The Colfax chronicle. [volume] (Colfax, Grant Parish, La.) 1877-1981, 1883-09-22


Captain Webb, the English swimmer,
has Just drowned himself in the Niagara
whirlpool, prodigious swirl of angry
waters occasioned by sharp bend in
the river two or three miles below the
falls. When told by every person ac-
quainted with the locality that he would
never come out of it alive, he an
swered: ssYou don't know me; am
an Englishman. AS though an En-
glishman's bones and muscles could go
through liquid grist-mill, where the
pressure of the supper and neither mill
stones" though of fluid, to which they
would be subject would be millions of
tons to every square inch. without be-
ing ground as fine as the bones and
muscles of man of any other nation
atty would be under like circum-
stances.
As far as known no white man had
ever attempted to scale the whirlpool
in an open boat, and no Indian in
canoe. The Maid of the Mist went
down successfully few years ago, the
master being the sole person on board,
and, we believe, without steam up, but
making what use one man could of the
helm. Even this was regarded as a
foolhardy enterprise, though the Maid
of the Mist was staunch little craft
built below the falls especially to sail in
the swirling and eddying tide between
the cataract and the upper suspension
bridge.
At the whirlpool which Captain
Webb attempted to scale, for it could
hardly be called swimming, the current
appears to the observer, standing on
the precipice some 800 feet above, to
descend by straight northward shoot
at rate of perhaps thirty miles an
hour and runs at this rate abruptly into
the bank, and is turned so that the cur
rent in order to make its way onward
down the river is obliged to pass under
itself, 1. e., under previous portion of
its course In doing SO the uppermost
current, which is the portion running
with the greatest velocity, is lifted in
the center of the river at least twenty,
perhaps thirty, feet above the level of
the stream at its banks on either side.
As between the whirlpool and the falls
themselves there would be very little
choice, the certainty of death being
about equal.
Captain Webb's sole motive for the
foolhardy act was the silly desire to be
more widely known than he already
was. although in being thus more widely
known it must have been evident even to
him that he would only be known as a
fool. A few ladies and gentleman
or two, hardly twenty in all, gathered
at the bluffs, and saw the form of the
victim, helpless as stick, dart through
the current and reel amid the foam for
a moment, and then it was visible no
longer. Itwould seem as though among
the virtues that need to be taught in any
perfect system of ethics should be the
power to add up public opinion cor
rectly so that every man shall know
that if each individual opinion that goes
to make up the aggregate is a cipher,
then the whole is cipher. Captain
Webb undoubtedly had sense enough to
know that each single person who would
admire his foolhardiness in going down
these rapids would be cipher. But he
thought the sum of them all would be
fame. There are great many who
think, like Captain Webb, that the con-
current applause OF a sufficiently large
number of persons, no one of whom
carries any weight, becomes sort of
divine voice., They are always accumu-
lating fortune by adding ciphers.-
Chicago Inter- Ocean.