Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (14 page)

And once again, the land bridge did not hold. For a second time the ground shuddered and lurched and the waters broke through, instantly and catastrophically, in a flood even larger than before, a deluge contemporary scientists believe was the largest flood in history, releasing even more water than before, scouring the Channel floor even deeper, this time creating troughs and gouges in the earth as much as ten kilometers in width and some fifty meters deep, turning the waters of the North Atlantic brown with earth and sediment for months.

For all intents and purposes, England was now an island, as on only a few subsequent occasions has ice caused sea levels to drop far enough to expose the remnant of the land bridge and reconnect England to Europe, and then only briefly. For most of this time England and Europe have been separated by the confluence of the North Sea and the North Atlantic.

The result of these two floods was the English Channel, a great basin through which the ocean waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, driven by the tides, meet violently, creating massive and at times thoroughly unpredictable currents that wash back and forth and up and down and to and fro as if in a gigantic bathtub. The result is some of the roughest and most unpredictable waters in the world, waters that are calm one moment and storm tossed the next, often shrouded in fog and driven by winds, waters that for eons isolated Britain from the rest of the world, and left human beings on each side, wondering how to get across.

Every six hours, as the moon orbits the earth, the ocean tides change. In the English Channel, currents powered by the tides speed up, slow down, and then reverse course, and the tide rises and falls. For about an hour and half before the high tide to about four and a half hours after—known as the "flood tide"—the water rushes through the Channel in a northeasterly direction as the waters of the North Atlantic flow toward the North Sea. Then the ebb tide takes over, and the water first slows, then, forming a series of channels in slack water, reverses its course before moving again en masse in the opposite direction, flowing southwesterly as the waters of the North Sea come rushing back in a rough imitation of the primordial flood that shaped the Channel in the first place.

The effect is most pronounced in the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the Channel and where the Channel waters, in effect, act something like the water in a river. For as the waters from the North Sea and the North Atlantic move through the narrows between England and France, they are squeezed between both coasts, increasing in speed. At their peak during the flood and ebb tides, the waters of the Channel flow astonishingly fast—as much as four miles per hour.

The intensity of the tide does not remain static but changes as the moon completes its twenty-eight-day orbital cycle around the earth. Every two weeks, when the moon is new or full and the tidal pull strongest, what is called a "spring tide" is in effect. Over the course of one twelve-hour cycle, there is an eighteen-foot difference between high tide and low tide, resulting in an enormous volume of water rushing back and forth. During the spring tide an otherwise stationary object will float some thirteen nautical miles northeastward during the flood tide, then be pushed back to the southeast fifteen nautical miles on the ebb tide. Even during neap tides—when there is a half moon and tides are somewhat weaker—the difference between high water and low water is still nearly ten feet, and a stationary object will still be carried some seven or eight miles in each direction as the tide floods and ebbs.

To this day even experienced mariners using gas- or diesel-powered vessels have a difficult time navigating these treacherous waters. For a Channel swimmer, the problem is exponentially worse. He or she is virtually at the mercy of the tides and wholly dependent upon the accompanying pilot boat to remain on course. The swimmer must simultaneously make use of the tides and at the same time swim through and against them, somehow maintaining a course that, in the end, will take the swimmer perpendicular to and across the direction of the tidal currents. The swimmer must work with the tides, at various points racing with the rush of water back and forth to tack across the Channel in a manner not unlike a sailboat running before the wind, and then take advantage of slack water between tides to gain ground toward the opposite shore before tacking with the tide once more.

As a result the swimmer's route across the Channel is never a straight line. Depending upon the speed of the swimmer and tidal conditions, the path across—if made under sixteen or seventeen hours—much resembles the letter Z, a serpentine course with at least two near-180-degree turns, a route that can add as much as ten or twenty miles to the twenty-one-mile distance the crow flies between Dover and the French coast. But if one swims more slowly and becomes caught in another tidal change, the route becomes even more tangled. Matthew Webb for instance, who took nearly twenty-two hours to make his crossing, made no less than four reverses of direction with the tides—his course resembled two squat Zs stacked on top of each other—and he traveled much farther within the Channel itself, back and forth, than the twenty-one miles across.

That is the reason swimming the Channel is so difficult and the reason so many swimmers have come so close to succeeding only to be turned back, for when the tide turns on an exhausted swimmer, even one only a few hundred yards from completing the swim, he or she often lacks the strength and energy to overcome the changing tidal current and can be carried off, either parallel to shore, or, in some conditions, even backward, back toward where he or she first started, a reversal with a devastating psychological impact. The hardest and most difficult part of the swim is often the final few hundred yards, when the tide combines with exhaustion and the cold to keep the swimmer from shore as surely as if he or she were anchored in place.

In the years following Webb's crossing, as one swimmer after another tried and failed to swim the Channel, those who pondered crossing the Channel would often spend as much time studying the tides and the currents as they would in training. But even the tides alone do not tell the entire story. In the same way that the waters of a river, when encountering shallows, can increase in speed and change direction, so too does the depth of the Channel waters impact the current in the ebb and flow of the tides, for as the depth of the water changes, so does the speed of the currents. Due to those two primordial floods in the Strait of Dover, the depth of the Channel varies wildly, from more than 120 feet in places to less than 6 feet in others. Around the Goodwin Sands, a ten-mile-long sandbank just northeast of Dover, the water is dangerously shallow, and a combination of storms and tides can make the waters around and over the sands surprisingly swift and uncertain. The Goodwin Sands, in fact, is even exposed at low tide, a condition that can create dangerous eddies and rough water in otherwise calm seas. The area is such a hazard that more than two thousand ships are known to have met their fate there. Even today an anchored vessel that serves as a lighthouse—a lightship—is permanently stationed atop the massive sandbank, yet ships still run aground with frightening regularity.

As if all this did not combine to make the crossing difficult enough, the weather adds another uncomfortable dimension. The clash of the waters often results in fog, a year-round hazard, one that not only can make the experience of swimming the Channel psychologically difficult, making it impossible for a swimmer to detect his or her own progress, but dangerous as well. The fog can be so dense that the accompanying pilot boats can and have lost sight of swimmers entirely, sometimes for hours, turning an already risky proposition into a potentially deadly one. Not only is it possible for a "lost" swimmer to drown, but due to the amount of boat traffic in the Channel, without the aid of a pilot boat a swimmer risks being run down by a passing vessel oblivious to the swimmer's presence.

Then there are the storms. Fronts moving in from the North Atlantic and funneled through the Channel can create winds that can reach hurricane force and waves that regularly reach two meters and occasionally much, much more. With every increase in wave action swimmers must struggle to breathe without swallowing seawater, which can cause nausea, while the constant rising and falling with each swell can make swimmers seasick. In short, crossing the Channel requires not only conditioning, physical fitness, and a measure of luck, but an experienced boat pilot and a complete and thorough understanding of the Channel itself.

For these reasons most attempts to swim the Channel have taken place during what early swimmers referred to as the "mystic season," August and September. Then, for two brief periods of three days each, the neap tides are at their weakest and the water temperature its warmest. If the weather cooperates, a virtually impossible task becomes only a nearly impossible one. For some swimmers that slender chance of success has made swimming the Channel completely irresistible.

Soon after Matthew Webb staggered onto the shore in Calais in August 1875, other swimmers began lining up for their chance at glory, for Webb's crossing made him wealthy, a fact that did not go un noticed. In the weeks immediately after the crossing Webb made nearly fifty thousand dollars—the Prince of Wales alone gave him an award of twenty-five thousand dollars in honor of his accomplishment. For the remainder of his life Webb earned upward of one thousand dollars per personal appearance, and for the swim that killed him in the Niagara River he was scheduled to make fifteen thousand dollars.

Swimming the English Channel suddenly became the Victorian equivalent of winning the lottery. It had the potential of taking an otherwise normal bloke and, in less than twenty-four hours, not only making him famous, but rich. And Webb's success, in only his second try, made what had once seemed impossible not only plausible, but even likely.

The first swimmer to follow Webb into the cold Channel waters was Frederick Cavill, the same Frederick Cavill who would later help develop the Australian crawl. Already a well-known swimmer and, like J. B. Johnson, a member of the Serpentine Club, Cavill prepared for his crossing by completing a twenty-mile swim in the Thames and afterward was confident that the Channel would prove to be little more difficult. But Cavill—and others—soon discovered that Webb had either been extraordinarily lucky or extraordinarily talented. It would take more than thirty years before another person would be able to duplicate Webb's accomplishment.

Cavill made his first attempt in 1876 using the breaststroke but had to be pulled from the water, exhausted, three miles short of his goal. One year later he tried again and made it excruciatingly close—220 meters—before collapsing from the effort and requiring assistance to get out of the water. Although the Serpentine Club recognized his crossing, no one else did—then, as now, swimming the Channel does not mean stopping 220 meters short. Cavill tried to claim success but tired of defending himself in the public eye and eventually immigrated to Australia, opened a pool, and became known as the father of Australian swimming.

Over the next twenty-five years at least a dozen other swimmers made a serious attempt at duplicating Webb's feat. Yet no matter how hard they trained or how prepared they appeared to be, none succeeded. In almost every instance the tides conspired to defeat them, often teasing them to within sight of their goal and then, with solid ground and glory reaching out a hand, stopping them cold, slapping them back, and even pushing the swimmers away from shore toward where they had first started. To many Channel swimmers the tides have proven to be a barrier nearly as impenetrable as the thick stone walls of Dover Castle.

Most swimmers who tried to swim the Channel in the first few decades following Webb's crossing followed his course, leaving from England and swimming toward France, but as more and more swimmers tried and failed to make a successful crossing, swimmers began to look the other direction, some leaving from France and heading toward England. The problem with the former course is that a swimmer leaving from England often takes aim on Cape Gris-Nez, the nearest point to England but a relatively small target jutting out into the Channel. But if a swimmer and the captain of the pilot boat miscalculate the tidal shifts and current as they near the French shore, it is entirely possible to sweep completely past Gris-Nez and then face certain failure. Swimming from France to England, while offering a wider landing area, also makes it necessary to time the swim with the tides so that the swimmer doesn't get hung up on the Goodwin Sands, just east of Dover, or swept along parallel to the coast.

Yet even when the weather and tidal conditions are the most favorable—even today—failure is far more common than success. Swimming the English Channel remains a challenge even for the most fit and committed swimmer.

In fact in the first few decades after Webb's crossing, as swimmer after swimmer tried and failed to match his accomplishment, many began to doubt that anyone had ever swum the Channel at all, or ever could. Some even began to think that Webb was a fraud who somehow had faked his deed. To quell such rumors, surviving witnesses aboard Webb's pilot boat eventually made sworn depositions attesting to his feat.

With every passing year, as newspapers and various patrons offered cash prizes and other incentives to the first man to match Webb, the stature of the quest only increased. While some swimmers tried once, failed, and then left the Channel experience behind as a memory they cared not to revisit, to others swimming the Channel became something of an obsession.

Of all the swimmers who tried to duplicate Webb's feat, none were more committed and determined than Jabez Wolffe and Thomas William Burgess. Like Matthew Webb, Wolffe and Burgess each looked across the Strait of Dover and saw not only a personal challenge, but a way toward fame and fortune waiting on the other side.