'We Saved The Niagara's Gold'

Some recent reading matter.  This is one of the batch of twenty three issues of Wide World that I got cheaply on eBay last year, (they cover Feb to Dec 62 and all of 1964).  This is the September 1962 issue, which I've recently been reading.  A British men's magazine, Wide World, like its US equivalents, claimed that the adventure stories it published were all true.  Obviously, this is something I've always been sceptical about, especially as many of the stories seem either somewhat far fetched, or too generic.  To be fair to Wide World, a fair number of their stories are actually extracts or condensations of non-fiction books, giving them a degree of veracity.  This is certainly the case with regard to the cover story on this issue: 'We Saved Niagara's Gold'.  This is a lengthy extract from the biography of a renowned deep sea diver who had been involved in the recovery of gold bullion from the sunken liner SS Niagara during World War Two.  From the, fairly cursory, research I've done on the subject, the story seems to be pretty accurate in its details of the actual incident.  Even the striking cover painting has a basis in fact - the Niagara had been sunk by a German mine, one of a field laid by a German merchant raider, which the crew of the salvage ship also had to contend with, including one which, as illustrated had to be disentangled from the ship's anchor chain by a diver.

The rest of the stories in the issue are a typical mix of outdoors adventure stories, daring escapades and encounters with savage natives, from around the world.  (At this time, Wide World's contents list preceded story titles with their location - 'New Zealand - We Saved Niagara's Gold', for instance).  They include a Cold War story involving a train bound escape from East Germany, another Cold War related tale involving a British merchant ship's voyage behind the Iron Curtain to a remote Soviet port, an outdoors ranching story set in Canada (which is one of a series, all of which sound like apocryphal tall tales to me), an Aboriginal uprising in Australia, a tale of daring early aviators in the states, an historical story from South America, (which again reads like an apocryphal story) and a story of a daring airborne escape in Liberia.  A new feature for this issue was the addition of an editorial ahead of the stories, which effectively provides a digest of various relevant developments in the real world and updates on the adventures of previous contributors.  All-in-all a pretty typical issue of Wide World during this era.  The stories themselves also are written in a style typical of male-orientated fiction for this era - full of stiff upper lipped masculine heroes unshakably confident of the superiority of the white middle class male over foreign johnnies, natives and women.  It's all, by today's standards, quite amusing to encounter these attitudes, born of an Imperial glory that, even by the time they were written, had long ago faded into dust, frozen in time.   That said, the stories are often full of interesting detail and, the ones actually based on fact at least, often throw light on some now forgotten historical incidents.