Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (2 page)

She knew, of course, that no woman had ever swum the Channel before. From 1922 through 1925 she had been the greatest female swimmer the world had ever seen, winning Olympic medals and setting more than a dozen world records, leaving the English Channel as her only remaining challenge. While she wanted to prove to those who believed a woman could not swim the Channel that, in fact, a woman could, and that she was that woman, Trudy Ederle was no feminist swimming for a cause. Although she was fully aware of the significance of doing what no woman had ever done before, she first decided to try to swim the Channel in 1925 simply because she had nothing left to accomplish in her sport and because others—her coaches and her family—believed she could.

She failed in that attempt, pulled from the water only halfway across, and afterward members of the crowd nodded knowingly, certain that if Trudy Ederle could not swim the English Channel, then in all likelihood no woman could. And even if a woman ever did swim the Channel, she would not do so using the American crawl. And, most assuredly, her name would not be Trudy Ederle.

The only way for Trudy to prove everyone wrong was to try again—and succeed. Swimming the English Channel became a challenge to her imagination. Crossing that divide would prove to be the ultimate test of man's—and a woman's—endurance.

I
T WAS A PERFECT EARLY
summer morning, the kind that remains etched in the memory forever, the sky a brilliant blue and the air cool and crisp as a white linen sheet hung out to dry. In the Lower East Side neighborhood known as Kleindeutschland, or, to outsiders, as Little Germany, the morning of June 15, 1904, made it possible for residents to forget their twelve-hour workdays and harsh living conditions in darkened tenements. The day had finally come.

In their tenement at 404 East Fifth Street, thirty-one-year-old Anna Weber, her husband, Frank, and their two children, Emma, ten, and Frank Jr., seven, were up early. While Anna made lunch and carefully packed it in a basket, the children danced around the apartment, periodically sticking their heads out the window, hardly able to contain themselves. Feeling the breeze and seeing the clear sky overhead, they squealed with delight and jabbered excitedly about the adventure soon to come.

For weeks the young family had looked forward to the annual excursion sponsored by St. Mark's Lutheran Church, where most residents of Kleindeutschland worshipped. The outing had come to mark the beginning of summer, and this year Reverend Haas of St. Mark's had rented an enormous steamship, the
General Slocum,
capable of carrying as many as three thousand passengers, to ferry church members up the East River and into Long Island Sound to a park. There, at place called Locust Grove, they planned to spend the day playing games, listening to music, picnicking, and splashing and playing in the cool waters of the sound. For one day, anyway, they would all be able to forget the smell of rotting garbage and offal hanging in the air, the constant noise and clatter of the streets, and the struggle to adapt to a new country. For one day they would live the life they aspired to, one of leisure and joy. In the Webers' apartment Emma and Frank gulped down their breakfast then dressed quickly in their best summer clothes, urging their parents to hurry up.

The family made their way to the Third Street pier, just north of Houston Street, arriving early so they could meet up with Anna's sister, Martha, and her brother Paul and his wife and three young children. As the youngsters played together on the pier, anticipation grew, and when the
Slocum
finally appeared steaming upriver just before 8:00
A.M.,
a few cheers and squeals of delight sounded along the pier. Even though no one would be allowed to board the vessel until 8:45
A.M.
and it was not scheduled to depart until 9:30, the Weber family got into line, anxious to get a good spot on deck from which to enjoy the journey up the East River.

Although the crowd on the pier included many men, Anna's husband was one of only a few dozen fortunate enough to be among the thirteen hundred people waiting to board the steamship. It was a Wednesday, a workday, and most fathers could not dare risk taking a day off, not even for this. Most simply walked their families to the pier, said their goodbyes, and headed off to work, leaving their wives and children to enjoy the rare holiday from city living.

One of New York's largest wheel-driven passenger steamships, the
General Slocum,
made primarily of oak and pine, was 235 feet long and 37 feet wide, weighed 1, 300 tons, and boasted of three decks. A side-wheeler, on each side of the boat at midships was an enormous paddle wheel thirty-one feet across and sporting twenty-six paddles.

As the crowd grew, the twenty-two-man crew busied itself on board, cleaning the decks, polishing the brass, and loading up the last supplies needed for the trip—ice, refreshments, and glassware. In the morning light the
Slocum,
covered in coat after coat of thick white paint, gleamed beneath the sun, making the ship, which had first launched in 1891, appear almost new.

At 8:45
A.M.
a member of the crew unceremoniously unhooked the chain that ran across the gangplank. Reverend Haas stood at the end of the gangway and greeted the passengers personally as they arrived on board. Anna and her extended family made their way to the middle deck toward the prow of the boat. As the children went exploring the adults warned them to stay within earshot, they chatted and laughed and leaned on the rails, watching the river traffic and seeing Manhattan come to life. Finally, just after 9:30
A.M.,
as a few final stragglers raced down the pier and crossed the gangplank, the engines churned, and the
Slocum
pulled away from the pier and into the East River, black coal smoke pouring from each of the two stacks that towered over the deck.

There was no rush. The
Slocum
leisurely moved up the East River, slowly gaining speed. The water was like glass, and those aboard the vessel could barely tell the ship was moving, yet at full steam she elegantly and sleekly ripped through the water at sixteen knots. On one of the decks a German band played familiar songs—American tunes, like "Swanee River," as well as "On the Beautiful Rhine" and other German songs, giving the journey the feel of something like a moving carnival. It was a perfect day—everyone kept saying so.

But just after 10:00
A.M.,
as the boat steamed up the East River toward Long Island Sound, a young boy exploring the lower deck at amidships, just in front of the pilothouse, sniffed the air. Woodsmoke. Living in the tenements, where even the smallest fire could spread rapidly and endanger dozens, if not hundreds of residents, even young children were attuned to the fear of fire. The boy sensed that there was something not right with the smell of woodsmoke below decks. Glancing around he noticed a small puff of smoke rising slowly up a narrow stairway.

Turning on his heels, the boy found a deckhand, told the young man that he smelled smoke, and led the crewman back to the top of the stairs. The sailor then followed his nose down the stairs to the doorway to a storage room. At the bottom of the steps, barely visible, he saw a few faint wisps of white smoke escaping from beneath the door, then rising up the stairs and rapidly dissipating.

Inside a small fire was smoldering. The floor was littered with straw and excelsior that had been used as packing material, and sometime earlier that morning, somehow, an ember had fallen to the floor, likely from a discarded match used to light a lamp or from the ash of a cigarette or cigar. There it had smoldered and perhaps even briefly turned to flame, but behind the closed door and virtually starved of oxygen, the fire barely stayed lit. Had the door remained closed for the rest of the day, it may well have gone out on its own.

But the deckhand, poorly trained and inexperienced, made a terrible mistake. Instead of calling one of his superiors for assistance and then preparing to fight the fire, he impulsively opened the door.

After a moment of hesitation, as if taking in a big breath, the fire inhaled the precious oxygen the open door now provided and roared to life. The flames licked upward and the excelsior burst into flame, nearly filling the room and sending a blast of heat toward the doorway. The crewman suddenly realized his mistake and panicked yet again. Instead of slamming the door shut and retreating, calling an alarm, he left the door open and tried to smother the flames with the only item within reach—a bag of charcoal. He threw the heavy bag on the source of the fire, which momentarily squashed flames, leaving only smoke. The deckhand raced away to get help, but instead of closing the door, he left it wide open.

With each step he took, oxygen and flame combined to kill. The fires roared back to life, and within minutes the flames raced out the open door and up the stairs. The blaze began to spread quickly as the wooden vessel, covered by layer upon layer of highly flammable paint, proved to be near-perfect fuel.

By the time the deckhand and other crew members made their way to the lower deck, the fire was serious, but not out of control. Yet they did not panic, not yet. The boat was equipped with standpipes and water hoses, and if the crew could get water to the fire quickly, there was still time to quench the flames.

As quickly as possible the crew pulled the hoses from the reels on which they hung and twisted the valves to open the flow of water. The water came, but instead of flowing through the hoses to the nozzle, as soon as the hoses became pressurized, they split, and instead of a stream of water being directed at the fire, the water simply spilled harmlessly—and ineffectively—over the deck.

Although the
General Slocum
had been launched in 1891, the canvas hoses had never been tested or even adequately inspected since. Fourteen years of exposure to the elements left them brittle and rotten.

The crewmen quickly processed the meaning of that failure and quickly abandoned their duties, racing toward the upper decks where more than thirteen hundred passengers were still oblivious to the danger spreading below.

Anna Weber and her party were chatting happily, unaware of the growing alarm down below, when all of a sudden a large puff of smoke belched out of a stairwell. Everyone stopped talking for a moment, and then someone quipped, "Don't mind that, it's just the chowder cooking." Anna let loose a nervous laugh, but within seconds flame followed smoke, and then the passengers heard the crew racing through the ship, yelling "fire" and spreading panic as fast as the flames.

In a heartbeat everyone on deck leaped into action. Anna, like nearly every other mother aboard the vessel, began screaming and calling for her children. Anna's husband raced into the crowd to find them and disappeared almost instantly.

It was a perilous situation, but not yet a very deadly one, for dozens of piers lined the river's edge. The captain of the
Slocum,
Edward Van Schaik, was now aware that his boat was on fire. All he needed to do was throttle back on the engines and pull alongside the nearest pier, an act that would have taken only a minute or two and would have given most of his passengers a chance to disembark.

But like the crewman who had first discovered the blaze, Van Schaik also made a fateful error. Looking down to either side from his vantage point in the pilothouse, although he saw smoke, he thought the fire was smaller and somewhat more contained than it was. He misjudged the seriousness of the situation, and, instead of fearing for the safety of his passengers, his first concern was that if he pulled up to a dock the fire might spread from his vessel, cause the pier to catch on fire, and then, perhaps, cause a larger fire onshore. Van Schaik decided instead to keep steaming upriver at full speed. He knew the East River well and planned to run the ship aground on North Brother Island, a twenty-acre islet in the entrance to Long Island Sound.

Although North Brother Island was less than five minutes away, to those on board the vessel each subsequent second was an eternity. No one knew Van Schaik's plans—all they knew was that flames and smoke were rapidly approaching. Anna Weber heard a man calling to "get the life preservers," and like dozens of other passengers, Anna climbed atop chairs and tables to reach the deck ceiling where the preservers were stored overhead. Some were wired fast, and others crumbled to the touch, but some passengers managed to pull some loose then strap them on each other and their children.

In a sense, Anna was lucky. She was unable to find a preserver. Those who did leaped overboard, where they bobbed to the surface for a moment, thinking they were safe, but then, after only a few seconds, most began to sink. Like the fire hoses, the life preservers on board the
Slocum
also dated from 1891. Their canvas covers had rotted, and the cork used to provide flotation had degraded into dust, losing all buoyancy. Instead of saving lives, as the cork dust became waterlogged the life preservers became dead weight. One might as well have strapped on a concrete block.

Some passengers and crew members then turned their attention to the vessel's lifeboats, which, like the preservers, were plentiful, more than enough to save everyone. But they too were useless. At some time in the past they had been wired fast where they hung and were now impossible to lower into the water.

By now portions of the middle deck were ablaze, and flames ran horizontally across the ceiling. Anna Weber felt the heat on her face and her hair caught fire. Each breath was like the blast from a furnace, and every surface she touched with her hands blistered her flesh. The crowd surged and carried Anna, still screaming for her children and husband, toward the side of the boat.