I’m not sure what happened to you, my Bad Things Family, that made you want more and
more execution content.
And I’m sorry for whatever dark path led you here, but here we are.
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Once people figured out agriculture and created governments one of the next things they had
to do was decide how to handle criminals.
Often the answer was to kill them.
We have looked at some of the ways this was done in previous episodes.
In parts of Asia elephants were used to crush the guilty.
The British were well known for using cannons to execute people in India.
But there was a more widespread and popular way of eliminating the criminal elements.
Today we are going to look at the history of drowning as a method of execution.
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Shedding Royal Blood
Before modern technology existed executing criminals humanely could be difficult.
Luckily for those in charge of doing the deed it usually wasn’t necessary to care how
much the victim suffered.
In most cultures the common criminal would be beaten to death, strangled, or beheaded.
None of these options resulted in instantaneous death.
Even with beheading it might take several attempts for the executioner to remove the
victim’s head.
Elite members of most societies didn’t want to share the fate of common peasants.
To that end cultures in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa considered it a crime to
spill royal blood.
When one among the nobility was required to die the justice system had to be more creative.
There were two popular methods these early societies developed to execute a criminal
quickly and humanely without letting blood escape.
Strangulation was an option.
But most of the time and in most of the world drowning was the preferred choice.
Each culture had its own way of making sure water entered the lungs of the condemned.
Burma, which is called Myanmar today, used a specific procedure for carrying out this
penalty.
Felix Carey was a missionary to Burma in the early 1800s and wrote of the process:
When a person of royal extraction is to receive a capital punishment, it is generally done
by drowning; in the first place the person is tied hands and feet, then sewed up in a
red bag, which again is sometimes put into a jar, and thus the prisoner is lowered down
into the water, with a weight sufficient to sink him.
This practice is resorted to because it is reckoned a sin to spill royal blood.
Islamic cultures also followed a similar practice.
In southern Thailand, a rebel was caught and sentenced to death.
But he was a direct descendant from the family of the Prophet Muhammad.
To make sure his rights weren’t violated he was killed by being drowned at sea.
The Ottoman Empire also liked to use drowning for the nobility.
For a time in the Empire when a new Sultan was chosen his brothers were executed.
This was done to prevent a political crisis.
After all, they couldn’t challenge the Sultan’s right to rule if they were dead.
The Sultan’s siblings were often killed by being drowned.
As with most things related to culture, there is always an exception.
One kingdom in Northern India considered it a privilege to kill anyone in a bloody manner.
The lower courts could only order methods of execution that didn’t cause the victim
to bleed.
In this society the peasants were usually the ones being drowned while the nobility
met more violent ends.
Some cultures only used drowning to execute people for specific crimes.
Father Knows Best Family was important in ancient Rome.
The father was the head of the family and he made all the important decisions.
Under Roman Law, the father had nearly limitless power over those related to him.
He could arrange marriages for his children and force them to comply.
Likewise, he could make them divorce a spouse.
If his wife or daughter had a newborn child and the father didn’t want it, he could
just put the infant outside and let the elements kill it.
If he became very annoyed by one of his children, the head of the family could choose to sell
the child into slavery.
Simply killing it instead was also allowed.
Most Roman men did not kill their children or sell them into slavery.
They were interested in the family line continuing.
But they could make their offspring so angry that murder was the result.
Roman society was not forgiving of those who crossed this line.
When a man killed his father in Rome the crime was called parricide.
The standard punishment for this offense was called poena cullei, which is Latin for “penalty
of the sack”.
The criminal was placed into a leather sack with one or more animals.
Dogs, snakes, monkeys, and chickens were the creatures most likely to be used when
carrying out the sentence.
Many historians today think that the punishment was never really carried out in this way.
First, how could an executioner get a human victim and all those animals into a leather
sack against their will?
Nobody knows because there is no detailed account anywhere.
The earliest recorded instance of a person being drowned for parricide didn’t mention
an animal at all.
The victim was simply placed in a sack and thrown into the sea.
The Republican Marriage The Reign of Terror was a period during the
French Revolution from 1793 to 1794.
Massacres and public executions were happening almost every day.
Today most people associate these executions with the guillotine.
But in some places, they drowned the victims instead.
In 1793 French Revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier was sent to Nantes.
He was supposed to suppress counterrevolutionary forces and appoint a committee.
Part of the committee’s job was to execute the guilty.
Carrier supposedly created a method of execution where a man and woman were stripped naked
and tied together.
Then they were thrown into the river to drown.
Here is one account of the practice: A Revolutionary Tribunal was established,
of which Carrier was the presiding demon—Carrier, known in all nations as the inventor of that
last of barbarous atrocities, the Republican Marriage, in which two persons of different
genders, generally an old man and an old woman, or a young man and a young woman, bereft of
every kind of clothing, were bound together before the multitude, exposed in a boat in
that situation for half an hour or more, and then thrown into the river.
A British author, Helen Maria Williams, was a supporter of the French Revolution.
She also had some thoughts on this method of execution.
"innocent young women were unclothed in the presence of the monsters; and, to add a deeper
horror to this infernal act of cruelty, were tied to young men, and both were cut down
with sabers, or thrown into the river; and this kind of murder was called a Republican
Marriage".
Modern historians do not doubt that men, women, and children were killed in Nantes.
Numerous victims were drowned, and it was well documented at the time.
But the historians do question whether Republican Marriages ever happened.
There are no witness testimonies that claim to have seen one.
Most of those who wrote about it did not actually see it for themselves.
Those who were sentenced to death probably met a more mundane end.
Their hands and feet were most likely tied with rope.
Then they would be thrown into the river to die.
Drowning Pits Scotland was ruled by a set of feudal laws
starting in the 12th century.
They were not very pleasant where punishments were concerned.
One of the problems the Scots had to solve when implementing feudal law was how to kill
people who were convicted of crimes.
Men were often hanged.
But women had to be handled differently.
In the year 1057 King Malcolm Canmore had the answer.
He ordered that every Baron should create a well or pit to be used for drowning women.
Women could be condemned to this fate for any number of reasons.
Stealing might earn a death sentence.
Sometimes women would kill their own child which was also a death penalty offense.
An unlucky few would be accused of witchcraft and found guilty.
The Baron was free to choose how he wanted his specific drowning pit to work.
Some of them had a ladder going down into the water.
A woman who was sentenced to die was forced to climb down the ladder.
Then the ladder was removed.
The condemned was free to continue living as long as she could swim.
Other drowning pits would use a piece of wood to force the woman’s head underwater.
This ensured that she would die quickly instead of treading water until exhausted.
Nobody is entirely sure why women were drowned and men were not.
Some historians think it’s due to a sense of decency.
It wasn’t considered acceptable to force a woman to meet a violent end in feudal society.
This conclusion is supported by some other death sentences that were given during the
feudal era.
Sometimes men were sentenced to drowning instead of hanging as a favor from the crown.
In the preindustrial world at least, drowning was considered to be a relatively painless
death.
How Did It Feel?
Other than experiencing the terror of knowing certain death is coming, what did it feel
like for the victims that were drowned during these executions?
The process of drowning begins when water is inhaled.
When that happens a fight or flight response is triggered.
The person struggles trying desperately to breathe.
Of course, there is no air to breathe.
It is a battle that cannot be won.
In most cases the airway will close to stop more water from entering the lungs.
The victim will hold his or her breath involuntarily.
Nothing can be done at this point but wait for the inevitable.
It may take as long as two minutes, but it will end with losing consciousness.
The heart slows and breathing remains stopped.
This can last for several minutes.
The body tries desperately to preserve what it can during this time.
When this stage passes then the body enters a state known as hypoxic convulsion.
It can resemble a seizure.
The lack of oxygen may have turned the victim blue.
He or she may also jerk around randomly and erratically.
Once that is finished the victim is truly and finally dead.
---------------------------- Humans are extremely creative.
And they have spent a lot of time figuring out how to kill each other.
But is it time well spent?
Many cultures used drowning as a method of execution because it was considered a more
humane form of punishment.
Perhaps it was slightly better than being strangled by a rope.
But it wasn’t pain free.
It wasn’t necessarily fast either.
What do you think about this ancient method for punishing criminals?
Was it too cruel or just right?
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Thank you for watching Bad Things in History. ----------------------------------------