Mr. Ellerthorpe, in a characteristic letter, says: 'I think no schoolmaster should regard the education of his scholars complete unless he has taught them to swim. That art is of service when everything else is useless. I once heard of a professor who was being ferried across a river by a boatman, who was no scholar. So the professor said, "Can you write, my man?" "No, Sir," said the boatman. "Then you have lost one third of your life," said the professor. "Can you read?" again asked he of the boatman. "No," replied the latter, "I can't read." "Then you have lost the half of your life," said the professor. Now came the boatman's turn. "Can you swim?" said the boatman to the professor. "No," was his reply. "Then," said the boatman, "you have lost the whole of your life, for the boat is sinking and you'll be drowned." Now, Sir, I think that if those fathers who spend so much money on the intellectual education of their children, would devote but a small portion of it to securing for them a knowledge of the art of swimming, they would confer a great blessing on those children, and also on society at large. I would have every one learn to swim females as well as males; for many of both sexes come under my notice every year who are drowned, but who, with a little skill in swimming, might have been saved. Not fewer than forty men and boys were lost from the Hull Smacks alone during the year 1866, of whom twenty per cent, might have been saved had they been able to swim.'
HE LEARNS TO SWIM.
Mr. Ellerthorpe was, for many years, Master of the 'Hull Swimming Club,' and also of 'The College Youth's Swimming Club,' and his whole life was a practical lesson on the value of the art of swimming. He contended that the youths of Hull ought to be taught this art, and pleaded that a sheet of water which had been waste and unproductive for twenty years should be transformed into a swimming bath. The local papers favoured the scheme, and Alderman Dennison, moved in the Town Council, that £350 should be devoted to this object, which was carried by a majority. The late Titus Salt, Esq., who had given £5,000 to the 'Sailor's Orphan Home,' said at the time, 'I think your corporation ought to make the swimming bath alluded to in the enclosed paper; do ask them.' 'The private individual who gives his fifty hundreds to a particular Institution,' to use the words of the Hull and Eastern Counties' Herald, Oct. 10th, 1857, 'has surely a right to express an opinion that the municipal corporation ought to grant three hundreds, if by so doing the public weal would be provided. If the voice of such a man is to be disregarded, then it may truly be said that our good old town has fallen far below the exalted position it occupied when it produced its Wilberforce and its Marvel.'
For upwards of forty years Mr. Ellerthorpe was known as a fearless swimmer and diver, and during that period he saved no fewer than forty lives by his daring intrepidity. In his boyhood, he, to use his own expression, 'felt quite at home in the water,' and betook himself to it as natively and instinctively as the swan to the water or the lark to the sky. 'This art,' to use the words of an admirable article in the Shipwrecked Mariners' Magazine for October, 1862, 'he has cultivated so successfully that in scores of instances he has been able to employ it for the salvation of life and property. Perhaps the history of no other living person more fully displays the value of this art than John Ellerthorpe. Joined with courage, promptitude, and steady self-possession, it has enabled him repeatedly to preserve his own life, and what is far more worthy of record, to save not fewer than thirty-nine of his fellow creatures, who, humanly speaking, must otherwise have met with a watery grave.'
HIS RECKLESS DARING.
It is but right to state that, in the early period of his history, a thoughtless disregard of his own life, and an overweening confidence in his ability to swim almost any length, and amid circumstances of great peril, often led him to deeds of 'reckless daring,' which in riper years he would have trembled to attempt. Respecting most of the following circumstances he says, 'I look upon those perilous adventures as so many foolish and wicked temptings of Providence. I have often wondered I was not drowned, and attribute my preservation to the wonder-working providence of God, who has so often 'redeemed my life from destruction, and crowned me with loving kindness and tender mercies.'
And certainly we should remember that heroism is one thing, reckless daring another. Two or three instances will illustrate this. A few years ago Blondin, for the sake of money, jeopardized his life at the Crystal Palace, by walking blindfolded on a tight-rope, and holding in his hand a balancing pole. In so doing he was foolhardy, but not heroic. But a certain Frenchman, at Alencon, walked on one occasion on a rope over some burning beams into a burning house, otherwise inaccessible, and succeeded in saving six persons. This was the act of a true hero. When Mr. Worthington, the 'professional diver,' plunged into the water and saved six persons from drowning, who, but for his skill and dexterity as a swimmer, would certainly have met with a watery grave, he acted the part of a 'hero;' but when, the other day, he made a series of nine 'terrific plunges' from the Chain Pier at Brighton—a height of about one hundred and twenty feet—merely to gratify sensational sightseers, or to put a few shillings into his own pocket, he acted the part of a foolhardy man. Can we wonder that he was within an ace of losing his life in this mad exploit? And when John Ellerthorpe dived to the bottom of 'Clarke's Bit,' to gratify a number of young men who had 'more money than wit,' and struggled in the water with a bag of coals on his back, he put himself on a par with those men who place their lives in imminent danger by dancing on ropes, swinging on cords, tying themselves into knots like a beast, or crawling on ceilings like some creeping thing! But when he used his skill to save his fellow creatures, he was a true hero, and was justified in perilling his own life, considering that by so doing the safety of others might be secured.
We shall close this chapter by recording a few of his deeds of reckless daring.
JOHN'S FIRST ATTEMPT AT SWIMMING.