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

by Glenn Stout

  When Catherine Brown was only two and a half years old, Alfred Brown had taught her how to swim the breaststroke in Long Island Sound. Something of a publicity hound, Brown made certain newspaper photographers were present whenever he took the toddler swimming, and New Yorkers soon became familiar with both Brown and his precocious daughter. When she was only four her father had her give a diving exhibition at the New York Sportsman's Show. The appearance caused a sensation. Local authorities were mortified at seeing the young girl diving into a small tank of water and dragged Commodore Brown into court, charging him with endangerment of a child. The charges were soon dismissed, but the publicity made Catherine Brown—and by extension, her father—one of the best-known swimmers in the country. Syndicated newspaper articles giving swimming instructions appeared under her byline when she was only five.

  When Charlotte Epstein organized the WSA, Brown's daughter became one of the group's first members, instantly giving the fledgling organization both notoriety and credibility, for Epstein was savvy enough to understand that parents needed to be convinced that swimming was both safe and healthy. The sight of little Catherine Brown swimming confidently assuaged many of those concerns.

  Not only was Brown a proficient diver, but since joining the WSA she had added a new stroke to her repertoire. She did more than just move gently through the water using the breaststroke, or thrash her way through the waves with the trudgen.

  Brown dove from the pier, surfaced quickly, and, like Trudy so often did, began swimming for the next pier. Almost immediately the Ederle girls looked at one another and began talking excitedly back and forth. Catherine Brown plowed through the water like a steamship, using an overarm stroke many had never seen before and most did not even know existed, something known as the American crawl. She made the men and boys who'd been showing off near the next pier look like they were standing still.

  Trudy and Meg weren't the only ones who were impressed. Seeing the eager look on her daughters' faces excited Gertrud Ederle as well. Although her own children could swim, Gertrud still worried and fretted when they were in the water. Yet young Catherine Brown made swimming seem as natural as running down the sidewalk and almost as safe—she seemed utterly at home in the sea.

  At the end of the demonstration Charlotte Epstein gave a brief talk about the WSA and described the benefits of membership. For a nominal fee any woman or young girl of any age could join the association and take one fifty-minute lesson per week, either at its outdoor pool in the summer or an indoor pool in the winter. For a few dollars more, each member could take additional lessons, and after a swimmer became proficient she was eligible to compete in swim meets sponsored by the WSA. Eppie extolled the virtues of the group and, before calling for interested parents to enroll their children, cautioned that for the first six months membership was provisional to allow WSA officials "the opportunity to observe closely each candidate during the period of probation and ascertain whether or not she is desirable in every way as a representative of the organization."

  Mrs. Ederle raced to the front and, as Charlotte Epstein later recalled, "begged her to take Gertrude in hand and develop her natural swimming powers." Mrs. Ederle then turned to young Catherine Brown, standing idly by, and blurted out, "I'll pay you a thousand dollars if you can teach my girls to swim like that," drawing a laugh from everyone and a few embarrassed looks from her own daughters. In short order, Trudy's mother had enrolled Helen, Meg, and Trudy in the WSA. Now, for the first time in her life, Trudy would be able to swim year-round, and she might even learn to swim that overarm stroke. Eppie had a few more converts.

  The ripples in the water that had formed the day the Flying Gull and Tobacco leapt into the pool at High Holborn had crossed the Atlantic and finally landed onshore.

  6. The Crossing

  IF SHE WASN'T DREAMING about swimming, helping Meg and Helen with their chores around the house, or watching over her younger brother and sister, Trudy Ederle could usually be found curled up with a book, losing herself in another world, this one fashioned not of water but of words.

  Although she would later be drawn to more romantic works, in 1918 she was only twelve years old, and thoughts of romance were still a few years in the future. Instead, she found herself reading adventure stories, often true tales of personal courage and daring. Few of these books featured female subjects—very few such subjects existed. Most were breathless morality tales about male adventurers like Lewis and Clark overcoming great odds, or patriotic biographies of great men such as Abraham Lincoln. Trudy read these stories over and over again, nearly committing them to memory.

  A favorite author of the time was Henry Llewellyn Williams, whose inspirational works included the titles The Boys of the Bible; The Lincoln Story Book; Taking Manila: Or in the Philippines with Dewey, Giving the Life and Exploits of Admiral George Dewey, U.S.N.; and Buffalo Bill, the Hon. William F. Cody: Rifle and Revolver Shot, Pony Express Rider, Teamster, Buffalo Hunter Guide, and Scout, a Full Account of His Adventurous Life with the Origin of the Wild West Show. Of course she would have preferred reading similar stories about young women, but such books featuring female subjects were all but unknown.

  One Williams title, however, had particular resonance. The Adventurous Life ofCapt. Matthew Webb, Swimming Champion of the World told the story of Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel. Williams's thirty-page recounting of Webb's heroic battle with the English Channel, as well as other accounts of his story, which included comics, made Webb as familiar to children of Trudy's generation as the frontiersman Daniel Boone. To a young swimmer such as Trudy, Webb's story was like discovering a kindred spirit—here was someone who felt the same way she did about the sea.

  Williams's account and other versions of Webb's story all told the basic story of a young man who tested himself against the elements. Webb's adventure began as a thrilling act of selfless heroism and hooked Trudy immediately. She was never going to be a great explorer like Lewis and Clark, or president of the Unites States like Abraham Lincoln, but like Matthew Webb, she was a swimmer.

  On April 28, 1873, while he served as a merchant seaman on the crew of Cunard steamship Russia, Webb's vessel, en route between England and the United States, hit a patch of rough weather. On deck, a crewman on lost his footing and fell into the frigid seas of the North Adantic. While the ship's captain continued steaming onward at sixteen knots, oblivious to the accident, the barrel-chested Webb, who stood only five foot seven, sported a walruslike mustache, and weighed nearly two hundred pounds, kept his eye trained on the sea and raced the length of the ship before he courageously—and foolishly—dove into the waters in an effort to rescue his fellow crewman.

  Webb saw the man's head suspended above the waves and swam toward his companion, but as he reached out for him and grasped his head, Webb discovered that the man had already slipped beneath the waves and perished—all that remained was the sailor's cap bobbing on the surface of the water.

  Now Webb was alone—the Russia steaming off toward the horizon. Although the captain of the Russia was soon informed of the accident and launched a lifesaving boat to search for both men, Webb's chances of being saved in the frigid seas were nearly nil—he would be nearly impossible to spot between waves, and it would be only minutes before hypothermia would send him to the depths.

  But Webb thought fast. Knowing his clothing was weighing him down, Webb stripped off his garments and started to swim after the Russia, trying to follow the boat's wake. After more than a half an hour in the water, Webb, rising on a wave, spotted the rescue vessel and the men in it spotted him. He was pulled out of the water a moment later, some thirty-seven minutes after he first leapt overboard.

  When the gallant sailor, half frozen, returned to the ship, the captain, crew, and passengers all hailed him as a hero. When the story of his courageous effort reached the press, Webb was again hailed as a hero, earning the Stanhope Gold Medal, Britain's highest civilian award for heroism, awarded by the
Royal Humane Society.

  Webb was no fool. He had not only survived for nearly an hour in the frigid waters of the open ocean, something few other men had ever done before, but despite the cold water and rough seas he had swum for more than a mile. He immediately realized that not only had he just experienced a life-altering event, but he had discovered a unique talent, one that could free him from the drudgery of the merchant service.

  While Webb remained a member of the merchant service, he made the decision to stake his future on his prowess as a swimmer and sought out a challenge equal to his aspirations. The English Channel, which to date had been crossed only by boat and by balloon, was the obvious goal. Webb declared that he would be the first man to swim from England to France.

  Observers reacted skeptically. Although boat and balloon crossings of all kinds were commonplace, the notion of swimming across the English Channel was almost unthinkable. No one, absolutely no one, except for a handful of swimmers themselves thought that it would be done or ever could be done. Even then, few swimmers had even dared take more than a few strokes in the water, and most of those were men in a drunken stupor who quickly found sobriety in the cold Channel waters. A foolish few had drowned, but most were pulled out of the water by their less-inebriated companions and nursed their failure with brandy. A handful of sailors claimed to have swum across the Channel, but none could provide any witnesses or documentation and weren't taken seriously. In 1862 a merchant seaman named William Hoskins claimed to cross the Channel clutching a bale of straw, but if he did, his crossing more resembled that of a cork than a true competitor.

  In fact, it was not until 1872 that anyone made a serious attempt to swim the Channel, and that effort made it seem even more unlikely than ever before. The English swimmer J. B. Johnson, twenty-three years old, well built and handsome, had already swum his way to fame by winning a variety of swimming medals as a member of the Serpentine Club, London's first swimming club, then barely a decade old. Something of a publicity hound, Johnson made a very public rescue of an elderly man, diving from the London Bridge to save him, which made him the best-known swimmer in England, although observers later learned the man he saved was quite a good swimmer and really hadn't needed saving at all. When someone laid a wager of one thousand pounds versus thirty that Johnson couldn't swim the Channel, he saw his opportunity and he took it.

  He made certain all of England knew about his plans, plastering London with placards touting his attempt, identifying himself as "Hero of London Bridge and Champion Swimmer of the World," and on the morning of August 25, 1875, he drew a crowd of several thousand people to the Admiralty Pier in Dover to witness his departure. Johnson pulled out all the stops, hiring a brass band to entertain the crowd, and made an entrance worthy of a monarch, wearing a fine blue coat trimmed in white braid and brandishing upward of thirty swimming medals on his chest. After several hours of self-serving pomp and circumstance, Johnson finally climbed aboard a steamship, changed into his swimming suit, and, when the steamer was two hundred yards offshore, dove off the paddle box and into the sea. The crowd hung around for a while as Johnson swam out of sight and the boat began to fade on the horizon.

  Only sixty-five minutes into his swim, with the coast of France still well out of sight over the horizon, Johnson swam over to the steamer and asked for something to eat. Then, realizing the tide had turned and his attempt was futile, Johnson climbed aboard and the boat continued on its way to Calais, France. As the boat entered the harbor Johnson had sufficiently recovered from his time in the cold waters of the Channel to entertain taking another dip. He leapt back into the water and swam to shore, leaving the impression that he had indeed swum all the way from England, and he was briefly hailed as a hero before his hoax was revealed. He soon left the country to remake himself in America and left the impression that anyone who tried to swim the English Channel was either a quack or a con man, or both.

  Johnson's failure seemed to answer the question of whether it was possible to swim the Channel—if Johnson could not, it was likely no one else could. Still, among other swimmers his effort made the notion of swimming the Channel the Holy Grail of swimming. Like the running of a marathon, it captured the imagination of athletes and dreamers alike—a one-way ticket to notoriety, a way to stand out from the crowd.

  Three years later Paul Boyton, an American, became the next man to test the Channel, and his effort underscored just how difficult a task it was and how eager the pubic was to embrace a hero. Boyton became the first person to cross the Channel without either a balloon or a boat—sort of.

  Boyton, an Irish-American who served in the U.S. Navy in the Civil War before first becoming a mercenary and then operating a lifesaving service in Atlantic City, was hired by the inventor C. S. Merriman to demonstrate his latest creation, a "patent waterproof life-saving apparatus," essentially a primitive dry suit. Weighing nearly thirty-five pounds, Merriman's suit was made of vulcanized rubber and, save for the face, covered the body completely. The suit contained a series of inflatable air chambers and was capable of supporting three hundred pounds, a man, and up to nine days of provisions stored in a special pouch. The wearer of the suit carried a paddle to propel himself through the water, and it was even possible to attach a small sail to an iron hook that protruded from the sole of one of the suit's rubberized feet.

  Boyton made demonstrating the suit something of a cottage industry, wearing the suit, which he referred to as the "lifesaving dress," to accomplish all sorts of stunts, ranging from having himself thrown overboard from a boat during a storm to taking extended trips down rivers, sometimes paddling, sometimes sailing, and sometimes kicking with his feet and flailing his arms to propel himself along, but usually depending upon the current as much as anything else to send him downstream. In April 1875 he decided to try to cross the Channel.

  His first attempt ended in failure due to a combination of bad weather and unfavorable tides that nearly swept him and his escort boat into the North Sea. Nevertheless, he had spent an extraordinary fifteen hours in the water and upon his return to shore was greeted like a hero, receiving dozens of congratulatory telegrams, including one from Queen Victoria herself. Over the next month he cashed in, making public appearances in the suit, earning about $250 for only a half hour's work. Then Boyton decided to make a second attempt. This time he traveled to France, choosing to leave from Cape Gris-Nez and swim to England, to take advantage of what he hoped were favorable tides, currents, and, just as importantly, wind.

  Press reports noted that Boyton looked "like a giant porpoise" when he waded into the water at 3:00 A.M. and began to paddle his way through choppy seas toward England, floating on his back in a horizontal position, a human boat. He looked completely absurd in the suit, an odd marriage of a sailboat, a kayak, and a diving suit, but it was nonetheless effective. Twenty-four hours later Boyton landed at Fan Bay, just west of the South Foreland Lights. Boyton was hailed as a bona fide national hero, and he basked in the attention.

  Matthew Webb, however, was aghast. He had spent the last several years in training and had even secured a wealthy patron to back his plan to swim the Channel. To Webb, Boyton's achievement was an embarrassment, a stunt that was offensive both because of its crass commercialism and because of the use of the suit. He now became more determined than ever.

  Four months later, at 12:55 P.M on August 24, 1875, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and claret, Webb, his body glistening under a coating of porpoise fat to hold his body heat that caused everyone downwind to give him a wide berth, entered the water at Dover, diving from the Admiralty Pier. He was accompanied by two boats, a dory and a sailboat, bearing a total of fifteen witnesses, including members of the press.

  Under relatively calm conditions and in waters of about sixty degrees, near the upper limit for the Channel, for the next twenty hours Webb, his head held high, relentlessly pushed his arms out ahead and kicked with his feet, gulping air and occasionally swigging brandy, beef tea, coffee, and ale and
eating stale bread. The tide and currents of the Channel first pushed him to the southwest, then almost due east, then south and east again, like so much human flotsam. Yet even as the weather deteriorated, with each stroke Webb inched ever closer to his goal.

  He was near the point of collapse when he stumbled onshore at Calais at 10:35 A.M. the next morning. Indeed, he needed assistance to stay on his feet as he waded out of the surf, an indiscretion that today, under official Channel-crossing guidelines that prohibit any physical contact with the swimmer in the water, would disqualify his accomplishment. His success was more a demonstration of stamina, good fortune, and stubborn determination than true aquatic skill. Nevertheless he had made the twenty-one-mile crossing without material assistance, swimming for twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes, covering more than thirty miles as he plodded along at a pace of a bit less than a mile and a half an hour.

  Webb's accomplishment made Boyton insignificant. At a time when few people walked twenty miles, swimming that distance seemed superhuman. Webb's success earned him worldwide fame. Swimming the English Channel was instantly recognized as the world's supreme athletic achievement, the standard against which all else was measured and compared. Ever since that day every swimmer of any ability has had to answer the question, "Do you think you could swim the Channel?"