IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 33

Dan Dare encountered the 'Sargasso Sea of Space' in Reign of the Robots  and The Ship That Lived, but two years earlier in 1955, the American writer Alice Norton,under her pseudonym of 'Andrew North', wrote a novel which used the name, although not the idea. Dan Dare's Sargasso was a dead zone in space where damaged spaceships drifted and gathered. Norton's book features a planet from which a group of wreckers use sophisticated equipment to pull in ships, so that they can capture and loot them. The book was later reprinted and credited to Norton's more familiar 'nom de plume' of Andre Norton. Her book was not the first Sargasso of Space though. 

A 1931 novelette by Edmond Hamilton also used the title and in Hamilton's story the Sargasso is a dead zone in space full of wrecks of damaged ships. A ship commanded by a Captain Crain drifts into the zone when its fuel tanks leak and just like Dan Dare, Crain and his crew escape by taking fuel from another ship in the zone. It is quite possible that this story inspired the Sargasso incident in Reign of the Robots. Hamilton's story first appeared in the American Astounding Stories magazine which was imported into Britain and Australia before the War, so either Frank Hampson or the writer Alan Stranks (in Australia) might well have read it. The real Sargasso Sea is an area of the north western Atlantic where several currents meet and deposit marine plants and refuse. It is named after the Sargassum seaweed, which is found there in abundance. An old tradition of sailing ships becoming becalmed there is merely due to the calm winds of the Horse Latitudes.