List of drowning victims
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This is a list of drowning victims, either real or fictional characters in chronological order. The reasons for drowning are diverse and range from suicide, to accidents or murders.
- Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of the mathematician Pythagoras, drowned by his master for the imprudence of discovering irrational numbers
- Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII of Egypt, drowned in the Nile in January 13 47 BC
- Antinous (born circa 111), lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130; the grieving emperor commissioned hundreds of statues of the youth and spread them around the Empire
- Li Po, Chinese poet, in 762
- Giselberg, Duke of Lotharingia, drowned on October 2 939 in the Rhine, near Mainz
- William Adelin (born 1103) and his half sister Matilda FitzEdith, countess of Perches (born circa 1090), sons of king Henry I of England, drowned in the Channel on November 25 1120 in the White Ship wreck
- Fierdrich I Barbarrossa, duke of Swabia and Holy Roman Emperor, drowned in the Göks River (Cilicia) on June 6 1190 during the Third Crusade, leaving an unstable alliance between Richard I of England and Philip II of France
- King Magnus II of Sweden and Norway, 1316 – 1374
- Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, Constable of the Tower of London, 1430 – 1475
- George, Duke of Clarence (born 1449), executed for treason against his brother king Edward IV of England on 1478, by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine; or so the legend says, because modern assessments favour the traditional decapitation instead
- Felix Manz, co-founder of the Swiss Anabaptists, was drowned in 1527 in the Limmat River in Zürich by the Zürich Reformed state church
- John William Friso of Orange-Nassau, stadholder of the Low Countries, in 1711
- Peter Artedi, a disciple of Linnaeus, considered the father of Icthyology, fell by accident in a channel of Amsterdam in 1735
- Ludwig II of Bavaria, 1845 – June 13 1886
- Percy Shelley, while sailing off Livorno
- Adolphe Heliére, French cyclist. Drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean Sea during a rest day of the Tour de France, 1910.
- Grigori Rasputin (died 1916), Russian mystic and Imperial adviser; the aristocratic faction tried to kill him using several methods, eventually drowning on the Neva River proved to be the most efficient
- Enrique Granados, drowned after jumping out of a lifeboat to rescue his wife, following the torpedoing of their ship by the German navy during World War I, in 1916.
- Virginia Woolf (born 1882), British writer, committed suicide on May 28 1941
- Albert Ayler, jazz musician, suspected suicide
- Josef Mengele (born 1911), war criminal and leader of the Nazi human experimentation program, drowned while swimming in an Argentinian beach in 1979
- Hart Crane, poet; suicide in the Caribbean.
- Natalie Wood (born 1938), actress, drowned in a yacht accident in 1981; the accident raised several suspicions and murder was considered
- Dennis Wilson, one of the members of the Beach Boys, in 1983
- Robert Maxwell, newpaper magnate, disappeared from his yacht under mysterious circumstances in 1991, body later recovered off the coast of Tenerife
- Tom Mees, longtime sportscaster for ESPN, drowned while trying to rescue his 4 year old daughter in a neighboor's swimming pool, in 1996
- Jeff Buckley (born 1966), drowned in the Mississippi River in 1997
Fictional and mythological characters
- Aegeus, father of the hero Theseus, committed suicide by jumping into the sea for believing his son dead; the sea was named after him and today is known by Aegean Sea
- Jason, the living dead, masked serial killer of the Friday the 13th movies, was originally a boy who drowned in a summer camp
- Primula Brandybuck and Drogo Baggins, the parents of Tolkien's character Frodo Baggins of the Lord of the Rings trilogy
- Ophelia in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet
- Rebecca, central character of the eponymous Alfred Hitchcock movie and Daphne Du Maurier novel, drowned while trying to anchor her yacht in a bay
- Adam and Barbara Maitland, the main characters in the movie Beetlejuice, drowned when they crashed their car off a covered bridge.
See also
- Filicide, most common method is drowning
- List of shipwrecks
- Lists of people by cause of death
- Burial at sea