Trelawny
talks about his experiences at the Falls in his published letters—both in a
text that he apparently mailed to no one (dated August 5, 1833) and in a letter
to Claire Clairmont (dated December 10, 1833), posted from Charleston, South
Carolina. (More about that later on.)[1]
Anyway, in both
texts Trelawny writes vividly about a somewhat rash decision he’d made to swim
across the Niagara River, just downstream from the Falls. I’d love to reprint
them here in their entirety, but I can’t imagine asking readers to deal with all of it, so, instead, here’s a summary
of what he said in his letter to Claire—with some of his words in italics.
He begins
his account by asking, who can look at a clear
river on a hot day without wishing to plunge into it? He described the
river below the Falls—the water eddying,
whirling, and turbulently boiling in a caldron. And so, he tells Claire, he
just must give it a go.
I plunged into the river of the cataract.
He says he made it to the other side all right, but, coming back, he ran into
some trouble. Let’s let him speak at a little more length here:
I was overpowered by the strength of the
current and whirled along headlong till I was drifting towards the rapids—which
form a terrific whirlpool in which nothing that lives could float an instant—exhausted
and powerless—I for a moment resigned myself to my fate …. I cannot tell how I
regained the shore—but this I know, I was so used up I could not see things
distinctly for nearly an hour ….[2]
He describes
this experience in far greater detail
in his un-mailed account—but the details are basically the same. Now … a word
in his defense. He was a strong swimmer—and later in his life swam every day in
the ocean near his home in England. But the Niagara River? Just above the
rapids and whirlpool? Could a person do
that?
I wasn’t
sure. So in early March 2000, I decided to take a drive to the Falls and find
out.
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