Chandler is a sick artist and I only waited a day ! Brett is booked until April <| sep |> This is a broad questions , and as a result there ' s a lack of definitive statistics , but there seems to be a fair degree of consensus that for the most part European and by extension early American sailors were comparatively poor swimmers . For much of the period at least into the 19 th century , moreover , a clear distinction was drawn between bathing which essentially meant going into water where it was possible to stand , if need be , and which was relatively popular and swimming meaning in open water where it was not possible to stand , which was not . Several authorities have attempted estimates of the proportion of sailors who could swim . Overall , it seems to be agreed that as late as 1900 a high proportion of sailors significantly more than half were not able to swim . Nicholas Orme , in his Early British Swimming , 55 BC to AD 1719 , comments that early swimming in Britain was confined largely to ponds and rivers , and almost never done in the sea the practice also virtually excluded the whole female sex p . 107 . He also usefully discusses the relatively late development of scientific swimming and efforts to maximise efficiency in the water , noting that up to the 17 th century at least sidestroke was considered the fastest stroke available , modern strokes had not been invented , and swimmers in general were weak in the efficiency and speed of their basic propulsive strokes . It ' s estimated that only about one in seven Dutch sailors in the first half of the 17 th century could swim Mike Dash , Batavia ' s Graveyard p . 110 Little , in The Buccaneer ' s Realm , notes that , in the Caribbean , swimming was a common ability among the indigenous peoples of the West Indies and adds that many whites . swam and dived , and the notion that European sailors could not swim was false . Nonetheless , one captain observed ' how deficient our common seamen in general are . ' Europeans who fell overboard generally drowned , even if they landed uninjured in the water . Perhaps only one in four to one in six common sailors could swim . Compton , in Why Sailors Can ' t Swim p . 18 , notes that a contemporary newspaper estimated in 1910 that 40 % of US Navy sailors could not swim . As to the reasons why this was so , they probably combine culture and geography . It seems it was at least in part because the skill was not regarded as a natural one for civilised white men to possess , and that status and fear of ridicule was a factor here . In Haunts of the Black Masseur The Swimmer as Hero , Charles Sprawson comments on the disinclination of British colonists in India to swim , despite the hot weather It was as though the English had taken to heart George Borrow ' s precept that a ' gentleman ' should avoid swimming , ' for to swim you must be naked , and how would many a genteel person look without his clothes . ' Similarly Blackmore , in his Manifest Perdition Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire , pp . 912 , argues that the human form in water . foregrounds the civilizedbarbaric binarism . because natatorial ability is , in expansionist thinking , a ' barbaric ' skill one that was beneath European sailors and which they expected other people to perform for them . Blackmore cites the Dutch navigator Jan van Linschoten ' s Itinerary late C 16 th , which stresses how useful Arab men infected with Islam could be in this context . Where European gentlemen swam , it was generally in private and where they were not likely to be seen by either women or by their social inferiors . While Sprawson also explores lots of other odd cultural tangents , noting that Rupert Brooke swam as a celebration of youth , Goethe as a declaration of freedom and beauty , and Baron Corvo as an expression of his homosexuality , it ' s also rather noticeable that there ' s almost no evidence in western sources for people learning to swim as a precaution or because it was seen as a useful skill until some way into the nineteenth century . That said , I would guess that opportunity and conditions played at least as much a part in determining who could and who could not swim . One obvious factor is that facilities and conditions for teaching swimming safely were lacking . No swimming pools , and cold and uninviting local waters , probably help to explain why Europeans were less likely to be able to swim than the locals on Caribbean islands and Darcy , in his The People of the Sea , p . 31 , a book about Oceania , similarly notes that the ability to swim was commonplace among Fijians , even those who lived well inland . Bruseth and Turner , in From a Watery Grave , p . 116 , attribute the deficiency to the fact that swimming was not the recreational sport that it is today .