find.
Cushions and blankets and clothes.
But the water was still rising.
It had reached their knees.
They did all the things that you're supposed to do and more to try and save their boat.
This boat, you know, that they thought of as their child.
They would do anything they could to save her.
And yet the water was rising.
And there's a point at which there's a critical point, at which you realize that if the water is still rising, you only have a certain amount of time before the boat starts to go down.
And it wasn't just about saving themselves.
It was saving as much as they could. in order to survive off the boat.
And I think they made a sort of silent calculation.
It was almost a sort of understanding, an unspoken understanding between them that, as the water was rising as quickly as it was, that the boat was unsavable.
And the best they could do now was get up as much as they could and save themselves.
They worked silently.
Maryland started filling two sailbacks with everything she could from the cupboards.
And Morris grabbed containers of fresh water and started inflating a rubber life raft and a dinghy with oars.
How long did it take for them to get off the boat?
So the boat they have about 45 minutes from the whale's first strike, until really she's sinking and the boat goes down is sunk within an hour.
By that stage they get off.
They're sitting in the dinghy with the life raft attached by a rope and they've managed to get off tens of food and water and emergency provisions.
And they watch their boat sink.
Marilyn being Marilyn has the presence of mind in this moment.
They have a camera to take photographs.
And so she sits there actually photographing the sinking of their boat.
You can see the last white triangle of sale go down below the water in one of the photographs.
And she also takes a picture of Morris who's there with the oars of the dinghy turning round.
And on his face, you see a kind of rigid tension.
It's just pure sort of pragmatism in that moment where they are trying to almost just accept the reality of the situation they now found themselves in.
What were their first thoughts after sitting there in the boat?
So at first they, in those sort of early moments, they're in silence.
There almost isn't anything that can be said.
They sit separately.
Marilyn is in the life raft.
Morris stays in the dinghy.
And Marilyn immediately goes into a kind of doing mode rather than thinking.
She starts to organize the belongings that they've managed to rescue off the boat and arranges them around the edges of the life raft.
And realizes that she needs to try and figure out how long they can survive with what they have.
Morris is in shock.
He rests for a moment.
And when he does a little later look across at Marilyn, he sees that she's crying.
And I think at this point, Morris feels the weight of what's happened very acutely.
And some of his earliest thoughts are really about well, how likely or unlikely it is that they will survive.
And really, whether the best thing they could do would be to take their own lives.
Marilyn.
After that initial grief, I think, again reverts to this sort of in-built pragmatism, this desire for routine, this sense of needing a plan.
And she goes into a different mode to try and come up with a system that will keep them alive.
What were they left with?
What had they been able to salvage?
They had been able to salvage A significant amount of food, of tins, but also of objects.
In all that, in that sort of crazed time of just trying to get as much as they could off the boat, they'd managed to get the camera buckets cushions jackets trousers clothes, a lamp sextants, which is a navigational tool, the compass, even some books.
A biography of Richard III, and a guide to circumnavigation.
They also managed to grab the ship's log and two diaries, along with two pencils and one pen, a first aid kit, a knife matches and two dictionaries.
And then you know enough tins she calculated about 33 tins and a cake which she really kept for her birthday, a Scottish fruitcake.
The cans they'd grabbed were filled with things like Heinz baby food staking, kidney pie filling ravioli margarine peanuts, and there is also half a jar of coffee made.
Maryland calculated their daily rations.
Breakfast was a sliver for birthday cake and margarine.
Then they would share a cup of water with three spoonfuls of coffee made.
At 10 a.m. they'd get one butterscotch.
For lunch they'd have a few peanuts, one date each, one ginger biscuit and a cup of water.
And then for dinner they'd have a can of meat and a third cup of water, which she thought would last them about 20 days, which at that point they thought well, that should be enough.
Surely we're not going to be stuck out here for that long.
Hopefully someone will go past and see us.
So we'll figure out a way.
You know where, if we're only three days from the Galapagos, we'll find a way of getting there and we'll be rescued.
They started settling into their new home.
They had the small dinghy.
But they spent most of their time in the raft.
It was about four feet in diameter and had a tent-like canopy for shade.
But there is no space for them to fully stretch out or to lie alongside each other.
They have to take turns, resting or sleeping, and even that sort of curled up.
The next day, they huddled under the canopy, taking sips of water and looking for anything on the horizon.
But there is nothing.
Their initial thought was, look, we're three days from the Galapagos Islands.
This is obviously sailing days.
So that was when they were doing 100 miles a day.
They're now static, but the dinghy has ores.
So their initial strategy is to try and row to the Galapagos Islands.
It's too hot to do it in the day.
It's very sunny and they decide they'll try at night.
So they start rowing and they take turns rowing while the other one rests.
But it doesn't take long after a night or two of trying to do this.
They are exhausted.
It takes a huge amount of energy.
They don't feel like they're getting very far more.
It can work out from the stars, a rough calculation of where they are and of their trajectory.
And it's not even helping them go.
They're drifting.
The drift of the ocean is taking them out of the path of the Galapagos and they're unable to row fast or hard enough to get them back on track.
And also, of course, if you're rowing, if you're taking that amount of vigorous exercise, you need water, and they've got a limited supply of water and it hasn't rained yet.
So they're working through the water too quickly and it's simply not sustainable.
They're neither making the progress they need and they can't consume the water at the rate they're consuming it and they give up.
And so at that point they both realize that their only hope of rescue is if a ship does pass by and sees them.
Did a new routine develop?
I mean, how did they split up the day?
What they quickly realized once she had organized all their belongings, once she'd organized the provisions, once she'd laid out a sort of plan for their meals and how much they were allowed to consume, there was suddenly nothing to do.
Actually, what they were faced with was this sort of expansive physical expanse of nothingness in the ocean and nobody passing them by, but also a kind of empty time.
And so Marilyn made it her business to try and fill that time to try and structure it.
So she took the books that they'd managed to rescue and said, right, well, we'll read these books.
We'll read them line by line and we'll analyze every single line.
She gradually, over time, came up with ideas like making dominoes out of bits of paper at the back of their log books.
But the dominoes kept blowing away or getting wet.
So she drew playing cards.
The paper was so thin they could see through it.
So they had to be careful about not looking too closely at each other's hands.
They also told each other the plots of books they'd read before they started their trip.
And they played word games.
One involved picking a word and then coming up with as many four letter words as they could using its letters.
After eight days, Maryland saw something on the horizon.
It's in the morning, it's early.
It's hazy, but she sees a shape, a sort of hard dark shapes sort of start to become more and more solid.
And she realized it's a ship.
It's probably only about a mile away.
And they jump to attention.
They know what they have to do.
They have flares that they've managed to rescue from their boat.
And Baron impasses Morris one of them.
It's a smoke flare.
He tears off the tape and tries to light it with the matches, but nothing happens.
It doesn't light.
He's furious, throws it into the sea.
They try another and the same thing happens.
And a third, nothing happens.
Clearly, somehow these players have got damp in the process and nothing is working and the ship sails on by.
And they see it disappear into the horizon and out of sight.
And Morris sits down and sort of gives up.
Marilyn keeps waving her jacket, just hoping against hope that someone might see her, but nobody does.
At first, the Pacific Ocean had seemed empty and huge to them.
They knew it covered almost a third of the Earth's surface.
But then Morrison Marilyn started noticing things.
Because they're so close to the Galapagos.
It's this incredibly rich part of the ocean where there are turtles, there are fish, There are sharks that pass by, which at first they sort of a wary of, and you know quite quickly, almost tame, because they are this singular, like floating almost organism in the ocean.
They almost like the fish and the sharks and the turtles are attracted to them as sort of curious.
They become always part of the ecosystem.
The turtles, in particular, kept coming up to the raft and rubbing up against it, sometimes from below.
Morris and Marilyn so that it felt like they were being punched through the thin material between them and the water.
By this time, their supplies were starting to run low and they were running through them too quickly.
And so the next time a turtle slammed into the raft, they grabbed it and hauled it in.
But a turtle has.
You know, they're huge and they're strong and they have a very hard shell, and so they know they have to find the quickest way they can of killing the turtle that they've captured, and they have to cut off its head in order to do this, catching the blood in a bucket below.
And it's gory, it's gruesome, it's violent.
The knife isn't sharp enough.
They are essentially having to soar through this creature's neck.
And there are a ghast really, the fact they're having to do this, but I think this kind of absolutely basic pragmatic survival instinct kicks in and they essentially do what they have to do.
And Marilyn ends up sort of carving up this turtle like a chicken, almost working out how you can cut out the flesh which obviously they have to eat raw.
They got the idea to use some of the turtle meat as fish bait.
But when they looked for the fish hooks and the emergency pack they grabbed from the boat, they weren't there.
Marilyn looked through the rest of their supplies and found some safety pins and a pair of pliers and made her own fish hook.
And it worked.
They fished every day and continued catching turtles, too.
They even eat their eyeballs, which they realized have a sort of rich fluid in the eyeballs.
And when they're becoming dehydrated, it's incredibly nourishing.
At one point, Maryland started to think the turtles could also help get them to land.
Maybe we could harness one or two and almost like horses.
They could lead us to the Galapagos.
And they managed to do this.
They've rigged up a kind of makeshift harness around a turtle.
And he even seems to start swimming in the right direction.
So they caught another turtle and harnessed it too.
But almost immediately it started swimming in the opposite direction.
But these creatures start sort of amassing around the raft almost.
And there's this sort of almost beautiful sense, at times when their situation isn't overly bleak, of them being at one with the ocean, and when they concede in those terms, they feel this almost poetic sense of that they have become sea creatures themselves.
On March 14th, Morrison, Maryland heard a strange sound.
It's like a rush of air, hiss almost, or like something taking off, like a plane.
Maryland folks are head out and there's a whale right there, about 20 feet away.
And obviously they've been in the situation before when they were on their boat, And this time they were on a tiny raft, completely vulnerable, so close to the surface of the ocean.
There was nothing they could do.
The whale was right there.
And they could just see.
It's so huge.
They could just see a portion of its body, sort of framed by the little sort of hatch-like doorway of the raft.
And they could see the blowhole right there and they could see it open and the great cloud of drops sort of burst out and rain down on them in the raft.
And all they could do was watch and wait and be as still and as silent as they possibly could.
And the whale was peaceful.
It wasn't like the whale earlier whale thrashing in the ocean.
It was just gently passing by.
The one thing they hoped was that it wouldn't dive, that it wouldn't suddenly make a huge movement that would capsize them.
But it did eventually dive below the surface, but very gently, cleanly.
And then it disappears and Marilyn, having seen it, wishes she'd had this sort of presence of mind to take a photograph, because she sort of feels like well, no one will believe that we saw a whale like that when we tell them.
And Morris in turn can't quite believe that she thinks they're going to live to tell the tale.
As time passes, they see another ship and then another one and the same thing keeps happening.
They try and attract their attention.
The ships sail past.
There's even a tantalizing moment when one of the ships pauses and seems to turn, and they convince that the ship has seen them, and then it goes on.
They made their own smoke flares from torn up clothes and turtle shells, but the ships never stopped.
And at a certain point when this has happened several times, they almost feel a sense of defiance.
Like if you're not going to see us, then we don't want to see you.
Just leave us alone.
It's worse having the hope because the disappointment after that the hope passes is so painful.
How are they doing mentally and physically after a few weeks of being out there on the raft?
So as the weeks go past, there is a real divergence in how they're faring mentally.
Physically, they're both struggling, of course.
They have a diet of essentially raw protein.
They're managing to catch rainwater, so they are hydrated just about enough.
But they're losing weight fast.
And Morris sometimes gets physically sick.
He has developing a sort of lung infection.
He's coughing horribly and sometimes gets a feverish.
Occasionally they'll eat a fish that will.
They've either kept too long or some.
The flesh has become rotten and they'll be incredibly sick and unwell.
These will kind of come and go.
So physically they're both struggling. but mentally they're in very different places.
Marilyn is doggedly trying to stay optimistic, trying to stay positive, trying to respond to each disappointment of a shit passing either with defiance or with a sort of renewed sense of purpose, coming up with new ways to sort of light flares or trying to make themselves seen.
Morris, however, is sinking.
You know he's finding it harder and harder to maintain, I guess, a belief really in the fact that they'll survive or be ever be seen by a passing ship.
And so Marilyn really has to dig incredibly deep and come up with evermore sort of inventing strategies to keep his hope alive.
And one of the things that she does is essentially use her imagination.
She starts to sort of plant the seed of an idea in his mind, which is of a trip they might take in the future.
Once they're rescued, once they're back on land, They'll build another boat and they'll sail to Patagonia, which is somewhere Morris had always wanted to go.
Morris sort of finds this preposterous, as if they would ever want to go sailing again after this adventure.
But she is adamant that she doesn't want to go back to their sort of life in England and living in a house and, you know, living their old life.
And he, she manages to convince him yet again, and They then proceed to spend significant amount of time planning this next voyage.
In the back of the diary, this volume that was rescued from the boat that it's possible to look at, you can see all these drawings that they make of their next boat.
You know, the exact dimensions and where everything will go and how they'll provision it.
And she starts creating these incredible menus of all the food she wants to cook when she's rescued and when she gets home, and the kind of meals she'll make on board.
And it becomes this sort of elaborate fantasy which is essentially something for them to sort of hold on to in their minds as a reason to keep going.
One of the menus included tubs of potato and coleslaw salad.
Another ended in coffee and mince.
At one point, Marilyn made a list of, quote, cakes to bake for morris.
There's a lemon cake covered in crystallized fruit, a Madeira cake covered in marzipan and a quote Mars special chocolate sponge sandwich with chocolate butter icing and layer of Mars bars topped with chocolate buttons and buttercream, sides with squares of Mars bars pushed in.
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After seven weeks on the raft, it was Maryland's birthday, the 24th of April.
She was 32 years old and she never thought they would be a drift this long long, long before any of this calamity had happened.
She'd made a plan that they were going to meet some friends on the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific.
And they were going to share this cake, which she had kept especially.
But that cake was long gone.
They'd eaten it.
And now they were really losing sort of a sense of hope and purpose.
But they tried on this day to kind of create a sense of celebration.
Morris tried to catch and did manage to catch one of their favourite fish, a sort of silvery fish.
And just at the moment where he catches this fish, the hook catches the rubber in the dinghy and they hear this hissing sound, the terrible sound of air leaving an inflatable vessel, and they realise there's a puncture.
They had to move quickly, taking everything out of the dinghy and then to the raft with them and trying to patch up the hole.
Once they were done and they put everything back, they counted their water containers.
One was missing.
So they have a limited, even more limited amount of water now.
And to try and raise their spirits, they decide they'll eat their last hint of rice pudding.
And they open it, topped with a kind of treacle that's creamy and rich and delicious.
They eat it spoonful by spoonful.
And then they realize Once they've finished and they look at the empty tin, it's coated with rust.
All this delicious pudding they have been eating is saturated with rust.
Are they annoying each other?
How do you not want to kill the person that you're with like that?
So there are times when Morris is really struggling and becoming ever more morose.
Marilyn certainly feels the sort of weight of that responsibility of trying to keep his spirits up.
She finds ways of trying to help herself.
She writes anywhere she can, scraps of paper, the backs of the logbook, the diary.
And she writes letters to her friend June in England.
And she sort of thinks she probably won't ever even send these letters, but they become an important sort of almost therapy, I guess, of a way of trying to say all the things about him that she can't say to his face.
They have to keep a certain strength to their dynamic between each other.
They can't turn on each other and they don't.
They do support each other and they do maintain a survival of their bond. that keeps them going.
But those frustrations which inevitably builds, she has to express in some way, and it's just why she ends up writing these letters, just to get them out and to get them out of her head.
There was no escape for them.
No escape from each other.
I mean, Marilyn was able to write, but they had to do everything right next to each other, in front of each other.
No getting away.
It seems like such a test.
That's right.
It's something that always struck me and spoke to me about the story was that, as much as it's a story of extremity, it's one of unbelievable intimacy, that of course in our relationships we're sharing beds rooms homes, childcare.
Whatever it is in your relationship that you share is that internal, deep intimacy and proximity.
And in their experience, it's just in this hugely extreme and exaggerated way.
And there is absolutely no relief and no respite in a way from each other.
And it makes you realize the importance of privacy in a relationship and how much you depend on time away as well as time together.
And that the endurance of their relationship, that their marriage is survival in the face of such relentless intimacy, is a kind of feat of in itself.
A few days after Maryland's birthday, they found a small row of holes in the raft.
Maryland thought they'd been made by some spinefoot fish that had been gathering around them.
They found the instruction manual for the raft, which said that they had to keep the area dry long enough for two coats of glue to set.
The patch they put over the holes came off right away and they had to pump water out of the raft two or three times an hour so that the floor wouldn't sag into the ocean.
Marilyn wrote, if we need help, now is the time.
Did they talk about what they would do if one of them died?
The conversations they had inevitably had to face up to the reality of a situation where one was sick, or one died, or someone fell overboard.
Morris had always from the beginning thought about ways that they could take their own lives.
He'd looked at the gas canister and wondered if there was enough in it to suffocate themselves.
He imagined them swimming away from the raft until they drowned.
But Maryland didn't want to do that.
And they even discussed the possibility of if one died and the other stayed alive, would they end up eating the flesh of the other?
But it was hypothetical.
They couldn't really talk about it as a reality, an actual sort of scenario that could actually happen.
On May 8th, they saw their sixth ship, a cargo vessel, but it didn't stop.
Ten days later, they saw another ship, which was sailing towards them.
They waved and shouted, but the ship just kept sailing.
And at that point they really kind of resigned themselves to the fact that no ship will see them in all this time that they haven't been seen.
Then how will they ever be seen?
By the end of June, after almost four months, Morris was very sick.
He is at the point of such illness and weakness that he's passing in and out of consciousness.
He's starting to almost hallucinate.
He feels like he can see people that they've met on other parts of their voyage.
And in the midst of this kind of almost hallucinatory dream, he senses Marilyn calling him.
He can hear her saying his name, and then she's shaking him.
And what she's seen, of course, is a ship and a ship that has turned and that has come back.
And this ship, it turns out, is a fishing vessel.
It's called the Womie 306 South Korean.
And it's Captain is a man called Sue Chongel.
So Captain Sue who had gone past what he thought was just a sort of black dopped on the horizon.
Someone, one of his crew pointed it out to him.
He'd had a bad voyage so far.
They'd been at sea a long time.
He was desperate, a screw were desperate to get home back to South Korea.
And he wasn't going to turn around, but something bugged him about it and he couldn't let it go.
And eventually he does ask his crew member to turn the ship around.
They go back and they approach this dot which grows and grows and it becomes this shape and he sees two figures moving on, these vessels tied together, and he can't even make out at first whether it's a man or a woman, how old they are, what condition they're in their skin and bone.
Morris is bearded.
Marilyn is so frail, her legs are like tiny sticks.
And he orders his crew to pull alongside, to throw ropes and ladders over the side and to go down and help them up.
And eventually, though they can barely walk, barely stand, the crew managed to get them up the ladders and they haul up the raft in the dinghy too, and the contents of the raft in the dinghy, onto the fishing boat and they're rescued.
The ship's crew brought Morris and Marilyn each a glass of milk.
Morris said, we've made it.
Marilyn replied, now for Orelin II and Patagonia.
Their first meal was eggs, bread with butter and corn beef.
The crew gave them clothes they'd bought on their trip as gifts for their families.
The clothes Morris and Marilyn had been wearing were falling apart and smelled so bad that the crew threw them overboard.
They put mattresses on the floor for Morris and Marilyn to sleep on, because they were too weak to climb up into the bunks.
And they were finally able to lie down fully stretched out.
Every morning they watched the sunrise together on deck and they spent the rest of the day learning how to walk again and eating a lot.
Marilyn wrote down every meal in her diary and the crew continued to bring them gifts a chocolate bar, pens and paper and belts to hold up their pants, which are much too large for them.
After two weeks they arrived at the nearest major port Honolulu, and Morrison Marilyn give a press conference.
And straight away he gives her the credit that he says there's no way that he would have survived without her and that really she was the one that kept them both going.
And that is a sort of narrative that he sticks to forever more, really.
He is never afraid or shamed to credit her entirely with their survival.
Marilyn told an interviewer that Morris had also saved her in a way.
What kept her going was quote having someone to think about rather than think about myself all the time.
Morris and Marilyn were put up in the penthouse of a five-star hotel while they stayed in Hawaii for the next couple of weeks.
And then, after a trip that took them to South Korea, where they visited their rescuers, they eventually went back home to England.
They wrote a book about their time in the Pacific.
It was called 117 Days a Drift.
Its sections had titles like The Fifteenth Turtle and We Talk of Death.
They helped use the money from the book to fund their sailing trip to Patagonia.
And just over two years after they'd been rescued, they left England again.
This time, they equipped their boat with rocket flares.
After Patagonia, they sailed in the Mediterranean and to Spain.
Eventually though, they couldn't afford to keep the boat, and they sold it.
Back in England, they got a bungalow and a dog.
They guarded and went on walks.
Both of them became vegetarians.
And then, Marilyn got cancer.
She died in 2002.
After almost 40 years with Marilyn, Morris was alone again.
I think that you know, Morris in a way alone at the end of his life.
Well, he's he's more alone.
He's more of a shipwreck, in a way, than than he was when he was a drifter in the middle of the ocean with his wife.
Do you think part of him wished he could go back there?
So right was the end of his life.
Morris gives an interview and in this interview he talks very movingly about their time adrift.
You know, this is now so many years afterwards and so many years after Marilyn has died.
But when he recalls their time on the raft, it's with such emotion.
And he sees it almost, you know, so many years later, as this, while extremely challenging and difficult and painful time also is a sort of a beautiful time.
It's sort of there was a purity to it, a degree of Isolation, of immersion in the ocean and its creatures, and he'd been out there with his wife.
He once said, she was the guiding light in everything we did.
I was extraordinarily lucky to find her, extraordinarily lucky that she would choose me.
Without doubt, she was remarkable.
This is Love is created by Lauren Spore and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison and Megan Canane.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
You can learn more about the show on our website.
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Sophie Elmer's book is A Marriage at Sea, a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love.
