Swimming

"When they've got two weeks vacation, they hurry to vacation ground... They swim and they fish, but that's what I do all year round."

"Swimming probably ranks close to running, jumping and throwing as the oldest sport of all. We know that even the overhand swimming stroke was practiced by the Romans. Their paintings and mosaics show swimmers cutting through the water overhand, and others swimming with their faces in the water, which suggests the speedy crawl of modern times. The Greeks and Romans knew a great deal about swimming and diving. Plato declared that in Greece, a man who was not able to swim and dive was as uneducated as one who was ignorant of letters. Caesar was a good swimmer, and Cato showed his son how to cross dangerous gulfs, and the Emperor Augustus taught his nephew to swim. In more modern times, Charlemagne was noted for his swimming stroke, King Louis XI of France often swam in the Seine at the head of his courtiers, and the swimming couriers of Peru traversed hundreds of miles of the South American continent swimming day and night down the rivers. They were aided only by a light log of wood, and their dispatches were enclosed in turbans on their heads."

"Several exceptional swimming accomplishments in history have been recorded. One of the most unusual was that of a famous Neapolitan diver named El Pesce, or "The Fish," who once swam fifty miles without stopping along the coast of Calabria in Southern Italy. Another almost unbelievable episode occurred in 1769: A vessel overturning in a squall off Martinique in the French West Indies was lost. Its entire crew of Europeans were drowned. However, a Carib, after battling the violence of the tempest as well as hunger and thirst for thirty hours, reached land safely. The most modern is, of course, the aquatic spanning in August, 1926, of the foggy English Channel by Gertrude Ederle, a nineteen-year-old American girl, who swam the thirty-one miles between England and France in fourteen hours thirty-one minutes, breaking by more than two hours all previous records established by any of the five men who had swum this treacherous stretch before her. This in spite of the fact that Benjamin Franklin had said that the only way anyone would ever swim the English Channel was on the back with one leg extended vertically and a sail attached to it."

"Literature is filled with allusions to swimming. Longfellow's Kwasind, in Hiawatha, caught a beaver after a long underwater cruise; Beowulf and Breca swam seven nights in the swollen seas, carrying their swords with them to fight off whale fishes; Dumas' hero Edmond Dantes escaped by swimming from the Chateau to the Isle of Tiboulen; and Leander swam across the Hellespont, the narrow strait that divided Europe and Asia. Perhaps the most poignant tale ever written about a swimmer occurs in that charming short story, The Tale of James Carabine by Donn Byrne, the Irish author. The swimmer was not successful and paid with his life. His name was Bartley McGeehan, known as Swimmer McGeehan, the Swan of Ireland or the Marine Marvel, as he was billed in the circus. He had once swum between Ireland and Scotland over the stormy waters of Moyle."

"Night swimming deserves a quiet night."