It was a fine early summer afternoon in England, and the port at Chelsea was just slipping out of sight when Benjamin Franklin—at the urging of his fellow passengers—kicked off his buckled shoes and tossed aside his heavy jacket. John Wygate, a fellow printer whom Franklin had taught to swim, had been regaling the gentlemen aboard the ferry with stories of Franklin’s fishlike agility in the water and the peculiar aquatic tricks he could perform.
They had spent the morning viewing taxidermied crocodiles and rattlesnakes at Don Saltero’s curiosities shop and weren’t ready for the day’s amusements to end, even as they headed back to Blackfriars. Franklin likely put on a good show of modesty, demurring at first to the group’s excited requests for a demonstration, but was no doubt secretly pleased as he undressed for his dip in the Thames—he loved both an audience and any excuse to get in the water.
With his short breeches, knee socks, and frilly-collared shirt folded safely away, leaving only his birthday suit, nineteen-year-old Franklin leapt off the edge of the boat. Some of the men’s hearts may have quickened at the thought of their own heavy, landlubber bodies plunging into the dark water; overboard was not a place most people in the eighteenth century went voluntarily. Despite the great amount of time spent on ships and ferries, swimming was a rare skill among men. Among women, it was unheard of—even suspect.
Franklin, however, was in his element—and it showed as he floated effortlessly on his back, bobbed like a spinning top with his knees held tightly to his chest, and dove under and above the surface like a porpoise. This future statesman and political philosopher, known in London as the “Water American,” was a proud practitioner of what would later be called “scientific swimming.”
He could float on his back and raise a leg straight in the air, mastlike—much as a modern-day synchronized (or artistic) swimmer would do. He could make a circle on the surface, his head remaining still in the center like the point on a compass as his legs rotated around it. He could swim on his back, arms free to ferry dry clothes or declarations and treaties high above the water. He could even swim on his belly with his wrists tied behind his back.