Prize Sea Stories

Well, after all of this week's excitement and exhausting myself celebrating the beginning of the end of Boris Johnson's reign of terror, I feel that I should be lying down quietly in a darkened room.  Certainly, I've rather run out of steam for postings - two stories over at The Sleaze and three posts here have done for me in writing terms -  so I thought that I'd round the week off with a pulp cover.  As I've mentioned before, I've always been a sucker for sea stories, the pulpier and more sensational the better.  So here we have the Spring 1964 issue of Prize Sea Stories.  This was a very short lived magazine - it had only one other issue, Summer 1964.  It came pretty late in the men's magazine cycle, particularly with regard to specialist subject titles like maritime-based ones.  There's really little to say about this issue - going by the story titles it is the usual mix of war and adventure stories, but with a maritime theme.  The cover, depicting the sunken liner 'Andrea Doria', is quite magnificent.

The 'Andrea Doria', for those unaware, had sunk off the East Coast of the US some eight years before the publication of this issue, after being struck amidships, in thick fog, by a Swedish passenger ship, the 'Stockholm'.  Thanks to a major rescue operation, the majority of her passengers and crew survived.  The French liner SS 'Ile de France', notably, turned back from her Atlantic crossing, (having only recently left New York), to assist.  While the 'Andrea Doria' - the then pride of the Italian merchant fleet - might have sunk, the Swedish ship, which suffered damage to its bows, survived the incident and, as far as I know, is still in service today, (albeit under a different name and rebuilt into a cruise ship).  The 'Astoria', as she is now, is the oldest liner still in service.