List of drowning victims: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

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.

• 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 Zurich by the Zurich 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

• 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

• 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 in mysterious circumstances

• 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