In a vivid letter to his publisher, Lord Byron describes the courage of the English romantic poet
It is 1819, and a great poet has a story about the courage of Percy Bysshe Shelley. “He was once with me in a gale of wind, in a small boat right under the rocks between Meillerie and St Gingo,” Byron writes to his publisher, John Murray, in a letter collected in Lord Byron: Selected Prose (Penguin, 1972). He means Saint-Gingolph, on the south bank of Lake Geneva.
“We were five in the boat – servant, two boatmen, and ourselves. The sail was mismanaged and the boat was filling fast. He can’t swim. I stripped off my coat – made him strip off his and take hold of an oar, telling him that I thought (being myself an expert swimmer) I could save him, if he would not struggle when I took hold of him – unless we got smashed against the rocks which were high and sharp, with an awkward surf on them at that minute. We were then about a hundred yards from the shore and the boat in peril. He answered me with the greatest coolness, that ‘he had no notion of being saved, and that I would have enough to do to save myself, and begged not to trouble me’.” The boat righted. Shelley lived to drown another day, “the wind having been high enough to tear up some huge trees from the Alps above us”.
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