3-070-578 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Captain Matthew Webb, the Celebrated Swimmer (Drowned on Tuesday last in his attempt to swim the whirlpool rapids below Niagara Falls, 1883. '...incredible as it may appear, the Railway Companies had the inhumanity to combine to offer [the bravest and greatest of swimmers] ten thousand dollars for risking his life...[Webb] well knew the dangers...:..."The current, they say, is thirty-nine miles an hour, and the river is ninety-five feet deep...I want to avoid the sides, and yet I dare not go into the middle, for there lies the vortex, and that means death...The only clothing I shall wear will be the silk trunks I had on when I swam the English Channel...It may take me two or three hours to get out of the whirlpool, which is about a quarter of a mile long"...Captain Webb, with the quiet resolution which was his strongest characteristic, plunged into the perilous rapids...but "while diving through the wave he reached the whirlpool, and was drowned."...Had the Government been wise enough to appoint this gallant Channel swimmer to some useful berth (say, as Swimming-Master in the Navy), it is unlikely we should have to deplore his early death in a foolhardy enterprise, the encouragement of which by the railway magnates was most discreditable'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.