"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."