Splash! E-Book

Howard Means

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'This fascinating history of how, where and why humans swim...is perfect reading for those missing a splash-about during the lockdown.' Guardian From the first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the recreational swimmers in your local pool, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all. Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then re-emerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at the modern Olympic Games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, revealing how its history spans religion, fashion, architecture, public health, colonialism, segregation, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory and much, much more. As refreshing as jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history with an irrepressible enthusiasm that will make you crave your next dip.

Leseprobe

SPLASH!

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Allen & Unwin

This edition published by arrangement with Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, New York, USA.

Copyright © Howard Means, 2020

The moral right of Howard Means to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos and illustrations are in the public domain. Interior design by Amy Quinn

Allen & Unwinc/o Atlantic BooksOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]Fax: [phone]Email: [email protected]: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 91163 081 4Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 082 1E-Book ISBN 978 1 76087 429 2

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memoriamJonathan B. London

CONTENTS

Prologue: Once Upon a Time in Egypt . . .

1 Gods, Humans, and the Aquatic Ape

2 Swimming’s Golden Age

3 First There Was Swimming; Then There Was None

4 Rediscovering a Lost Art

5 Swimming 2.0

6 A Frog in Every Tub

7 Diving in for Dollars and Pounds

8 Climb Every Mountain, Swim Every Sea

9 The Great Swimming Cover-Up

10 An Aussie Wrecking Ball Goes Rogue

11 Nylon, WWII, James Bond, and the G-String

12 Swimming Together, Swimming Alone

13 The Last Taboo

14 Growing Pains

15 The Fastest Swimmer Ever

16 Is Enough Ever Enough?

Epilogue: My Watery Life

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

There is an essential rightness about swimming, as about all such flowing and, so to speak, musical activities. And then there is the wonder of buoyancy, of being suspended in this thick, transparent medium that supports and embraces us. One can move in water, play with it, in a way that has no analogue in the air. One can explore its dynamics, its flow, this way and that; one can move one’s hands like propellers or direct them like little rudders; one can become a little hydroplane or submarine, investigating the physics of flow with one’s own body. And, beyond this, there is all the symbolism of swimming—its imaginative resonances, its mythic potentials.

—Oliver Sacks

PROLOGUE

ONCE UPON A TIME IN EGYPT . . .

In the desert, you celebrate nothing but water.

—Michael Ondaatje

Swimming conjures many things: fierce competition, recreation, exercise, open water; a chance to cool off, show some skin, or sink below the surface and be all alone. Swimming is both a precise skill— see the Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming at Indiana University—and a performance art. (Think water ballet and synchronized swimming.) It’s wading, splashing, dunking, the dead man’s float, Marco Polo, snorkeling, bodysurfing, a poolside or beachside or lakeside summer romance. The near weightlessness of swimming is the closest most of us will ever get to zero-gravity space travel. The terror of being submerged is the nearest some of us ever come to sheer hell.

Whatever swimming means to us individually, though, there’s one thing it cannot do without: water. And therein lies a great irony because the most ancient representations of swimming ever found are eight-thousand-year-old pictographs on cave walls in what is now the driest spot on planet Earth.

But maybe that’s not such a great irony after all because swimming, like any activity that dates back to the dawn of humankind, is also an index of change: of social mores, of fashion, of how we relate to nature, of religious teachings and superstitions, of sport and how we judge performance, and most notably in this case of climatological change. Which brings us back to the so-called Cave of the Swimmers at Wadi Sura in the Gilf Kebir, in the southwest corner of Egypt, not far from Libya and Sudan.*

The cave and its pictographs had long been known to Bedouin nomads, but they first came to the attention of the West in October 1933 thanks to the desert mapper and explorer László Almásy. The Hungarian-born Almásy was part of a small wave of adventurers who fanned out across the vast, unknown stretches of the eastern Sahara beginning in the late 1920s. In 1926, he motored the 1,350 miles from Cairo to Khartoum, among the earliest efforts to tame the Nile basin by automobile. That trip at least had the advantage of a river to follow, and river towns along the way. Three years later, Almásy ventured by car far more daringly across a long stretch of the Darb el Arbain, following the ancient caravan route from Selima in western Sudan to the southern Egyptian oasis at Karga.

The rugged Gilf Kebir plateau (its name translates as “Great Barrier”) was slower to yield its secrets. The plateau is both massive—a sandstone outcropping the size of Puerto Rico, rising nearly a thousand feet above the desert floor—and massively remote. So far as is known, its existence was never mapped until early in the twentieth century when it was “discovered” by two of Egypt’s most famous desert explorers: Ahmed Hassanein, who would later serve as chamberlain to King Farouk, and Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein, son of the Egyptian sultan Hussein Kamel.*

The western side of the plateau was particularly forbidding, unseen by European eyes until the early 1930s when Almásy and a twenty-three-year-old Englishman, Sir Robert Clayton-East-Clayton, the 9th Baronet of Marden, mounted a joint attack. Almásy would lead a fleet of automobiles across the desert, while Clayton handled reconnaissance overhead in his lightweight, single-engine de Havilland Gipsy Moth airplane. Flying low over the plateau, Clayton was able to pick out a promising, nearly hidden valley, but neither he nor Almásy on the ground below could find a way to ascend the abrupt plateau, and with fuel running low for both ground and air explorations, the party gave up and retreated to Cairo.

Robert Clayton would never complete the mission. He died of polio soon after returning to England. In the end, it was Almásy, Patrick Clayton (no relation to the Baronet), and several others who became the first Westerners to enter the valley and explore its caves—the first also to realize that they had stumbled upon a treasure trove of primitive ancient art. To Patrick Clayton goes credit for discovering the so-called Giraffe Rock, rich with paintings of the long-necked mammals. Other caves featured archers, cattle, and female figures. So plentiful were the figures that the site quickly became known as Wadi Sura—roughly, Valley (or Dry Riverbed) of the Pictures.

László Almásy, though, won the big prize, or at least the most inexplicable. In October 1933, he scrambled up some boulders, poked his head inside a previously unexplored cave fourteen meters by eight meters wide, and there, floating effortlessly on the rock wall, were multiple painted figures who gave every indication of being caught midstroke doing some highly relaxed version of the old-fashioned doggy paddle.

Almásy had found the Cave of the Swimmers, but the swimmers themselves posed far more questions than answers. The archers, the cattle, the female and other human figures were basically predictable. As daunting as the Sahara was, it was not uninhabited. Nomads had been crossing the sand for millennia. Ancient caravan routes like the one Almásy had traveled by car in 1929 were well established. Camels by the thousands, herded and wild, could still be found among the dunes and vast empty spaces.

Eight-thousand-year-old pictographs found in the Cave of the Swimmers at Wadi Sura, in the southwest Egyptian desert. (Roland Unger, altered to black & white)

But swimmers? Swimming implied more than ground moisture and sufficient rain to sustain grasses for grazing. Swimmers conjured up water in depth and quantity. The pictographs suggest that the bone-dry riverbeds that crisscrossed the Gilf plateau—Wadi Sura and nine others—had once fed lakes that had not only been swimmable but actually swum.

What did it all mean? László Almásy attempted to provide the answer in a little-read 1934 monograph, in Hungarian; subsequent research and archaeological evidence have backed Almásy in his broad details: The Sahara—the “Great Sand Sea” as it is often called—had been for the better part of many millennia a thoroughly inhabitable and very aquatic place. In some places, maybe in most, it appears to have been a very dangerous place to swim as well.

Recent excavations led by the National Geographic Society at the largest Stone Age graveyard ever found in the Sahara—at Gobero, in Niger’s T’en’er’e Desert (the stark “desert within the desert”)—revealed skeletal remains of crocodiles, hippos, and Nile perch. The hippos and perch particularly indicate a deep-water lake at the Gobero site: mature Nile perch, which can easily reach six feet and five hundred pounds, are not a fish made for shallow waters, or light fishing tackle either.

Skeletal evidence was also found of elephants, giraffes, hartebeests, warthogs, and pythons at the Gobero site. Similar fossil evidence can be found at Tassili n’Ajjer, the 72,000-square-kilometer plateau in southeast Algeria, where it meets Libya, Niger, and Mali. More important at Tassili are the fifteen thousand plus rock engravings and paintings that first came to Western attention in 1933, the same year Wadi Sura was discovered. Among them are a whole host of animals, including hippopotami, that have been absent from the area for thousands of years.

Wadi Sura hasn’t received anything like the same well-funded archaeological attention that has been lavished on Tassili and especially Gobero. But it’s on roughly the same latitude, and its pictographs suggest a similar, if less diverse, animal population and a hunter-gatherer human population that learned to take advantage of the water that nature had placed so generously at its doorstep.

Triangulating the evidence from all three sites and many, many others creates a fairly accurate timeline (that is, geological time— within, say, plus or minus a thousand years) of when this Green Sahara flourished.

What’s known is that about twelve thousand years ago, the Earth, as it does every now and again, wobbled slightly in its orbit. That was enough to shift the seasonal monsoons we now associate with the Central African jungles slightly northward, bringing fresh rains to the previously parched Sahara. All across North Africa, lakes sprang up in long-dry indentations. The plentiful rains may have also reactivated river systems that date back to the Middle Miocene period, eleven to fifteen million years ago. One radar study posits a 300-kilometer drainage basin, beginning with three tributaries—one originating in the western Gilf Kebir, near Wadi Sura—and ending in the Mediterranean Sea.

Where water arises, fish and birds follow. Animals, too, including human ones. By ten thousand years ago, migrants had shown up in the previously desiccated Sahara in sufficient numbers to leave a discernible record behind them. That’s when the towering Kiffian—sometimes six feet or taller—began settling into the Gobero site. Nile perch seem to have been plentiful. The Kiffian hunted them probably from reed boats, using bone-tipped harpoons.

For people accustomed to wild climatological extremes, this must have been a paradise, but not a permanent one. Circa eight thousand years ago, just about the time the swimmer-artists were hard at work at Wadi Sura, long history began to reassert itself. The monsoons once again went south. For a thousand years, the Sahara slowly reverted to its desiccated self, but then the climate gods intervened again. A fresh monsoon uptick, not as strong this time, not as much rain, regreened the desert for another two and a half millennia. Burial sites from this later period still show evidence of deep-water waders—an upper-arm bracelet carved from a hippo tusk, for example—but the fish skeletons that survived are smaller and suggest shallow water: tilapia instead of Nile perch.

And then? Maybe it was just the Earth wobbling yet again, or that plus the effects of grazing livestock and domesticated farming. But the monsoons retreated once more to Central Africa, perhaps for good. Rain in any quantity grew sparse, then all but vanished. The thin ground cover that remained offered little and finally no protection from the relentless sun. Desertification had a force multiplier. Dirt yielded to sand. The sand grew, encompassed, and overwhelmed virtually everything and everywhere, save for a few oases and deeply isolated valleys, and the swimmers on the cave wall at Wadi Sura—a lost tableau of the Green Sahara— entered into a kind of hibernation, not to be seen again by other than nomadic eyes for six thousand years or more.

The Cave of the Swimmers gained fame a quarter century ago because of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, and the subsequent movie of the same name, starring Ralph Fiennes.

Beautifully written, Ondaatje’s novel is hard to grab hold of. Time and place seesaw back and forth. Truth is elusive; characters are sometimes intentionally amnesiac. One reviewer called the novel “a poetry of smoke and mirrors.” It’s every bit of that. László Almásy survives intact in Ondaatje’s telling, at least as a person. He’s the “English” patient, ironically enough, given his Hungarian roots. Robert Clayton-East-Clayton becomes Geoffrey Clifton. (The blue blood remains, but the baronetcy is gone.) Dorothea, Clayton’s new wife in the real world, is transformed in this fictional one into Katharine Clifton, Almásy’s lover. (There’s irony here, as well. By all accounts, Almásy was gay.)

The timeline has been pushed forward to embrace World War II. Suicide, violent death, hideous wounds sometimes seem to be everywhere. Treachery, too. Clifton fronts as a freelancing aerial photographer but is secretly mapping the desert for British intelligence. Almásy ultimately betrays British secrets to the Germans, as he did in real life.

For the greatest part, the story is set in the near-ruins of an Italian villa, but the Gilf Kebir, the surrounding desert, and the cave and its swimmers are always there in the background. Director Anthony Minghella opens the movie with an unknown hand—Katharine’s, we later learn—brush-stroking renderings of the suspended figures on the cave wall and segues from there to an aerial sweep of the surrounding desert, sand wave upon sand wave. He closes it in much the same way. Almásy carries the dead Katharine out of the Cave of the Swimmers and then flies her body over the Great Sand Sea and into the horror that awaits him, before the camera makes a final shift back to now-liberated Italy.

In his novel, Ondaatje also keeps returning to the cave and to the Sahara more broadly. When Almásy falls to earth burning from his plane, the Bedouins make a “boat of sticks” to transport him. They keep him alive because “I had information like a sea in me”—maps of the seafloor they traveled. “These were water people,” he writes still later. “Even today caravans look like a river.” As with the sea, nothing in the desert is strapped down or permanent. Dunes disappear. Like waves, they are pushed across the desert surface and vanish. People disappear, too— drowned as completely in sand as they might be in water. Maybe most important: “In the desert, you celebrate nothing but water.” Exactly what the Cave of the Swimmers ultimately does.

Between the 1992 book (which won the prestigious Booker Prize), the 1996 movie (nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director), and the sheer exoticness of the site, Wadi Sura would seem to have been ripe for a tourist invasion, and indeed there has been some tourism and attendant desecration of the cave paintings such as by, for example, splashing water on the cave wall to sharpen the contrast for photographs or chipping off pieces of paintings for take-home souvenirs.

But tourism remains the exception at Wadi Sura, and for good reasons. For starters, there is no infrastructure within hundreds of miles of the Gilf Kebir. Such expeditions as there are commonly leave from Cairo, head to the oasis at Bahariya and then on to the White Desert for a first night of camping. From there, it’s a week of hard driving via Land Rovers or their equivalent across the desert, to the Ammonite Scarp, rich in tiny sea fossils (another reminder of the Sahara’s ancient wet past), then deep into remote landscapes, and finally—a punishing week or so into the trip—through the Aqaba Pass and on to the Gilf Kebir and to Wadi Sura. If you get there at all.

Looking out the mouth of the Cave of the Swimmers. Wadi Sura is the driest spot on Earth. (Carlos de la Fuente, altered to black & white)

One adventure travel outfit that includes Wadi Sura on its itinerary warns at the outset that given “the realities of travel across the Gilf Kebir . . . it is not possible to guarantee the tour will pan out exactly as described.” Sandstorms, mechanical problems, shifting terrains are commonplace. National authorities restrict and open access as the political climate shifts in nearby Libya and Sudan. Since 2010, every expedition must also be accompanied by a police vehicle and armed police officer. “This is a journey of a lifetime,” the warning continues, “for the true desert lover prepared to tolerate some discomfort in order to see places only a few Westerners have ever visited.”

Another guidebook is more specific about the potential “discomfort”: “Don’t even think of going with less than three 4WD vehicles, or without a GPS set and satellite phone.” Even then, the book cautions, “sand gets into every crevice of your body, there’s no water to spare for washing, and you start to stink—like everybody else in the vehicle.” Little wonder that in the film version of The English Patient, the “Wadi Sura” scenes were actually shot in Tunisia.

For its part, the British Foreign Service as late as spring 2019 was warning “against all but essential travel” to anywhere remotely near to the very far-flung Gilf Kebir. All of which probably explains why seventy years passed before a second major rock art site became known in the Wadi Sura valley, the so-called Cave of the Beasts, with at least fifteen hundred representations of animals and humans on its mute stone walls, including more swimmers painted in a style similar to those discovered by László Almásy.

And then there’s Wadi Sura itself. While many places claim to be the driest spot in the world, this totemic home of primitive swimming art really does seem to take the prize, especially if you measure by the aridity index—a ratio of the evaporation power of the solar energy that hits a specific location to the rainfall actually received there. In the case of Wadi Sura, that ratio is 200. Put another way, the sun is capable of evaporating two hundred times the local precipitation, which is annually negligible or nonexistent. At the Cave of the Swimmers, water doesn’t have a chance in hell.

The Swimmers themselves, those depicted on the cave walls, dealt with no such discomforts. The planet hadn’t yet rewobbled on its axis, condemning a huge swath of North Africa to desert. For all they can imagine, the water will be out there waiting for them every day to come until the end of time.

No one can say exactly what the swimmers are swimming through. Nor are scholars unanimously convinced they are swimming at all. In a 2009 article for Anthropologie, Jiri Svoboda contends the figures are more likely floating in thin air—perhaps because they are in an altered state of consciousness or more likely because they have been literally thrown in the air by unseen humans below them as part of an ancient African ritual dance. Douglas Coulson, founder of TARA (Trust for African Rock Art), also posits that the seemingly floating bodies are a “visual metaphor” for the artist’s (or artists’) out-of-body experience, maybe induced through hallucinogens or via the kind of rhythmic clapping and chanting Coulson has witnessed among other African desert people.

Other scholars have suggested that the swimmers are actually negotiating a region called Nun, a primordial ocean that the dead must pass through on their way to a beneficent afterlife and where the evil dead are culled for special tortures. As evidence, the authors cite the presence of similar beastlike figures in the paintings found at both sites, in 1933 at the Cave of the Swimmers and in 2003 at the Cave of the Beasts.

Maybe, then, this really is a case of afterlife hell; Christians didn’t invent purgatory. The beasts are many times larger than the swimmers and undeniably scary, but if those monsters are culling the evil, why is there so little panic among the swimmers? The ones on the wall at Wadi Sura look like they could keep going all day.

Besides, anyone deeply familiar with the doggy paddle knows it when she sees it: the feet, the hands, the position of the head are unmistakable. Those representations of swimmers could have been modeled at the Brookside pool in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; the Crozet Community Park pool in rural Virginia; and other venues where I lifeguarded and taught swimming to boys and girls—and men and women—who had no idea how to otherwise move through the water.

Who knows? Eight-thousand-year-old mysteries are not easily solved. The key point is—dead or alive, heading for the afterlife or just beating the midday sun, or maybe just plain stoned—the swimmers are actually swimming, feet stretched behind them or legs bent at the knee as if getting ready for a new kick, arms reaching out in front. What’s more, even if these are tableaus of tripping, not swimming, the artist or artists responsible still had a frame of ready reference for portraying it, another near-gravity-free experience that didn’t require hallucinogens or frantic dancing to enjoy.

Wheeled vehicles were still four millennia in the future, hieroglyphs almost five thousand years away. But in an area that is now so like the barren surface of Mars that NASA has used it for landing simulations, swimming was common enough that prehistoric artists enshrined it on walls that have preserved the record for at least eight thousand years.

_________________

* To be exact, 23 degrees, 35 minutes, and 40.99 seconds north of the equator, and 25 degrees, 14 minutes, and 0.6 seconds east of the Prime Meridian.

* Hassanein was a multitalented man. He competed for Egypt in the épée and foil events in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics.

1

GODS, HUMANS, AND THE AQUATIC APE

Over 380 million years ago, the basic form of our limbs was already in place, albeit in fish which swam through the Devonian sea.

—Brian Switek

Creationists and evolutionists agree on at least one thing: life began with water.

In the opening lines of the Book of Genesis, God creates an Earth without form and void, an Earth on which darkness is upon the face of the deep. Then in verse 2, less than thirty words into the six-hundred-thousand-word Old Testament, God’s Spirit moves upon the water, and the fine work of creation begins. God separates light from darkness. He divides the waters under the firmament from those above it—the oceans from Heaven. Dry land appears, vegetation, the sun and the moon, creatures of the deep, fowl of every kind, and beasts as well, four-legged ones and creeping things. Then on Day Six, God creates his masterwork—humankind in his own image—and on the Seventh Day he rests.

Evolution gets us to the same place but takes four billion-plus years longer. The one-cell creatures of that first, all-encompassing deep grow to two cells, eight cells, complicated fish with gills capable of taking oxygen out of H2O, and on from there. Eventually, air breathers struggle ashore, get a foothold on the land, and finally half a million years or so ago, Homo sapiens—our long-distant ancestors—begin to leave their first footprints.

Either way, in creationism’s fast lane or along the scenic route of evolution, water is central to the story. It’s where life first formed, and maybe where life as far we can imagine it will end. (See Kevin Costner’s Water-world, Steven Spielberg’s A.I., global warming, and more.) Even today, we humans are aquatic mammals until virtually the moment of our birth. Our first breath out of the womb can’t be that different from the one taken by the first proto-us who stumbled or more likely finned themselves ashore—pure surprise!

Although we are eons to the hundredth power removed from those first fish that crawled or flopped or pushed themselves out of the sea, we still bear some striking anatomical resemblances to them and their immediate ancestors. The fish genus known as Tinirau dates back at least 375 million years. Tinirau never left the ocean, but in an evolutionary sense, it clearly was preparing to. Instead of the sort of fins any fisherman would recognize—fans of thin bones, often spikey at the tip—Tinirau’s four fins were each attached to its body by a single bone, just as our arms are attached to our bodies by the humerus and our legs by the femur. Today’s “walking catfish” of South Florida are closer to chunky snakes— they wriggle their way forward. The Tinirau heralded the dawn of tetra-pods—four-footed creatures, just like us before standing up caught on.

As Brian Switek wrote back in 2012 for Wired.com, “Over 380 million years ago, the basic form of our limbs was already in place, albeit in fish which swam through the Devonian sea.” Something to think about! The fish–human comparisons don’t end there. Swimming also remains deeply encoded in our biology. Full or even partial submersion triggers a whole suite of involuntary responses that would seem far more helpful to animals that lived in the water than to those that walk on dry land.

Spend an hour up to your head in water heated to 32 degrees Centigrade (almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit), and your heart rate will drop on average by 15 percent, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure by 11 and 12 percent, respectively. Knock the temperature down 10 percent or more (toward the range that competitive swimmers prefer) and the benefits in cardiopulmonary efficiency are greater still. A study in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health found that “winter swimming” (and remember, we’re talking “circumpolar” here) reduces tension, fatigue, and negativity while boosting vigor and relieving pain from multiple conditions including rheumatism, fibromyalgia, and asthma. No wonder whales often seem more at peace with themselves than we humans do.

One more piece of evidence reinforces that there’s something genetically aquatic about us humans: the mammalian diving reflex. Plunge into cold water, and three things happen automatically:

• Your heart rate slows by up to 30 percent, or 50 percent or more in trained individuals. (The triggers here are the trigeminal facial nerves, which run on either side of the nose, and the vagus nerve, which connects brain, heart, lungs, and digestive tract.)

• As that happens, muscle contractions in blood vessel walls reduce blood flow to the extremities, preserving blood (and critically the oxygen it carries) for the core organs—your brain and heart.

• Continue descending below the surface, and you trigger a third phenomenon: blood plasma and water fill your chest cavity to protect the critical organs there—lungs and heart—from the increased external water pressure.

Granted, other than pearl hunters, maybe Navy SEALs, and socalled free divers, no part of this reflex is broadly useful for humans.* The water has to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit or colder to trigger the diving reflex, an uncomfortable temperature for most of us. What’s more, humans simply aren’t made to swim with the ease, strength, or power of the mammals most dependent on the diving reflex—whales, seals, otters, porpoises, and the like. But that such a reflex exists at all surely suggests our watery past.

One variant of the reflex provides an important safeguard for human newborns. Submerge an infant up to the age of about six months in water, and his or her windpipe automatically closes to keep water out of the lungs—the secret behind “water-baby” classes and the like taught at so many YMCAs.

And then there’s sound. Out of the water, sounds travels through air to our inner ear, where it is detected and sent to the brain for translation. But as Helen Czerski points out in a fascinating “Everyday Physics” piece for the Wall Street Journal, below the water line, the outer ear is blocked by water. Instead, sound waves reach the inner ear through what’s known as “bone conduction”—that is, by traveling through the jaw bone and skull. One result is that we hear high-pitched sounds and sharp ones like tapping and clicking—exactly the kind of “language” that whales, porpoises, and other large aquatic mammals use—far better underwater than we do above. Maybe our underwater ears were made to hear them, and we just forgot what all those sounds mean.

Combine the embedded human water responses described above with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and it can be tempting to arrive at the aquatic ape theory. Back in 1960, British biologist Sir Alister Hardy posited that humans first began to differentiate themselves from other apes when they climbed down from the trees and set up house beside the sea and other large bodies of water. Academically, that was a big leap. Conventional wisdom held that those first proto-humans set out as hunter-gatherers across the grasslands rather than heading for the beach. But, at another level, Hardy’s theory was nothing more than common sense.

Up until about age six months, an infant’s windpipe automatically closes underwater, an indication perhaps of our aquatic heritage. (Affebook, altered to black & white)

Mastering rivers, deltas, and coastal waters would have extended the range of those first human-apes, broadened their diet to include the roots and tubers of water lilies and the like, and critically forced them into an upright stance so they could wade through the water with their heads held high and hands free to forage. Adding swimming and diving to the skill set—not just entering the water but also, in a sense, conquering it— would have yielded even greater rewards: access to protein- and omega-3-rich food sources such as fish, shellfish, and kelp—a banquet less subject to seasonal variations than nuts or berries or migrating land animals.

From that premise, other ape–human differentiations appear to fall more or less naturally in place. Proto-humans began to shed their fur, replacing it with subcutaneous fat, both to keep themselves warm when foraging in colder waters and icy weather and to protect their young. Just as their windpipes naturally close when submerged—and for the same reason: air trapped in their lungs—newborn humans naturally float. No other ape-descended newborn can claim that.

Grasslands or wetlands? Big-game savannah hunters or waterside foragers? That’s basically where the controversy stood in 1972 when Elaine Morgan tossed a feminist grenade into the mix with her book The Descent of Woman. Morgan had no problem with Alister Hardy’s theory—in fact, she thoroughly embraced it—but Hardy hadn’t pursued his own logic deeply enough. The grasslands theory had always favored men. They were the strong ones. They led the hunt and developed big brains to coordinate the kill. The women followed along, cooked the meat, serviced the hunters, had their babies, and on life went, killing and rutting.

Hardy’s aquatic ape opened up for Elaine Morgan a whole new world of reasoning. If women weren’t leading the water foraging in those proto-human societies, why did they develop thicker layers of subcutaneous fat than men? And why is it that, even today, the only sport in which women are clearly superior to men is long-distance (as in, very long distance) open-water swimming? Michael Phelps might have a chest full of Olympic gold medals, but Lynne Cox has swum the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, in water that averaged 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is the greater accomplishment? Well, it depends on what you set out to do.

Alister Hardy’s aquatic ape theory—and Elaine Morgan’s feminist take on it—still struggles for traction in the academic world, but swimming’s role in evolution seems beyond dispute. At the simplest level, a high comfort level with water might be a key discriminator between which strains of early hominoids survived the massive climate shifts of prehistory and which didn’t. Seas rose. Oceans flooded. A bolt of lightning could turn hundreds of miles of sere grasslands into a raging wall of flame. At such tipping points, those who didn’t fear water could take to the sea in rafts in search of more hospitable living circumstances, while those who feared water stayed put and perished.

By the eighteenth century BCE, when Hammurabi put together his famous code of laws, swimming had become in an odd way a key element of an entire judicial system. Hammurabi’s code is an astoundingly thorough document. For adultery alone, it makes nine distinctions and provides as many separate legal remedies, many of them more women-centered than Hester Prynne encountered in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late seventeenth century CE. Three of the strictures, though, do seem both primitive and punitive:

• If a wife of a man be taken in lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water.

• If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man, and she have not been taken in lying with another man, for her husband’s sake she shall throw herself into the river.

• If that woman do not protect her body and enter into another house, they shall call that woman to account and they shall throw her into the water.

Even in these cases, though, swimming provides an out. In the first instance, a repentant husband is allowed to jump into the water and rescue his accused wife. In the second and third, where the woman is unbound, her fate is presumably up to the river gods. If she’s innocent, they will rescue her. If not, goodbye. On the other hand, if the accused already knows some rudimentary swimming skills, why not fake it and let the gods take credit?

An even more dramatic example of swimming’s utility four thousand years ago can be found in the second of Hammurabi’s 282 laws:

If anyone bring an accusation against a man and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river proves that accused is not guilty and he escapes unhurt, then he who hath brought the allegation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that belonged to his accuser.

As Alan Isles and John Pearn write in their essay “Swimming and Survival: Two Lessons from History”: “In the greatest city of the world in its time, it was more important to be able to swim than to be honest.” Given such a watery system of litigation and justice, one suspects the Euphrates was filled after dark with homeowners—and would-be homeowners and maybe even tempted women—working secretly on their strokes.

SWIMMING EXISTS ONLY BY INFERENCE IN HAMMURABI’S CODE. THERE seems to have been no word for it: you knew swimming when you saw it. Leap forward five hundred years, though, to the reign of Akhenaten— about 1360 BCE, during the Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt—and swimmers have moved into high-end household art. Carved cosmetic spoons from that epoch often feature a swimming motif: a young woman, stretched out on the water with her head held high and, in her extended arms, a shallow, lidded saucer to hold whatever cosmetic might be desired.

One such swimmer-girl spoon from Akhenaten’s reign has the figure’s tightly crimped hair piled high on her head to keep it dry. Another, carved from alabaster with slate trimmings, shows a swimming girl being towed by a pet gazelle whose back is indented in a spoon shape. This from thirteen centuries before the Christian era. Jump forward another five hundred years, and swimming has broken through art and entered the language—or rather multiple tongues.

While the Bible is stingy on specific references to swimming, Isaiah 25:10–11 provides a clear example of its ubiquity: “The Moabites shall be trodden down in their place as straw is trodden down in a dung pit. Though they spread out their hands in the midst of it, as swimmers spread out their hands to swim, their pride will be laid low despite the struggle of their hands.”

Nine centuries before the Christian era, Assyrian warriors were using inflated animal skins to surprise their enemies. (BibleLandPictures.com/Alamy Stock Photo)

Obscure? Yes, also somewhat scatological and definitely anti-Moabite. But focus on origins. This is from the first third of the Book of Isaiah, generally credited to the prophet Isaiah himself, from the eighth century BCE, and swimming is apparently a familiar enough activity that the prophet Isaiah can throw it around as a commonplace simile.*

From almost exactly the same time frame comes a far less obscure proverb from the Chinese Book of Odes, advising people confronting a body of water to “row across if it is deep and swim across when it is shallow.”

Swimming’s toehold by the seventh and eighth centuries BCE was more than linguistic. Etruscan tombs from 600 BCE and earlier depict swimmers. Huge carved reliefs taken from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled from 883 to 859 BCE, show warriors in full battle gear swimming a river, some in pursuit, others to escape their pursuers as arrows rain down from above, not unlike a cowboy-and-Indian B movie of yore.

Just as common as the swimming warriors in those reliefs are what might be thought of as water-wing warriors—soldiers who are using flotation devices, probably inflated goatskins, judging by their size, and seemingly keeping pace with the action. Reliefs from a century and a half closer to our time, taken from a palace at Nineveh, show Assyrians using floats in peacetime: swimming while lying prone on the inflated goatskin, somewhat like paddling oneself on a surfboard, and fishing midriver sitting astride the float.

In a 1942 essay for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, James Hornell cites multiple examples of this kind of semi-swimming from the deep vault of history. During Julius Caesar’s Spanish campaign in 49 BCE, foraging parties were bedeviled by Lusitanians who used inflated bladders to cross the River Segre and harass them. “These men,” Caesar wrote afterward, “could readily swim across the river because it is the custom of all these people not to join their armies without bladders.”

On the lighter side, a scene found on a gateway of the Buddhist temple at Sanchi, in India, depicts men using inflated bladders and logs to stay afloat as they frolic in a lotus tank. Such evidence leads Hornell to speculate that using floats was the gateway to swimming itself:

It is doubtful if early man became acquainted with the art of swimming prior to the utilization or invention of some form of buoyant appliance capable of supporting his body when he ventured beyond his depth in river or lake.

Floating while holding onto, say, a log led to kicking to propel and direct the log in still waters, which led to straddling the log while lying down and using the arms to propel and direct the log even more effectively, which led to finally abandoning the log (or rolling off it) and . . . voilà, swimming! Maybe so, but swimmers in the Cave of the Swimmers from five millennia before those Assyrian reliefs were carved are doing just fine without a single flotation device in sight.

Neither the Bible nor the Chinese Book of Odes makes reference to the one thing that any swimmer in those early years of recorded history would likely have most feared about water: not the current or the waves or the eddies—that would have been sweating the small stuff—but the demon forces therein.

Born of water, dependent on it, surrounded by it either near (islands, isthmuses, etc.) or far (continents), humankind perhaps inevitably enshrouded water in myth and filled it with gods and demigods. And the gods sometimes went out of their way to make swimming as difficult and danger fraught as possible.

Hindu mythology tells us that the ocean god Varuna can be both vengeful and gracious, but his angry moments are more common and definitely more memorable, especially for those who have sworn falsely. The ancient Maori never went to sea without making offerings to Tangaroa, their jealous god of the sea, who did constant battle with Tane, ruler of the forests. The God of the Judeo-Christian Bible kindly parts the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites, then closes it ruthlessly on the Pharaoh’s army, with calamitous results. The same God nearly scours the Earth of sin with a deluge that rages forty days and nights.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known literary works—written in Sumerian, of Mesopotamian origins, sometime between eleven and sixteen centuries before Christ—tells an eerily similar story about the gods voting to destroy humankind and how one of them, the God of Wisdom, alerted a Noah-like figure to construct a huge ark in which he, his family, and the seed of every living thing might ride out the destruction and restore life to the planet once the waters receded.

In fact, flood myths and angry gods are so prevalent across cultures and around the world in the millennia before the birth of Christ that it’s half amazing any living thing was left on Earth to greet the Christian savior. The story of Manu and Matsya, which first appears in India circa 700 BCE, tells of the god Matsya—Lord Vishnu incarnated as a fish—who warns the human Manu of an impending flood and tells him to gather up all the grains of the world in a boat. The mythological great flood that the Incans call Una Pachakuti was launched deep in prehistory by the Creator Varicocha to slay all the people around Lake Titicaca save for the two who would then populate the rest of the world.

Not to be outdone, ancient Greek mythology tells us that an aggrieved Zeus used yet another great flood to kill all the inhabitants of Earth save the requisite two: Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha. Likewise, in the ten-year War of the Titans, the monstrous Hecatoncheires—“hundred-handed” ones, not to mention their fifty heads—let loose ferocious earthquakes and tsunamis that precious few manage to survive.

As befits a maritime people, Greek mythology is rich with seafaring adventures that sometimes seem to presage the violent-action drama of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise. In the greatest of the Greek tales, Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus survives ten years of every peril imaginable—most notably, the sea god Poseidon’s wrath—to reclaim his throne at Ithaca and slay his wife’s many suitors. But the very fact that Odysseus survives at all (and in human form, no less) makes him virtually an outlier when it comes to aquatic encounters with the many deities of ancient Greece.

In a 2009 study, Stathis Avramidis of the Leeds Metropolitan University scoured a database of forty thousand names mentioned in ancient and mythological Greek literature for any evidence of drowning or near-drowning incidents. In all, he came up with thirty-seven names of which twenty-one were mythological accounts. Of those twenty-one, several were accidental or self-imposed deaths. Icarus flew too close to the sun and plunged into the sea when his wings melted. Mistakenly thinking that his son had been killed by the Minotaur, Aegeus jumped to his death in the sea that was later named for him: the Aegean.

Far more often, though—seventeen of the twenty-one mythical drownings and near-drownings—a god or a demigod is somehow involved.

When Ceyx and Alcyone anger the gods by jokingly calling themselves Zeus and Hera, Zeus slays Ceyx with a thunderbolt while he’s at sea; then when Alcyone sees her lover’s body wash up on the shore, she throws herself into the sea. Only when she, too, is dead do the gods take pity and turn them both into kingfishers.*

And so it goes. Narcissus overadmires his own watery reflection, falls into a lake, apparently has no idea how to save himself (even though, as we will see in the next chapter, Greeks were generally excellent swimmers), but instead of drowning gets transformed into the flower that we know today by his name. Voutis would have drowned as well after he was lured into the sea by the song of the Sirens, but Aphrodite rescued him at the last minute, less from mercy than to make him her lover.

Virtually all ancient cultures recognized in one way or another the same four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. They’re the mixing bowl of life—impossible to ignore. But in all of them the greatest tests are often reserved for the last of those elements: water. Think of the Christian doctrine alone. Jesus’s miracles in the New Testament are many, but none is more compelling than when he performs the one act we all know cannot be done by mere mortals: walking on water, the one element in which we can never live fully again. Or can we?

Wasn’t that the true lure of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, the 2017 Oscar winner for Best Picture? That we can breach the border? That, like Sally Hawkins’s Eliza Esposito, we have a choice between the two mediums? That, with just a little nudge from magic realism, neck scars can become gills? Those of us who have spent a lifetime swimming up and down pools, across lakes, and along ocean shorelines probably dream more often than we should that such things can happen. But water forgives our infirmities, physical and otherwise. It frees us to dream. Swimming is an equal playing field.

One could even argue that swimming makes us whole: we humans are, after all, 70 percent water, nearly identical to the percentage of the Earth’s surface that is ocean: 71 percent. Rather than fight that dualism and natural affinity, the Greeks and Romans at the height of their civilizations embraced it in ways we can still distantly witness.

_________________

* No artificial breathing aids are allowed in free diving, but the variants in what is permissible—monofins, sleds and weights to quicken descent, and so forth—are so great that it’s hard to name a gold standard of achievement. Austrian Herbert Nitsch is among the giants of the sport. In 2012, he free-dove to a depth of 831 feet. At that depth, the pressure on his body was 360 pounds per square inch, more than ten times the pressure in a fully inflated automobile tire. Such feats would be impossible without the mammalian diving reflex.

* Moab, a mountainous kingdom in what is now Jordan, got off to a bad start. Its patriarch was a drunken Lot, who committed incest with his oldest daughter after she had lost her fiancé when Sodom and Gomorrah were laid low. At least in the Bible, the Moabites never recovered.

* In honor of the star-crossed couple, the genus Ceyx, part of the river kingfisher family, is named for him, while the tree kingfisher family, Halcyonidae, is named for her. Immortality of a sort.

2

SWIMMING’S GOLDEN AGE

A man is not learned until he can read, write, and swim.

—Plato

For swimmers and swimming, the classical period truly was the golden age, not just among Greeks and Romans but also across a wide sweep of the world. In his well-regarded Letters on Egypt, Claude-Étienne Savary notes Egyptians of the time—men, women, and children—were almost to a person remarkably able and graceful in the water. At the height of the Armenian kingdom in the first century BCE, royals and aristocrats trained their male offspring in the “manly sports”: boxing, wrestling, and swimming. Within the same time frame, the Japanese were having organized swim races.

The Greeks of antiquity took their swimming just as seriously, but for them, swimming was elevated to a civic virtue. Plato’s famous maxim, above, was honored in practice as well as in word. “Swimming,” one commentator tells us, “was a material part of youthful education among the Greeks.” Even Aristotle ventured advice on the subject: saltwater was better than fresh for swimming, and the colder, the better.

The Romans treasured swimming, too, and built municipal baths in part for the purpose as well as for hygiene, other forms of exercise, and the sheer pleasure of a good soak. For them, Plato’s words were turned into an insult, a dis: “The man can neither swim nor read!” Like Aristotle, the Roman poet Horace weighed in with aquatic council: “Let those who are in need of deep sleep, anointed swim thrice across the Tiber.” Like many leading Romans, Cato the Elder was at pains to teach his son to swim.

The story of Hero and Leander, lovers who lived on either side of the Hellespont, was part of the cultural fabric of both Greece and Rome, and it’s an open-water romance through and through. Nightly, the priestess Hero would light a lamp in her lonely tower at Sestos. And nightly, Leander would brave the narrows from Abydos, guided by Hero’s beacon, to be with her . . . until the wintry night when howling winds extinguished Hero’s lamp; Leander, unguided, succumbed to the storm-tossed sea; and Hero leapt from her tower to join her lover, in death if not in life.

As Frances Norwood noted in a 1950 article for Phoenix, the journal of the Classical Association of Canada, the story was so commonplace that when Virgil referred to it in the first century BCE, he didn’t even bother to mention the lovers’ names. Everyone would have known.

Not surprisingly, given such broad and varied support, the secular pantheons of both cultures are filled with swimmer-heroes. Predictably, too, swimming’s first utility for both the Greeks and the Romans was as a military art, and its first aquatic heroes were born of combat.

In 480 BCE, during the great naval clash in the Straits of Salamis between the Persian fleet of Xerxes and an alliance of Greek city-states, the celebrated Macedonian diver and swimming teacher Scyllis first hired himself out to the Persians to recover treasure lost when several of their ships went down in a storm. Then, when Xerxes tried to detain him, Scyllis leapt overboard and swam underwater to Artemisium—a distance of eighty stadia, about ten miles, perhaps using a reed as a snorkel and hopefully taking advantage of currents and the tides—to warn the Greek fleet of the Persian king’s plans.

That’s from Herodotus’s account, written within a half century of the events he describes. The second-century CE Greek geographer Pausanias also credits Scyllis and his daughter (and fellow swimming teacher) Cyana with starting the whole mess when they dove beneath the Persian ships as a storm bore down and cut their anchor lines. Regardless of which version of the event is more accurate, the greatly outnumbered Greek fleet prevailed, and for their heroism Scyllis and Cyana both had statues consecrated at the Temple at Delphi. Centuries later, Nero was so taken with Cyana’s likeness that he had her statue brought back to Rome for his own enjoyment.*

Even with the use of a reed snorkel, Scyllis’s ten-mile underwater swim might stretch credulity—Herodotus, for one, suspects he took a boat. But in a 1934 essay for the Classical Journal, Brown University classicist H. N. Couch cites two other “undoubtedly historical” examples of swimming lending the winning edge in battle. In 425 BCE, for example, when a Spartan army found itself besieged by Athenians on the toxic-sounding island of Sphacteria, volunteers supplied the Spartans with food by swimming underwater dragging behind them skins stuffed with poppy seeds mixed with honey and pounded linseed.

Still more impressive and also well documented is the role swimming played in the Athenian naval attack on Syracuse, an ancient city on the southeast coast of Sicily, in 415–413 BCE. Forewarned that the Greeks were coming, the locals drove piles into the Mediterranean floor at the front of the harbor to protect their fleet and to prevent the Greeks from landing. When they arrived, the Greeks set about pulling out the visible pilings that were exposed on top with a mechanical device brought along for that purpose. But the underwater pilings that threatened to gut the hull of a ship were left to divers, who sawed them off for extra pay.

“This was an exceedingly difficult task,” Couch writes, “as anyone can testify who has attempted to saw through a wet log under the most favorable conditions. . . . Such skill in the water would be so generally found only among a people who were regularly taught as children to swim.”*