How to Prevent Drowning

Abstract

I ONLY write in the interests of humanity. Let those who will go in for swimming, and I wish sincerely that every one could swim. Treading water however conducts at once to swimming. Every one can tread water who likes. It is just as easy, if we only knew it, to tread water as to tread the earth, and proximately just as safe. Men and women might walk into the deep sea and out again when they pleased. Nature has not been so niggard with us as some persons imagine. Why are we not as safe in water as is the dog? It is simply because he treads water, and we do not. As often as I chose to chuck my stick into the Causey surge my dog brought it out. I could have done the same; any one could do the same who chose. But assuredly I should have paddled water as the dog did. In treading water the body is erect, or nearly so; in swimming we sprawl, and are comparatively helpless. The admirals, both of them, have given valuable testimony as regards the efficacy of treading water. Before the present pier at the Cape was built, vessels in bad weather could not communicate with the shore, even by boats. Men, then, treading water amid the mountain seas, carried communications to and fro in oilskin caps. I have heard it was the same at Madras. Young Gordon, apprentice to the sea, fell into mid-ocean while fisting a sail. The poor fellow's heart sank when he saw the ship sailing away. But, as he afterwards told me, he trod water, and kept up till the boat reached him. I have trodden water again and again with a big boy on my back. Any one might do the same. Not one woman in ten thousand, not one man in a thousand, I suppose, can swim. They do not know they can tread water when they fall in, and of course drown, as two fine young women who had got a little out of their depth in this place did last year. But ignorance and prejudice cannot always rule, and the day will surely come when human beings, better instructed, shall enjoy the same immunity in the water that other animals not human beings, now enjoy.