Chapter 2 Water Babies-1

WE SWAM before we walked or breathed, but then we forgot. Over and over again. The same thing happened outside the womb: swimming was practiced regularly in ancient times but virtually disappeared for centuries. It finally resurfaced in the modern world, rising and falling like a wave and periodically getting rediscovered. If only we’d paid attention to the handwriting on the wall.
 Thousands of years ago in Egypt, swimming was so familiar, there were several hieroglyphs for it. Fashionable ladies applied their makeup from long, slender spoons sculpted like a female swimmer’s body.

And on the walls of the so-called Cave of the Swimmers in the Eastern Sahara, images of plump bodies jauntily stroke through the prehistoric waters that once irrigated the area. The goldfish-sized figures, relics of an era before climate change dried up their sea, are the real-life version of the memories invoked by the wounded airman in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, a dreamy fusion of time past and present. The author chose the granite grotto as his backdrop, he told me, “because it seemed so primal: swimming in the desert.” At least one archaeologist suggests that the blissful figures may be gliding to the underworld, not the next beach, but even that would have required knowledge of strokes.

In other words, there wasn’t one of those first-brave-person-to-eat-an-oyster moments.

Swimming was so deeply embedded in the culture of classical Greece, Plato quotes the proverb, well known in 360 BCE, that calling men ignorant means “they know neither how to read nor how to swim.” Alexander the Great rued the ignominy. “Most miserable man that I am,” he lamented, as his Macedonian troops faced a wide river before an enemy citadel, “Why, pray, have I not learned to swim?” For Socrates, it was a critical life skill. Swimming, he said, “saves a man from death.”

That the men of antiquity addressed themselves only to other men didn’t stop many women—real and imagined—from doing as they pleased. The Theban princess Semele, who holds special status in Greek mythology as the only mortal parent of a god (Dionysus), was a graceful and accomplished swimmer who could glide across a rapid stream without getting her hair wet and wash off the terror of dreams with one plunge into the water. A group of young Amazons—those too-good-to-be-true women warriors—are painted sliding through the sea on a red and black vase, sharing an afternoon of pleasure with a pair of equally serene fish. Two bathing caps hanging from unseen hooks remind us how little things change.

Swimming converted young men into heroes. Roman noblemen taught their sons how to swim, a lesson in the manly arts. The centaur Chiron trained Achilles, in an age when the storied acts of immortals reflected the earthly activities of humans. And a compelling section from The Odyssey is a portrait in heroism. Odysseus is trying to find his way home—after ten years of war at Troy and seven of sea travel—when Poseidon stirs up a battering storm. The weary warrior is tossed into the wine-dark waters for more than two days. A friendly goddess gives him a life-saving scarf, and Athena calms the winds, but what ultimately powers Odysseus through the murderous waves is his own extraordinary skill. He “dove headfirst into the sea,” Homer tells us, “stretched out his arms, and stroked for life itself.”

Swimming was also one of the martial arts.

A series of reliefs from the ninth century BCE depicts the battle of Nineveh in ancient Assyria, near modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq. The warriors exhibit an impressive range of aquatic skills: one muscular fellow with bulging biceps tows a boat full of people; several others steal across the water atop inflated goat skins called mussuks, the inner tubes of antiquity, packing quivers and shields on their backs; a raft of reserves prepares to join the invasion. All this while dodging schools of fish, some of them human-sized.

Further east and many centuries later, a Chinese bronze from the turbulent Warring States Period depicts a fierce naval battle. Two ships face off, prow to prow, as seamen onboard fight with long spears and short swords. Shift your gaze below deck, way below deck, and you find three lithe swimmers ready for combat beneath the hulls. These early precursors of our Navy SEALS are among the first depictions of human swimmers in China. Once again, giant fish authenticate the tableau.

In Greece, at least one major military victory is chalked up to swimming. During the Persian War, in 480 BCE, a noted diver named Scyllias and his talented daughter Cyana (or Hydna) swam underwater to cut the anchor lines of the Persian ships in the Bay of Salamis. The chaos that followed led to pitched warfare and Greek triumph, not least because of their mismatched aquatic skills. “Of the Greeks there died only a few,” wrote Herodotus, “for, as they were able to swim, all those that were not slain outright by the enemy escaped from the sinking vessels and swam across to Salamis. But on the side of the Barbarians more perished by drowning than in any other way, since they did not know how to swim.” Not every part of the story holds up. Legend says the talented Scyllias then swam underwater to report his success to the Greeks at Artemisium, some eight miles distant. “In my opinion,” Herodotus writes, “he came by boat.”

In Rome, Publius Horatius Cocles famously held off the Etruscan invasion single-handedly while his colleagues destroyed the bridge over the Tiber. Then he swam to safety, a heroic crossing while gravely wounded, bearing full arms; he lost neither them nor his life. No less audacious was the later female version, when a young Roman named Cloelia escaped the same Etruscan aggressors by leading her sister hostages to freedom in a daring swim across the Tiber. Both stories are likely legendary, but that is beside the point; swimming was part of the conversation in Rome, a symbol of valor and a mark of respect.

The most prominent Roman to swim for the glory of the Republic was Julius Caesar. During the revolt against him in Alexandria, he tore himself away from Cleopatra and, ducking swords and Egyptian ships, “threw himself into the sea and with great difficulty escaped by swimming,” according to Plutarch. Historians note that Caesar, then in his fifties, swam nearly three hundred meters—that’s six lengths of an Olympic pool—clenching his sword and his purple cloak in his teeth, his papers held high above his head. As a result of his one-armed sprint, Ptolemy was slain and Cleopatra declared queen of Egypt.

       While Caesar wisely removed his cloak to facilitate his escape in Egypt, swimming with heavy metal became a symbol of Roman pride. Scipio Africanus taught each of his soldiers to “stem the billows of the sea with his breastplate on,” an awkward but handy trick. Their role models were Germanic tribesmen, known to ford the most turbulent streams clad head to toe in iron. By the fourth century CE, the author Vegetius recommended that the entire army be trained to swim, and included in his text a helpful, if not improbable, illustration of a fully sheathed soldier marching along the floor of the river with only his sword clearing the surface. How he was to breathe was not explained. The nearby fish have no such problem.

Soldiers stayed submerged through the next millennium. The fictional Beowulf spent seven nights in the sea in a coat of mail, while balancing up to thirty changes of armor. Sir Lancelot, King Arthur’s bold knight of the round table, faced a similar challenge, but claimed he could pull it off with ease, as reimagined in the Broadway show Camelot. In the charmingly arrogant “C’est Moi,” his character boasts that being “invincible” meant one of his “impossible deeds” was to “swim a moat in a coat of heavy iron mail”—a coat weighing at least fifty pounds. Even Lancelot understood that was as daunting as slaying a dragon, with potentially mortifying results. Lancelot’s colleague Sir Gawain, clad in a helmet and iron greaves, once tumbled into the deep water surrounding Lady Guinevere’s castle and bobbed around helplessly. “One moment he rises, and the next he sinks,” wrote Chrétien de Troyes, describing the other warriors’ efforts to retrieve him. “One moment they see him, and the next they lose him from sight.” The hapless Gawain was finally fished out with long hooks and branches, a soggy, silent knight.

That’s how swimming moved to the Middle Ages, as a military function. It mostly took place in moats, which were designed to keep people out. Some historians blame its decline on the church, which censured everything from the revelries of Rome to the curves of the human body. Some say the ban on mixing water and flesh—even bathing was seen as a pagan ritual—was due to misguided medicine, with terrifying warnings of diseases lurking in contaminated water. The ignorance and charges of immorality worked. With rare exceptions, swimming vanished as Europe plunged into intellectual darkness.

It reappeared with the dawn of the Renaissance.

The first mention of swimming in print in Britain came in 1531, when Sir Thomas Elyot, a scholar who also coined the term “encyclopedia,” wrote The Boke, Named the Governour, a popular guide for wannabe English gentlemen. “There is an exercise,” he wrote (I’ve updated the English for easier reading), “which is right profitable in extreme danger of wars, but because there seems to be some peril in the learning thereof; and also it has not been of long time much used, especially among noble men, perchance some readers will little esteem it.” Here’s the payoff in the original English: “I meane swymmynge.”

Seven years later a Swiss-German language professor named Nikolaus Wynmann published the world’s first full book on swimming, Colymbetes (The Swimmer, or the Art of Swimming), a conversation in which Pampirus (the elder) teaches Erotes (the younger) how to swim. It is the first printed description of strokes, the first suggestion that swimming can open the wonders of the world. But since it was written in Latin, its impact was limited. One translator, however, has preserved a felicitous phrase that I’d nominate for swimming idiom of the century. When the lesson is over, Pampirus invites Erotes home with him so that they may get “an inward wet.” An inward wet. It is a concept perhaps invented by the Roman poet Horace, who satirically described advice to cure insomnia: “Let those who are in need of deep sleep, anoint themselves [with oil] three times and swim thrice across the Tiber. Then, as evening falls, refresh themselves with wine.” That’s both an inward and outward wet.

All this was mere preface to the real breakthrough. In 1587, a cleric and philosophy scholar named Everard Digby wrote a tiny guide called De Arte Natandi (On the Art of Swimming) to rescue swimming “from the depths of ignorance and the dust of oblivion.” The importance of this five-by-seven-inch volume on the history of swimming cannot be overestimated. For the first time in the modern era, swimming was being taught as a sport, a skill, and recreation—as fun!—something to do for its own sake, not just to repel the enemy. Saving lives was one motive, of course; England’s coastal waters, swift rivers, and lakes took a huge toll yearly. Digby aimed to preserve human life from “the greedie jawes of the swelling Sea.” But he wanted more than just attention to what he called “a thing necessary for every man to use.” Addressing what he knew was a skeptical audience—he also wrote in Latin, the language of the establishment—he aimed to be to the art of swimming what Hippocrates and Galen were to the art of medicine, Aristotle to the liberal arts, Mercator to the maps of the world. Digby claimed boldly that humans (defined, in those days, as “man”) swim naturally, even better than fish. As one of his later translators put it, “a man may swim with his face upwards, downwards; on his right side, on his left side; stand, sit, lie, carry his clothes and other things safely, walk in the bottom of the waters: which no fishes nor other creature can do.” At a time when open water was the only option, he imparted such practical advice as this: swim only in daylight and only in summer months; don’t swim in “a place growing full of weeds or grass.” And look for clear water, “not troubled with any kind of slimy filth.” Digby taught a swimmer how to flip from one side to the other, an invaluable skill should a ship suddenly appear “to run over him. . . . Likewise if there should be any Lions, Bears, or fierce dogs lurking in the river.” He also may have been the first to advocate the buddy system, shrewdly suggesting that a beginner find a partner “taller and stronger than himself.” Reverend Digby was so convinced of the benefits of swimming, he gilded his 114-page treatise with forty-three charming woodcuts illustrating techniques for taking the plunge. For example, here’s how to enter the water, wading in slowly from the bank:

Here’s how to do the backstroke:

Digby even anticipated the show-off kid on the high dive with some tricks you could perform in the water. Here is how to pare your toenails in the water—considerably easier than on the land, or in bed, he writes. As an added benefit, “you may easily wash your Toes.”

 
Today, fewer than ten known copies of Digby’s little treatise exist in the rare book collections of major libraries. Another sold in 2007 for more than $150,000. But while mesmerizing to us for its quaint yet precise understanding of the benefits of swimming, it too could have been read by only a few educated people. The author died shortly before another Everard Digby was famously executed for his role in the failed gunpowder plot to assassinate the king—what is now celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day. The conspirator was likely a distant relative, but as one British royalist and swimming aficionado later sniffed, he was guilty of a crime “of which no swimmer would be capable.”

Still, while De Arte Natandi went largely unrecognized in Tudor England, it eventually found its audience. By 1696, more than a century after his little tome was first published, it had been shortened and translated twice into English and once into French. Unfortunately, two of the translators barely credited him, which is why his name was largely lost in history. But the message was spreading. When the French version, by Melchisédech Thévenot, librarian to King Louis XIV, was translated into English, it so caught the draft of the growing activity that it became, according to one historian, “the most popular book on swimming in France and England.”

One of M. Thévenot’s biggest swimming fans was an American teenager working as a printer in early-eighteenth-century London. “I had from a Child been ever delighted with this Exercise, had studied and practis’d all Thevenot’s Motions and Positions,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography many years later. He learned well, mastering “the graceful and easy, as well as the Useful,” often demonstrating his talent. Once on a boat ride, Franklin was persuaded by friends to strip down and leap into the Thames, where he swam “from near Chelsea to Blackfryars,” three and a half miles, “performing on the Way many Feats of Activity both upon and under the water, that surpriz’d and pleas’d those to whom they were novelties.” Franklin also invented what may have been the first swim paddles—“two oval pallets, each about ten inches long, and six broad, with a hole for the thumb. . . . They much resemble a painter’s pallets.”

Franklin wrote that swimming cured everything from diarrhea (“I speak from my own experience”) to insomnia (“After having swam [sic] for an hour or two in the evening, one sleeps coolly the whole night, even during the most ardent heat of summer”). And that’s without Horace’s cup of claret. He advised everyone to learn. One nobleman was so impressed with Franklin’s skills, he offered him a handsome fee to instruct his own two sons. “From this Incident,” Franklin later wrote, “I thought it likely, that if I were to remain in England and open a Swimming School, I might get a good deal of Money. And it struck me so strongly, that had the Overture been sooner made me, probably I should not so soon have returned to America.”

Lucky for the young republic, he did.

What he found on this side of the pond was nothing like what he’d seen in London. At a time when there were no American swimming books and virtually no swim instruction, only a few colonists braved the waters of Virginia’s James River, Boston’s Charles, Philadelphia’s Schuylkill, among others. President John Quincy Adams took daily dips in the Potomac at 5 AM—naked—a practice so unusual it inspired a tale that made its way, more than a century later, into a White House press conference. President Harry S. Truman liked to tell the story, totally unsubstantiated, of Anne Royall, America’s first female professional journalist, who was frustrated with her attempts to get an interview with President Adams. One day she supposedly followed him to the river, gathered his clothes, and sat on them until he answered all of her questions. “I thought you would be interested in that,” Truman teased another insistent journalist, May Craig of the Portland, Maine, Press Herald. He, like Adams, is said to have admired the woman’s spirit.

They Call It Windsurfing, Ben

“The exercise of swimming is one of the most healthy and agreeable in the world,” Ben Franklin wrote, but he acknowledged that “rowing with the arms and legs” could be “a laborious and fatiguing operation when the space of water to be crossed is considerable.” His solution:

When I was a boy, I amused myself one day with flying a paper kite; and approaching the bank of a pond, which was near a mile broad, I tied the string to a stake, and the kite ascended to a very considerable height above the pond, while I was swimming. In a little time, being desirous of amusing myself with my kite, and enjoying at the same time the pleasure of swimming, I returned; and, loosing from the stake the string with the little stick which was fastened to it, went again into the water, where I found that, lying on my back and holding the stick in my hands, I was drawn along the surface of the water in a very agreeable manner. Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes round the pond, to a place which I pointed out to him on the other side, I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue, and with the greatest pleasure imaginable. I was only obliged occasionally to halt a little in my course, and resist its progress, when it appeared that by following too quick, I lowered the kite too much; by doing which I occasionally made it rise again—I have never since that time practiced this singular mode of swimming, though I think it not impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais. The packet-boat, however, is still preferable.

     The real story about Adams’s famous swims threatened considerably more than his dignity. One June day in 1825, he headed off on a little boat down Tiber Creek, which ran behind the White House to the Potomac. He was planning to paddle across (clothed) with his valet, Antoine Giusta, then swim back home. But a freak wind and sudden storm flooded the flimsy craft; when it sank, Adams and Giusta swam furiously for the opposite shore. Giusta made it easily since he had left his clothing behind, but the president was nearly dragged to the bottom by his long sleeves and trousers. As he later recorded in his diary, “while struggling for life and gasping for breath, [I] had ample leisure to reflect upon my own discretion.” Adams gave his soggy garments to the valet and sent him to walk back for help. He then sat stark naked for five hours, separated from the Oval Office by more than half a mile of churning waters. A carriage finally returned him home, thus eliminating Vice President John C. Calhoun’s chance to run the country. “By the mercy of God our lives were spared,” President Adams wrote. At the insistence of his wife, Louisa, Adams discovered the joys of gardening. Today what remains of Tiber Creek runs under Constitution Avenue.

PRESIDENTIAL POOL REPORT

Presidential swimmers after John Quincy Adams include outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt (who also skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and “swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it”), the very athletic Gerald Ford (who commissioned the outdoor pool at the White House), the former lifeguard Ronald Reagan (who reportedly saved seventy-seven lives on that job), and the famously buff Barack Obama, whose shirtless image wading into the Hawaiian surf in 2008 led to such a frenzy of tabloid headlines—PEC-TACULAR PRESIDENT-ELECT, for instance—the White House limited his exposure on the next outing. When he dove into Florida’s waters in 2010, the press had to make do with a modest picture from a staff photographer.

In 1933, a White House laundry room was converted into a swimming pool so that the polio-stricken president Franklin Delano Roosevelt could get some exercise. President John F. Kennedy used it for noontime naked swims, partly to relieve his chronic back problems. In 1969 it was bricked over by President Richard Nixon (once photographed walking the beach in shoes and socks) to make, ironically, a press room. Today the tiled pool remains below, empty and unused. The podium where the press secretaries, or other members of the administration, are offered up to reporters, is located directly over the deep end. I told you swimming was a metaphor for life.

While Americans struggled with the proper way to enjoy the water, swimmers from other cultures practiced the art with natural grace. Numerous images capture the facility with which natives of Polynesia and the Caribbean dove for pearls or hunted for food. In Typee, his novel based on several months in the South Pacific, author Herman Melville describes the swimming skills of the women of the Marquesas: “Sometimes they might be seen gliding along just under the surface, without apparently moving hand or foot; then throwing themselves on their sides, they darted through the water, revealing glimpses of their forms, a. . . . they shot for an instant partly into the air; at one moment they dived down deep into the water, and at the next they rose bounding to its surface.”

Native Americans were also expert swimmers, as the artist George Catlin observed at a Mandan village on the upper Missouri. “They all learn to swim well,” he wrote, “and the poorest swimmer amongst them will dash fearlessly into the boiling, and eddying current of the Missouri, and cross it with perfect ease. . . . It is learned at a very early age by both sexes, and enables the strong and hardy muscles of the squaws to take their child upon the back, and successfully to pass any river that lies in their way.” A group of Minataree women, he wrote, swam “as confidently as so many otters or beaver. . . . with their long black hair floating about on the water.”

Africans from many tribes impressed legions of travelers with their effortless strokes. In 1454, one group of West Africans churning through the waves led Venetian explorer Cadomosto to call them “the best swimmers in the world.” The eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park had an African guide named Isaaco. He was swimming across a river when a huge crocodile clamped onto his thigh. As the story was reported at the time, the croc “would doubtless have crushed and torn it off with his immense jaws, but the negro was as good a swimmer and diver as the crocodile; and, turning rapidly round, he dashed his thumbs into the animal’s eyes and tore them out.” When the animal seized his other thigh, Isaaco repeated the punishment. The croc finally let go, and Isaaco swam to safety, where Park dressed the wounds to complete the rescue.

 Stories like these were read avidly in Europe, where the craze finally took hold. The nineteenth century was the swimming century, as men and women started flocking to the seashore. What began as a health movement—public baths to cleanse the great unwashed—soon became a sports mania. Clubs were established, along with competitions, some in indoor swimming pools. Swim schools opened in Paris, in Vienna, and across Europe. If you couldn’t make it to class, there was a raft of instructional books, most still plagiarizing the pioneering Reverend Digby, some actually providing valuable new information. By the 1930s, lessons on each stroke were helpfully provided on wallet-sized cards given out with packs of cigarettes. There were no helpful hints on how to stop smoking.