A Shipwreck Story

 

Last week I promised to tell you more about my current work in progress. But first I’ll give you a little personal background.

As I also mentioned last week, the first time I crossed the Atlantic Ocean was on the Nova Scotia in September 1957. (The photo at the head of this post shows Mama, my brothers, and I in our cabin back in the days before selfies would have allowed Daddy to be in the picture, too.) I was six years old at the time and was afraid of many things, but I don’t remember worrying that the ship would sink.

That might have been different if I had heard about the shipwreck of the Andrea Doria just over a year earlier. My parents were well-informed about world events, but one of them might have said something like this to the other: “There is no reason to mention the Andrea Doria  to the children. The chances of shipwreck are extremely small, but Kathryn would be terrified if she knew about it.”

As an adult, I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Titanic At one point I considered writing a book about a protagonist traveling on that fateful voyage. One of my criteria for a historical novel is that there must be enough first-person accounts to make the book emotionally as well as historically accurate. The story of the Titanic has that.

Unfortunately, though, it has been overdone. One of my favorite contemporary authors of children’s historicals recently published a children’s novel that, in my opinion, isn’t up to her usual standards. It felt like she was trying too hard to create something that hadn’t been done before.

I looked around for other shipwrecks that might make a good story and chose the sinking of the Andrea Doria. It also has plenty of eyewitness accounts reported in books about the event, mostly taken from newspaper interviews or interviews conducted by the authors. Equally important, I found only one children’s book about it. There may be more, but a search on the Titanic brings up dozens.

Since my current work in progress is about a girl traveling on the Andrea Doria’s last voyage. I thought this would be a good time to reprint a former series of posts involving other fascinating shipwrecks involving passenger vessels. The others took place in the same decade, forty years before the Andrea Doria sunk, but I’ll start there anyway.

So stay tuned for next week’s post on the sinking of the Andrea Doria.