Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (3 page)

As the fire grew it created a terrible dilemma for some. Mothers had to choose between the prospect of burning to death with their children or jumping overboard with them into the waters of the East River. For most, the fear of fire proved more powerful than the fear of drowning. As the boat steamed toward North Brother Island, hundreds of passengers, one after the other, from all sides and all decks, leaped or were pushed into the water.

Most didn't have a chance. Only a handful of the passengers knew how to swim. It seems unbelievable today, but one hundred or so years ago the ability to swim was almost entirely unknown, a skill practiced by only a few men and virtually no women, for in the Victorian era swimming, for a woman, was considered immoral. Learning to swim was taboo.

By the time the boat lurched to a halt in the shallows of North Brother Island, hundreds had jumped overboard and already drowned, while hundreds more had burned to death as the decks began collapsing on one another. Yet hundreds more still remained aboard the vessel, and now the bow of the boat was buried in the sandy bottom only twenty feet offshore in seven feet of water, while the stern lay only fifty feet from shore in thirty feet of water. For those still huddling along the railing, safety was only a few strong swim strokes away.

For most, however, making it to land was as daunting and as likely as making it across the English Channel. Even those few who could swim were burdened by layer upon layer of heavy woolen clothing that acted like a straitjacket.

Still, they tried, mothers and sons and daughters alike. Human beings poured from the vessel, leaping and diving and even being thrown, and for a few moments the water around the boat was alive with people. Anna Weber, like most of the women, could not swim but neither could she convince herself to jump. She somehow found a rope dangling over the side and lowered herself into the water, but since she could not swim, even as the boat kept burning and she felt the flames begin to scorch her hair again, she held fast. She watched as everyone struggled to stay afloat, children grabbing onto their mothers in terror, but with each passing second one head after another slipped beneath the surface. The few who could swim and somehow managed to stay afloat despite their heavy garments had to fight off the desperate grips of those who did not.

Anna was one of the few lucky ones. A man who could swim—she never learned who—grabbed her and convinced her to let go of the rope and somehow pulled her to shore. But hundreds drowned within only a few yards of the beach, some in water so shallow that had they only thought to stand, they would have survived. Yet these nonswimmers were in such fear of the water that as soon as they hit the surface they immediately panicked, breathed in water, and drowned.

Soon screams of panic turned first to soft moans and then to silence, replaced by the crackling roar of the huge vessel fully engulfed in flame. In only fifteen minutes the
Slocum
burned to the waterline and then bobbed on the surface, steam and smoke rising in the air.

The scene on the beach at North Brother Island was horrific. Each wave delivered more and more bodies to the beach, while hundreds of bodies bobbed face down in the water. Most survivors did not scream or wail or cry, not yet, but stood or sat on the beach in stunned silence, in shock. Anna found her husband on the beach, alive, but nearly naked, his clothes burned off. But their two children were gone, as was her sister, brother, sister-in-law, and, save for the youngest, an infant who miraculously survived, her children as well.

With the carcass of the boat sitting so close to shore, it did not seem possible that so many had died. Captain Van Schaik, who managed to make his way to shore after running the boat aground, was incredulous at the carnage. "I do not understand," he said a short time later, "how so many were lost." While approximately 300 passengers survived, a total of 1, 021 victims were eventually recovered from both the boat itself, trapped under collapsing decks, and from the waters of the East River. Many of the drowned were found still clutching one another.

The disaster was the biggest single loss of life in the history of New York City at the time and remained so until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the vast majority of those who died were residents of Kleindeutschland, all New York mourned. The newspaper descriptions of the panic on board the vessel and the photographs of the bodies of so many women and children laid out on the gravel beach at North Brother Island were almost unbearable.

Women, in particular, were affected, for in the body of each mother and each son or daughter they saw themselves and saw just how random and pointless and unnecessary each death had been. While the government quickly reacted to the tragedy and concluded that the dead were victims not only of the greed of the company that operated the vessel, Van Schaik's poor decision, the cowardice of many crew members, and the corruption of Tammany Hall officials whose safety inspections of the vessel had taken place on paper only, the women of New York City and some other enlightened members of the public arrived at an even broader conclusion. While greed and corruption had certainly played a role in the tragedy, so too did an outdated and oppressive set of social mores that discouraged women from learning how to swim and take control of their own destiny. Most of those who had known how to swim—mostly male crew members and young men and boys—had survived. Those who did not know how to swim—mothers and young women and girls—had not.

It was murder, pure and simple—death by repression. They had been murdered as surely as if they had been tied to one another, fer ried far offshore, weighed down with stones, and dropped into the depths. The broken hoses, tattered life jackets, and inaccessible lifeboats did not, in the end, matter as much as the oppressive moral climate that prevented women from learning one of the most basic skills of survival. They never had a chance.

That realization, like a pebble dropped in the water that sends out a single small ripple, would, over time, grow into a mighty wave that would lift all women, sending one, Trudy Ederle, across the English Channel.

M
ARKED BY LAND'S END
on the southwest coast of England and the Strait of Dover to the east, the English Channel stretches some 350 miles in length, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that joins the Atlantic to the North Sea. Relatively shallow, with a depth that generally varies between 500 and 150 feet in mid-Channel, at its widest point the Channel is more than 150 miles across. Yet at its narrowest, the Strait of Dover between the English city of Dover and the French city of Calais, the Channel is only twenty-one miles wide. In good weather, one can stand on either shore and see across to the other side, making the crossing of the Channel a tantalizing prospect.

There are no witnesses to the first human crossing of the English Channel, no ancient account of daring celebrated in poetry or some other epic. Yet for as long as human beings have gazed across the English Channel toward the thin strip of land on the opposite horizon, they have dreamed of crossing it. Sometime after the last ice age ended nearly ten thousand years ago, the first boat crossing was made in a boat carved by means of stone tools from a great earthen log. This first trip was likely an accidental excursion that began in coastal marshes and pools in pursuit of game and fish before a rising tide and too-strong current pulled the boat and its occupants into the sea. After a number of hours or days adrift, they came to rest across the Channel on the opposite shore, where they were likely greeted with hostility by local residents, if not attacked and killed on the spot.

Over time, as boatbuilding and navigational skills increased, human beings learned to make this journey on purpose, and scholars agree that by 2000
B.C.
cross-Channel human contact was a more or less regular occurrence. Yet even as these crossings became commonplace, they were never without danger.

If one of these intrepid early travelers were knocked or swept overboard, unless he or she was able to grasp onto something that floated and reboard the vessel, death in the cold Channel waters was only a few moments away. If the entire ship was swamped and sunk, unless the vessel was very close to shore, exposure to the water meant certain death. That is because in all likelihood these early travelers shared the same deficit as the passengers on the
Slocum—
they could not swim. That ability was as lost and unavailable to them as the ability to breathe underwater or fly through the air like a bird.

Unlike many of our relatives in the animal kingdom, human beings, like other primates, cannot swim by instinct. Although a human baby will instinctively hold its breath when submerged and move about as if still immersed in amniotic fluid, the infant will make no attempt to surface and breathe. By the time children are only a year or two old, most have lost the instinct to hold their breath, which is why there are labels on buckets and pails that warn parents against leaving young children alone in proximity to anything that can hold even a few inches of water. Even a few moments under water can be enough to cause drowning.

Nevertheless, in some other, mostly warmer parts of the globe, human beings have been swimming for thousands of years, a skill they probably learned while looking for food along the shore and in the shallows. The earliest visual depiction of swimmers dates from the Stone Age, and swimmers are depicted on clay seals and bas-reliefs that date back to the beginning of civilization itself, as the Egyptians, Minoans, Assyrians, Greeks, and many other ancient cultures were known to swim, some apparently even using a version of the now familiar overarm stroke known as the "crawl" or, more commonly today, the "freestyle" stroke. In ancient Greece, surrounded by the warm waters of the Mediterranean, the swimming tradition was such a central part of Greek lifestyle and culture that one could not hold public office unless one knew how to swim.

After the fall of Greece, swimming remained popular under Roman rule, and, as the Roman Empire spread to Europe, the knowledge of how to swim, like that of sailing, was one of many cultural improvements exported to the nether reaches of the empire. In fact, a Marseilles-based Greek named Pitheas made the first known voyage by sail into the English Channel, and for the next two thousand years the boat remained the only way possible to cross the Channel.

Yet even as the Romans conquered most of western Europe, they did not pass on their knowledge of how to swim to the local population, and after Rome fell in the fourth century and the empire fractured and split apart, the ability to swim became an ever more elusive skill known to only a select few. To most Europeans, particularly of the peasant class, large bodies of water came to be objects of fear, the domain of monsters and other beasts real and imagined. Even smaller bodies of water such as rivers, streams, and swamps were viewed warily, the domain of unhealthy vapors and the cause of mysterious fevers, illnesses, and unexplained disappearances.

The ability to swim became a rare skill that was practiced in secret, if at all, and so charged with mystical significance that most people began to connect it with the supernatural. Trial by water—
indicium aquae—was
believed to be an infallible test to ferret out witches and others suspected of practicing the black arts. Suspected witches and wizards were thrown into the water, often while bound. If the accused sank and drowned, he or she was presumed to be innocent, while those who fought against their fate and kicked until they floated—in effect, until they swam—were instantly judged guilty and often executed. First performed in the ninth century, the practice was used throughout most of western Europe. Although it ceased to be an official English law under Henry III in 1219, for the next six centuries the ritual, also known as "swimming a witch," was still widely practiced in England and elsewhere.

Although swimming was a lost art among most Europeans, the skill did not entirely disappear—swimming was one of the seven skills required of knights. Yet most western Europeans were probably not even aware that human beings
could
swim without supernatural assistance.

By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries swimming had, in fact, all but disappeared in the western world. In the wake of the Protestant reformation, increasingly conservative moral values combined with simple superstition to make the act of swimming a virtual sin. To swim, one had to remove most, if not all, clothing, which was thought to lead inevitably to impure thoughts in regard to sex. Nakedness was so discouraged by both the Catholic and Protestant churches that even simple bathing was taboo. At Cambridge University any student caught swimming risked a public flogging, a fine, and a day in the stocks. People didn't learn to swim because there was no one to teach them.

It took the written word—and books—to begin to effect a change. The first book on swimming was published in 1538 by Nicolas Wynman, a German professor of languages, and entitled
A Dialogue on the Art of Swimming.
The volume provided rudimentary instruction in the breaststroke and presented swimming not as some mystery, but as a simple skill that could be acquired and learned. A second book,
L'Art de Nager (The Art of Swimming)
by the French author Melchisedech Thevenot, published in 1696, described the breaststroke in more detail, and after the book was translated into English it received wide distribution and became the standard swimming manual. In 1754 the physician Richard Russell further demystified swimming when he began prescribing seawater baths to patients and members of the nobility. Over the next hundred years or so swimming became more commonplace and more acceptable, although the practice of "swimming a witch" was still used by the ignorant in rural areas of England well into the nineteenth century.