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[page 4, column 6, continued:]
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S SWIMMING POWERS. — Colonel Robert Mayo, of Westmoreland county, who was during his boyhood days a companion and schoolmate of Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond, gives an interesting description of the latter’ swimming powers. He started with Poe in his ‘celebrated swim from Richmond to Warwick bar, six miles down the James river. He says the day was oppressively hot, and he concluded, rather than endure the infliction, to stop at Tree Hill, three miles from town. Poe, however. braved the sun and kept on, reaching the goal, but emerging from the water with blistered back, neck and face, and bearing the semblance of a boiled lobster. Part of this celebrated water voyage was made against the tide. Colonel Mayo represents that on another occasion, in mid-winter, standing on the banks of the James with Poe, the latter bantered him to jump in and swim to a certain point. After floundering in the nearly frozen stream for some time they encountered the piles on which Mayo's bridge then rested, and were glad enough to stop and essay to reach the shore by climbing up the log abutment to the bridge. To their dismay they found on getting to the bridge that its floor overlapped the abutment several feet, and ascent by that means was impossible: Nothing remained but for them to descend and retrace their steps, which, weary and partly frozen, they did, Poe reaching land in a nearly used-up state, and his companion being fished out by a friendly boatman just as he was about to succumb. On getting ashore Poe was seized with a violent attack of vomiting, and both lads were sick for several weeks.
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Notes:
It might be noted that on November 10, 1875, Colonel Mayo was declared as “of unsound mind,” a condition that was first noted in the summer of 1873. This evaluation took place in court, and was reported in the Richmond Dispatch for November 11, 1875, p. 1. He apparently committed suicide by shooting himself in the head on September 13, 1883. (It being stated that he was 77 at the time, he was born in 1806.) He did so aboard the Baltimore steamer Virginia, in the stateroom. One of his sons, Robert M. Mayo, Jr., was declared deranged and committed to an asylum in 1885. There may be some confusion caused by the similarity of names.
The original source for this note appears to have been the Richmond Journal about June 27, 1875, of which no copies have been located. This assumption is based on a reprint in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for June 27, 1875, which cites the “Richmond (Va) Journal.”This newspaper may be the Richmond Evening Journal, included as a clipping in the Ingram collection as part of item 607. The account of the second swim is noted by Ingram in his 1880 biography of Poe (1:29-30).
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[S:0 - BS, 1875] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Edgar Allan Poe's Swimming Powers (Anonymous, 1875)