Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout

  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.

  In Europe, the breaststroke became, for all intents and purposes, swimming. Over time more and more people learned the stroke. Because one could swim the stroke while still clothed, and even then the bulk of the body remained underwater, hidden from view, with only the head above the surface, the breaststroke did not offend moral sensibilities. Although the stroke was easy to learn and required relatively little effort to stay afloat, it was not particularly efficient or fast, as one soon tired of keeping the head unnaturally raised above the water. Its use was almost exclusive to calmer waters—protected bays, sleepy rivers, ponds, and private baths.

  No one purposely swam in the open ocean, far from shore where waves could make keeping the head out of water difficult and exhaustion caused by swimming while clothed was dangerous. That was considered madness. The notion that anyone might one day swim a distance as great as that of the English Channel seemed as likely as man one day reaching the moon.

  For almost as long as men and women have gazed across the Channel they have also schemed and dreamed about various ways to cross it. For centuries dreamers had imagined one day digging a tunnel beneath the Channel, while others prophesied that humans would one day cross the Channel in the air, like the birds that flew over its waters so effortlessly. Yet despite these dreams, until the late eighteenth century, passage by boat remained the only possible way of crossing the Channel. Then, in 1782, two French brothers, Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier, heralded a new mode of travel.

  The brothers, who operated a paper mill, noticed that not only did the smoke from their operation rise into the air, but when one brother filled a paper bag with smoke, it too rose in the sky. Inspired, the two brothers concluded that if they could build a bag large enough and fill it with heated air, it might be possible to lift a man into the sky.

  After nearly a year of experimentation, on June 4, 1783, they succeeded in building an unmanned balloon that rose more than a mile into the air, and within a few months they succeeded in lifting a man off the ground.

  The accomplishment spawned a period of something approaching balloon-mania among the public, and soon dozens of other Frenchmen were not only copying the brothers, but trying to improve upon their design. These early balloonists soon discovered that not only could they rise in the air, but once aloft the balloon could be driven by the winds and provide an utterly new way to travel. After a series of successful flights on land, for these early balloonists a trip across the English Channel became the obvious and undeniable goal.

  Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard succeeded in doing just that. After building his own balloon and making a series of land-based flights, he traveled to England to make his attempt. On January 7, 1785, with another balloonist on the French side of the Channel waiting for favorable weather to launch his own balloon and make his own crossing, Blanchard and an American doctor, John Jeffries, who had served as a British Army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, took to the air at Dover Castle.

  Catching the prevailing wind, the balloon floated eastward and success seemed certain. Then the balloon suddenly began losing air and plummeted toward the sea. For a time the two men feared that they would land in the Channel and drown, for neither could swim, and the cold Channel waters promised a quick death.

  They saved themselves. The two had filled the passenger basket with ballast and all sorts of memorial cargo, including a packet of mail to be delivered from England to France. As the balloon dropped they started tossing items overboard as quickly as possible, including most of their own heavy clothing, which they had needed to stay warm on the long crossing. Not until the two men were stripped down to street clothes did the balloon stop dropping and begin a slow but steady rise into the air. Everything else, save the packet of mail, had been thrown overboard.

  Two and a half hours after they first took to the air the balloon finally came back to earth in France, landing roughly in the Fellmores Forest. The Channel had not only been crossed, but crossing the Channel—by any means—now became the world standard of adventure, an accomplishment that all but guaranteed fame and fortune.

  Balloonists on each side of the Channel scrambled first to match Blanchard's achievement, then better it by building bigger balloons that could rise higher and drift both farther and more quickly, or carry more cargo and more and more passengers. In only a few decades crossing the Channel by balloon became nearly as safe and commonplace as crossing the waters by boat.

  Adventurers on both coasts looked across the Channel and soon began to dream of yet another challenge.

  3. Highlands

  TRUDY DID NOT like it, not one little bit.

  Standing in the sand looking at her sisters, Helen and Meg, laugh and splash about and swim in the warm waters and gentle surf of the Shrewsbury River estuary in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Trudy's face was fixed in a deep pout, a frown upon her lips.

  Just a few months before, her father, Heiner Ederle, a successful Manhattan butcher, had purchased a small summer cottage in Atlantic Highlands. The Highlands was virtually surrounded by water, hemmed in by the ocean on one side and the Navesink River and Shrewsbury River estuary on the other, with Sandy Hook, a barrier beach, protecting the Highlands from the turbid waters of the open ocean. From the front porch of the Ederles' small cottage, which was only a few dozen yards from the water, one could not help but
see the ocean, and the beach was only a few steps away.

  Yet for Trudy Ederle, at age nine the youngest of Ederle's three young daughters, the view was nothing but a tease. She could not swim, and because she could not swim she was not allowed to go alone with her two older sisters to the beach, to play and splash in the water with other children. While her sisters frolicked with other kids in water and let the waves toss them about, Trudy had to either stay home or wade in water below her knees. Margaret—Trudy always called her Meg—and Helen were allowed to go farther out where they could dive under the water and bob around like corks. During a recent visit to Germany, where each spent hours with their many cousins and other relatives at a familiar swimming hole, both Meg and Helen had learned to swim, mastering the dog paddle and the breaststroke. Trudy had gone to the swimming hole, too, but once, when she was playing in the water and everyone was turned around and looking the other direction, she had slipped in just over her head and had to be pulled out, sputtering, to shore. She hadn't come close to drowning, not really, but it had given her father and mother a start, and now they were protective, maybe even overprotective, of their youngest daughter.

  Trudy didn't think it was fair that Meg and Helen could go to the beach and that she could not unless either her father or mother or one of her many aunts and uncles was with her. She particularly didn't think it was fair that she couldn't go with Meg. She worshipped her older sister, who had doted on her as she was growing up as if she were a special doll all her own, and now Trudy followed Meg everywhere and tried to do everything Meg did.

  Now she sat roughly in the sand and began taking out her disappointment by digging into it with a stick—well, it just wasn't fair. Why, she must have wondered, did they even bother coming to the Highlands instead of staying home in New York, when she wasn't allowed to go to the beach and go swimming?

  The fact that Heiner Ederle owned a summer home in the Highlands was a measure of just how successful he had become since immigrating to America twenty-five years before. He had arrived in 1892 as a sixteen-year-old after a one-week journey on the steamship Havel of the North German Lloyd Line. One of twenty children, for twenty hard-earned dollars he had left his family behind and booked passage in steerage for the trip from Bremen to New York, spending most of the voyage crammed on a noisy lower deck with little sanitation, poor food, and no privacy. When the ship approached New York Harbor on the morning of May 25, 1892, Ederle's first glimpse of America was likely the hills that gave Highlands its name, for the first sight most immigrants from Europe gained of the United States was not the Statue of Liberty or the skyline of Manhattan, but the dark silhouette of what geologists know as the Atlantic Highlands in New Jersey. The most prominent headland along the Atlantic coast south of the state of Maine, the Highlands rise more than two hundred feet above sea level, topped by the massive, brownstone lighthouse known as Twin Lights, then the brightest lighthouse in North America. Ocean travelers could detect Twin Lights' glow while still seventy miles from shore. At twenty miles the lights themselves became visible, and soon after one could see land. If Heiner Ederle, who soon after arriving at Ellis Island would anglicize his name to Henry, was looking for a sign that his journey to America would prove to be both wise and profitable, the Highlands would be that sign. His first view of the United States would point him toward his family's destiny.

  When he arrived in New York, Ederle found a welcoming environment. There was already a large, vibrant, and supportive German-American community, and unlike among other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, most German immigrants were craftsmen or semiskilled workers. Although Henry Ederle listed his occupation as "laborer" on the manifest of the Havel, in Bissingen, Germany, he had worked on the Ederle family farm and inn, gaining both a wide variety of work experience and a strong work ethic.

  Soon after he arrived in New York, Ederle, who had always helped butcher the family livestock, found work as a delivery boy and apprentice butcher in a small butcher shop at no Amsterdam Avenue, between Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth streets on the Upper West Side, near the piers that delivered livestock to Manhattan. Instead of living in a German enclave like Kleindeutschland, Henry Ederle took a room nearby. In only a few years he was able to buy out the proprietor and open the store under his own name. After he sent letters back home describing the opportunity that awaited those who immigrated to America, a number of cousins, siblings, and other relatives joined him in New York, many on prepaid tickets purchased either by Ederle or by the growing Ederle clan in America, and went to work for him at the butcher shop.

  By the early 1900s Ederle was in business with his brother Johann, or John. Although the business began as a simple butcher shop, before long Ederle Brothers Meats was producing its own sausages and other specialty meats craved by new immigrants hungry for a taste of the old country.

  In 1903 Henry Ederle married twenty-year-old German immigrant Gertrud Haverstroh, from Königsberg, East Prussia, which is now a part of Russia. A short time later their first child, Helen, was born. Another daughter, Margaret, soon followed, and on October 23, 1905, a third daughter, Gertrude Caroline, was born.

  There was nothing remarkable about the young child, who almost everyone called Trudy, apart from the robust health that character ized most of the Ederles, many of whom traditionally lived into their eighties or nineties. But in 1910 when Trudy was only five years old, that all changed.

  An outbreak of measles swept the city and, in a crowded urban environment like New York, nearly reached epidemic stage, a problem local health officials blamed, in all likelihood erroneously, on the constant influx of new immigrants. No vaccines yet existed to control such ailments, and the mechanisms of viral diseases such as polio and measles were poorly understood. Trudy Ederle was one of the thousands of New York youngsters to contract the disease.

  At first, she didn't feel bad at all, for the measles virus strikes with little warning. But over the course of only a few hours Trudy was seized by a high fever accompanied by congestion, watery eyes, and a rash that began on her cheeks and spread over her entire body, causing her mother to put her to bed and try to keep her other children from getting the disease.

  Then, as now, once measles sets in there is little to be done. Trudy was feverish, and her mother placed cool towels on her forehead and wiped her arms and legs with cool water, praying for the fever to break. For most children afflicted with measles, the fever is by far the most hazardous symptom, as it can sometimes rise to dangerous levels. If a fever is not controlled, temperatures above 105 degrees for an extended period of time can cause irrevocable brain damage.

  After her mother spent a few sleepless nights caring for her, Trudy's fever broke and she appeared to recover, apparently none the worse. But over the next few weeks her family realized that Trudy had not emerged unscathed.

  They began to notice subtle changes in the way she acted and behaved. Street noise and the clatter of city life seemed to distract her. She sometimes "misheard" what was said and began to speak louder than normal. When everyone was talking at once—a common occurrence at family get-togethers when German and heavily accented English flew back and forth across the dinner table in overlapping conversations, Trudy seemed confused. It soon became apparent that she simply didn't hear very well anymore.

  As soon as her parents realized what was happening, they rushed their daughter to a doctor. She had an ear infection and hearing loss caused by her bout with measles. Although doctors at the time knew there was some connection between the two events, they didn't really understand how the illness affects hearing. The disease had caused a blockage in her Eustachian tubes, which allow fluid and mucous to drain, and regulate pressure between the middle ear and the outside atmosphere. When Trudy's tubes became blocked, bacteria became trapped in the middle ear, causing an infection, known as otitis media, leading to a buildup of fluid that dampens the efficient transfer of sound energy, first resulting in a temporary hearing loss. While such infections are com
mon in children, today they can usually be successfully treated with antibiotics. When that fails, minor surgery to provide ventilation to the middle ear usually solves the problem, and when the infection clears, hearing returns to normal.

  Unfortunately, none of these options were yet available to Trudy Ederle. Her ear infection lingered, turning a small problem into a much more serious and permanent condition. The infection spread to surround the three bones of the inner ear and further suppressed her ability to hear. Within only a few weeks the chronic infection caused permanent damage to her eardrum, the bones of the ear, and even the nerves, resulting in a significant and permanent loss of hearing.

  Although Trudy's doctors were able to diagnose the condition, they were powerless to reverse the damage. Although her hearing loss was significant and more profound in her right ear, she was fortunate that she could already speak and she retained enough hearing that she was not yet significantly disabled. She was still able to live a normal life.

  Trudy resumed her usual activities, but now she and Meg grew even closer. Meg understood that Trudy sometimes had difficulty hearing, and she became adept at helping her sister without making it obvious, for example, by repeating others' statements back to Trudy and asking if she agreed or not, rather than simply repeating the statements and drawing attention to her sister's malady.

  Meanwhile, Ederle Brothers Meats was a resounding success. By 1910 the family could employ a servant girl to help with chores and look after the children, which after the birth of a son, George, in 1911, and another daughter, Emma, two years later, now numbered five and would eventually grow to include seven. Gertrud, who had helped out behind the counter in the butcher shop, was able to give up that task and become a full-time homemaker. Although the butcher shop maintained a retail storefront, Ederle Brothers Meats was also supplying sausages and other items to other retailers, something that was becoming an ever more important part of the business.