“You have the honor to be the father of the first and only American in history to swim the Hellespont. Leander was the first Greek—Lord Byron the first Englishman, and Richard Halliburton the first American.”
–Richard Halliburton, in a 1925 letter to his father
On August 10, 1925, the famed travel writer Richard Halliburton stood on the European shore of the Hellespont (the strait between Anatolia and the Balkan peninsula also known as the Dardanelles). After some hesitation, the Princeton graduate dived in.
The water was ice-cold and the current strong. Though a relatively active young man, Halliburton had not swum in three years. His pre-swim meal consisted of a tin of sardines. He repeatedly swallowed water from the white caps that crashed overhead, nauseating him. If not for his friend Roderic Crane who followed him in a rowboat, he might have drowned. “Shortly after the first hours, the cold began to cramp my feet & legs so that I had to seize the boat edge & bend them straight again,” Halliburton later admitted. But after taking a “heroic swig of brandy” from Crane’s supplies, Halliburton had sufficiently warmed up to finish the five-mile journey. At last, after several hours in the water, he marched onto the Asiatic shore.
Newspapers heralded his achievement around the world—correcting earlier false reports, orchestrated by Halliburton himself, that he had drowned. “I’m the maddest—and the proudest—man in Greece,” Halliburton wrote in a letter to his father. In accomplishing this feat, Halliburton had fulfilled his lifelong dream of reenacting the achievements of Lord Byron, particularly the poet’s celebrated 1810 transit across the same strait. Halliburton’s Hellespont swim, highlighted in his travel memoir, The Glorious Adventure, about his explorations of Greece, became a signature moment in his short-lived but dramatic career. Halliburton’s capriciousness, however, almost prevented the exploit from ever happening.
Four years earlier, Halliburton was a graduating senior at Princeton. On a Friday night in April of 1921, he wrote a letter to his parents. While he waxed nostalgic at the conclusion of his education, reflecting fondly on Princeton’s manicured lawns and his desire to stay (“I should like to live here”), he also sketched his post-graduation plans—an epic journey to gather material for a groundbreaking travel narrative:
I’ve a picture of my book—a great melting pot of history, literature, personal autobiography, humor, drawings, paintings, photographs, pathos, romance, adventure, comedy, tragedy, all branching off, but an integral part of the most vivid narrative of real experiences of a very live, open-eyed and sympathetic young man on an unconventional and originally executed circumnavigation of the globe...
Ambitious as his plans were, Halliburton ended up achieving much of what he sought to accomplish. For the next two years Halliburton traveled through Europe and Asia, where he performed daring and scurrilous escapades, including an ascent of the Matterhorn with zero climbing experience, skinny-dipping in the Taj Mahal’s reflecting pool, and achieving the first known summit of Mount Fuji in winter. The book that followed, The Royal Road to Romance (1925), became a runaway bestseller and required reading in school districts across the United States.
Despite the extensive globetrotting nature of his first adventure, Halliburton had omitted one land that had long fascinated him: Greece. At one point during his first post-graduation travels, Halliburton contemplated a journey either to Greece (“For years my secret passion had been to swim the Hellespont”) or India. Short on cash, Halliburton decided by way of a coin toss—five of them. After winning three of five flips, India came out on top. For his planned adventures in Greece, Halliburton would have to wait.
He didn’t have to wait long, though, as he found his opportunity the following year, when he was commissioned to travel to Greece for his second book, ostensibly to “retrace the steps of Odysseus.” In addition to the dangerous Hellespont swim, Halliburton kept up his propensity for stunts. He climbed Olympus during a thunderstorm, and in another incident he illegally ascended the Acropolis at night and slept at the foot of the Caryatids, where he claimed the korai spoke to him in a dream. Most humorously, Halliburton retraced the ancient Marathon route, until he stopped in a drought-stricken village devoid of well water. Instead, he hydrated with several glasses of wine. Too drunk to continue, he had to return to Athens by taxi.