The Great Wide Sea

The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea. As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about the reason for their father’s disappearance. The novel explores how children form different coping strategies to make sense of the loss of their loved ones, proposing that they can emerge from grief more resilient and connected than before.

The novel begins shortly after Mrs. Byron tragically dies in a car accident. Ben has a hard time coping with losing his mother, and barely remembers the last time he was happy. Meanwhile, the boys’ father tries to find a way for them all to constructively process their grief as a family. He decides to take them out of school to spend a year sailing from the U.S. coast to the Bahamas. Ben, Gerry, and Dylan commit to the plan reluctantly, unsure how moving away from their friends will improve their lives.

The boys and their father travel to Florida and acquaint themselves with their rental vessel, a slightly shoddy sailboat called the Chrysalis. Ben and his brothers are skeptical that the boat is fit for a voyage to the Bahamas, but their father assures them it is fine. As they set sail, they have a hard time getting along in the close quarters and with the added stresses of ensuring they are heading in the right direction. Ben’s father takes the role of “captain” despite his limited sailing experience, and is hard on the boys at first. However, the family soon becomes a well-functioning team, improving their optimism about the voyage.



One morning, Ben wakes up to find his father missing from the boat. In disbelief, he searches it thoroughly, though it is too small to hide anyone. The other boys wake and search for clues as to his disappearance. Dylan finds a poem on their father’s bed, which he interprets as a suicide note. Dylan rejects his interpretation, arguing that their father must have taken a fall during the night. Before they can come to terms with his loss, the boys are confronted by a huge storm. Ben and Dylan struggle to take control of the ship’s controls in the thrashing wind, while Gerry, too young to help, tries to take refuge. Despite their best efforts, the boys crash near a deserted island. As the Chrysalis capsizes, they use a tiny dinghy to escape to the island.

On the island, Ben and his brothers find themselves without enough food and water provisions to survive for long. Scavenging for food, Dylan falls off a cliff during an attempt to obtain some hawk eggs, breaking his leg. Ben tries to perform emergency surgery, but botches the attempt, and the wound does not fully heal. Dylan develops an infection, compelling Ben to make a last-ditch effort to find help. He builds a makeshift raft out of the pieces of the dinghy and floats out to sea with the last of their food rations. Just as he begins to lose hope, he crosses paths with a boat. The passengers pull him aboard, and they search for the island where Dylan and Gerry lay in wait. They rescue Dylan in time to heal his infection. Miraculously, they reconnect with their father, who had, indeed, fallen off the boat and been adrift at sea for hours before being rescued.

Ben feels little gratitude towards his father for bringing them on such a perilous journey. He nearly abandons the family altogether to get a job as a ship hand, refusing to board the flight back home. Just as they begin to drive away, he changes his mind and runs after them. The story ends an indefinite time later when the family buys a boat to sail on the lake near their home. The Great Wide Sea ends with this symbolic return to the boat where Ben and his brothers embarked on their journey to process their mother’s loss, suggesting that while grief may work its way permanently into one’s life, it need not be futile or endured alone.