The Shipwrecked Marriage | Meet the Man Who Also Survived Being Lost at Sea | 4

Douglas Robertson and his family survived 38 days in the same stretch of water as Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, after their yacht was sunk by killer whales in 1972. Drinking turtle blood, fantasising about buttered toast, and searching for rainwater became their daily reality. Douglas joins Alice and Matt to share what it's really like to survive against impossible odds, his surprising meeting with the Baileys, and the parallels between their remarkable stories. What does survival really take? Can any relationship withstand it? And how does it change you forever? Do you have a suggestion for a scandal you would like us to cover? Or perhaps you have a question you would like to ask our hosts? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:11Alice Levine?

  I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:12Matt Forde?

  And I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:13Alice Levine?

  And this is British Scandal, an Audible original.

• 0:27Alice Levine?

  So, Matt, I think this is possibly one of the most extraordinary British scandals we've ever done, unlike anything else, really. Just an incredible example of human survival against the odds. If you made it into a film, you would say it's too unbelievable.

• 0:46Matt Forde?

  Yeah, I don't think we've ever done a survival story like this before. I'm still astonished they managed to live as long as they did in that situation.

• 0:56Alice Levine?

  But sadly, of course, Maurice and Marilyn are no longer with us. And I think, just as a team, there are dozens and dozens of questions we would have loved to be able to ask them. What is swirling around in your head?

• 1:08Matt Forde?

  It's the day-to-day stuff I'd be more interested in. Like, do you sleep and for how long? How do you pass the time? What's your mood? Are you scared? How many arguments did you have? You know, do you chart the passage of time? How do you keep sane? I mean, there's just so many things I want to ask them.

• 1:24Alice Levine?

  Go on, say the one about food.

• 1:26Matt Forde?

  What was the first thing you ate?

• 1:28Alice Levine?

  That's important. I think that's important. Well, someone who is in a unique position to answer all of those questions is our guest today, Douglas Robertson, who, and you aren't going to believe this, was also shipwrecked in the same stretch of water after his boat was struck by whales the year before Maurice and Marilyn.

• 1:48Matt Forde?

  That is unbelievable, because to find anyone else who's been in that situation is vanishingly rare. That he was in the same situation in the same place is balmy.

• 1:58Alice Levine?

  Honestly, I know, crazy. Douglas was just 18 years old at the time. And like Maurice and Marilyn, his parents bought a boat to chase a dream of sailing around the world. Douglas and his parents and his two younger brothers, plus a young student, would then adrift at sea for 38 days. Maurice and Marilyn, of course, did 117. So there really are few people in the world, like you say, who can better understand what they went through. Douglas Robertson joins us after this.

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• 4:03Alice Levine?

  Douglas, thank you so much for joining us.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  That's a pleasure.

• 4:05Alice Levine?

  So you were 16 when your parents sold their farm and took you and your siblings on a sailing trip around the world. What did your parents do at the time? And why did they decide to go sailing?

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Dougal and Linda, my parents, professionally qualified individuals living in Hong Kong, when they got married, decided to give that life up and take up farming in the middle of England. So they gave up jobs that they were exceptionally qualified to do, to do a job that they had no idea how to do it. And believe it or not, it was not successful. I mean, over 15 years, they farmed for 15 years, gradually running out of money. And there came a time when we were faced with the sale of the farm. We would have to sell the farm. We couldn't really afford to keep it going. But my dad said that his children were a bit stupid,

• 5:00Speaker 05

  backward, it was his exact word, because they had been brought up in this rural environment. Well, excuse me, Dougal, you are the one, along with my mother, who decided to bring us up. I would have loved to have been brought up in Hong Kong, you know? And he decided he would take us to the University of Life, wherever that was. And so he was a sea captain by profession. And he sold the farm, bought a boat. And two years after having said that, there we were in Falmouth, thinking, are we really going to do this?

• 5:35Matt Forde?

  What was the plan as your dad saw it? And when he announced it, were you excited?

• 5:40Speaker 05

  I was very excited. I had a godfather who, when he heard of this absolutely preposterous idea of Dougal's to sail around the world, because they're all, they're born and bred farmers. Dougal was a sea captain and the concept sort of could work for Dougal. But to them, it was just madness. And he said to me, Douglas, you don't need to go with your father around the world. He says, I'll tell you what, he says, me and Emmy, who's his wife, we haven't got any children. He says, I'll adopt you. And when I die, you can have the farm.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  I said to him, John, thank you very much for that, but I want to go around the world with my dad. So not even a farm would have tempted me, you know? So I must have really wanted to do it, you know?

• 6:27Alice Levine?

  So you set off and you were at sea for two years before you reached the Galapagos Islands. Can you just paint a picture for us of what those days were like?

• 6:35Speaker 05

  When we were sailing from Falmouth on the day of departure, Dougal was seen to be stamping on the deck of the ship, of the lusette, saying, yee-haw.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  And we were thinking, you liar. We were doing this for you, not for us. You know, it's your trip that you want to go on. And whatever, whatever, we were there with him and we had this fantastic trip. We sailed south to Lisbon and on to the Canary Islands, across the Caribbean, up there to Miami, stayed in Miami for six and a half months, and then down to Jamaica, through the San Blas Islands, through the Panama Canal. And then we got to the Galapagos Islands. We sailed to the Galapagos. And about two weeks into that trip, we had a large whale try to make love to the boat by rubbing itself up and down the side of the boat.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  And we thought, we must look like a whale. And then we got to the Galapagos. We stayed there about a month. And we came the night on, I'll get the date, it was June 13th, 1972. And my mother said, we can't sail on the 13th, it's bad luck. And Dougal, of course, who was an expert on all matters, said that it wasn't Friday the 13th. And it would only be bad luck if it was Friday the 13th, so we'll go anyway. So off we went. And we set sail to the Marquesa Islands, which were some 40 days away. It's the longest leg of our trip around the world.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Two days out, 10 o'clock in the morning, the 15th, bang, bang, bang. Three killer whales hit the boat. And the lusette sank in two minutes or so, a few minutes, a couple of minutes.

• 8:27Alice Levine?

  My god, two minutes.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  We had no time to get anything. We were just waking up, really. I mean, and there was a cup of coffee on. And I was looking forward to having that cup of coffee. I was not to drink a cup of coffee that day, because that was when the whales hit us.

• 8:44Alice Levine?

  To take us to that moment, then, what is going through your mind?

• 8:48Speaker 05

  Well, I didn't know what had happened. I just heard these three loud bangs that sounded like a giant had snapped a tree trunk across his knee, a really loud ear splinting, breaking of wood sound. And Dougal was down below. And I put my head down below and said, and I could see he had water around his ankles. I said, Dougal, what are you, what are you doing? And he said, where's this water coming from? And I heard this swooshing sound. And I looked over my left-hand shoulder and I saw three killer whales. A big one, a baby one, and like a mummy one, if you like, beyond it, all swimming in the same direction as we were sailing.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  But the daddy one had his head split open and the blood was in the water. And then I sort of put two and two together, because I thought we must have gone aground or something. You don't think about whales hitting the boat. But when I poked my head back down the hatch to tell Dougal that I'd seen the whales, he was up to his knees in water. And he said, we're sinking. And I thought. That's not happening. He says, abandon ship. I said, abandon ship to where, Dougal? He said, it's not Miami Marina. Like, that could change, and petulant youth, you know? And Dougal said, get the life raft over the side, abandon ship.

• 10:13Matt Forde?

  Is that just your personality, or do you think the shock of it put you into denial?

• 10:17Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, because I came up with plan B. I thought, well, Dougal clearly doesn't know that the boat's not sinking. So I will go forward and take the sails down. And by the time I've taken the sails down, I will have woken up from this nightmare. And we'll be, everything will be all right. So I go forward and start taking the number one ship down, and the boat's sinking. And, and Dougal did appear, and he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm just taking the sails down, ready for our sinking, you know? That you said we're having, you know? And then I sort of realised, actually, no, that we are sinking.

• 10:54Alice Levine?

  This is real.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  And this is real. And I just changed my mindset immediately. I got the raft over the side, I got the dinghy over the side, tied it to the rail. Put the oars in the dinghy, thank God, thank God else we were finished, you know?

• 11:08Alice Levine?

  Where are you in the age order?

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Second eldest child. My sister had left us in Bahamas, she fell in love with somebody. And we, we took fare-paying passengers in her place, because we had six births available. We had taken a fare-paying passenger from Panama to New Zealand. And his name was Robin Williams, he was twenty-three, so I was eighteen and a half, he was twenty-three. And so we were young men, if you like. And then my twin brothers, they were twelve. So I was sort of second down, but I was the first son, so I had pedigree, you know?

• 11:44Alice Levine?

  But you must have been thinking about them in, in, when the panic hit, after the denial?

• 11:49Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I wasn't thinking about them. I wasn't think, I couldn't think about anything, except get the raft over the side, get the oars into the dinghy, get the raft inflated, a wave washed me off the deck of the Lucette, and that was it. And I remember swimming in the, through the water, I'm not the best of swimmers. And the, the boat was licking, the raft was licking. But a sequence of events took place that, like a comedy of errors, that led to our survival at that moment in time. And one was that I was washed off the deck before I could untie the raft from the Lucette. So the raft was still attached to the Lucette. And the Lucette was going down.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  And Dougal then had moved the dinghy from where I'd launched it, aft for my mum and the twins and Robin to get in. And Robin, being a landlubber, not really understanding the ways of the sea, stepped on the side of the boat and pushed the gunwale underneath the sea and swamped it, so sank the dinghy. So the dinghy was now sunk alongside, so it was all on the raft, it was raft or nothing. But Dougal had the presence of mind when he abandoned the Lucette to tie the dinghy to the raft.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Now, as the Lucette went down, the rail gave way. But that holding of the raft kept the raft close enough to the Lucette so that we could actually get to it. Because the wind was blowing about four, six, it would have just blown the raft away, we would never have got on the raft. But because it was tied on through an arrow, it couldn't get away. And when this rail broke that it was tied to, the dinghy, which was full of water, acted as a sea anchor and continued to hold the raft.

• 13:39Alice Levine?

  This is extraordinary.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  Close to the area where we'd sunk, so we could actually all get on the raft. And I, I was the last on the raft. And, I mean, it was at that point that it hit me, what had happened. So who are these yellow people looking at me? Because the canopy was over our heads, and everybody was yellow. And I was thinking, that looks like my parents, you know, but they're yellow. And I realised we were in the raft and the Lucette had gone. What's going to happen now? Are the whales coming back? And that was my first concern, was that the whales were going to come back and attack us in the, in the raft.

• 14:22Speaker 06

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• 14:38Speaker 03

  A dark night, a quiet house, but inside, danger was lurking.

• 14:43Speaker 07

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• 15:00Matt Forde?

  So then what does happen? Do people stay calm, or are they breaking down in tears?

• 15:03Speaker 05

  The twins were crying. I know, we were all scared, but we were, we were handling our fear, you know? My mum said to Neil, who was crying, she says, don't be frightened, the whales are gone now.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  And he said, we're not crying because we're frightened, mum. We're crying because we've lost Lucette. See, Lucette was our home, she'd been our home for two years. And now she'd been taken from us in the, like, the most bizarre way. My mum said to my dad, Dougal, if we're going to die, we want you to tell us.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  We don't want you to tell us something that is not true.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  And Dougal decided at that moment in time that the truth was more important, that he owed the truth, as so far as he knew it, to his wife and to his children, about what the future held. And he thought, we were all doomed. He thought, we can't survive this. We didn't get a chance to get a distress message away. We were on a forty-five day voyage, nobody would even start looking for us for a week or two after that. Call it sixty days. We had no food or water at that time, where was the next meal coming from? I'd managed to get some stuff, because that, the dinghy was attached to the raft and it was sunk or submerged.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  I was able to get some fishing hooks and fishing line and a sail. And that sail had a wire attached to it, and my mother's sewing basket floated past, which contained a treasure trove of things that we were to find later, you know? And I managed to get all of those and sling them into the, into the raft. So Dougal started to try and sum up what had happened. He said, look, we were two hundred miles west of Galapagos Islands. We're two degrees south of the equator, we're sailing to Marches, forty-five days, in a westerly direction. He says, we've been hit by killer whales. He said, we're, we're two days away from the Galapagos.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  We're only two hundred miles away from the Galapagos Islands. We must be able to get back to Galapagos Islands, so we've got some water in the raft, we've got enough for ten days' supply for, for the six of us. We've got some food, some sweets and some glucose tablets and, and so we should be able to stay alive for long enough to get rescued, and we'll look for a rescue ship, that's what we'll do. In that sort of moment in time, we made three pledges to each other.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  We promised each other that we would stay alive for as long as we could, because we knew that we needed each other to stay alive. We pledged that we would look for a rescue ship. And Dougal said, I will not rest until I get you boys on a steamer home.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Now, that sounds like words, but they were bloody important words at the time, you know? And I, I took great strength from that. And the third plan was that we wouldn't eat each other. We promised that we would not eat each other, no matter what. That we would die quietly together if that's what the future held for us.

• 18:19Alice Levine?

  I mean, I just laughed, but that's actually not, that's not a joke. That's very, very serious.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  That was a very serious, we were, again, it was great comfort, especially for Robin, who was not a family member, to know that he wasn't going to be eaten alive, that we were, we would, we would die together if that's what it came to, because we were in this together. So we made these three pledges to each other. And then we had to think of a plan. In this meantime, I'd also bailed out the dinghy with a box with holes in it, but I managed to get, get enough traction off the side of the life raft to bail the dinghy out, and we'd connected the dinghy to the raft. But like the Baileys did, you know? And so we had two, two vessels, two craft. And because we had a sail on the dinghy, we could make it into a tugboat.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  So we realised that we could tow the raft with the dinghy. So we had some say in which the direction we could sail. Now, my dad, we called him Captain Bligh, because he shouted, and he gave us good hides. And so, you know, we were, we were very well behaved kids, but we never argued with him, because he wouldn't be argued with. But there came this point, we were sitting in the raft, and Dougal says to me, Douglas, I want you to take the dinghy, half the food and water, and row to the Galapagos Islands, it's two hundred miles. Raise the alarm.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  And I said something to him, well, you probably saved my life in the moment. I said, Dougal, I said, I'm not going to do that. It's two knots. How fast can I row? Twenty, fifty miles a day, seventy-five at the very most. But I'm being set off to the west at the same distance. And I'm gonna run out of water and food. I said, it's gonna take me twenty days to get back to the Galapagos Islands. Is there enough food for me for twenty days? And if I'm going to have that, what are you guys gonna do? We said we would die together if we were gonna die. I don't wanna die out there on my own.

• 20:19Alice Levine?

  How did you feel pushing back on his plan in that moment?

• 20:22Speaker 05

  Desperate, because he had to buy into it. He had to, if I was going to survive. But Dougal did buy into it.

• 20:30Matt Forde?

  So why did he think it was a good idea for you to row off on your own?

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Desperation, isn't it? You think, well, the land nearest land's two thousand miles, but just two hundred miles away, some islands. Surely we can row back to them. But Dougal accepted it, and he said, I'm sorry, son, I should never have asked you. It was a fool's errand to try and get back to the Galapagos.

• 20:50Alice Levine?

  So if you weren't gonna go on a solo rescue mission, what was the next option?

• 20:55Speaker 05

  Well, I suppose that's a pretty good incentive to come up with an alternative plan, you know? So I said to Dougal, look, water is key. We can survive thirty days without food, three days without water, and three seconds without air. I said, but I don't know how relevant that was, but I said, water, where is water? We knew the doldrums rained heavily in the doldrums. We knew the doldrums lay five degrees north of the equator. We were two degrees south of the equator. Each degree sixty miles. So four hundred and twenty miles away lay rain, heavy rain. We'd just come through when that whale had tried to make love to the boat.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  I said, Dougal, there is water. We must sail to the water, collect the water, and then decide what to do. And Dougal said, well, in the doldrums is something called the counter current. It's the current that flows the opposite way to the way that the current flows in the trade winds. He said, we can catch that, that's worth twenty-five miles a day, just standing still. If we can row and we can catch a bit of wind to the east, we can make fifty miles a day. We can sail northwesterly from here to the doldrums, catch the water, and then sail back towards America and hit the American coast in seventy days' time.

• 22:23Alice Levine?

  Seventy days?

• 22:26Speaker 05

  And I said, seventy days? I said, we're never gonna survive seventy days. He said, well, but we'd made a promise to each other that we would try, at least try. So that became our plan.

• 22:39Alice Levine?

  Even though you made the pact, you had your pledges, in that moment, are you thinking it's a suicide mission?

• 22:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, every day. I thought, what's the point? No, I've never heard of anybody surviving this. The futility of it hung over us, which of course the Baileys and Steve Callahan and the people that followed us that were shipwrecked knew that we had done it, that it is possible to do this sort of thing. But we had no, no idea, we had no hope. If it wasn't for my dad, who was such a tough guy. I mean, cometh the hour, cometh the man, he's only five foot six. But, I mean, even the sharks were scared of Dougal. And he kept us going. We made the oars, we made a mast out of the oars, I tore the genoas sail into a square,

• 23:26Speaker 05

  made a square sail, and we tied little bits of rag that we'd made out of, out of the other bits of the sail. And we rigged it so that the boat would crab across the seaway in a more northerly direction.

• 23:40Matt Forde?

  And what are you all talking about? They're just sat there in a dinghy together.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  No, that's what we were talking about that. There's only one thing that people talk about who are in a situation like we are, and it's food. And it's non-stop. Tell me how you'd butter that slice of toast again, please, when we get home? Because I wanna hear the knife scrape on the bread.

• 24:00Matt Forde?

  So you're fantasizing?

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Oh, it's like visions in your head, strong visions. We talked about the food that we had, and Dougal said, you know, when we get back home, we could open a cafe. We'll call it Dougal's Kitchen. And we loved Dougal's Kitchen.

• 24:16Alice Levine?

  So you didn't have toast?

• 24:17Speaker 05

  We didn't have toast.

• 24:18Alice Levine?

  But what did you have?

• 24:19Speaker 05

  In our minds, in our minds, we had the most fantastic food ever. And as the days went by, we got more and more desperate. We were starving, we were getting one little bit of a glucose tablet, one little bit of forty-five bread, a barley sweet, and a swig of water. Take as little as you can, but as much as you need was our watch. But we didn't ration the water. But of course, my mum wouldn't drink any water. She says, I'm not drinking water. Well, these boys don't have water to drink. We got to the doldrums, and guess what? Didn't rain.

• 24:58Alice Levine?

  Stop it.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Didn't rain for three days. We said, what the bloody hell is this?

• 25:02Alice Levine?

  Douglas.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  But we knew it was too late, we couldn't go back. This was the plan that had to work.

• 25:11Alice Levine?

  At this point, how many days have you been adrift?

• 25:14Speaker 05

  We were about ten days adrift. Maybe a little bit longer, twelve days, that sort of time. Sure enough, a week later, it rained, and it rained so heavily. And the joy of God's great gift, water. And maybe we got the first inkling then that we would, we could, we could survive. By this time, we'd caught the first turtle. The Baileys talk about this, killing turtles is not a very nice thing to do. But you have to eat. And it's the pecking order, I'm afraid. And he goes, well, I'll try then, because I'd killed a turtle, I'd managed to catch and kill this turtle, you know?

• 25:57Speaker 05

  And he slit its throat, Dougal did, and he drank the blood. And we realized that it's not salty, you can drink it.

• 26:08Matt Forde?

  Do you remember the taste of the?

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, it's horrible.

• 26:10Matt Forde?

  What like?

• 26:11Speaker 05

  It's like the Danes drink something called schnapps, potato schnapps. It's a bit like that, it hits you in the back of the throat about a few seconds after you've swallowed it. You can't do anything about it, you know what I mean? And you have to drink it quick because it coagulates, it, blood coagulates. So you have to, you have to, as soon as it gets a bit cold, it goes solid. So you have to knock it back. So it's like going, but we all drank it. And so we'd learned to catch turtles, we'd learned to, that we must hunt turtles. I remember watching a frigate bird fly down, the flying fish was skimming across the water.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  And this frigate bird swooped down and plucked it out of the air with its beak and flew off with it. And I turned to my dad and I said, you know, taking the piss that bird.

• 27:05Matt Forde?

  Just showing off.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, look what I can do, you know, where, where, where's your wings? Where's your beak? You know, you can't do any of that. And Dougal said something quite prophetic. He said, Douglas, he says, we, we have hands. And we have things. And with these things, we can make tools. And with those tools, we can bridge those millions of years that that frigate bird's got on us. And we'll catch these damn fish. And that's what we did.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. Thirty chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You've lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop, you have to find out what happens next. Then it's over. The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible, stories that speak to you.

• 28:07Alice Levine?

  On January twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-three, in Duckspree, Massachusetts, Patrick Clancy called nine one one. He had found his wife Lindsay badly injured and his three children dead and dying. What followed would become one of the most searing and complicated cases in recent memory, raising hard questions about motherhood, mental illness, and how far our justice system will go.

• 28:31Speaker 07

  To understand what really happened. I'm Candice DeLong, host of the podcast Killer Psyche. In our latest episode, we take you inside the case of Lindsay Clancy, the postpartum psychosis defence, the courtroom battle, and the trial that just ended in a stunning mistrial. Follow Killer Psyche wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Killer Psyche one week early and ad free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 29:13Matt Forde?

  Maurice and Marilyn were able to catch the odd turtle. And you've actually met them.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:17Matt Forde?

  So what were your first impressions of them? And did anything surprise you about them?

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, we were a bucco sailing family, right? And we were captain by Captain Bligh Dougal. And my long suffering mother, who was a nurse, who looked after her family and loved her family. And we were bound together by family obligation, whatever that is. Right. But Marilyn and Maurice were the exact opposite of us. You know, they were a loving couple and he was a very soft man. A loving, and it was clear that they loved each other and they were together. And I met them in 1975 and I tried to compare our two, two stories, you know?

• 30:06Speaker 05

  And I thought, well, you know, we survived because we had to, because Dougal told us we had to, you know? We were never going to give up because we were too scared to give up. But in Maurice's case, it was their love that kept them going. He was much older than her. He was a bit of a loner. The motivating power behind their survival was completely different than ours, but very similar in another way, in that we were a family who loved each other, despite what the rumors said, you know? They were a couple who loved each other. And I think Marilyn was the strong force in that relationship.

• 30:46Alice Levine?

  So they were cast away. They were adrift for 117 days. And, and your family survived 38. So what did you think of that number? Because you'd been through such a horror.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Well, you know what survivors do. They're the same and completely different, you know? So, well, you know, two of them for 114 days? Is that the same as six and 38 days? I don't know. Tell me, you know? We had a dinghy, so dinghies, when we were goners. They had a raft, you know, bloody luxury.

• 31:15Alice Levine?

  They had a lovely time.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Lovely time, you guys did, you know? And we laughed at each other because there's so many similarities, but so many differences. I mean, they were north of Galapagos Islands. They didn't have the luxury of the doldrums. They didn't know enough either about the, the world to have a plan. They were drifting. They hadn't been picked up. They, they were goners, you know? I mean, it was, they couldn't steer the boat. It was just blown before the wind and sea, but they managed to stay alive. And they did have longer to get their stuff off. They, they had an hour before the yacht sank. I remember Maurice telling me about blowing the, I said, why didn't you blow it up with your mouth? He says, well, I never thought of that.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  Because they had, they had, they had a pump, you see? But the pump was so much hard work. I said, you know what I did? I cut the bloody pipe off and just blew it with my mouth, you know? Well, it's too late now, isn't it? You know, but I mean, how many people can sit down with and say, well, how did you catch your shark then, you know? And we caught it in exactly the same way. We had a hook in our shark, whereas they didn't. They had a pet shark and they then turned on the pet net.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  I thought we were friends. Not anymore, mate. You're coming ashore for dinner.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  And that, but you're dragged by the tail. You lift it up by the tail, the shark can't move. Who knows that? You don't know it till you do it. And then you realise the shark can't actually move because it's too heavy. That's why they live in the water, because they're too heavy to live on land. And you pull them up, oh, it's not moving. Pull it in, cut its head. We, for us, we cut its head off and, and the damn thing bit me, you know? Just the head, it like that bit me. And up to a few years ago, I used to have the teeth marks across the back of my fingers, but I can't find them anymore. It's either my sight's going or the, or they're healing up, you know? But we had a lot in common. We were able to share this wonder, this experience that we'd been through,

• 33:14Speaker 05

  where, as he put it, you know, our neighbours were the fish in the birds. And we'd come to terms with that. They're not bad neighbours. You just have to understand the rules, right? If they'll eat you if you're not careful and, and you will eat them if they're not careful, you know? I mean, those are the rules, like, but once you get those rules sort of established, you can live with each other. The beauty, the absolute beauty which Maurice reflected on.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Marilyn was a more tough, she was a tougher sort of practical, more pragmatic person.

• 33:49Alice Levine?

  Do you think something that made Maurice and Marilyn able to be tough was the fact that your story had gone before? Do you think you're in their mind? Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  I think so. It can be done. This is not futile. It can be done. Whereas we were saying, why are we doing this?

• 34:04Alice Levine?

  There's no precedent.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  There's nobody survives this sort of stuff. You know, it's just a matter of time before we go. And there were so many close calls, but we survived.

• 34:17Matt Forde?

  What do you think, as well as a bit of luck, is the most important thing people need to survive a scenario like that?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  There's got to be a reason for survival. And my mum and dad's reason was to save their children. They'd put their children in this position and they're overriding force. She said, Dougal said, I'll not rest till I get you on a steamer home. And he meant that. He said himself, I could have quite easily died out there. It's hard work. There's no point in it. You're never going to survive this anyway. It would have been easy to give up. You've got to keep going. Where there's life, there's hope. You've got to just keep going, perseverance, because you've got many setbacks, but you can't give up. You've got to come back to the plan. What is my plan? Well, our plan was to get to the Costa Rican coast.

• 35:06Speaker 05

  When we got picked up, we were six days off the Costa Rican. We would have been there in six more days, you know? So our plan was actually coming together, so to speak. Whereas Maurice and Marilyn were drifting off into the westerly, that, that long trip to the Marquesas, they were drifting in that direction. There, there would have been little hope.

• 35:26Alice Levine?

  We're talking about survival. A key component of survival is the rescue. So can you tell us about, about what happened in those final days? And, and when, when you were found or when you found help?

• 35:37Speaker 05

  Well, in, in, as I said, you know, there's a lot of differences and a lot of similarities in our survival, along with the Baileys. But this is one, one of the things that we share, like a common ground, is the return to civilisation.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  It's the best day of your life, isn't it? I mean, this, Dougal described it as a pinnacle of contentment he would never reach again. Because you can't, you cannot reach a pinnacle of contentment beyond somebody saying,

• 36:10Speaker 05

  after all that struggle, here's your reward, your life back, you know? And our day came. We were, we'd lost the water through our own fault. We'd lost all our water and we managed to, that morning, that very morning, on the 38th day, we'd topped up the water. And we thought, well, we could start rowing again now at night time when it's quiet, when the water's quiet, we start rowing. How far is it to go? 300 miles, six days? Bloody hell, we're nearly home, you know? And so talk returned to Dougal's kitchen. And Dougal was saying that, you know, we should, could get a wine licence because

• 36:51Speaker 05

  we've talked about everything else. We talk about wine, if we get a wine licence. Yes, of course, you know? And Dougal was an expert on wines. He sort of knew what they were. We were talking about that and, and he said, there's a ship over there.

• 37:09Speaker 05

  And we carried on talking. And I said to him, Dad, did you just say, there's a ship over there? He said, yes. Yes, there's a ship over there. Right. Right. So we're just in the dinghy. There's no buoyancy. So we couldn't afford to have the waves come over the side of it. We, we only had about four inches, only sticking out about of the sea, about that much. And we had the, the box, this wooden box that we'd kept, the one I'd bailed the dinghy out with, that we kept the flares. And Dougal says, right, Douglas, go forward, trim the boat, take the sail down. Dougal took the sail down. He stood on the thwart. He said, pass me a flare.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  So I took the flare, flare number one, passed it up to him. And he, he held the flare up, a load red in the, in, it was about four o'clock in the afternoon. And we looked at the ship and the ship didn't alter course, just kept going and and in the end he threw this, threw the flare. Little did we know that somebody had seen that. And they, they, the ship altered course by about twenty degrees, not enough. Is it coming or not? Get me another flare, the last flare, said it's the last one, Dad. And he tried to light that and it wouldn't light. And, but the ship altered another twenty degrees.

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Said, I think it's coming, Dad, I think it's coming.

• 38:38Alice Levine?

  Oh my God.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  And, and then she, she altered course and came straight to us. And Dougal's flopped down in the bottom of the boat and he says, you know, he says, I think our ordeal is over. I think it's over. And that boat, the Tokomaru Two, came, she was on us in minutes, it seemed. And they threw this dirty rope across to us. And I grabbed hold of that dirty rope and I looked at that dirty oily rope. And I thought, that rope belongs to a world that I am no longer part of, but I'm about to be reunited with.

• 39:24Alice Levine?

  I can really sense that you can put yourself back there. When you think about that, I really feel like you can, you can feel the rope, you can, you can see the turn of the boat. I mean, it's still very emotional.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can't get over it, can you? You can't really get over something like this. Even though it's a good look, it's a good story. It's, it's a story of having your life, mankind returning your life, another mankind delivering your life back to you. The best thing that men do, when you think of all the bad things they do. Here, we're a Japanese fishing boat. And I had the great good fortune in the spring of twenty four, twenty twenty four, to be reunited with the captain of the ship that saved us. And he's eighty eight years old. And he, he said to me, and he said, he spoke, but my friend spoke fluent Japanese and he

• 40:20Speaker 05

  spoke obviously only Japanese. He says, you, you're doing well, Douglas, he says, you're doing well. I said, why does he say that? He says, because you're so fat. Because Japanese people are all thin, aren't they, you know? And when I met him, I pulled him in like this and I said, I want to say on behalf of myself and forty five other people who are not here today, thank you for our lives, for giving us our lives back. And he said, well, I'll never forget you either. And I said, but I've got a question to ask. So why didn't you come and pick us up straight away? Why did you alter course twenty and then twenty?

• 41:04Speaker 05

  And he said, well, I looked at you through the binoculars, I couldn't see what it was. I thought, maybe pirates, maybe you were pirates. He said, and then I saw the red flare. So I said, you did see the red flare then? He said, yeah, we saw the red flare. He says, but we thought that's a typical trick a pirate would play. He says, but the lookout, he also had binoculars, could see a woman and two children. He says, no, I know pirates don't have women and two children on board. He says, I knew you must have been, you must be survivors, shipwrecked, been shipwrecked. He says, I kept, put the engine on full steam ahead and came to get you.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  He said, and you know, I thought, well, the sentiment's fantastic, but we've already been thirty eight days adrift, you know?

• 41:56Matt Forde?

  You must have been starving. So what, do you remember any of the first meals you had?

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Well, uh, we couldn't eat and we couldn't drink. I mean, we were, because we were, our bodies were tortured, like, but we were four days to get to Panama City. And in that four days, we got used to drinking water and used to eating food again. And then they put us in a American hotel, a twenty four hour cafe service.

• 42:22Matt Forde?

  Every boy's dream.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Every boy, especially a survivor. And they had steak and egg breakfast. And I had four of those. And I was as sick as a pig, you know? I didn't care. I was lying in those mattresses with a pillow and just laughing to myself. Bloody wonderful.

• 42:51Alice Levine?

  How did it change you as a family? How, how did the experience change you and how did doing that and surviving that together change you?

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Well, that's a good question because the answer was surprising. Because my mum and dad were wracked with guilt about what had happened. And, and I used to say to them, look, we're all here, we survived, you did it. We should never have done it. We should never have taken you on that trip. It was reckless and foolhardy. My mum wanted to go back to farming. Dougal said he would never go back to farming, it was too hard a life. Long and short of it was Dougal wrote a book, a worldwide bestseller, and he changed his life, he lived a different life. And he left us, he went to, he bought another yacht and went to the Mediterranean.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  I went to sea. I was shipwrecked again in nineteen seventy five aboard the British Ambassador in the Pacific Ocean. But it was only three days then, and we'd sent out an SOS. And I, of course, was the old hand, said, you guys don't need to worry about anything, we will be picked up very soon. And the twins and my mum took up farming. And my mum managed to, with the proceeds of Dougal's book, they'd managed to buy a farm. And so life returned to a new normal, really. My dad died of cancer in nineteen ninety two.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  And my mum looked after him for the last three years of his life. You know, it doesn't matter what you do in life. Sometimes bonds are made that are so strong, but nothing can break them. And for all they, they, they went through, Dougal and Linda, they had saved their family. They had got them home in what was an impossible task. They'd come to terms with it in their way. That's all I can say.

• 44:56Matt Forde?

  And did it change your philosophy on life or your approach to it, your belief about what it's for?

• 45:01Speaker 05

  I think so, but I think as a young boy, you're growing up and you get lots of different influences on you, you know? But the, the message I have to give to anybody who cares to listen is that you have to live your life because you only get one shot at it. And you can't always figure it out, you have to let it happen to you sometimes. And I have, my sister says, I've had nine lives. She says, you're like a cat, Douglas, you've had, took nine completely different lives. I've never been frightened to do something, to take something on. And when my son had, my son had an accident, motorbike crash and he got brain damage from it.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  And I had to fly to Australia on the evening of Christmas Eve, two thousand and four, because they said he'd been killed. And, but he hadn't and I spoke to the doctor. And I thought to myself while I was flying out, I thought, this is my survival of the savage sea. This is, I've got to find a solution for an impossible problem. Somehow I've got to save the life of my son. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it. And I went there and I, it wasn't long before I was counselling other people in the hospital who had their children in there, who were losing their children.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  And they said, can you please talk to this couple, they're, they're, they're losing their son, that, to help them come to terms with that. And I was coming to terms with my own son, you know, but he was alive, my son was alive. And he, he did survive. And I watch him today, I mean, he's disabled, severely disabled, and I watch him try to go to the toilet and have to feed him and, and I look at him and I, I see the struggle he has in his life. And I see him dealing with that as I dealt with the raft, as Dougal dealt with the raft. You can develop it like a personal trait, you know, that you, you, you don't give up,

• 47:12Speaker 05

  that you keep fighting, that you, where there's life, there's hope, you try and stay alive for as long as you can. These are messages I pass on to people, you know, and this is not a problem. No matter how big this problem looks right now, it's not a problem really. We've just got to find our way around it. There's a way around this problem. And we just think hard enough, come up with an answer. You can't let the first failure knock you down. You just get up and try again from a different side.

• 47:40Alice Levine?

  Douglas, that is such an inspiring story.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 47:43Alice Levine?

  Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Extraordinary.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 47:47Alice Levine?

  Thank you to the incredible Douglas Robertson for sharing his story. Still so much emotion there, really, I could have spoken to him all day. Matt, we must move on. What do you have for me next?

• 48:00Matt Forde?

  Okay, well, it's sort of a departure from the sea. Rations do play a part, but not sea turtles.

• 48:05Alice Levine?

  Okay, so war?

• 48:07Matt Forde?

  Yes, well done. But which one? It involves a dictator.

• 48:11Alice Levine?

  That really narrows it down there, doesn't it?

• 48:13Matt Forde?

  Okay, it also involves spies, a dead body and a very important briefcase.

• 48:18Alice Levine?

  Oh my God, is it a musical?

• 48:20Matt Forde?

  It is a musical.

• 48:21Alice Levine?

  Is it Operation Mincemeat?

• 48:23Matt Forde?

  It is Operation Mincemeat. I was worried you were going to guess The Lion King for a second there, but we are going back to World War Two and the story of two desk-bound officers who never fired a shot but saved thousands of lives. They cooked up one of the most audacious deceptions in military history, convincing Hitler that the Allies were invading the wrong country using a corpse.

• 48:44Alice Levine?

  It's incredible, can't wait to do this one. From Audible Originals and Samizdat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Shipwrecked Marriage. British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine.

• 48:56Matt Forde?

  And me, Matt Ford.

• 48:57Alice Levine?

  For Samizdat, the producer was Louise Mason. Our series producer was Chica Reyes. Our senior producers were Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisatsina. Executive producers for Audible were Theodora Leludis and Estelle Doyle.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  For decades, two legendary brands fought for the hearts of American bikers, Indian Motorcycle and Harley-Davidson. The battle looked a lot like Coke versus Pepsi or Ford versus Chevy, but tastes changed and Indian didn't adapt fast enough. The icon all but died. Then came the con men, the dreamers, a string of spectacular failures that kept Indian in the grave, until one company finally got it right. This is the story of an improbable revival and the reignition of an old rivalry. Hey, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast Business Wars. And every season we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world. Indian's new owners are going all in, but an existential crisis looms. Can Indian and Harley recruit enough younger riders to survive?

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. There are books that change how you see the world and there are books that change how you see yourself. In a new podcast series, A Great Book with Barack Obama, President Obama sits down with a series of surprising and sharp guests to explore six books that have shaped his life and perspective on the world. From Song of Solomon and the Fire Next Time, to All the Pretty Horses and Gilead, the president is joined by guests like Tom Hanks and Ta-Nehisi Coates to reflect on how these

• 50:46Speaker 03

  timeless stories shaped his thinking on everything from fatherhood to leadership and discover together what they tell us about the world we live in and the world we want to create. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of A Great Book with Barack Obama ad-free right now, plus access each audiobook discussed in the series. Download the Audible app today.