The Woman Who Swam From Europe to Africa

A little after sunset on Thursday, April 6, 1928, after 12 hours 50 minutes in the water, a lone swimmer scrambled onto a rocky shore at Punta Leona, Morocco and grabbed a handful of sand to take home to London as a souvenir. Cheered on by dozens who had followed her progress in boats, 27-year-old Mercedes Gleitze arrived at the northernmost point in Morocco in a manner that no known person had before: by swimming from Europe to Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Her route, from Spain’s southernmost point at Tarifa was 12 miles as the crow flies, although the officials who had tracked her from the boat estimated that the strong and shifting currents had extended her swim to more than 22 miles.

Although Gleitze’s Gibraltar crossing was perhaps her most singular achievement—it would be 20 years before another swimmer (this time a man) repeated it—it was a career footnote for an athlete best remembered for her accomplishments in British waters.

The daughter of German immigrants, Gleitze was born in 1900 in Brighton on the south coast of England. She spent her childhood there and with her grandparents in Bavaria, and after her schooling secured work as a bilingual typist in London. While there, she devoted her free time to pursuing her passion for open-water swimming. In the summer of 1922, Gleitze made her first attempt to swim the English Channel—something no woman had yet done—but her shoulder muscles gave out after three hours and she was forced to abandon the attempt.

Although the strait that separates England and France was first swum by Matthew Webb in 1875, “in the years following World War I, the English Channel provided a virtual battlefield on which nations could compete for superiority,” explains Marilyn Morgan Westner, a cultural historian who writes about 20th-century women's marathon swimming. “Many seasoned athletes had made the attempt, but until August 1926 only five men had completed the swim. The media dubbed it the ultimate test of athletic prowess, strength and endurance.”

A year after Gleitze’s first English Channel attempt, she set a record with a 10-hour 45-minute swim in the Thames and continued to train for and attempt Channel crossings. In 1926, though, it was American Gertrude Ederle who made the first successful crossing by a woman with the fastest time yet. Three weeks later, a second woman repeated the feat: Danish American swim instructor and mother of two Amelia Gade Corson.

Finally, in 1927, on her eighth formal attempt, Mercedes Gleitze became the first Englishwoman to swim across the English Channel, in 15 hours 15 minutes. The British press had followed her previous unsuccessful attempts and cheered her success. The Sphere, a London newspaper, captioned a photo of Gleitze, “PLUCK AND PERSEVERENCE WIN THE PRIZE.” Even the Americans took notice: the front page of the Boston Daily Globe led with “ENGLISH TYPIST SWIMS CHANNEL.”

“In 1926 and 1927, the American media flaunted that two American women had swum the Channel while no English woman had completed the distance,” Westner says. “When Gleitze made her successful crossing on October 7, 1927, her feat was celebrated nationwide for restoring England’s reputation for the nation.”

The celebration soon became complicated. Days after Gleitze’s swim, another Englishwoman emerged from the waters at Folkestone, England, having allegedly swum from Cap Gris Nez, France, in 13 hours 12 minutes. Dorothy Logan, a London physician, had beaten Gertrude Ederle’s time, and was quickly claimed as a heroine on both sides of the Atlantic (her uncle was a New York Supreme Court justice).

Within a week, she admitted it was a hoax. Logan had neglected to mention that she had spent hours of her journey aboard a boat. The media frenzy quickly turned on Gleitze as well: if Logan had faked a Channel swim in full view of spectators, surely Gleitze, who came ashore in fog, could have done the same.

Gleitze decided that the best way to prove she had crossed the Channel was to do it again. On October 21, Gleitze set out on her “Vindication Swim,” accompanied by a tugboat full of witnesses, including a journalist from the Kent Evening Post who sent updates to his editors every two hours by carrier pigeon. Gleitze swam strongly, but the waters were cold and rough. Organizers had hired musicians to play tunes from a skiff near her, but they soon became seasick and had to be transferred to the more distant tug. Instead, Gleitze’s supporters encouraged her by singing hymns and “Britannia Rules the Waves.” After 10 hours 20 minutes, with the water temperature dropping to 51 degrees Fahrenheit and the tides carrying her away from land, Gleitze agreed to be taken aboard.

Strangely, the failed Vindication Swim was arguably Gleitze’s most acclaimed feat (it was even made into a movie in 2024). Media coverage was laudatory, and one aspect of the swim was particularly called out. After she was pulled from the water, a journalist noted that Gleitze had worn a small gold watch around her neck during the swim. The timepiece was a prototype Rolex Oyster and, by the next month, Rolex was running full-page ads featuring Gleitze and the watch.

Her athletic performance under unfavorable conditions convinced most of the doubters that she had in fact completed the crossing two weeks earlier.

Gleitze quickly turned her attention to Gibraltar, arriving in February 1928 to train for her first attempt alongside Millie Hudson, another typist-turned-distance swimmer. The print and newsreel press covered her attempts to cross, but with less attention than the year before.

“When Gleitze swam Gibraltar in 1928, widespread interest in women’s distance swimming was beginning to taper for ideological and practical reasons,” Morgan Westner says.

After Gibraltar, Gleitze returned to British waters, making several distance swims along the coasts of Britain and Ireland, including unsuccessful attempts to cross the treacherous North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland. She also made two more intercontinental swims, crossing from Europe to Asia and back in 1930 at the Hellespont—a route pioneered by Lord Byron in 1810—during her honeymoon in Turkey. Between 1929 and 1933, she undertook 27 endurance swims in Scotland, Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

The final endurance feat of Gleitze’s career was also her longest: a 47-hour swim at the Heene Road Baths in Worthing, England. Proceeds from these events went to support a charity she had founded, the Mercedes Gleitze Homes for Destitute Men and Women in Leicester, England.

Seven months after her final endurance swim, Gleitze gave birth to the first of three children. In retirement she shunned the media. Ciara Chambers, a film historian at University College Cork who has written about Gleitze's portrayal in contemporary newsreels, thinks that Gleitze’s negative experiences in the media led her to make a full break from her celebrity past in her retirement.

“Gleitze was associated with the rise of the ‘new woman,’ who was more educated and more socially powerful than ever before,” Chambers says. “In dealing with this, the newsreels undermined her strength and physical achievements by often describing her as pretty or girlish.”

Still, it was media attention that had helped make many of Gleitze’s record attempts possible, and it influenced which of her feats would be most celebrated and remembered. “Her achievements were also a great source of British pride at a moment when the Empire began to disintegrate,” Chambers says. “That also may have something to do with the focus on the Channel as her greatest achievement, and a source of pride and nostalgia for a dying Empire.”