Brewer's: Noyades

(2 syl.). A means of execution adopted by Carrier at Nantes, in the first French Revolution, and called Carrier's Vertical Deportation. Some 150 persons being stowed in the hold of a vessel in the Loine, the vessel was scuttled, and the victims drowned. Nero, at the suggestion of Anicetus, drowned his mother in this same manner. (French, noyer, to drown.)

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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