Drown

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Sailor walks over the plank (Howard Pyle, early 20th century)

Under drowning refers to the killing by asphyxiation under or in the water. In particular, the term drowning includes all types of death penalty in which the convicts are choked to death by pressing their bodies underwater .

There are several variants of drowning, for example sacking , in which the convict is sewn into a sack and thrown into the water. Most of the time, however, the convict was tied up, thrown into the water and then pushed under the surface of the water with bars.

Especially on the high seas, weights were tied to the victims' legs like old anchors or iron bars and then thrown overboard. It is believed that Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard , used this method many times.

The symbolic character of water played an important role in the death penalty of drowning : water is said to have a purifying effect.

Drownings in History

Drowning in a barrel or sack, 1560
A convicted person was drowned in Vienna in 1592

A victim of this method of punishment was allegedly Hippasus of Metapont , a Pythagorean of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BC. According to an ancient legend, he published evidence of the existence of irrational numbers , which the Pythagoreans would have considered betrayal. He later drowned in the sea, which was interpreted as divine punishment for the betrayal. According to a late variant of the legend, he was drowned. According to the current state of research, the legend is completely implausible (see Hippasus of Metapont ).

Well-known victims of this method of punishment are Agnes Bernauer and Anna Laminit . The saints Florian and Johannes Nepomuk died as martyrs in the water , which is why one is the patron saint of the fire brigade and the other is the bridge saint.

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern period , this death penalty was mainly carried out on women.

In the Republic of Venice , drowning was a common method of execution. The execution was often carried out in court by pressing the condemned person's head into a bucket of water until he was dead.

In Nantes , drowning was used for mass executions during the reign of terror of the French Revolution . In 1793/94 Jean-Baptiste Carrier had two chained convicts (always a man and a woman) thrown into the Loire from boats equipped with flaps . Carrier cynically referred to this method of execution as "vertical deportation". These mass executions are also known under the no less cynical term “republican marriages”.

Animal drownings

Depiction of cat watering on a postage stamp from 1972 , designed by Holger Börnsen

In the rural environment, drowning cats was a traditional method of decimating the population.

Such a procedure is forbidden and punishable as cruelty to animals by the Animal Welfare Act.

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