Today in Maritime History — 25 August
1875 — Captain Matthew Webb becomes the first man to swim across the English Channel
Do not let anyone crush your dreams, unless you dream of getting crushed at the bottom of the Niagara Falls. But we will get to that in a moment.
Captain Matthew Webb was the first recorded person to swim the English Channel without artificial aids (to be clear, there is nothing artificial about being smeared head to toe in porpoise oil). He achieved this feat in less than 22 hours, swimming from Dover to Calais.
This was not the Captain’s first deed of derring-do. At the age of 15, he saved his younger brother from drowning and, a few years later, while serving as second mate on the “Russia”, travelling from New York to Liverpool, Webb tried to rescue a man overboard by diving into the sea in the mid-Atlantic. The hapless soul was never found but Webb won GBP100 for his trouble, became the first recipient of the Stanhope Medal and a hero to the British press (even then they loved a good celebrity story).
Webb was inspired by JB Johnson’s failed attempt to swim the English Channel and began training. The fact that he survived training in the Thames (arguably a greater — or stupider — feat) bode well for his attempt, the first of which failed due to inclement weather. Not to be deterred, he set off from Dover 12 days later with a jaunty breastroke and lathered in the aforementioned oil. (At the time, the English considered the front-crawl ungentlemanly despite, or because, they were roundly beaten in a race by a team of very “un-European” Native Americans.)
Webb was impeded by strong currents and attacks by, presumably, French jellyfish protecting the coastline. Revived by a generous glug of brandy, he made it to shore 21 hours and 40 minutes later, having swum 64 km, almost double the 34 km straight-line crossing.
Webb became a Victorian celebrity with his own line of pottery, a dinner service, books, boxes of matches and all sorts of other products (no record of “Webb’s All-Porpoise Oil”; a missed opportunity in my humble opinion).
It should hardly come as a surprise that he liked both a good stunt and the income this could generate. One of the more bizarre was floating in a tank of water for 128 hours. You would do it too for GBP1,000 now, let alone 150 years ago.
Alas, Webb’s final stunt was an attempt to cross Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls in 1883. Webb was warned that this was suicide by any other name but proceeded nonetheless. His body was recovered downstream four days later. His memorial in his home village of Dawley, Shropshire, reads: “Nothing great is easy”, which is a damn sight better than what his surviving wife, Madeline Kate, and their two kids, presumably had in mind: “You daft tw*t”.
Having died long before the age of senseless litigation, Madeline Kate never got to sue Peter Sellers and the producers of the Pink Panther movies; Webb’s picture on boxes of Bryant and May matches allegedly inspiring the physical appearance of Inspector Clouseau.
Swimmingly yours,
Dim
PS. I am not a historian, nor do I play one on the internet. This is meant to be a bit of light relief and an encouragement for you to donate to The Mission to Seafarers. If you find yourself salivating over the prospect of dates, annotations, references, footnotes, and further reading, you may want to run away now.
