28 THE FIRST DIVERS 



swimming speed humian beings have ever made is fifty-one 

 seconds for one hundred yards, and twenty-one minutes, 

 six and four-fifths seconds for a mile. 



A certain Gustav Kobbe said, at some unknown date, "I 

 hold the world's record for fast walking under water. Off 

 Oak Point, at One Hundred and Fiftieth Street and East 

 River, New York, I walked five miles in eight feet of 

 water in two hours and twenty-seven minutes, defeating 

 William Smith, the champion English submarine walker." 



There is so much exaggeration in unofficial records of 

 depth and duration of unaided diving that the truth is 

 difficult to discover. One hundred and fifty feet have 

 possibly been reached, and three minutes must be almost 

 the maximum limit of human endurance, as compared 

 with the ridiculous record of two hours given by the great 

 Moorish traveler, Ibn Batuta. If we accept the latter we 

 might as well believe in that grand old swimmer Glaucus, 

 of Grecian mythology, who built the Argo for the Golden 

 Fleece Expedition, and who is reputed once to have swum 

 to the bottom of the ocean when a tempest was raging, 

 and to have spent a week-end with his friend Oceanus, 

 returning later with an armful of fish he had caught. 

 There was an ichthyologist for you! 



One of the first allusions to diving, although indirect, 

 is in Book XVI of the Iliad, where Homer puts a rather 

 sarcastic and unsportsmanlike speech into the mouth of 

 Patroclus: 



"Against Patroclus Hector turned his strong-hooved 



