Page 82 - Celebrating 50 Years of the International swimming Hall of Fame

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Ben Franklin The Swimmer
“Unfortunately,” as Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Carl Van Doren wrote, “for a man so explicit and graphic about his later
life, Benjamin Franklin wrote very little about his first ten years of life.” His biographers don’t tell us much more than what
Franklin told us. It’s as if nothing important happened in his life. Yet these are the years child development psychologists believe
are the most critical in forming adult personality and behavior.

Here’s what we know about Ben Franklin: Eighteen years before his birth in 1706, an older brother died at childbirth, another
died the next year the same way. In 1703, another brother, 16 month old Ebenezer, drowned and just before his birth, 19 year
old Joshiah, Jr. ran off to sea against his parents wishes. Eight months after Benjamin was born, another brother, three year old
Thomas died, probably from disease. So - he was something of a golden child, a precious male child, who benefited from the
attention of parents and many older siblings, mostly sisters - living in a tiny house of less than 600 sq. feet - and able to read the
bible by the age of five.

At the time Franklin was born, New England was in a state of war - Queen Anne’s War, a European war that spilled over to the
colonies. In 1710 and 1711, thousands of British and Colonial troops gathered and trained in Boston in preparation for an
assault on Canada..

On June 24th, 1711, Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker’s flagship, HMS Humbe, led the largest Armada to ever cross the Atlantic
into Boston Harbor. This 1,300 ton Man-of-War, with its 80 guns, tall masts, white sails, colorful signal flags and Union Jack
blowing in the wind was the largest vessel to ever sail into Boston’s harbor. On board an equally impressive 80-gun warship,
the HMS Devonshire, was General John Hill. By the end of the day, 12 Men of War, two bomb galleys and 67 transport and
provision ships crowded the small harbor. The combined expeditionary force of 6,000 British seamen and marines along with
seven of the Duke of Marlborough’s regiments, numbering 5,200 veterans of the wars in Europe. This force more than doubled
the population of Boston. For over a month the troops trained on Noddles Island and roamed the streets of Boston. Is it any
wonder that Benny wanted to be soldier or sailor, or go to sea like his brother Josiah?

View of Boston Harbor from Noddles Island

“Swimming is needful of all men, but it is most necessary and important to a soldier.”
– Sir George Buck, 1615

There can be no doubt that the soldiers and sailors also swam as part of their training - probably using Thevenot as their manual.
As in his introduction, Thevenot stressed the importance of swimming in war - relating anecdotes from history, including the
story of Caesar’s famous swim to safety in Alexandria.

The necessity of learning to swim at sea was driven home when the colonial troops returned from the disastrous Walker Expedition “
in September 1711. The survivors were filled with stories of the horrors of more than 500 soldiers and sailors drowning in the St.
Lawrence River when the fleet was caught in a storm, and stories of survival from those who could swim.

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