17 JULY 1886, Page 10

THE LATEST FOOLHARDY FEAT.

THE story flashed all over the world this week about Mr. C. D. Graham, the English cooper of Philadelphia, is one of the strangest that has been told for many a day. The man is evidently not only one of those who can compel themselves to do any thing, that is, who for all practical purposes are perfectly brave, not to say foolhardy ; but he is also a cool, and even reflective person, who, though he risks his life for no end beyond the gratification of a fancy, tries to make certain that he has a reasonable chance of surviving his mad feat. He had conceived the idea that although no boat could live in the rash of waters below the Falls of Niagara, and though Captain Webb, probably the best swimmer the world ever produced, had been drowned in the attempt to swim the whirlpool, it would be possible for a novel kind of boat, a cask shaped like a buoy, with a man in it, to get down in safety. He therefore made a series of such casks, expending on them, of course, a great deal of time and labour; and finding a shape to his mind, filled two or three in succession with a bag of sand equal to his own weight, and set them afloat on Niagara. They arrived safely in smooth water, threading the rapids and the whirlpool, after a journey of some five miles ; and he then resolved to trust himself to his contrivance. He ballasted his cask so as to keep one side uppermost, in which he left an air-hole, and fastened in the cask a long canvas bag, made like a suit of clothes, and water-proof. Getting into this bag, he held on to the inner sides of the cask by two iron handles fixed to the staves, and a movable cover being fastened on, was thrown, no doubt by friends, though this is not stated, into the rushing water. The cask, of course, turned over and over, water got in at the air-hole, though not into the canvas bag, and the stream rolled the cask so rapidly that Graham became sick ; but he held on to his iron staples, the water did not drown him, and in a space of time exceeding thirty minutes, but within the hour— the accounts differ about this—he had reached the smooth water some five miles away, and was safely taken out, able to toast that he had performed a feat hitherto deemed impossible. He had lived through the Niagara Rapids, very much as Sir Erasmus Wilson's obelisk—which was also shut up in a colossal cask—lived through the storm in the

Mediterranean. What did he do it for It was certainly not for any use. Men have risked their lives over and over again in some experiment intended to conquer Nature, but it has been usually with a fair certainty of surviving, or for an end which at least looked adequate to the risk. The first man who ever put to sea in a hollow log, whom Horace thought so over-bold, had probably had plenty of river practice, and need not, besides, have greatly exceeded the distance to which he knew he could swim, four or five miles out from shore probably, in the smooth, warm water of the Mediterranean, or the Sea of Marmora ; while the brothers Montgolfier, when they first shot into the air—a bolder feat by far than that of the first navigator —had an adequate temptation. They thought they were going to revolutionise human history, to discover a new mode of com- munication among mankind, which, steam being unknown, seemed more tempting then than it does now; or, at the very worst, to organise a new method of espionage in war, for which they would obtain renown and profit. Graham, however, had no end of any utility in view. If man, with adequate appli- ances, could always live in swirling water, there would be nothing gained, for he could not travel up-stream in his con-

trivance, and an explorer may just as well skirt rapids as be carried down them in a boat which in smooth water he could not row. There is no whirlpool anywhere which man desires to pass, and Graham's cask, "shaped like a buoy," will not help to reveal the secret of the Maelstrom ; nor does any one want to be kept safe while carried down a mill-race. The new boat itself is of absolutely no value ; and if it had been, the risk of the bagful of sand proved its value just as well as the risk of Graham's life. He did nothing in his cask except hold on and get sick, and possibly think of himself for a moment as the fool he certainly was. The adventure does, we suppose, prove to the observant that a particular shape of cask might, under certain conditions, be used to draw feeble or sickly passengers from a wrecked ship in bad weather, for a woman or child could have lived in Graham's machine as well as the cooper himself ; but the circumstances are few under which it would be useful, and Graham, by his own account, had no idea of applying his contrivance in any such way. He pleaded no excuse for risking his life at all. He performed his feat, we suspect, partly out of the "bedevilment" which is a common note in the character of the perfectly fear- less, and arises from a wish to pursue, as it were, an excitement which they know of, but which perpetually escapes them—the excitement of the " cradle " caused in most men by excessive danger—partly out of the inventor's passion, such as led poor Mr. Cocking to try his parachute ; and partly out of the desire, so strongly felt in our day, to be notorious, to be somebody who has done something separate, even if it be perfectly useless, like standing on one leg on a steeple, or taking a header from some impossible height. Graham knew that if he lived, his name would fly all through the Union, if not through the world ; and being utterly careless of his life, sought fame by a risk which nevertheless his previous experiments show that he had calculated with almost scientific keenness and patience of inquiry. He did not want to be strangled by water, quite the contrary, though he risked such strangulation for no perceptible gain. The notion that he could make money by his success, which he hinted to an inter- viewer after the feat, came, we suspect, afterwards, when he found himself an object of interest to thousands, and of inquiry to all neighbouring newspaper reporters. He would not do it, he said, for fan again, but he would soon enough for money ; exactly the thought a trapezist would have when he found himself unexpectedly able to perform a strikingly dangerous jump into the air.

We wonder whether Graham's obvious fancy that somebody might pay him to repeat his feat has any solid foundation. We should fancy not. That nothing interests callous men like the risk of a human life is undoubtedly true, and has been proved by the whole history of amusement, from the days of the arena—if not much earlier in Egypt—to those of the modern brill-fights in Spain and Blondiu's performances in England ; but we fancy the interest must depend on sight. Nobody would pay merely to know that at a specified hour Blondin would be risking his life a hundred miles off. The man inside the cask would not be seen, and to see a closed cask go bobbing about down five miles of rapids would not be an exciting amusement, more especially as, after two or three successful trials, the notion of any imminency or inevitableness of mortal danger would disappear from the spectator's mind. A crowd does gather, it is true, under the high wall of Newgate when an execution is going on, though nothing can be seen, and the only sound heard is the ordinary one of a passing-bell ; but it may be doubted if any member of it would pay sixpence to stand there rather than anywhere else. Captain Webb, of course, ex- pected his speculation to pay him ; but then, it was in a somewhat different way. He did not expect any money from those who gazed from the shore, but believed—as did also the speculator who paid him—that if he swam Niagara, he would revive the waning interest in his really splendid feats of customary swimming. Graham might, if he took to exhibitions, get addi- tional wages for his "Voyage in a Cask," but it would not be because the crowd enjoyed the risk of his life, but because they liked to stare at a man possessed at once of such unusual courage and such a deficiency of common-sense. The audience would pay more to see him than to see his cask, which is all they would see while he was in the rapids. At least, the balance of probability is that way, though we admit that the fascination that attaches to approaching death is one of the most inexplicable of all the worse phases of the human mind. The condemned cell

would be crowded but for the prison regulations, and both in England and America heavy sums have been paid merely to see a sentenced criminal hours or days before execution. Mr. Steven- son's idea, as expounded in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll," that a wild beast lives in every man, is a little crude ; but something very evil connected with death does live in a great many un- developed Selwyns. The oddest thing is that it often does not live in the man who, for pay, gives the crowd a gratification for enjoy- ing which he despises or detests them. No gladiator left memoirs, as he ought to have done, not even Spartacus, who alone among his fellows thought he might as well die fighting Romans as fighting his friends for Roman amusement ; but all acrobats and lion-tamers who have been interviewed have expressed the same sentiment. They do not at all appreciate the feeling which they perceive to be latent in the crowd, and think a visitor who comes too often something of a brute. The crowd, however, always gathers when a human life is in peril, and it is just possible it would gather to see a cask, because a man might be drowning in it.