Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (6 page)

For years, westerners had noted that natives in the Americas, Polynesia, and the Far East could not only swim, but that they swam better than anyone in the West. As one Virginia colonist noted, "They strike not out both hands together, but alternately one after another, whereby they are able to swim both farther and faster than we do." It was a curiosity, but despite the fact that some members of the upper crust were gingerly stepping into the water and testing their skill and bravery with the breaststroke, making daring long-distance swims either down rivers or between towns along the seacoast, hugging close to the shore as they plodded along, no one in the West thought about emulating the savages.

Catlin, however, found the sight both mesmerizing and melancholy. Although he was certainly not the first westerner to witness Native Americans swimming, he was certainly the first to pay such close attention. To him, it was personal.

Born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1796, Catlin had been raised on a small farm in nearby Broome County, New York. From an early age Native American culture had fascinated him. His mother had briefly been held by a band of Iroquois, and Native Americans still roamed the nearby woods. Once, in fact, while hunting in the woods young Catlin was surprised when a shot rang out and dropped a deer before him. As Catlin later wrote, he then saw "what I never had seen before, nor ever dreamed of seeing in that place, the tall and graceful form, but half bent forward, as he pushed his red and naked shoulders and drew himself slowly over the logs and through the bushes, of a huge Indian!" Petrified, Catlin considered killing the Indian but when the native turned his way, wrote Catlin, "I saw then (though a child), in the momentary glance of that face, what infant human nature could not fail to see, and none but human nature could express. I saw
Humanity.
"

The encounter sparked a lifelong interest by Catlin in the American natives. He studied law and briefly worked as an attorney but soon abandoned the law and turned to painting, eking out an existence as a portrait artist. Although the self-taught artist was kept busy, his work was considered crude and was a critical failure.

In 1824, however, after encountering an Indian delegation traveling to Philadelphia, Catlin had an inspiration and decided to devote his talent to documenting the American natives as his primary subject matter. Over the next few years Catlin made plans to take an extended trip west to observe Native American tribes. But in September 1928, as Catlin tried to wrap up his affairs before beginning his journey, his younger brother Julius Catlin traveled to Rochester, New York, to deliver one of his brother's portraits. While there, he decided to sketch a waterfall along the Genesee River. On the hot day, after sitting in the sun for several hours, he found the waters too tempting and decided to cool off.

Like most other of his contemporaries, Julius Catlin's swimming skills, were, at best, rudimentary. He could float and probably paddle along a bit using the breaststroke, but was by no means an accomplished swimmer.

On this day he delicately stepped into the water. Taking care not to slip, he slowly made his way from shore, feeling, with each step, the rising tide of cool water around his body, and then a steady pull as the current increased.

Then he was gone. The current lifted him off his feet, pulled him into the Genesee, and swept him downstream. Panicked, he fought and splashed and called out, but neither Catlin himself nor anyone else had the skills needed for rescue. In only a few moments he was exhausted, slipped beneath the water, and drowned. His battered body was found days later far downstream.

George Catlin was broken. Not only was his brother dead, but he had died while making a journey on his behalf and while pursuing a vocation George Catlin himself had inspired. George Catlin then decided to make his journey westward alone, a trip that in 1832 brought him to the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes.

Catlin observed the tribes with the eye of an artist and a keen attention to detail, but he was never more precise than when he saw the natives swimming in the swift currents of the Knife and Missouri rivers. The Mandan and the Hidatsa took to the water every single day without incident, the women and younger children at a place above their village, and the men and older boys below. As he looked down from the surrounding bluffs and saw the natives cavorting in the water, laughing and shouting, he could not help but think of his brother.

"They all learn to swim well," wrote Catlin of the natives, "and the poorest swimmer among them will dash fearlessly into the boiling and eddying current of the Missouri, and cross it with perfect ease ... The art of swimming is known to all the American Indians, and perhaps no people on earth have taken more pains to learn it, nor any who turn it to better account.

"The mode of swimming amongst the Mandan, as well as amongst most of the other tribes, is quite different than that practiced in those parts of the civilized world which I have had the pleasure yet to visit," wrote Catlin. Unlike the Europeans, the natives did not use the breaststroke. Instead, noted Catlin, the native "throws his body alternately upon the left and right side, raising one arm entirely above the water and reaching as far forward as he can, to dip it, whilst his whole weight and force are spent upon the one passing under him, like a paddle propelling him along; whilst this arm is making a half circle, and is being raised out of the water behind him, the opposite arm is describing a similar arch in the air over his head, to be dipped in the water as far as he can reach before him, with the hand turned under, forming a sort of bucket, to act most effectively as it passes in its turn beneath him. By this bold and powerful mode of swimming, which may want the grace that many would wish to see, I am quite sure ... that a man will preserve his strength and breathe much longer in this alternate rolling motion, than he can in the usual mode of swimming, in the polished world."

There, in a few brief paragraphs, was the future of an entire sport. And there it sat, in one of Catlin's notebooks, for much of the next decade, unread and unstudied, as countless men and women "in the polished world" drowned, just as Julius Catlin had. But if anyone had looked closely at the painting Catlin made the following winter entitled
Hidatsa Village, Earth Covered Lodges, on the Knife River,
they would have seen how profoundly the scene affected the painter. From the perspective of the opposite shore the scene shows more than a dozen mud dwellings atop a bluff above the river. In the foreground of the far shore, where the river runs beneath the village, four natives lay horizontal in the water, each with an arm stretched out or overhead, apparently swimming easily.

Yet on the near shore, almost unnoticed, in the lower right corner of the painting is an indistinct lone figure not identifiable as a native. This figure, half immersed in water, arms thrust overhead, appears to be drowning. A canoe is rushing toward the figure, water churning as it speeds to help, and several natives can be seen running toward the riverbank, preparing to dive into the water.

The contrast in the scene is unmistakable. The natives can swim. The drowning figure cannot.

Over the next few years Catlin made several more journeys, eventually making contact with nearly fifty tribes, turning his sketches into paintings, opening a modest gallery to display his work, and giving lectures with little success. In the meantime the Mandan and Hidatsa were both afflicted with smallpox. The disease raced through the tribes, and only five years after Catlin's first contact barely one hundred Mandan remained alive, while nearly half the Hidatsa succumbed.

Distraught, depressed, and on his way toward bankruptcy, in 1840 Catlin gathered his paintings and other artifacts and abandoned America for England, hoping for a better reception, and self-published a two-volume collection of his writings and prints entitled
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians,
a book that included Catlin's description of the swimming natives. For a time his gallery was quite successful, but after a few years interest began to wane. Catlin, scrambling for financial survival, then created an English version of the "Wild West" show, using family members and actors to portray Native Americans.

Then he encountered a retired member of the Canadian military, Colonel Arthur Rankin, who had befriended the Ojibwa tribe and had traveled to England with nearly a dozen members of the tribe. The Ojibwa caused a sensation in London, and Rankin and Catlin became partners as the Ojibwa become a living display in Catlin's gallery, performing actual native dances and songs.

A short time later at the invitation of a member of the British Swimming Society, who had apparently read Catlin's book, the Ojibwa were invited to make an appearance at the swimming baths at High Holborn. The society wished to see a demonstration of native swimming. Two Ojibwa, Wenishkaweabee (the Flying Gull) and Sahma (Tobacco), were invited to compete for a silver medal to be presented by the society.

As London's
Times
reported, "At a signal the Indians jumped into the bath, and, on a pistol being discharged, they struck out and swam to the other end, a distance of 130 feet, in less than half a minute. The Flying Gull was the victor by seven feet ... The style of swimming is totally 'un-European.' They thrash the water violently with their arms, like sails of a windmill, and beat downward with their feet, blowing with force and grotesque antics ... They dived from one end of the bath to the other with the rapidity of an arrow, and almost as straight as the tension of limb." Although no one in attendance realized it, they had just witnessed the first formal demonstration of a stroke that would one day be refined into the "crawl," better known today as the "freestyle." It left enough of an impression that for some decades afterward the stroke was known in England as simply "the Indian."

After a second race, again won by the Flying Gull, the two natives were challenged to swim once more by Harold Kenworthy, a member of the society and widely acknowledged as one of the best swimmers in England. For the third time in less than ten minutes, the two Ojibwa dove into the water, this time joined by Kenworthy. Kenworthy, utilizing the backstroke, won easily as the Flying Gull and Tobacco, by this time exhausted, barely managed to finish. The victory satisfied the Englishman's sense of superiority, for the English would be slow to adopt "the Indian" stroke, but the days of the breaststroke as the preeminent style of swimming were numbered. All it would take was someone to recognize it.

Perhaps the first swimmer to recognize and take advantage of the style of swimming that so captivated George Catlin was John Arthur Trudgen, who, quite apart from Catlin, made his own discovery. The son of an English engineer employed in Brazil, as a boy Trudgen was taught how to swim by native Brazilians, learning a stroke that was essentially identical to that displayed by the two Ojibwa. When he returned to England he began to use the stroke, which he refined somewhat from the original, using the same double overarm stroke displayed by the Mandan and the two Ojibwa. But instead of beating "downward with their feet," as the Ojibwa had, Trudgen utilized the "frog kick" used by proponents of the breaststroke, kicking simultaneous with the downward stroke of his right arm. He then glided forward, legs together, as he stroked with his left arm. Although the result was rather jerky, as the swimmer constantly sped forward then slowed down, this slight change made the stroke palatable to the English sensibility, which was at least as concerned with grace as it was with raw speed, and Trudgen's kick resulted in less splashing than the swimming style demonstrated by the Ojibwa.

In early August 1875, representing the Alliance Swimming Club of London at Edgbaston Reservoir, in a race in which every other swimmer used the breaststroke, Trudgen captured the English 100-yard championship, traveling the distance in one minute and sixteen seconds—roughly the same pace as the Flying Gull in his first exhibition some thirty years earlier. Recalling the two Ojibwa, as a writer in the British publication the
Swimming Record
sniffed a few days later, Trudgen's "action reminds an observer of a style peculiar to the Indians."

O
NCE TRUDY LEARNED
to swim, there was no keeping her out of the water. Although her parents insisted that she spend a few more sessions attached to the rope, Trudy soon learned not only the dog paddle but, with the help of Helen and Meg, the breaststroke as well. Every day of every summer the family spent in the Highlands, Trudy spent at least a few minutes in the ocean, either watching over her younger siblings or racing though the surf with Meg.

She and Meg were both intrigued by the men and boys they saw swimming farther offshore—and not just because they were men. These swimmers used a stroke the girls had heard of—the crawl—but neither girl had any idea of how, precisely, it was done, and both were too shy to ask. They tried to learn by watching, but whenever they tried the stroke themselves, churning each arm like a pinwheel, they were far more successful at splashing each other than at swimming, able to propel themselves forward only a few yards before becoming exhausted and collapsing in laughter.

Ever since the Ederles had spent their first summer in the Highlands it had become not just a second home, but something of a sanctuary, for as World War I unfolded and it became ever more likely that the United States would enter the conflict, anti-German sentiment, which in some parts of the country had even led to lynchings, began to foment and spread. Despite the long-established role German immigrants played in American culture, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt had summed up the growing climate of intolerance by referring to German immigrants that tried to retain their German heritage disparagingly, calling them "hyphenated Americans ... not Americans at all, but traitors to America and tools and servants of Germany against America."