Byron Swims the Hellespont
Byron felt compelled to set the record straight after it was alleged that he had swum the Hellespont the easy way.
1810
King George III 1760-1820
Byron felt compelled to set the record straight after it was alleged that he had swum the Hellespont the easy way.
1810
King George III 1760-1820
Every night, so the Greek myths tell us, Leander left Abydos in Asia Minor and swam across the narrow Hellespont to his lover Hero, priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos in Thrace, the European side, until he was drowned in bad weather. On May 3rd, 1810, George Gordon Byron and his friend Lt William Ekenhead swam the same stretch of water in the other direction, from Europe to Asia.
‘MURRAY published a letter I wrote to him [said Byron] from Venice [in February 1821], which might have seemed an idle display of vanity; but the object of my writing it, was to contradict what Turner had asserted about the impossibility of crossing the Hellespont from the Abydos to the Sestos side, in consequence of the tide.*
‘The real width of the Hellespont is not much above a mile;* but the current is prodigiously strong, and we were carried down notwithstanding all our efforts. I don’t know how Leander contrived to stem the stream, and steer straight across; but nothing is impossible in love or religion. If I had had a Hero on the other side, perhaps I should have worked harder.*
‘We were to have undertaken this feat some time before, but put it off in consequence of the coldness of the water; and it was chilly enough when we performed it. I know I should have made a bad Leander, for it gave me an ague* that I did not so easily get rid of. There were some sailors in the fleet who swam further than I did — I do not say than I could have done, for it is the only exercise I pride myself upon, being almost amphibious.’
* Byron’s letter was written in February 1821. Diplomat William Turner (1792-1867) had tried to cap Byron’s stunt, and swim from Abydos to Sestos (i.e. Asia to Europe) but failed, and in A Tour of the Levant (1820) laboured to prove that the trip was much harder in that direction. The waters of the Hellespont are certainly treacherous: two major currents flow in opposite directions, a surface current from the Black Sea towards the Aegean, and an undercurrent from the Aegean to the Black Sea, and the captains even of large vessels must await the right moment to attempt to navigate the strait.
* Over its whole length, the strait’s width varies from around ¾ of a mile to 3¾ miles.
* Byron completed the trip in an hour and ten minutes. He recalled his historic swim with such pride that he managed to work it into his unfinished, satirical epic Don Juan (1819), at ii, cv:
He [Juan] could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr Ekenhead, and I did.
* A fever. A clue to the pronunciation was given by Byron at the end of After Swimming the Hellespont, musing on any comparison with Leander:
’Twere hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals, thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.