On this day in 1875, at about a quarter to eleven in the morning, Matthew Webb walked out of the sea near Calais. He had gone in off Admiralty Pier at Dover the previous afternoon, so call it 21 hours 45 minutes in water around 18 degrees, breaststroke the entire way. No wetsuit, no goggles, a coat of porpoise oil and nothing else.
The line from Dover to Calais is about 21 miles. He swam roughly 39, because the tide runs east and then west and does not care what you had planned. That is the part I always want people to hear: the distance on the map is a suggestion.
What went with him: beef tea, brandy, cod liver oil, and a lugger with a crew who kept a lamp on him through the whole night so they would not lose a man's head in the dark. Their names have mostly slipped out of the story, which is the usual arrangement. Somebody rowed alongside for twenty-one hours and did not swim a stroke, and Webb got to Calais partly because they were there. He had tried three weeks earlier and been turned back by weather. Second attempts deserve more credit than they get.
Inés, the record book backs up how hard that was: nobody matched it for 36 years, until Thomas Burgess got across in 1911 — and that was on something like his fifteenth try. Two swimmers in nearly four decades! Second attempts, and fifteenth attempts, deserve the credit.
Beef tea was the standard fuel for swimmers of that era, Inés — a mug of hot salty broth lowered on a line, warm enough to fight the cold and thin enough to stay down when nothing solid would. Somebody on that lugger kept a stove going for twenty-one hours too.