St Mary's Harbour, Isles of Scilly, c 1850

The current issue of the Marine Quarterly, Autumn 2024, is number 55. During our lifetime we have published some 900 stories, and established the MQ as  a new kind of journal, reporting subjects of strong interest to everyone who goes on or thinks about the sea. It is full of big, authoritative articles on sailing, fisheries, adventuring, merchant shipping, conservation, natural history, heritage, trade, naval matters, nautical books, and anything else connected with salt water.

Our contributors are people who know how to tell a good story well. Topics have included the reminiscences of a nervous gap-year student who found himself sailing to Greenland with the adventurer Bill Tilman; an account of the Thames barge and its modern descendants in the coasting trade; instructions on how to swim the Channel; the strange case of the Cutty Sark; Naval unpreparedness down the years; travels with the plankton; murder in the Pacific; health and safety on Noah’s Ark; the infamous Shetland mackerel laundry;  childbirth at sea; navigating the Thames by unpowered lighter; the deeply informal beginnings of Caribbean chartering; fish farming past, present and future;  sustainable tuna fishing under sail; the sea life of T S Eliot and the vagaries of Hilaire Belloc; the appalling story of the development of submarines; the Invergordon Mutiny; the private life of the sperm whale; and an occasional ‘how to’ series, giving instructions on such important matters as sailing round Cape Horn, invading the Falklands, wintering in Antarctica, parking a supertanker, running a superyacht and camping on Rockall. We have also printed fiction new and old. For further details, take a look at the extracts page.

The Marine Quarterly is also keen to remind its readers of great sea writers who have slid over the horizon. We have already reprinted excerpts from (to name but a few) George Millar, the intrepid but relaxed Ernest Gann, the brilliant Alf Loomis, as well as Hammond Innes, Bill Tilman, Edward Allcard, Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, Wilfred Thesiger and the mighty adventurer and doubtful speller Captain Klebingat.

The current issue is published in September. There will be further issues quarterly hereafter – the next will be sent out during the first fortnight of December 2024. It is hardly necessary to point out that a gift subscription makes a fine present that lasts all year.

Subscribers who would like to buy back issues should visit our Back Issues page. To help readers who are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the MQ’s output, we have recently published an INDEX to the first ten years, also available on the Back Issues page.