list of drowning victims

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 Gks 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
Adolphe Helire, 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
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 Maintland, the main characters in the movie Beetlejuice, drowned when they crashed their car off a covered bridge.

List Of Drowning Victims

Fictional and mythological characters

See also